first obama interview

the first television interview your messiah obama gives after he is president is to whom?

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co … id=topnews

"Obama’s comments came during his first formal television interview as president, with a correspondent from al-Arabiya, the Dubai-based satellite network that is one of the largest English-language TV outlets aimed at Arab audiences. "

appease the terrorists.

I see dead liberals.

-Imp

Everything is appeasing the terrorist with you.

Actually, if you thought about for, maybe 10 seconds,
you realise it is a great idea. Something bush didn’t do,
try to win the PR war in the Muslim world.
Instead of blowing them up, marginalize the terrorists within the Arab world.
If they lose their funding and support, they have nothing. Why fight, when you
can win the war intelligently and cheaply at virtually no cost to yourself.

Intelligent thinking. What a concept.

Kropotkin

[size=85]I miss the one dimensional president already. [/size] :crying-yellow:

Another lame thread.

Look, you can either fight someone or try to work out your differences with them. Each case is different. Some people work best one way, some another. There are different ways to approach the problem of terrorism. You’re leaders, the dudes in the republican party that tell you what to think, have told you that there is only one right way to deal with it. Your leaders don’t actually believe that, though. They just say that to stay in control. Deep down they know the truth, but they won’t say it because they need to give the impression to you that they’re the best at what they do.

You on the other hand, I pitty. You have been lead and abandoned by your pack. That’s why Rush Limaud has been so mad lately. He has been pumped up to support and tow the line of the party just like you have, and is pissed that no one is left doing it with him. He feels like he is doing everything all by himself and no one is there to help, which is exactly how you feel and why you have had this series of angry posts. What you need to be doing is channeling your anger towards Bush. He is the one who let you down. He lead you down a path that leaves you where you are now. Not only should you be mad at Bush and not Obama, but you should be mad at yourself. You should be mad at yourself because it is your own personal responsibility to pick a side. It is you responsibility to pick Republican or Democrat. If you pick the loser that is your fault too.

If I route for the Cardinals in the super bowl and they lose and I’m angry. It’s partly my fault. I didn’t have to side with the Cardinals. I chose to. You too picked a side my friend and now you have to face the consequences.

Of course it’s lame. But the problem is that it’s not taken to task explicitly for it’s lameness. An ongoing problem on ILP, I’m afraid, but let’s look at the background of this ‘lameness’ phenomenon when it comes to the American political landscape generally. IMO, the reason that we see so much of this nonsense from the Limbaugh-esque wingnuts (although they get info from a variety of wingnut sources, of course) is explained in a great column by Mark Lilla in the Wall Street Journal. According to him, the problem has a name: the political right’s counter-intellectualism. An excerpt (link to full article below):

[i]"How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It’s a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an “adversary culture of intellectuals.” It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with “ordinary Americans” whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that “populist paranoia” was “subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government.” But by the mid-'80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the “common sense” of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by “our disoriented elites,” which is why “so many people – and I include myself among them – who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism.”

The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders’ intellectual virtues – indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them."[/i]

Full column: The Perils of ‘Populist Chic’

Yeah, you got it all wrong man. The reason for this is Bush is a retard. Since Bush was the leader of the Republicans, being a retard became the way you were supposed to be if you were a Republican. Take Impenitent for example. Ever since Bush took the reigns of the Republicans Impenitent has been pro-retard. Not only has he been pro-retard, but he has been trying his best to become a retard.

The history you’re suggesting is bogus. Republicans became pro-retard when Bush became popular after 911. The Republicans saw they had a winner and they all started acting like him - retarded.

First of all, it was a quote. Second of all, the history that you claim is ‘bogus’ wasn’t ‘suggested’ by me, it’s an analysis based on research that the author of the article did. Third of all, did you even read my fucking post? Fourth, this right-wing ‘counter-intellectualism’ goes back beyond Bush, to the rise of the “Republican Revolution” during the Reagan years. The disintegration of the Republican party just came faster than it would’ve ordinarily, because of the Rovian 51% formula (which required the cobbling together of fundamentally incompatible bedfellows) and the breathtaking incompetence of the Bush administration.

I don’t use words like ‘retard’, although I found some irony in how you just wrote about them.

I don’t appreciate the attitude. Why would it be okay to insult me and ask if I even read your fucking post, but not to use the word retard? You’re saying it’s okay to insult me for no reason, but it’s not okay to say retard?

That said.

–Anti-intellectualism takes too long to say, 10 syllables, so I prefer pro-retard, 3 syllables.

This is exactly what I’m telling you is wrong. It does not go beyond Bush. That is what the WSJ article is saying, and I did read it. Maybe there were shades of pro-retard in the past, but what broke the dam was having a retard as their leader. This author is trying to paint the picture of a movement building over time and he’s wrong. He wants to see something that isn’t there. What happened was a sudden turn on 911. When Bush became popular, being a retard became popular too.

This is dead on. I am utterly amazed at the bubble the Right is creating for itself. Social Constructivism used to be a far left mode of attack, saying things like science is just one mode of knowing, poetry is equally as useful. Crazy butterfly chaser stuff. Yet now, you have an entire group of people who deny evolution, saying its just one episteme amongst others, deny global warming, deny the fact that even Milton Friedman said there is a point of tax cutting below which you cannot go, deny even the idea that 9/11 was a terrorist plot. (actually “The big government conspiracy was actually a plot to convince the people that the government controlled everything, including 9/11, rather than slipping up and letting twenty terrorist nutcases kill 3000 people with boxcutters.” from tvtropes.org)

How in the hell did we get to be so anti-science? Or rather anti-realism? It blows my mind. The American Right is headed for the same laughing gas hills as postmodern critical theory. A damn shame because I have a lot of intellectual respect for the Old School Right’s heavy hitters: Friedman, Hayek, Buckley, Sowell, et al. It’s a shame to see actual public intellectuals who have studied and published being replaced by “failed comics” (Lewis Black’s words, not mine) with nothing more than broadcast journalism degrees (if they have even that). O’Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh and John Coleman (that guy from the Weather Channel) are simply NOT EDUCATED. Broadcast journalism degrees are vo-tech degrees, guys. It says a lot about Sarah Palin that she had to attend four Universities/Colleges and she finally walked with a B’j degree.

With all these talking head populating the GOP as mouthpieces and public intellectuals, it’s even funnier (or perhaps they protest too much for a reason) that the Right spends all its time hollering about liberal media bias and the MSM. Of course media is biased. all ways has been always will be. But if you’'ve never receive critical thinking skills as part of your degree all you’ll ever see will be the surface appearances of things.