So THAT’s why he had to fake the birth certificate!
Since I don’t think he’s a shadowy mysterious figure with a furtive past, I don’t spend a lot of time wondering why he’s secretly buried all traces of his past. Why didn’t he talk about a 90-second speech regarding Bell during the 2008 campaign? Uh, maybe because he was busy talking about his campaign platform, his record in the U.S. Senate, and his decade in the Illinois state senate. Whatever you’ve done in college, you put it below your professional experience on your resume. When you’re an adult running for president, bragging about what you did in college is mostly just going to look silly - like an implied admission you haven’t done much since.
The other day I got a breathless email from The Washington Times about Obama’s connection to a play called The Love Song of Saul Alinsky. Scaaary! Obama was involved with a play about that labor leader Newt Gingrich is obsessed with- who must be a Communist or something. It turns out Obama attended a performance of the play and spoke at a panel discussion afterward. The horror!
The stuff he wrote about in his autobiography.
Serious question for JQPublic (or else on the Hannity/Breitbart side of the fence).
When a voter is deciding whether or not to vote for Obama in 2012, what should they take more stock in?
A) That in the past Obama surrounded himself with and was greatly influenced by far left extremists
or B) How he has governed in the 3 3/4 years that he was actually the president.
Basically, all of JQPublic is rehashed/recycled Tea Party talking points that have been refuted before. Obama’s life prior to Chicago is NOT a blur, his “associations” with people the Tea Party don’t like have been addressed, the “new allegations” that are coming to light are nonsensical exaggerations of outrage at best if not downright fabrications at worst.
I, too, am okay with fundamentally changing America, if those changes ensure policies that I agree with, such as same-sex marriage, universal health care, the elimination of corporate personhood, etc.
Or maybe he just doesn’t feel the need to push to the forefront a 20-year-old video of him cavorting with some guy that most people have never heard of.
Right. Nevermind that the video was in fact broadcast by PBS in 2008 - I agree it didn’t get a lot of attention, and I do think it’s sort of interesting to hear Obama at this earlier stage in his life - there’s no particular reason he would have put this at the forefront of his campaign. If there were footage of Bush, Gore, Kerry, McCain, or Romney at a similar point in their lives, I wouldn’t have expected them to do much with it either.
Funny, I’d say that critique applies more to (non-libertarian) conservatives than to liberals. “Tough on crime” and “war on terror” conservatives want the government to be able to spy on U.S. citisens without warrants or probable cause, to throw American citisens in prison indefinitely without access to courts, to give cops patrolling inner city streets wide latitude to crack heads or worse to keep those scary Negroes in line…etc.
You mean kind of like George W. Bush’s life before the age of forty?
Ok, You’ve all convinced me everything we need to know about him was told to us in his autobiography. Anything not in that book doesn’t matter. Nobody’s past has any influence on their present.
I heard there’s video footage of Barack Obama hugging a huge black strawman.
Yeah, but who watches PBS? What better place to hide these shocking, shocking revelations!
Excellent! Thanks for stopping by!
Just to give a brief, serious response to this:
Nobody made this claim at all. I said (for example) that his past is not mysterious, and it’s hard to call his past mysterious when he wrote a book about it.
Nobody said that either. It just debunks the idea that his past is a secret.
And nobody said this either. What’s past is prologue, but you can go too far in scouring a guy’s past for clues. Since Obama spent four years as a well-known senator and spent half that time running for president and has now spent more than three years as president, going on and on about his college years is more than a little ridiculous. He got his law degree in 1991, so it’s very, very old news. Although it’s a small improvement over the insanity that surrounds his birth certificate. And SlackerInc makes a good point: during his candidacy George W. Bush declares his life off limits through age 40 - he was around 54 at the time - because he didn’t want to discuss his alcoholism or rumors that he’d had issues with cocaine (which he pretty well confirmed by refusing to talk about them, not that this stuff had any real bearing on the race). And yet some of the same people who gave Bush a pass on that stuff are desperate to see Obama’s college grades and talk about a hug. If you want to know what he’ll do if he’s re-elected, take a look at what he did after getting elected.
This could actually be fun. (I never went to college, this is based on the pictures of drunken frat boys I’ve seen on the internet.) 
Obama wasn’t running for re-election until this year.
Parts were aired by Frontline but, apparently, they dubbed over the portions where he endorsed Bell. Charles Ogletree admitted that they hid the tape during the 2008 campaign. I haven’t seen the original so I can’t judge. My guess, though, is that if there was a video of a republican candidate endorsing David Duke 20 or 30 years ago it would be front page news. Face it…the media had no interest in vetting Obama. They deliberately sat on the Rev. Wright story for almost a year.
Oh, he wrote a book about himself! I guess he was vetted! We’ve had this debate before. The press deliberately ignored certain stories until their hand was forced. Your response is that there is nothing to see here so let’s move on. Meanwhile the press was digging through Sarah Palin’s garbage for info. Maybe Bush stated he didn’t want anyone to look into anything he did before age 40 but that certainly didn’t stop the press. Dan Rather went as far as to report on false TANG documents without properly vetting them. See the difference?
For the record I doubt this story will do any damage. Soledad O’brien was in full attack mode during her interview with someone from the Breitbart outfit and displayed a complete ignorance of critical race theory. I don’t think she was expecting the guy to correct her as she hand-waved.
I think this will be viewed the same way by Republicans as Ron Paul hanging out with Stormfront members will be viewed by Democrats.
Speaking of which, there’s a user over at Stormfront called John Q Public… Any relation?
That’s different.
Again, that’s different. Bush wasn’t running for re-election.
Well, OK, he was, but it still doesn’t count.
Because - well, it’s different. You can’t count past associations against a politician.
Well, you can, but not Obama. Because - well, because you just can’t.
It doesn’t count unless the DNC tells you it counts.
Simple enough.
Regards,
Shodan
The bastards! (I guess. Somehow.)
Evidently you’re determined to have it again by arguing with stuff I didn’t say. JQPublic argued that Obama’s past was “buried” and everything before he began his life in Chicago is “a blur;” I responded that he wrote a book about it, so it’s hard to argue it’s really a secret. Whether or not you feel he was properly vetted is another story - I guess if you think they should have spent a third or fourth week talking about Jeremiah Wright, you are welcome to that opinion. I forget which poster said it, but conservatives tried this strategy in 2008 and lost, and if they try it again in 2012, they will lose again in 2012. The guy is president now and it makes much more sense to talk about his record than about what he said in college.
I believe what he said was that he would not discuss his personal life prior to that point, yes.
…that did happen four years later, yes (and Rather was wrong). I realize details like what happened when and what topic is being discussed are not very important in arguments like this, but for the record, I was discussing his campaign in 2000.
Here’s what PBS says:
They do dub over part of the speech (the program after all, is about Obama, not Bell), but the narration makes it pretty clear that Obama is supporting Bell, and show the two hugging. Saying that this is “hiding the footage” is crazy.
Charles Ogletree was joking. Harvard didn’t own the tapes, WGBH did. And WGBH gave them to PBS, where they were “hidden” by airing them on TV.
Derrick Bell isn’t David Duke.
Sssshhhh. Let them keep believing this for a while. Here’s my message to the GOP:
You guys should totally run on the whole Derrick Bell = David Duke platform. It will fit very well with your whole “people who think racism exists are racists” gestalt. Trust me, the racism in your party has nothing to do with the fact that Arizona, home of Joe Arpaio, might be close this election. Just keep your head down and stay the course. Best of luck!