Tuesday, October 12, 2010

How's that working for you?

21 months into HopenChange and here's where we stand.


Via Left Coast Rebel - here is the President at a rally in Philadelphia over the weekend.




Just don't know how much more of this post-racialness we can endure.

But you know something else? It really cheezes us off that the Democrats cannot show any more creativity to their mid-term campaign strategy than to simply ape the Republican message of "fear".



And in other totally related news:

In two campaign stops Thursday, Mr. Obama invoked what he portrayed as a specific new example (ed.:foreign money contributions), citing a blog posting from a liberal advocacy group as he teed off on a longtime adversary, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, over its political spending.

“Just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations,” Mr. Obama said. “So groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections.”

But a closer examination shows that there is little evidence that what the chamber does in collecting overseas dues is improper or even unusual, according to both liberal and conservative election-law lawyers and campaign finance documents.

In fact, the controversy over the Chamber of Commerce financing may say more about the Washington spin cycle — where an Internet blog posting can be quickly picked up by like-minded groups and become political fodder for the president himself — than it does about the vagaries of campaign finance.


The New York Times is attempting to downplay this but unfortunately this goes way beyond spin: the President of the United States is hurling completely unsubstantiated allegations of illegality at a private entity. Not a water-carrier or a lefty blog but... the President of the United States.

Team O even acknowledges there is absolutely no basis for these accusations but instead of backing down, the onus of proving innocence now resides with the Chamber of Commerce.

White House officials acknowledged Friday that they had no specific evidence to indicate that the chamber had used money from foreign entities to finance political attack ads.

“The president was not suggesting any illegality,” Bob Bauer, the White House counsel, said. Instead, he said Mr. Obama’s reference to the chamber was meant to draw attention to the inadequacies of campaign disclosure laws in allowing groups to spend large amounts of money on politics without disclosing their donors.

White House officials called on the chamber to go beyond current disclosure laws and establish that no foreign money has been used in its political campaigns. “They can put this to rest,” said Joshua Earnest, a White House spokesman. “They have the keys to the file cabinet.”


How can this not be described as tyranny in order to silence dissent? Again, this is the Commander-in-Chief making these wreckless accusations.

And please - we don' want to hear about how this is "just politics". The President is engaging in gutter politics of the worst order by making these accusations and then Team O demands that the Chamber clear its name of these same utterly baseless claims.

Of course, 3 weeks out from the midterm elections, this wreaks of desperation but it also reveals just who the man is and what he stands for. Being backed into a corner and stripped away of the former false airs of the '08 campaign, the world is seeing that Obama is nothing more than a Chicago machine pol and has transformed himself over the course of these 21 months into a self-mockery of his HopenChange narrative.

1 comment:

Harrison said...

Wonder when ThinkProgress will write about International unions that donate money to US races?