Hillary’s loss is mot Women’s Failure. The claim that some ‘Angry White Women‘ either will vote for John McCain or stay home on Election Day, sounds like disappointment devolving into hypocrisy.

Writes: Connie Schultz

Last week, I gave my daughter a small plaque painted with the words of a Japanese proverb.

It was a mother’s gift to celebrate her new apartment and to remind her that she is ready for whatever life throws at her. I couldn’t help but think, though, that the six little words at its center were a potent reminder for me, too, in these days following the primary election defeat of Hillary Clinton:

“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”

There are plenty of Clinton supporters who don’t want to hear this, I know, but it’s time to brush the dirt off and pull ourselves up. Hillary Clinton’s loss is not a failure for women unless we will it to be so.

A woman will not be elected president in 2008. This reality has knocked the wind out of millions of Americans, especially a lot of women, including me.

Like many women about my age, I grew up believing that a woman could run our country but thought I never would get to see her do it in my lifetime.

Then along came Hillary.

I was never so happy to be wrong than when she proved, one primary after another, that plenty of fellow Americans believed she had the mettle to be commander in chief.

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And the chutzpah. Lord. Time and again, pundits and politicians predicted her demise. Time and again, there she was, giving another victory speech. It was enough to make a grown girl giggle.

I didn’t always agree with Clinton, but so what? I’d voted for a lot of bozos over the years, and even the best of candidates have flaws. I didn’t need Hillary Clinton to be perfect. I needed her to win.

Oh, to come so close.

There is a funereal quality to the coverage of campaigns once they’re over, and Clinton’s is no exception. Lots of “post-mortem” this and “life after” that; dreams “die,” careers may or may not be “resurrected.”

There are lots of references to mourning, too, especially in discussions about the letdown after a long and hard-fought battle. Grief has many faces, many moods, and it must be said that some Clinton supporters aren’t at their best just yet.

Let a little time pass so that this disappointment can run its course.

I’m not talking months or even weeks. I’m just asking for a little space for those who poured a lot of hope and energy into what they thought was going to be the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of dreams.

Surely, nobody understands better that rush of adrenaline than those who dared to believe in Barack Obama. That’s just one of the many things they have in common with the Clinton crowd.

Which brings me to those Clinton supporters who now insist they cannot and will not support Obama. They claim they either will vote for John McCain or stay home on Election Day. That sounds like disappointment devolving into hypocrisy.

We either stand for change or we don’t. We believe in participating in democracy, or we don’t. It’s one thing to vote for McCain because you trust his road map for the future. It’s quite another to do it out of some warped notion of revenge. A bitter retreat is no way to honor the first woman to come this close to being the presidential nominee.

McCain Lies and Flip-Flops

Hillary Clinton lost, but she lost on her terms. She was no quitter, and that is a legacy that will only burnish with time. I am reminded of a recent dinner with several other female columnists from around the country.

At first, we talked about the usual things: family and jobs and keeping watchful eyes on the balance. But after a round of drinks — OK, maybe it was two rounds — we started whining about ugly reader responses, particularly from men who focus on our gender instead of our opinions.

Then one of the women mentioned Clinton and brought all of us to a hush.

“I don’t know,” she said, poking at the ice in her glass. “Some days I think this job isn’t worth it, but then I think of Hillary and how she never stops no matter how hard they hit her. If she can take all that and still come out smiling, we can keep on, too.”

Yes, we can.

Popularity: 9% [?]

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination until June …… “Bobby Kennedy Was Assassinated In June” — Vince Foster Is Rolling In His Grave!

SPECIAL COMMENT BY KEITH OLBERMANN
Olbermann: Hillary Clinton — ‘You Invoked A Nightmare’…

REACTIONS:

• Time: “Strange And Tasteless”…


• Washington Post: “At Best A Poorly Chosen Example”…


• Andrew Sullivan: Clinton Just Imploded…


• Howard Fineman: “A Campaign That Probably Needs To Be Put Out Of Its Misery Real Soon”…


• New York Times: Clinton’s Reference to Slaying of Robert Kennedy Stirs Uproar

MY SPECIAL COMMENT

[Pending]

REFERENCES:

1. Government Cover-ups: Vince Foster
2. The Death of Vincent Foster — Evidence Of A Cover-up
3. The Cover-Up Of Vince Foster’s Murder Gets Stranger and Stranger
4. Vince Foster on Wikipedia

Popularity: 26% [?]

You may have heard of Rev. John Hagee, the McCain supporter who said God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its homosexual “sins.” Well now meet Rev. Rod Parsley, the televangelist megachurch pastor from Ohio who hates Islam. According to David Corn of Mother Jones, Parsley has called on Christians to wage war against Islam, which he considers to be a “false religion.” In the past, Parsley has also railed against the separation of church and state, homosexuals, and abortion rights, comparing Planned Parenthood to Nazis….[more]

A look at Jeremiah Wright, Geraldine Ferraro and John Hagee, who have been associated with the campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain respectively. Only Hagee is still an adivsor.

Video(s) Courtesy: BraveNew Films

Popularity: 28% [?]

Bob Johnson - ‘An American success story & an African-American tragedy’

By: Leonard Pitts Jr.

Columnist - Leonard Pitts Jr.

I bet Hillary Clinton wishes Bob Johnson would stop trying to help her. Johnson is the billionaire founder of Black Entertainment Television and the Clinton supporter who embarrassed his candidate and himself during the South Carolina primary by clumsily attempting to inject Barack Obama’s self-confessed youthful drug use into the campaign and then clumsily denying he was doing it.

To judge from his latest comments, he still hasn’t learned to engage brain before operating mouth.

In March, Johnson told The Charlotte Observer that he agreed with comments that forced Geraldine Ferraro to resign from Clinton’s campaign last month. Ferraro essentially called Obama the affirmative-action candidate, saying that if he were not black, he would not be the political phenom he is.

Said Johnson, “What I believe Geraldine Ferraro meant is that if you take a freshman senator from Illinois called ‘Jerry Smith’ and he says, ‘I’m going to run for president,’ would he start off with 90 percent of the black vote? And the answer is, probably not.”
Naturally, Johnson is wrong.

If being black conferred, as he and Ferraro seem to think, some mysterious advantage in politics (unlike in virtually every other field of endeavor), Jesse Jackson would have been president years ago. He is, after all, black. As are Al Sharpton and Alan Keyes. All tried, yet none came close to winning the presidency.

Johnson is also wrong about black support for Obama.

As recently as December, Gallup pollsters found Clinton had significantly “higher” favorable ratings among black voters than Obama.

Of course, that was before Obama’s resounding victory in Iowa, Clinton’s gaffe about Martin Luther King’s role in the civil rights movement, and clanking attempts by Clinton surrogates like Johnson to kneecap Obama.

For the record, Barack Obama became a political phenomenon for the exact reason a political novice named Ross Perot did: he moved voters.

But Perot is white. I’d love to see how Johnson fits that into his crackpot thesis.

It’s not just that he’s wrong on the facts that’s galling but, rather, that he is wrong on something deeper.

If you are black, after all, you are used to this, used to having your achievements — and failures — lazily conflated with your skin color. It’s an easy hook for those who lack the imagination or intelligence to dig deeper. Like Rush Limbaugh, who said in 2003 that Donovan McNabb only became a football star because he’s black.

You’d expect Johnson, as a black man, to know better. Especially since he’s surely seen his success diminished this same way. You think no one ever said Johnson (who, according to a Washington Post report, went to Princeton on an affirmative-action program) only became a billionaire because he’s black?

But then, Johnson has never identified overmuch with black folks’ struggles. He once told C-SPAN he acknowledged no responsibility to be a role model for his community.

“What are my responsibilities to black people at large?” he asked. “If I help my family get over and deal with the problems they might confront, then I have achieved that one goal that is my responsibility to society at large.”

And the rest of y’all Negroes is on your own.

Johnson proved his regard for his people by exploiting them on his network, poisoning our kids with a video parade of gyrating backsides, gold grills and pimp values, a caricature of black life so unremittingly racist as to make the Ku Klux Klan redundant.

I pity him. He is an American success story and an African-American tragedy: a selfish, sterling example of the self-loathing so common among marginalized peoples.

On the plus side, I don’t think he has to worry about being called a role model.

About The Author: Leonard Pitts Jr. won the Pulitzer PrizeAnd-the-Winner-Is-Them-Again for commentary in 2004. He is the author of Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood. His column runs every Monday and Friday. Email Leonard at lpi...@MiamiHerald.com or visit his website at www.leonardpittsjr.com

Popularity: 26% [?]

In the 7 years of George Bush’s ‘fear-mongering’ presidency, hate and associated crimes have jumped a staggering 48 percent.

The dwindling Ku Klux Klan may seem like a relic of crueler times, but the number of hate groups operating in the United States has risen exponentially — since 2000.

Many of these groups have sprouted along the border in Arizona, California and Texas, where their ringleaders have often hijacked the immigration debate. — says Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.

Hate groups in America consist of [All Republicans]:

1. Ku Klux Klan
2. Neo-Nazis
3. White Nationalists
4. SkinHeads
5. Neo-Confederates
6. ALL other Anti-Immigrant Republicans + Lou Dobbs and FOX News — a.k.a. ‘Fake News’ Channel

This Hate Map lists ‘Black Separatists’ as hate groups — I dis-agree. Black Separatist movements exist because of hundreds of years of ‘actual’ white oppression, and ‘mental’ oppression perpetuated by stealthy ’stink-bomb’ political maneuvers by the likes of Geraldine Ferraro — for the Clintons.

Many whites are tired of this ‘Racism Thing,’ and would like to see it go away, but when the Bill and Hillary Clinton are running around making racist statements to undermine super-star presidential candidate Barack Obama, then any progress made towards racial harmony is stumped!

The Clinton BIGOT Strategy is aimed squarely at the ‘established bigot vote,’ consisting of older white males and females — those who are most familiar with the racial intolerance of the past, and those unsure of what to do (a.k.a the ‘working class’) — waiting to be ‘lead to the slaughterhouse,’ so to speak.

The younger and the college educated voters, who tend to be more open minded, are substantially devoid of the ‘Racism Scourge,” whereas the so-called ‘working class’ — usually much less educated, lack analytical sophistication — and therefore are more likely to be fear-mongered and race-baited into voting for Bill and Hillary’s old politics of deception, manipulation, perceived ‘female‘ victimhood, and distraction.

Add seven years of Republican dictatorship, war-mongering, immigrant bashing, …., and race-relations in America gets driven back to the 1940’s.

Popularity: 22% [?]