[Rhodes22-list] POLITICAL-Maureen Dowd (NYTimes) on Gen. Powell's Obama Pick

[Brad Haslett]

Ben,

Forgive me in advance for a rambling response to your "real American" issue.

A few years ago my boys and my best friend were driving home from a
weekend on the CoraShen and took the scenic route.  We got trapped in
a traffic jam in Grand Junction, Tennessee (population 600?) because
of an auto accident.  A woman came running to our car and asked if we
had a fire extinguisher.  Out of curiosity, we piled out of the van
and walked to the scene of the accident.  There was a seriously
injured, and seriously fat woman dying in a car with the engine
burning.  The locals were worried about the fire.  A policeman was
sitting in his car on the scene, talking on the radio.  I immediately
sent my boys back to the van to retrieve all the towels and blankets
we'd just removed from the boat.  The woman was too fat to pull
through the broken windows.  The doors were stuck closed.  Out of a
crowd of 50, there was one large muscular black man who asked me "what
should we do?".  "Pull that GODDAMNED  door open!"  The "jaws of life"
couldn't have done it quicker.  We pulled the lady out of the car
(pulling her pants off in the process) and drug her to safety. My boys
showed with the blankets and towels - we applied the towels to the
parts that were bleeding the most, covered her with the blanket for
some dignity, and quickly split the scene when the ambulance showed.
The locals continued to watch.

My sons peppered me with a hundred questions on the journey home.
"Dad, why didn't the cop pull the lady out of the car?"  "Dad, why did
every one stand around and watch?"  "Dad ------?"

"Boys, people are sheeple!"  "We are herd animals, you pay a price for
being the Black Sheep of the herd".

Where is this going you ask?  Ben, you put your faith in the MSM and
the herd.  So did the Germans in 1933 and the Chinese in 1949.

Call me the Black Sheep of 'da list".

I've been called worse.

Brad

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 2:29 PM, Ben Cittadino <bcittadino at dcs-law.com> wrote:
>
> Andrew,
>
> The answer is ..........................Patrick Henry of "give me liberty or
> give me death fame".
>
> Brad,
>
> When Powell (or I for that matter) reference the negative tactics of the
> Republican party or McCain operatives, you can be sure of one thing.  We are
> not talking about you or John McCain personally.
> We are talking about the people behind the scenes stoking the fires of
> religious and racial division.  When some lady gets up at a rally and tells
> John McCain that Obama is an Arab and that is why she can't support him
> there is a reason she got in the front row.  When the Sheriff got up and
> introduced Gov. Palin by referring to Barak HUSSEIN Obama there is a reason
> he got that opportunity.  When Gov. Palin talks about "real Americans" she
> is sure not including me.
>
> If the McCain campaign behaved as you have behaved during this entire debate
> I would have no beef with them. But, they have not behaved well and that was
> what General Powell and other centrist Republicans can't stomach.
>
> Best,
> Ben C.
>
> Brad Haslett-2 wrote:
>>
>> Ben,
>>
>> First, let's pay our respects to Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, a fallen
>> American hero and the family who raised him as such. He and they
>> deserve our praise for their sacrifice.
>>
>> While other's were reading stories in the New York Times and the
>> Washington Post about the  "failed" policies of George W Bush and his
>> Secretary of State, Colin Powell, I ate my cornflakes reading Micheal
>> Yon and other military bloggers who put faces and names to the
>> statistics. Turns out, Yon and his fellow bloggers actually on the
>> battlefield had the better perspective than the AP stringers holed-up
>> in the Green Zone.
>>
>> Do I care if Obama is a Muslim?  No!  I seriously doubt that Kareem
>> was indoctrinated with "God Damn America" or "Allah Damn America"
>> weekly in his mosque for twenty years.  I've met and socialize with
>> too many good and patriotic American Muslims to believe otherwise.  If
>> your Mosque, Church, Temple, Synagogue, etc. spews these vitriolic
>> hateful statements on a regular basis, I DO question your values.
>>
>> Was Obama "embarrassed" by the Muslim women who were excluded in the
>> Detroit area?  Bullshit!  He's embarrassed by getting caught. Obama
>> has played the race card his whole career.  Has everyone forgotten the
>> "we need more white people" moment in the campaign?
>>
>> BTW, my sincere condolences to the Obama family for the health issues
>> of his "typical white women" grandma who is apparently near death.
>>
>> Brad
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:07 AM, Ben Cittadino <bcittadino at dcs-law.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Gentle Readers;
>>>
>>> I read this over my corn flakes today.  There isn't alot that brings a
>>> tear
>>> to my eye, but I gotta tell ya' I highly recommend this column to anyone
>>> who
>>> thinks they might be "on the fence" about this election.
>>>
>>> Ms. Dowd is usually not my "cup of tea". She is often too sarcastic and
>>> caustic for my taste.  She nailed it with this one.
>>>
>>> See the following:
>>>
>>> Moved by a Crescent
>>>
>>> By MAUREEN DOWD
>>> Published: October 21, 2008
>>> Colin Powell had been bugged by many things in his party's campaign this
>>> fall: the insidious merging of rumors that Barack Obama was Muslim with
>>> intimations that he was a terrorist sympathizer; the assertion that Sarah
>>> Palin was ready to be president; the uniformed sheriff who introduced
>>> Governor Palin by sneering about Barack Hussein Obama; the scorn with
>>> which
>>> Republicans spit out the words "community organizer"; the Republicans'
>>> argument that using taxes to "spread the wealth" was socialist when the
>>> purpose of taxes is to spread the wealth; Palin's insidious notion that
>>> small towns in states that went for W. were "the real America."
>>>
>>> But what sent him over the edge and made him realize he had to speak out
>>> was
>>> when he opened his New Yorker three weeks ago and saw a picture of a
>>> mother
>>> pressing her head against the gravestone of her son, a 20-year-old
>>> soldier
>>> who had been killed in Iraq. On the headstone were engraved his name,
>>> Kareem
>>> Rashad Sultan Khan, his awards — the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star — and
>>> a
>>> crescent and a star to denote his Islamic faith.
>>>
>>> "I stared at it for an hour," he told me. "Who could debate that this kid
>>> lying in Arlington with Christian and Jewish and nondenominational
>>> buddies
>>> was not a fine American?"
>>>
>>> Khan was an all-American kid. A 2005 graduate of Southern Regional High
>>> School in Manahawkin, N.J., he loved the Dallas Cowboys and playing video
>>> games with his 12-year-old stepsister, Aliya.
>>>
>>> His obituary in The Star-Ledger of Newark said that he had sent his
>>> family
>>> back pictures of himself playing soccer with Iraqi children and hugging a
>>> smiling young Iraqi boy.
>>>
>>> His father said Kareem had been eager to enlist since he was 14 and was
>>> outraged by the 9/11 attacks. "His Muslim faith did not make him not want
>>> to
>>> go," Feroze Khan, told The Gannett News Service after his son died. "He
>>> looked at it that he's American and he has a job to do."
>>>
>>> In a gratifying "have you no sense of decency, Sir and Madam?" moment,
>>> Colin
>>> Powell went on "Meet the Press" on Sunday and talked about Khan, and the
>>> unseemly ways John McCain and Palin have been polarizing the country to
>>> try
>>> to get elected. It was a tonic to hear someone push back so clearly on
>>> ugly
>>> innuendo.
>>>
>>> Even the Obama campaign has shied away from Muslims. The candidate has
>>> gone
>>> to synagogues but no mosques, and the campaign was embarrassed when it
>>> turned out that two young women in headscarves had not been allowed to
>>> stand
>>> behind Obama during a speech in Detroit because aides did not want them
>>> in
>>> the TV shot.
>>>
>>> The former secretary of state has dealt with prejudice in his life, in
>>> and
>>> out of the Army, and he is keenly aware of how many millions of Muslims
>>> around the world are being offended by the slimy tenor of the race
>>> against
>>> Obama.
>>>
>>> He told Tom Brokaw that he was troubled by what other Republicans, not
>>> McCain, had said: " 'Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.' Well,
>>> the
>>> correct answer is, he is not a Muslim. He's a Christian. He's always been
>>> a
>>> Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there
>>> something
>>> wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no. That's not
>>> America. Is something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid
>>> believing that he or she could be president?"
>>>
>>> Powell got a note from Feroze Khan this week thanking him for telling the
>>> world that Muslim-Americans are as good as any others. But he also
>>> received
>>> more e-mails insisting that Obama is a Muslim and one calling him
>>> "unconstitutional and unbiblical" for daring to support a socialist. He
>>> got
>>> a mass e-mail from a man wanting to spread the word that Obama was
>>> reading a
>>> book about the end of America written by a fellow Muslim.
>>>
>>> "Holy cow!" Powell thought. Upon checking Amazon.com, he saw that it was
>>> a
>>> reference to Fareed Zakaria, a Muslim who writes a Newsweek column and
>>> hosts
>>> a CNN foreign affairs show. His latest book is "The Post-American World."
>>>
>>> Powell is dismissive of those, like Rush Limbaugh, who say he made his
>>> endorsement based on race. And he's offended by those who suggest that
>>> his
>>> appearance Sunday was an expiation for Iraq, speaking up strongly now
>>> about
>>> what he thinks the world needs because he failed to do so then.
>>>
>>> Even though he watched W. in 2000 make the argument that his lack of
>>> foreign
>>> policy experience would be offset by the fact that he was surrounded by
>>> pros
>>> — Powell himself was one of the regents brought in to guide the bumptious
>>> Texas dauphin — Powell makes that same argument now for Obama.
>>>
>>> "Experience is helpful," he says, "but it is judgment that matters."
>>>
>>>
>>> All I can add is God Bless Colin Powell and God Bless America.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Ben Cittadino s/v Susan Kay, Highlands NJ
>>> --
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>>>
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