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Putting the brakes on Obama — 21 Comments

  1. Actually you made an adjustment in what Obama said to align it with your own metaphor. Obama said “back of the bus” and it stuck with me because of the connotation that I still believe was deliberate connecting to Jim Crow laws.

    Surprisingly no one picked up on that at all but you can bet that if it had been a white Republican using that metaphor it would have mushroomed into a media outrage.

  2. Adrian Day: you are, to put it simply, wrong. Many people imagined he said the bus, but he did not. His quote was an extension of a metaphor he has used over and over again, which is that Republicans are bad drivers of a car, who have driven that car (the economy) into a ditch. The metaphor has always been a car for him; the “back seat” comment merely conjured up in people’s minds the image of the back of the bus.

    I wrote about it here when I said:

    And it’s an interesting metaphor, isn’t it, conjuring up not only back seat drivers who are not allowed to give advice on steering, but Southern blacks relegated to the back of the bus.

    Check out the quote from Obama.

    [Obama] said Republicans had driven the economy into a ditch and then stood by and criticized while Democrats pulled it out. Now that progress has been made, he said, “we can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.”

    You don’t “ride shotgun” in a bus. The phrase refers to the passenger seat of automobiles.

    I try to be as precise as possible. I don’t always succeed, of course. But I thought a great deal about this one. It’s the people who think he actually said “bus” who are wrong. I don’t like Obama or most of what he does and says, but I am determined to try to accuse him only of those offenses that he actually has committed, and not make any up. There are enough of the former to go around.

  3. From the George Will piece:


    Today, two Hispanic Republicans – [Senator elect Marco] Rubio and Gov.-elect Susana Martinez of New Mexico – threaten Democratic hopes for similar sway over America’s largest and fastest-growing minority.

    He’s right…. but he forgot one more: Gov. Elect Brian Sandoval in Harry Reid’s own state of Nevada.

  4. I caught a phrase from PBS talking heads blabbering analyzing election results and switched the channel immediately.
    The phrase was “Republicans in Congress now are forced to be humble”.

    IS there an limit to the idiocy?

  5. Tatyana:
    IS there an limit to the idiocy?

    PBS simply modified its prepared sermon for a Democratic sweep: ” Republicans in Congress now are forced to be VERY humble.”

    It is only a mandate when Democrats win. When Republicans win, there is a need for the winners to compromise, to reach out to the other side of the aisle.

  6. J.L., your bringing up Governor-elect Brian Sandoval of Nevada reminds me of what Harry Reidsaid several months ago:

    “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, OK?” Reid said. “Do I need to say more?”

    Since Reid’s son Rory was running against Brian Sandoval and lost, perhaps the following is what Harry Reid MEANT to say:

    I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could vote against my son. Do I need to say more?

    OTOHI don’t know how any white could vote Democratic. Do I need to say more? Per the usual, Democrats get a pass when it comes to bigoted statements.

  7. Mess up on my final part:

    Imagine the furor if a Republican had said the following:

    I don’t know how any white could vote Democratic. Do I need to say more?”

    The speaker would immediately be branded as a bigot. Yet when Reid says

    “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, OK ?Do I need to say more?”

    , he gets a pass.

  8. Gringo,

    Youre correct that the left has a double standard for what they consider “racist.” I myself come from Cuban background (parents from Cuba, emigrated legally after Castro, I was born in the U.S.). When I was in High School back in the ’80s, I was asked by a very liberal teacher (a anti-Reagan flamer of that era) why I did not hang around “all the other Hispanic kids.” I was taken aback by the audacity of the question.

    The answer is: first, I was very assimilated, and thought of myself as an American first, rather than a “Hispanic” and I had friends that fit into all ethnic categories. Most of my friends were indeed, non-Hispanic. Second, the so-called “Hispanic” group where I lived consisted primarily of very streetwise New York Puerti Ricans, which I as a bookish middle class Cuban kid had very little in common with.

    But… back to the point… this liberal teacher asked me point blank why I didn’t “hang around the other Hispanic kids” as if it was perfectly normal thing to ask someone. If this had been a conservative, it would have been open to attack as a racist question… but I guess being Liberal is to exclude oneself from the normal rules of behavior (all the while agressively imposing those same rules on others). (Never mind the ignorance of this liberal apparently being unaware that “Hispanics” come from various cultural and social backgrounds, and that I had nothing in common with the group he was trying to lump me in with.)

    Im glad to hear Mr. Sandoval beat Harry Reid’s kid at the polls.

  9. They’re race-obsessed, JL.

    I grew up (born in ’56) thinking that the old song, “Your mother’s a Pole, your father’s a Swede, but you were born here, that’s all that you need!” was true.

    And it WAS. Rubio is a throwback to that ideal: that those who come here and sign on to the American ideal and want to become true citizens are welcome additions to our nation.

  10. J.L. : when I first came to TX from NE, I worked with a guy who had spent 8th grade in Framingham MA due to his father’s transfer from TX. He made friends with a fellow student who was black. “We’re going to tell your father you’re hanging around with a black.” “Go right ahead. You think he cares?”

    That was years ago, and perhaps today people in NE are not as inclined today to assign the racist label to those in TX. Wait a minute. What was that about all those libs and progs who gratuitously called Tea Party people racist? What was that about Journolist?

    More cannon fodder to hurl at Harry Reid:
    Bill Flores (TX-17).
    Francisco “Quico” Canseco, (TX-23)
    Jaime Herrera, (WA-3)
    Raul Labrador (ID-1)

    Berverly: while I am around your age, I had never heard that rhyme, though I grew up in a town with a lot of people of Central and Eastern European descent.

    I worked in college washing dishes at a ma and pa pizza place: Sicilian husband and Irish wife. When they married, they got a lot of flack from both sides. When the grandchild arrived, the flack stopped.

  11. “Artfldgr Says:
    Here comes the violence…”

    Artfldgr. This must be your shortest post and, I assume, your conclusion that the worst is about to come. I almost read by it. My opinion, for what it is worth, is that the Democrats are tied to Obama because there is no way they can get rid of him, that he will run for a second term regardless of the advice he does or doesn’t get from his apostles, and he will take personally as insults any Republican efforts to undermine his agenda. Moreover, he has shown an uncanny ability to stick to his agenda, no matter the consequences to the country or the lack of any success. He will double down on failure; e.g., he is back attacking Israel on the settlements in Jerusalem. He will not deal with Republicans. He has no idea what compromise means. He will try terrorists in NYC. He will inflate the dollar (and destroy much of the accumulated savings of generations). He will continue to kowtow to our enemies and belittling to our allies.

    The question is will he do something so rash and dangerous as to induce members of his own party to join with the opposition is voting for his impeachment. I’m not sure violence in the streets would even do it. I am, to say the least, scared sh**less.

  12. Jim DeMint: “You can’t be a fiscal conservative and not be a social conservative”

    http://hotair.com/archives/2010/11/09/jim-demint-you-cant-be-a-fiscal-conservative-and-not-be-a-social-conservative/

    then i guess you cant be a social democrat (menshivik) without being a communist bent on overthrow of the American government and institution of state slavery as the only future…

    in the old days, having beliefs contrary to the job you were being hired to fulfill, was enough not to be hired.

    this tended to limit the number of satanists being Catholic priests. the number of chefs willing to prepare pork for muslims and jewish people. the pedophiles as child massage therapists…

    but not in state, where we hire communists to fix economy

    no wonder they think the public is stupid and looks down upon you and cant handle your own affairs.

    someone that could do that, would not hire them!

    so the very fact they are working is proof to them that your incompetent to handle your own affairs.

    just as a sociopath thinks very litte of his victims for allowing him or her to victimize them!!!

    ie. if you dont want to be a victim, stop acting like one

  13. i am not calling for violence…

    its just part of the process and formulae of such state changes… ie. freedom to aristocracy…

    go way back when and you will see that i had already deatailed this whole thing right up to the same weimar moment we are now experiencing!

    no one beleived me that the currency may collapse..

    i said they were doing the EXACT same things, but that no one was getting it, so they were not going to prevent the process…

    you cant stop what you don’t believe

    which is why they are all about managing your beliefs, not knowledge.

    since we didnt belive that we would end up like weimar, we did not believe copying them along all lines from policy, politics, disparate impact, eugenic goals, demographic games, finance, heck… even the SAME FREAKING PEOPLE!!! the SAME philosphers.. the SAME collapse of social morals… SAME green nature cult…

    the SAME repositioning of the people to accept what they thought they would never accept

    any one remember that George Soros was a secular jew who at 14 was a hitler jugend who confiscated jewish property of camp victims for the state?

    mandatory volunteering is about to come

    remember Hux?
    he kept us on the wrong side of action!!!

    as long as he was holding up a false option that was better than reality, we would endlessly talk about it and discuss it and deny the reality we didn’t like.

    that’s how use to shopping delusions we are
    (we can no longer share the common reality that is common – we modify our perceptions of it till we are no longer compatible with each other, or reality)

    NOW we are sitting here where i said we would be
    nothing was actually done to have a different outcome

    other than maybe a lot of people yelling at me that this outcome was not possible so i had to be wrong.

    well..

    now i am out of answers or things you can do
    the horse is out of the barn, the masks are coming off to the point that they are now publicly saying on news shows they are so far left that “being liberal is a joke”.

    no amount of experience
    no amount of empirical information (too long for the sesame street generation to understand and decide which was valid).
    no number of authors who wrote the same warnings
    no amount of real history over false history

    the left is going to get violent, and they are going to shift blame to the body that they have been blaming and setting up their people to believe.

    in this way, when left becomes violent, the left not violent believes that that is the right, and then comes out to balance things.

    cause is followed by effect

  14. one last sad thought…

    that the US is going to fall to despotism because the despots this time weren’t into leather and jack boots.

    that if they only dressed up in costumes, we would have responded and saved ourselves.

    but since they dressed like regular people, hippies and such, we could not believe that they were just as bad or worse, regardless of what they were wearing…

    without the black leather we couldn’t identify them by their surface cargo cult presentation…

    we no longer saw substance over image
    so we accepted the image ignoring the substance

    we accepted equivalents as different
    and differences as equivalent

    and all the time we required Hollyweird clothing to tell us who to look out for…

  15. Baklava Says:

    Art,
    I remember Huxley. But I probably remember him differently than you do.

    He didn’t like the choice of fool or knave.

    Huxley. I miss him, and I regret I may have helped to drive him away because I cited a quote from him when I posted a comment against excessive hyperbole in the comments section. Unfortunately, he took badly the frequent disagreements with his views, rather than just accepting that people are going to disagree. (I can speak to that myself, as one who has had occassionally dissenting views on this board.)

    But one of Huxley’s best contributions was his skepticism toward the view that a “worst case scenario” was the only possibility at hand, and that the only remedies were the most extreme ones. I say this because, while I appreciate the historically precient views presented by Artfldgr and others, and the warnings they provide to be vigilant against encroaching totalitarianism not let go of our freedoms without a fight, I also think it is valuable to step back a bit and question whether we really are headed for the abyss or not, and what actually is the more practical course of action.

  16. Reports out of Great Britain today are of “peaceful” student protests over fairly substantial tuition increases that turned into violent riots against the Tories.

    Given its insolvent condition and the fact that it will not be receiving much is federal assistance with the new Republican House of Representatives, will the legislature of CA have the nerve to increase tuition at its many state funded colleges and universities? If so, is it likely that there will be similar protests that could easily get out of hand? If not, who will pay the bills?

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