Alright Hillary, that's it! - Democratic Underground

CTLawGuy

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Mon Feb-25-08 02:06 AM
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Alright Hillary, that's it!

I'm sick of your constant attacks on Obama. He is a perfectly qualified and perfectly capable candidate. Certianly he is as qualified as you are madam.

He is inexperienced? Look who's talking! Do you think that you could argue with a straight face that you are the "experienced candidate" against John McCain? You have 7 years of governmental experience, as a US Senator from a state you had absolutely no previous connection to, he has over 25 years of experience. While you have been a more than decent senator, your resume is not long in that department. Hillary, being first lady is NOT experience in the way that you are trying to make it out to be. First ladies have no governing duties or responsiblities. While yes, you did things, more than most first ladies,(gave speeches, travelled, wrote a very complex bill that went nowhere, advised your husband), the fact of the matter is that first ladies don't face election, or reelection. They don't answer to anyone. They don't get security clearances. They don't vote on bills.

Obama has 4 years of US senate experience and 8 years as a state senator in a not insiginficant state. There he worked with others to pass important bills such as a bill to require police videotaping of confessions (over the original opposition of the police and the governor). In the US Senate, he has sponsored bills on such topics as ethics reform and open government (see www.usaspending.gov), and nuclear deproliferation. I would hardly call that "no experience." While he doesn't measure up to McCain in experience, he is not running becuase he is the master of Washington, he is running because Washington needs to change.

He isn't tough and can't take a punch? I'll give you credit, Republican attacks haven't demoralized you. However, you are still standing mostly because you don't stand for election as first lady and your senate terms have been won from a very blue state against clowns for opponents.

Obama is very tough, he's had to listen to you and your surrogates run your mostly negative campaign for over a year. From having his faith and patriotism questioned, to being falsely called anti-choice, to being dishonestly labelled as a coward for engaging in a legitimate IL legislative practice (voting present), to being deemed to be doing well in certain states because of his race ("Jesse Jackson won there too!"), to being tied to the criminality of a land developer who comes in contact with every politician in Chicago, to being tied to Saddam Hussein because of his middle name, to being called a plagiarizer, a cult leader, peddling false hopes, being substanceless (more on that later), a homophobe, a former drug dealer etc. he's faced a lot of fucking shit in this lowbrow campaign, and he's handled it well. This shit is part of all campaigns, I understand that and he does too. But don't turn around and say that he's gotten a free ride after flinging all of this at him.

He's substanceless . There is a one link response to this. www.barackobama.com/issues. There, all the substance and detail your heart desires. There's a reason he does not go state to state reciting all of this as if he were Strom Thurmond reading the phone book during a filibuster, IT'S BORING. People don't go to speeches to hear every little tiny detail. They go to hear about a candidate's vision, philosophy, as well as major policy stances(with major details). If you want the detail, go look it up.

Also, Hillary, you should know by now that you can't promise that your meticulously detailed plans will be passed by congress as is. Remmeber when you wrote up an entire bill hundreds of pages long in secret? Back in 1994? Guess what, Congress, whose job it is to pass bills (remember way back to civics) didn't like a lot of your details. So they gutted them, especially the ones about employer MANDATES (more on that in a second). But they couldn't gut it enough to get anyone to put their necks on the line against he health insurance lobby to vote for it. and this was a DEMOCRATIC congress with a DEMOCRATIC president, with greater majorities than we have now. If you go around promising to pass your health care plan as is, you will fail. Our government does not vest the president with the power to make law. In light of that it seems silly to go overboard on detail. For any bill, such as a health care plan, Congress will have the last word. This does not mean never talk about your position on mandates, for example. What it does mean is that a presidential race is not a race to see who has the most pages on their issues section.

Obama doesn't favor universal health care; and in fact bashes it. Hillary I saw the best movie last year. It's called SiCKO. You'll see a lot of things in it. Michael Moore goes to Cuba; he rides along with a travelling French Doctor, he even travels to a Norwegian prison (in the DVD extras). Know what you won't see in it? "Freeloaders" getting "free" health care by simply "forgetting" to buy health insurance. You will see a couple who had to move into their daughter's house becuase medical bills BANKRUPTED THEM. You will also see poor patients dumped out of cabs, in hopsital gowns, onto an LA street in front of a public hospital becuase they lacked insurance. You will also see many instances of insurance companies outright refusing to pay claims in order to save money, and then people dying as a result of not getting treatment.

The idea that a large portion of the 44 million uninsured are people trying to scam free health care from the taxpayer sounds more like it should come from a propaganda film narrated by the corpse of Ronald Reagan and sponsored by the CATO institute rather than a Democratic candidate for president. That is the implication when you say that we need to mandate that people buy insurance. That makes as much sense to me as saying we can eliminate world hunger by mandating that everyone buy enough food to live on, or that we can solve the Palestinian/Israeli crisis by mandating that everyone sit in a circle and sing Kumbya.

Frankly I don't think either of your or Sen. Obama's plans are that great. But for the love of Jebus don't say Obama does not favor universal health care because he doesn't have mandates. You say you will subsidize people who can't afford premiums, and you will cover uninsurable people in a government plan (I'd hate to have to manage that thing!). If you do that, why the hell do you need something that will be hideously unpopular such as mandates? You will cover everyone who wants insurance, which is pretty much 99.99% of everyone. Obama does the same thing as you except he's not going to twist the arms of the .01% of wackos out there who think insurance is a sin or something.

Bottom line is, if everyone who wants insurance can get it, it is as universal as it is going to get absent a single payer system. Your mandate will have to leave out some people, even with subsidies. It will not acheive absolute 100% compliance. It hasn't in MA. Stop with the dishonesty. You both want to greatly increase access to health insurance and that in itself we can agree is a good thing.

He only offers speeches, I offer solutions. This one is my favorite. Remembering back to civics 101, that part about how presidents do not make the law, your idea that inspiration is a bad thing, and that rattling off details to your bored audience is a good thing, will bite you in the ass if you somehow manage to come back and win this thing. For your "solutions" to become law, they must be passed by Congress. In order to for congress to pass them, they need to be motivated, "inspired" if you will, to do so. You should have learned that from your last failure to inspire Congress to pass your legislation. If Congress can't stand listening to you becuase you insist on speaking as if you were listening to van halen with headphones on, or insist on going on a tirade because things aren't going your way, they won't make your "solutions" law. Also, they have the audacity to want to have a hand in producing the "solutions". They are legislators, that is what they do.

Obama understands the role of legislators much better than you do. That is why he speaks of working with others and why he highly values inspiration and a culture of respect for those who disagree. We cannot pass legislation without republican help unless we have 218 lockstep Dem house members and 60 lockstep dem senators. If we don't have that, guess what, we have to be nice to republicans! The horror! I know some of us would rather complain, stamp our feet and then cash in at the next election, but I think people are sick of a government that looks for political advantage over solving our problems. Obama would rather reach out to others to get something passed that does some fucking good rather than have another congress go by not accomplishing squat. And he realizes that Congress will write the law that gets enacted. He gets to veto if it is too unacceptable, but they ultimatley put the language in.

I don't know what change he's talking about!!!!! Ill end my rant with simplified bullet points as to WTF Obama is talking about when he wants change.

1. Change the discourse of government: he wants us to strive to "disagree without being disagreeable" rather than spending our time bashing each other while people's lives get worse. A culture of respect is more likely to acomplish something than a culture of disrespect.

2. Change the purpose of having power: right now the purpose of being in power seems to be to keep power. That's how we got into Iraq. That's why Newt Gingrich and the repubs did everything they could to kill the 94 health care bill. That's why I think we haven't done squat to end this war. Obama says "we should stop thinking so much about how we are going to win the next election and start thinking about why we should"; and "we don't just need to get out of Iraq; we need to change the mindset that got us into Iraq." Obama wants to make having power about using it to accomplish things, rather than using it to score political points. that sort of purpose leads naturally to both sides working together.

3. Change the power structure in government and the Democratic party: Obama's big theme on this front is the idea of an open and accountable government. See again www.usaspending.gov for an example. Government should be accesssible to the people and the people should have much greater participation in government and politics. Obama is about a decentralized, supporter-driven, bottom up, 50 state campaign, as opposed to Hillary's big state, centralized, consultant driven, top-down campaign.

4. Fundamental change in foreign policy: He wants to have a foreign policy that understands that it's hard to demonize people you are regularly talking to. For example, when the US embargoes Cuba, it is very easy for Castro to demonize the US, becuase no one sees anything different and Castro never has to face a US leader in person. By showing we are willing to talk, to even our enemies, we at least have the hope that concerns will be aired on both sides and people can work out something that is acceptable to all parties. See the movie "13 Days." It's about the Cuban Missile crisis from JFK's perspective. There are two characters you should pay attention to. One is John F. Kennedy and the other is Gen. Curtis LeMay. See which one sounds more like Obama's vision of foreign policy and which one sounds more like our current vision of foreign policy. See which one wins out in the end. We need to repair our image in the world, and Obama's the guy to do it.

/rant