You are damn right there's a pattern here!

Forum Name General Discussion: Politics
Topic subject There really IS a pattern to the stuff coming out of the Clinton campaign
Topic URL http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4040191#4040191
4040191, There really IS a pattern to the stuff coming out of the Clinton campaign
Posted by Kurt_and_Hunter on Fri Jan-11-08 11:10 PM

The pattern is that it isn't coming out of the Clinton campaign; certainly not as a planned strategy of pissing off black people every chance they get. It doesn't help Hillary to have black people mad at her. And it is lethal to Obama's broad support with white people to inject old-school racial politics into the mix. It is damaging to both candidates, in different ways, and damaging to the Democratic party.

The media (MSM and internet) exists to gin up controversy. If two candidates don't want to fight, the media will damn sure make sure they fight, like a mean kid shaking bugs in a jar. And when push comes to shove, the MSM does the bidding of the big money interests, aka the Republican Party.

We have the Democratic party on the brink of a realigning election, and we see an endless series of instances of anonymous sourced stories and spitefully, intentionally out of context quotes that all have the effect of sowing racial division within the Democratic party. And we partisans of candidates are so caught up in the take-no-prisoners mentality of campaigning that we don't see that this whole racial division story is ginned up from a lot of nothing.

Remember the ABC News blog characterization of Biden insulting Obama by offering him a cruddy job in the Justice Department? And when someone came up with a full transcript, it was obviously no insult at all in context... Obama certainly didn't take it that way.

And Politico puts out a completely fake story about Andrew Cuomo insulting Barack, except when you get the whole transcript, he wasn't talking about Barack at all.

Bob Novak puts out a story with anonymous sources about how Hillary is ready to drop a scum-bomb on Barack.

Karl Rove puts out a piece calling Barack "lazy" while reinforcing a general misinterpretation of something Bill Clinton said.

Hillary is interviewed by Fox News and says something about Martin Luther King that isn't the least bit objectionable, but the excerpted clip Fox shows over and over makes it seem like she's diminishing MLK gratuitously.

News outlets run a clip of Bill saying "fairy tale" over and over, implying he was talking about the idea of a black man being President, which he wasn't. (Thanks to Keith Olbermann for providing some perspective on that tonight, and thanks to Josh Marshall for his fair-minded refereeing of some of these incidents. http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com / is a wonderful refuge of common sense these days.)

You are damn right there's a pattern here!

We are being manipulated into a Democratic Party race war because divide-and-conquer is the only hope the Republicans have of retaining power.

Any other time we would see it plain as day, but in the hostility and dogmatism of the campaign mind-set where supporters on both sides are more eager for dirt and talking points than for truth we are vulnerable to the most ham-fisted manipulations.

Something to keep in mind: The Rove philosophy is to attack someone where they are strongest. With Kerry it was his war record. Ask yourself, where have the Clintons always been strongest?

Answer: In the black community. "Bill and Hillary are racists" is this year's version of "John Kerry was a coward." (And where is Barack strongest? In his post-racial new-politics appeal to people from every group.)