To follow up on my last post, about Obama surviving this, I just happened upon a post at Daily Kos summarizing the latest polling, which suggests very little change in the poll numbers during the time of the bitterness bullshit.
Of course… except I don’t agree with Obama. 
Little bitch George Will (he’s not really an intellectual, he just plays one on TV) weighs in.
George F. Will is most definitely an intellectual. Myself, I’d rather be a cowboy. Hippy is good, too.
You know, I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Clinton HQ. Between Wright-gate, and bitter-gate, and Canada-gate, and lack-of-experience-gate they keep looking for the meme that will take the wind out of Obama’s sails, and it just ain’t happening. While they might pick up a couple of points temporarily with each attack, they’re really not moving the undecideds in a big way, and the vast majority of Obama supporters continue to support him. Reagan was the teflon president because the shit didn’t stick to him, but there was some real shit there, e.g. Iran-Contra. I’ve got to think that to the Clinton campaign Obama must be looking like the teflon candidate, since none of their manufactured and/or exaggerated shit sticks to him for very long.
George Will has his good days and his bad days. This is the latter. His intellectual curiosity leads him not to the full text and context of the three or four word he quotes, but to obscure political history. I do respect Will, but sometimes he phones it in, and this is one of those times.
Oy. When he speaks with authority on a situation with which he has only a passing familiarity, as opposed to actual life experience, he does himself and the people he is speaking about a disservice. My example of my Scottish heritage related to your statement about his having family in rural Kansas. Just because he has that, doesn’t mean his concepts about life in rural Kansas count for anything.
Obama CAN speak about anyone he wants, the greatest amount of experience he has past the age of reason is with blacks in urban areas. Knowing his history, you could take his opinion of those areas he worked in and the people with whom he worked as one of experience. When he talks about how people he’s never spent more than a few hours with deal with their most private and difficult circumstances, he comes off as elitist. Whether or not you believe him right, he simply shouldn’t talk about what his assumptions are.
BTW, Hentor, I don’t know what this amounts to, but the flag is back in Senator Obama’s lapel.
Still think he’s doing things differently? I don’t, and haven’t.
A veteran gives Obama a lapel pin so he wears it for a bit. If you think that contradicts some principle he has stated, you’re not paying close enough attention.
So Obama does things differently when he takes off the flag pin, and does them differently when he puts it back on?
That’s some special guy you got there Just can’t do anything for normal reasons. 
What’s he doing differently? A disabled veteran gave him the pin. If he’d refused to wear it, he’d be getting ripped for THAT.
What things?
What he said about flag lapel pins was that they were in and of themselves meaningless. The more important thing was your actual patriotism, not your symbolic patriotism. He took it off because he felt too many people were wearing it as an empty symbol.
When a disabled veteran gives you a pin as a gift, it has meaning. It is different from buying it from a truckstop and pinning it on. So he said he put it on because of the meaning imbued in the gift (I am assuming you actually read your own cite, but I might be assuming too much).
I know some of you guys on the right are bad with nuance or distinction, but this one is pretty obvious.
Would you like some Freedom Fries with your empty symbolism?
One may smile and smile and be a villain.
One may grab a $2.95 lapel pin and jam it on their jacket and be a patriot, at least in some people’s eyes.
Not perzackly. Wearing the pin does not prove you are a patriot, that would be silly! Its that not wearing the pin proves that you are* not* a patriot.
Or as Laura Ingraham said “not ready for prime time”.
I mean, the guy can’t even dress himself like an american politician. It reminds me of John Oliver’s Fox News piece from a week or so ago on the Daily Show- they showed screen grabs from the news nets and there were like fifteen flags in evidence.
We are all so silly for listening to this stuff.
I wonder, does Obama brush his teeth and tie his shoes and hold his fork like every other Washington politician? I suspect he does and I really wonder how that jibes with his message of change and doing things differently when in reality hje is just like those inside the beltway, with his breathing oxygen and eating food to show how he is just like regular folks.
Maybe he should give a speech in Klingon, so we can do away with the politics of old - using standard english to deliver the message.
How is it different? It’s just a pin after all?
I actually am somewhat closer to Obama on this in some ways - I don’t wear pins or wristbands as a general rule, no magnetic ribbons are on my car, and I only fly my flag on holidays.
Still, I am not comfortable looking down on those who do things differently. Someone else might have bought a flag pin at a truckstop, as you said. So what? If it has meaning to him, who am I to say otherwise?
Who are you?
Someone asked me before whether a magnetic sticker on a car was an empty gesture - I replied that it was only if that was all that person was doing. And since you can’t know at first glance whether a woman in a minivan so adorned is just a dittohead or a military spouse, the sticker itself doesn’t mean much.
The sentiment does, and one hopes it is backed by more than a clasp or a magnetic backing.
And you can assume lots of things about those of us on the right - but John McCain won his nomination rather handily - and in any picture I see of him I see bare lapels. So I think you might be a bit mistaken there.
All I was saying was that those who thought Obama was making some grand gesture with the pin issue were simply wrong - he uses symbols just as any politician does. You are just inclined to think his use of them is somehow different than McCain’s, or Bush’s, or Gore’s, or Clinton’s. Not so.
Who ever said that his not wearing the pin was a grand gesture? Your thinking seems quite concrete, yet you are purportedly an adult.
His “grand gesture”, his “doing something different”, was his willingness to step outside of the wear/don’t wear equals patriotism framing of the debate to talk about how one’s deeds matter more than one’s symbols.
You might be able to see how this woild not translate into “I refuse to ever wear a lapel pin.”