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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JBTFD who wrote (257381)	2/23/2008 4:48:48 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

You republican spinmeisters are very good at taking a person's strength and framing it as a weakness. Look at what you did to Kerry. Yes, let's look at it. Kerry ran as a war hero. "I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty!" he said at the convention. His strength as a war hero was illusory, which made it very easy to frame it as weakness. It was weakness. This was the same John Kerry who collected purple hearts for scratches, bugged out of a 12 mo tour after only 4 months, testified before the Senate that his fellow soldiers behaved like the army of Genghis Khan and committed or condoned war crimes on a daily basis. Just for the icing on this 'war hero' cake, Kerry routinely told whoppers about his service, like "Christmas in Cambodia" running guns for the mysterious CIA guy, who gave him what came to be known as 'the magic hat'. This John Kerry was therefore cordially loathed by most of his fellow veterans, who blamed him for the fact that they were spat on as baby killers when they returned from Vietnam. That's why the Swifboat Veterans for Truth included 3/4 of the officers in Kerry's own division. You simply cannot credibly run as a war hero if the vast majority of your fellow veterans hate you. One would think this would be obvious. Yet to this day, the Dems cannot absorb the simple lesson here. Instead they wrap themselves in a kind of aggrieved paranoia, how Kerry was so a real gosh-darn war hero, he was just done in by the Republican smear machine. He was "Swiftboated" by operatives working for Karl Rove. Yeah, that's what happened. They have been enabled in this delusion by the NYT and all the main MSM media portals, who are reliable water-carriers for the Dem Party. The vast majority of veterans admire John McCain, btw.

To: JBTFD who wrote (257381)	2/23/2008 10:32:52 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

Obama's strength is that he is able to inspire people to get involved and think that they may be able to make a difference. It is not salvation, it is faith, that people are interested in. Well yes, that is Obama's strength. But faith in what? hope for what? "Change you can believe in"? What does that mean? What exactly are his followers having faith in? Christians have faith in God and hope for salvation. Obama seems to be tapping the same springs in some undefined secular way. This is quite different from what Martin Luther King, whom Obama sometimes seems to be channeling, did in the 1960s. MLK's message was faith in God and hope for civil rights. Hugh Hewitt, a conservative talk radio host, has been inviting young Obama supporters to call his show. He has listened to several very politely and tried to draw out their reasons for supporting Obama. They are really charged up for Obama but they cannot say why except to repeat the mantras of change and faith. Some of them mention the war in Iraq, that's the nearest they come to an issue. In fact, it's the only issue where there's a discernible policy difference between Obama and Clinton. The whole thing seems to be about the way Obama is making his young supporters feel right now. Obama is providing uplifting mass rallies that allow his supporters to project all their hopes and desires onto him. That's why more and more people are drawing comparisons, not with JFK, but with the Beatles and Frank Sinatra. Girls fainted at their concerts too.