Thursday, August 28, 2008

Big Dog in da howse


He drives some of us wild and most of them nuts -- like they aren't already -- and last night he threw his support to Obama while at the same time throwing McLame under the bus:

The delegates stood on their feet and roared for nearly 3 1/2 minutes when Clinton walked on stage. The former president basked in their affection, but after several false starts at his speech, commanded: "Sit down!"

Actually it was more request than command: "Y'all sit down! We gotta get this show on the road!"

“The campaign generated so much heat, it increased global warming,” he said of the primaries. “In the end, my candidate didn’t win. But I’m very proud of the campaign she ran: She never quit on the people she stood up for, on the changes she pushed for, on the future she wants for all our children.”

And a few more excerpts, courtesy Ted:

In this decade, American workers have consistently given us rising productivity. That means, year after year, they work harder and produce more. Now, what did they get in return? Declining wages, less than one-fourth as many new jobs as in the previous eight years, smaller health care and pension benefits, rising poverty, and the biggest increase in income inequality since the 1920s. American families by the millions are struggling with soaring health care costs and declining coverage.

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They took us from record surpluses to an exploding debt; from over 22 million new jobs to just 5 million; from increasing working families' incomes to nearly $7,500 a year to a decline of more than $2,000 a year; from almost 8 million Americans lifted out of poverty to more than 5.5 million driven into poverty; and millions more losing their health insurance. Now in spite of all this evidence, their candidate is actually promising more of the same.

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Think about it: more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that will swell the deficit, increase inequality, and weaken the economy; more Band-Aids for health care that will enrich insurance companies, impoverish families, and increase the number of uninsured; more going it alone in the world, instead of building the shared responsibilities and shared opportunities necessary to advance our security and restore our influence. They actually want us to reward them for the last eight years by giving them four more.

Then Clinton turned his focus on the only argument Republicans seem capable of making -- that Obama isn't "ready to lead":

Everything I learned in my eight years as president, and in the work I have done since in America and across the globe, has convinced me that Barack Obama is the man for this job. He has a remarkable ability to inspire people, to raise our hopes and rally us to high purpose. He has the intelligence and curiosity every successful president needs. His policies on the economy, on taxes, on health care, on energy are far superior to the Republican alternatives. He has shown a clear grasp of foreign policy and national security challenges and a firm commitment to rebuild our badly strained military. His family heritage and his life experiences have given him a unique capacity to lead our increasingly diverse nation in an ever more interdependent world.

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Barack Obama is ready to lead America and to restore American leadership in the world. Barack Obama is ready to honor the oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Barack Obama is ready to be president of the United States.

He is certainly a lot more ready than George Bush ever was, and the past eight years of demonstrated incompetence, failure, and outright deception are proof enough of that.

Really, it is to laugh: if somehow the GOP's warped definition of "leadership" was a decent argument then we would be wrapping up eight years of an Al Gore administration (or even four years of a John Kerry one).

George Bush had never traveled outside the United States prior to being elected president (sic). And not because he couldn't afford to.

Poor John McSame is -- besides being wrong about most everything else -- on the wrong side of history: the US hasn't elected the guy with the most Washington experience since Truman (that is, if you don't count The Wimp).

I sent him an e-mail pointing this out, but I'm pretty sure his staff did not print it out and read it to him.

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