I hope they’re clearing the 2012/16 pipeline for him. Man.
If he’s ever after my vote he has it. That was by far the best political speech I’ve read, or heard, in years.
I’m a big anti-union guy, simply because I don’t think it has a very valid place in the American marketplace, with the proliferation of opportunity and the legal controls that are in place. However, if Obama is just smart enough to hire a speechwriter this good, he has my vote forever. If he wrote it himself, or even most of it, I’ll suck his black cock. Obama rocks.
This, in particular, was bordering on the historic:
Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks to little of yourself. You need to take up the challenges that we face as a nation and make them your own, not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate, although you do have that obligation. Not because you have a debt to all of those who helped you get to where you are, although you do have that debt. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate, although you do have that obligation. You need to take on the challenge because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential. And if we’re willing to share the risks and the rewards this new century offers, it will be a victory for each of you, and for every American.
Sweet Jesus, whom I also don’t believe in, Amen.
H.
edit add: I think the fact that proofreaders can’t get “to” vs. “too” correct pretty clearly defines what is wrong with the media.
First of all: http://tinyurl.com/ or http://makeashorterlink.com/. Please. Superlong URLs make baby Jesus cry. They also make me hate you for being an incompetent idiotic asshole jerkwad fuckface who can’t be bothered to pay the slightest attention to how what you post gets viewed by others.
I really hate scrolling back and forth left to right back and forth back and forth aaaagh.
To the speech itself:
That’s the most fundamentally wrong-headed speech he could possibly have made, and this is the core of it:
Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation.
That is exactly precisely backwards. Collective “salvation” depends first and foremost on individual choice and willingness to act. Those escaped slaves he’s talking about weren’t helped by socialist initiatives, they were helped by individuals acting out of principle.
The middle class was not created by government programs, it was created by people going out and cutting themselves a piece of land from the wilderness, or building themselves a business selling to people who’d cut their land out of the wilderness.
It let’s us say to the child born into poverty - pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Wasn’t there a time when that was exactly the point of America? “Go west, young man!” and setting off to seek one’s fortune, and all that - that someone with absolutely nothing to their name could go out into the world and through dint of hard work and determination make a fortune? Why exactly is that no longer possible? Why does such a person now require government assistance in order to improve their position?
The free market is the system that works better than any other in a “rising tide lifts all boats” sense. If you try to screw with it, you screw up. The government is not capable of “solving” the problems he describes, and never will be.
For someone who talks about others “ignoring history”, he sure does a lot of it in that speech.
Wasn’t there a time when that was exactly the point of America?
Not really. Government industrial & farm policy was a key factor in making the west profitable.
Uh, is that really that long a url up there? Are you running 640x480 or something?
Oh please. Those rugged individualists you’re holding up as paragons cut their land out of wilderness that was granted to them by the government. If that’s not government assistance, I don’t know what is. The west was built on government assistance and survives on it still.
I mean if it really is too long, ok, but I thought it was fine.
it fills up most of my screen at 1152x864 but eh i dunno. i think rollory should offer chet a phpBB patch to wrap long URLs.
[bold emphasis mine]
Um…I hate to derail but, what does this mean, or rather, what do you mean by it? Proliferation of opportunity? Legal controls? Help me out, because my first instinct is to say, “You’ve got to be kidding,” but I want to quell that and try to open my mind.
So help a brother out.
-Amanpour
They took up the challenge of a nation and made them their own, you might say. Saw ideals that were greater than their own material wealth and acted in accordance with them?
Perhaps it is because they knew that they were all Americans; that they were all brothers and sisters; and in the end, their own salvation would be forever linked to the salvation of this land they called home.
That line isn’t socialist. It’s about how Americans should not allow the United States of America, this glorious ideal, to become the corrupted country of masters and servants that it broke away from. Through everyone’s individual choice to work for the betterment of the ideal.
The government has pretty much always been the body opening up opportunities for individuals to gain wealth. This need not be about government handouts, like you seem to think, but simply monopoly-busting, union-building and similar, that give the common man an honest chance for a decent life against the great power of inherited wealth.
We can no longer say that because it is, by and large, not possible to dig a hole, and there find gold, or drill and find oil. Technological achievements today require so much more than it once did. And the ones whose families grabbed the wealth of olden days have a vested interest in keeping the competititon down, and can do that with a power greater than most governments throughout history has. Today’s government is needed to regulate the excesses of corporations (which only follow the rule of making money, at any human cost, preferrably destroying the competition, and they are by and large controlled by people who did not so much pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but walked up the stairs their parents built for them), and make sure everyone indeed has the opportunities that are so clear in the minds of people all over the world.
NYT Special Report: Class Matters
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2005/05/15/national/class/index.html
From a Bob Herbert editorial linked on this page:
The war that nobody talks about - the overwhelmingly one-sided class war - is being waged all across America. Guess who’s winning.
A recent front-page article in The Los Angeles Times showed that teenagers are faring poorly in a tight job market because of the fierce competition they’re getting from older workers and immigrants for entry-level positions.
More Columns by Bob Herbert On the same day, in the business section, the paper reported that the chief executives at California’s largest 100 companies took home a collective $1.1 billion in 2004, an increase of nearly 20 percent over the previous year. The paper contrasted that with the 2.9 percent raise that the average California worker saw last year.
The gap between the rich and everybody else in this country is fast becoming an unbridgeable chasm. David Cay Johnston, in the latest installment of the New York Times series “Class Matters,” wrote, “It’s no secret that the gap between the rich and the poor has been growing, but the extent to which the richest are leaving everybody else behind is not widely known.”
Consider, for example, two separate eras in the lifetime of the baby-boom generation. For every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent of the population between 1950 and 1970, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162. That gap has since skyrocketed. For every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent between 1990 and 2002, Mr. Johnston wrote, each taxpayer in that top bracket brought in an extra $18,000.
Can you PLEASE change that link.
:evil:
Also: you guys are really suckers for a gregarious candidate. The problem isn’t your candidate, it’s you. It’s the ideas you believe in and the way you pursue them as a group. Obama can run for president someday and he may win because of his personality and his ideas (which may end up being palatable to conservatives) but until you guys stop being so wacky you’re not going to regain anything other than a few years in the Whitehouse.
Newt will keep having the last laugh until you stop attempting to impeach Bush using the Wisconsin House of Burgesses or whatever.
Conservatives have tiny, tiny monitors.
So, liberals should strive to be less wacky than Ann Coulter?
…
Done!
Now, do you have anything to say about the actual speech, or, if nothing else, the ideas “we” believe in?
Great speech, thanks for the link. Should he ever run for president, he has my vote.
I can’t imagine anyone with wackier, more incoherent beliefs than you, Spoofy. Seriously. You’re a trenchant self-parody of a libertarian conservative. Even freepers have more style.
Spoofy is unique. I love the content free way he tells people to “just give up”.
None of this will come easy. Every one of us will have to work more, read more, train more, think more. We will have to slough off bad habits - like driving gas guzzlers that weaken our ecomony and feed our enemies abroad. Our kids will have to turn off the TV sets and put away the video games and start hitting the books. We will have to reform institutions, like our public schools, that were designed for an earlier time. Republicans will have to recognize our collective responsibilities, even as Democrats recognize that we have to do more than just defend the old programs.
I love this paragraph.
What is a freeper? And what is a libertarian-conservative? Half of a center libertarian’s views are more or less “conservative”.