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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (13793)	3/16/2008 12:22:43 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 149317

Obama Prepares For Full Assault On Clinton's Ethics huffingtonpost.com

To: American Spirit who wrote (13793)	3/16/2008 1:07:36 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 149317

There are rumors about a potential Edwards endorsement of Hillary -- I believe it started with a Time magazine editor saying something about this on Chris Matthews' Sunday morning tv show. A Hillary endorsement would effectively kill what's remaining of Edwards' brand. He would alienate a good portion of his core supporters (and many of them are already actively supporting Obama). That said, a Hillary endorsement could be Edwards' hail mary attempt to end up in the White House one day. He can't mount a 3rd independent run, so his only hope is to get in through the VP back door. Obama will not make a commitment to pick him for VP, but Hillary may be ready to make a deal with the devil. At this late stage of the nominating contest I don't think any endorsements will make a big difference in influencing the electorate. At best, they can be used to send a message about the tides of the Democratic party, should they decide to finally rally around a candidate. Edwards' campaign, while containing many good ideas and working from a populist, underdog position, was never an insurgent campaign on the order of Obama's. It grew from and worked within the Washington mentality shared by both Edwards and Clinton. It could be in his own perceived interest to support the establishment candidate at this point, although I can't really see how it benefits him or the sum total of the causes he championed. The climate would have to change considerably for Al Gore to ever endorse Hillary Clinton. I seriously doubt there is any love left between Gore and the Clintons...Check out the Sally Bedell Smith book on how the Clintons did not want Gore to win the presidency in 2000 because it would have been an obstacle to Hillary's ascension to power.

To: American Spirit who wrote (13793)	3/16/2008 6:01:32 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 149317

Famed War Reporter Hits Media On Iraq Coverage mediainfo.com As the fifth anniversary of the start of the war nears, Joe Galloway, one of the most respected war correspondents ever, looks back at press coverage of Iraq, and concludes: "In war, truth is too often the first casualty, and it is not just a president or a secretary of defense or assorted official spokesmen who do the killing. Our brothers and sisters in the media also participate in the execution." By Joseph L. Galloway NEW YORK [Joe Galloway, recently retired but still writing a regular column for McClatchy/Tribune, is one of the most respected war correspondents of the past 40 years, and is co-author of the book "We Were Soldiers Once...and Young." The following is an excerpt from his foreword for E&P Editor Greg Mitchell's new book on Iraq and the media.] In war, truth is too often the first casualty, and it is not just a president or a secretary of defense or assorted official spokesmen who do the killing. Our brothers and sisters in the media also participate in the execution. Greg Mitchell has taken that as his lesson in "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits – and the President – Failed on Iraq" and in so doing has done a service to future generations in our business, and I believe, for readers of the news. Looking back to that fall of 2002 when war drums were beating loudly and the president and his closest advisers spoke with certainty – and deceit – about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction and the danger he ostensibly posed to our country and our friends and allies, most in the media either swallowed it whole or timidly refused to do their jobs and question the official rationale for war. The great gray lady, The New York Times, and the voice inside the Beltway, The Washington Post, put dozens of reports on the Bush administration's claims about Saddam's quest for a nuclear weapon on their front pages. The few reports that even suggested that some experts were questioning those claims were buried deep inside, among the Viagra ads. Did the national outburst of patriotism and an epidemic of American flag decals and flag lapel pins on the expensive suits of television anchors frighten those who had long believed that their newspapers set the nation's agenda? How could those agenda-setters and so many others in the media abandon their first duty to challenge and question the assertions of the politicians holding high office? To his credit Greg Mitchell was writing columns and putting out a prewar cover article in E&P that raised those and other important questions before the first American soldier ever planted a boot inside Iraq. Also doing critical reporting on the administration's claims were a few good people working in the Washington, D.C., bureau of Knight Ridder Newspapers – bureau chief John Walcott and reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel. (I worked there with them and made my own contributions to some of the critical stories before the war began and after.) But it would be several years before the work of these Knight Ridder reporters was acknowledged. During the early years of the war, I made two reporting trips to Iraq, in the fall of 2003 and again in 2005-2006. The soldiers and Marines I lived with and went on operations and convoys with were the same type of fine young Americans I wrote about in earlier wars. In fact, many of their commanders, from colonels to four-star generals, were officers I had marched or ridden with when they were captains and majors in an earlier war. All were doing their best with a bad hand dealt them by their civilian overlords – too few troops to do the job assigned, struggling against faulty decisions by people like Ambassador L. Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority that only fueled the insurgency, and laboring under the micro-management of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld whose ears were closed against any advice contrary to his thinking. I was an early and harsh critic of the administration's conduct of the war. In the interest of full disclosure, because I had worked in 2001-2002 as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell, then secretary of state, I had sources very close to the debates and infighting over the conduct of the war at the highest levels. It was clear that Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld were riding roughshod over anyone who urged caution and careful thought. By 2005 I was writing columns suggesting that Rumsfeld and his deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith be fired for their mistakes, along with the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Air Force Gen. Richard Meyer. None of this endeared me to either the White House or the Pentagon bosses. Not until the 2007 perjury trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's hatchet man, would the overly cozy relationship too many Washington pundits and reporters maintained with the likes of Libby and George W. Bush's spinmeister Karl Rove be exposed to the open air. Those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War, and to carry visible and invisible scars from our work there, felt uneasy about Iraq and the stated reasons for preemptively invading that country. Those feelings only grew stronger in the months after March and April of 2003 when the president and his men were doing premature victory laps around the press rooms at the White House and the Pentagon. Mitchell lays it all out in this book. Read it and weep. If you are a consumer of the news, I urge that you reserve judgment when reading reports quoting the calculated rhetoric of government officials. And, if you are a reporter, take a solemn vow to not believe everything you hear, and barely half of what you see. *Joseph L. Galloway (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is the longtime war correspondent and co-author of "We Were Soldiers Once...and Young." He has just completed a sequel. Galloway won a Bronze Star for valor in Vietnam.

To: American Spirit who wrote (13793)	3/16/2008 10:50:35 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

Has it occurred to you or anyone else that Hillary has had it easy in this presidential campaign so far? Obama has not thrown "the kitchen sink" at her and she has not been vetted (her tax returns, contributors to the Clinton library, white house documents from the Clinton years have not been released!). Hypothetically, if Hillary gets the nomination, you don't think the GOP will get this all out and throw the sink at her? I would be amazed if we did not see some shocking revelations from those disclosures. Don't be so sure to pass judgement on Obama when the establishment candidate has not been vetted since Bill left office (that's 8 years of history not being vetted!)