He's a better American than the guy in the White House.    Ronald Reagan praised his service to the country.

 Who wouldn't be a better American than the current guy in the White House? Besides Benedict Arnold...

 I've heard worse in church.

My father once had to be physically restrained in church (well, a hand on the shoulder) because the guest priest delivering a sermon at a grade-school graduation went off on a rant about J. Edgar Hoover, of all things. 

I read both of those links to Anderson Cooper's hosting of Roland Martin's "defense" of The Wrong Reverend Wright.

I take it that you are unable to see just how obnoxious and disconnected from reality that nutcase Wright is. 

If you are willing to try to see what the vast majority of people see immediately, I will suspend my immediate conclusions about your judgement.  Fair?

As a sign of your good faith, how about listing 3 things in each of those sermons that are just flaming idiotic?  Are you able to do that?

Tell you what, because I am a nice guy...  I will spot you 1 from each...

"God Damn America": 

1. “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color."

2.  _____________________________________.

3. ______________________________________.

"9/11"

1.  “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost."

2.  _____________________________________.

3.   _____________________________________.

 Once again rundum and company have shown us just how truly stupid they are. GW might not be the best Prez we have had but people like rundum and noony wouldn't make a good sized pimple on GW's butt let alone be better than him or even equal.. The nitwit Dems are in meltdown. The repubs are in the catbird seat watching them rip each others guts out. Isn't it great, the repubs don't even have to go out and dig up dirt. The niwits are handing it to them gratis.

Dropped out of that correspondence-school spelling course, I see, Charlie

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I hereby award you the "understatement of the week" trophy for "GW may not be the best Prez we have had."  The runner-up:  "Boy, that Bear Stearns stock might not be as rock-solid as we thought."

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George Walker Bush will only live down his title of "worst president in history" if he manages to get someone even *DUMBER* elected after him--like John Sidney McCain III, for example. 

Publican, Wright was told--and apparently believed--that HIV was an engineered virus sent to destroy minority communities.  On a scale of lunacy I put that just below belief in a 9/11 conspiracy involving that same government, but slightly more believable than most Christian theology.   One regular poster here apparently believes the "grassy knoll" crap about the JFK assassination.   I've run into people who think the world is only 6000 years old.   Buffoo thinks he's helping his religion by posting here.  John Hagee thinks he's helping *HIS* religion by saying nasty things about the Catholic Church that he thinks don't apply equally about his own creed.

Indeed do many people believe silly things, especially in churches.

Publican, I never said Wright was completely right. My point was that he's been castigated over one or two soundbites. Obama has stated he desn't agree with everything Wright said. Nor do I. Your # 1 listing on the "9/11" sermon is also rather scary. You can't see that our foreign policies--some of them anyway--have not exactly engendered us to the rest of the world? That's scary.

Toget back to the sermons: the Republican Party leadership is choosing to make this an issue because of their fear that we might indeed have a black man as president.

In 2004, to quote Al Franken, the tactic was "smear, fear and queer."

This campaign seems to be morphing into "attack because he's black." This campaign will continue to get uglier, and now they're going after Obama because his skin color seems to be all they have to stir people up with.

It's become an increasingly ugly political system where opponents claim discrimination as the reason all voters don't support their candidate.

The democrats in Kern got told they didn't support Obama b/c of race.

The republicans in Kern got told they didn't support Romney b/c of religion.

And those accusations came from party leadership.  No surprise that the tactic is trickling down to party members.  It's happened in both parties, it's not like the Republicans are the only ones guilty.  In fact, Clinton's camp is pretty gleeful about the Wright controversy because it gives her campaign a fighting chance.  Tell me, Noone, are the democrats supporting Clinton also doing so "because of their fear that we might indeed have a black man as president"?  Or is that a distinction that you reserve just for Republicans?

Guess what, there are reasons to vote against Obama that have nothing to do with his race.  And frankly, this Wright issue isn't about his race either; if anything, it's about his religion, his judgment and his religious advisors mixing of religon and politics.  This would be an issue for Obama regardless of color.  I wouldn't have voted for Pat Robertson either and the reason to reject his Presidential bid had nothing to do with his race.

But saying that Republicans won't support a black leader is easier than being honest about the situation.  B/c true believers would rather attack with claims of discrimination instead of acknowledging that there might be real reasons to not support a candidate.

Clinton's camp pretty much stayed out of the Wright controvery until recently.  They're getting desperate.

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I do think most Democrats will have an easier time voting for a black man than many Republicans.   And there *ARE* more of us. 

From a recent Pew poll which showed Obama ten points ahead of Clinton at this point:

"While Obama has a mostly favorable image among white Democrats, those with unfavorable views about him are likelier to say equal rights for minorities have gone too far and to oppose interracial dating. "

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(Personally, I can do without that sort of Democrat.)

From the poll:

GE:
Obama 49, McCain 43 (Obama 50, McCain 43)
Clinton 49, McCain 44 (Clinton 50, McCain 45)

Favorability:
Obama: 56 F, 34 UF (57, 34)
Clinton 50 F, 44 UF (51, 44)
McCain: 45 F, 41 UF (48, 38)

(McCain's unfavorables nearly as high as Clinton's.   And folks don't even know the guy yet.)

 No, most Democrats will have an easier time voting for a black man  Democratic nominee than many Republicans.

Ain't *THAT* the truth.  And a surprise--a candidate evaluated on the basis of his positions, and not the color of his skin.

And there's *STILL* more of us than of them.

Oh please, you have no problems going after McCain for non position reasons (his class rank, his age) but then you call racism if folks do that to your beloved candidate.  You don't even try to be consistent anymore.  Go after the evangelical Christian blogger but nobody better think about saying anything negative about Obama's church, cuz if they do, they're racist.

The fact you two are duking it out over this shows two things: one, how easy it is it is to get normally rational people focused on something besides the issues, and two, how far we still have to go before race isn't an issue in this country.

Oh, there are plenty of positional reasons to vote against McCain (his incredibly bad judgement on Iraq and the economy, for two).  I'll start using those as soon as folks drop the phony Wright stuff. 

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When Obama's church starts spamming here, I'll consider going after them too.

Noone, you made it a race issue by suggesting Republicans don't support Obama "because of their fear that we might indeed have a black man as president."  Had you not said that, I wouldn't have posted, I'm getting tired of the Wright threads too.  However, I don't appreciate the less than veiled accusation of racism.  There are plenty of reasons to not support Obama and they have nothing to do with his race.  Maybe you should ask fellow Democrats supporting Clinton some of their reasons for doing so instead of assuming.

RF, you've been making fun of McCain for non-position issues since long before the Wright issue.  Pretending that you're going to stop once the Wright issue dies down just isn't believable.  And, it's hardly Republicans spamming the Wright issue when many of the blogs are started by Obama supporters, including this one and the long one by SfBoston.

Me? Au contraire:

When the controversy over Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright reached critical mass last week, it was the political equivalent of the green flag at a NASCAR race. The conservative strategists and talkers had been slowly circling the track, feet itchy on the accelerator, just waiting for the signal to floor it. But now, as The Politico reported in a story titled "GOP sees Rev. Wright as path to victory," the Republican strategists know exactly what must be done, starting with famed ad man Alex Castellanos:

"All the sudden you've got two dots, and two dots make a line," said Castellanos. "You start getting some sense of who he is, and it's not the Obama you thought. He's not the Tiger Woods of politics."

As Castellanos knows well, these kinds of attacks have their greatest power when they tap into pre-existing archetypes voters already carry with them, and the deeper they reside in our lizard brains the better. So they will make sure white Americans know that Obama is not Tiger Woods. He's not the unthreatening black man, he's the scary black man. The rest of this is here.
 

But wait: there's more!But beneath the personal anecdotes and historical allusions, it was a delicately crafted political statement — one that makes clear that Obama understands exactly how much peril he is facing.

Even before the Jeremiah Wright controversy erupted in recent days, voting patterns in several states made clear — for all the glow of Obama’s reputation as a bridge-builder — how uneven his record really is when it comes to transcending deep racial divides.

The Philadelphia speech offered lines calculated to reassure all the groups with which he is most vulnerable.

For working-class whites — whose coolness toward Obama helped tilt Ohio to Hillary Rodham Clinton — Obama spoke with understanding about why they dislike busing and affirmative action. “Like the anger in the black community, these resentments aren’t always shared in polite company,” he said.

The rest of tht story is here.

No more is it believable when Republicans say they want an election on the issues.  They've never won an election on the issues.

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I've watched the last two elections.  There's no chance I'll have to play nice, because there's no chance the Republicans are going to play nice. 

This has just become another partisan insulting match.  It wasn't right when the party leaders blamed prejudice for Kern's vote totals and it's not right to claim that Republicans won't vote for Obama because their all racist.  I know it's shocking but Republicans aren't all racist and uneducated and NASCAR fans; some will choose to not vote for Obama and it will have nothing to do with race.   So are black folks who don't vote for Obama racist too?

Trying to pretend that Rush Limbaugh and Alex Castellanos speak for the entire Republican party is pathetic.  You two pick the loudest blowhards of the Republicans and act like they're the norm for the party and then use those constructed stereotypes to justify your own poor behavior.  I guess I could do that too for Democrats but I won't b/c I can at least understand how pointless and lame an intellectual exercise that is.