The Glade 4.0

Wow, you're working overtime to find retarded things Nitefox. A+

But RD and Farsky...no problem there?

No problem at all. Their simpleton is beyond reproach, whereas your simpleton is an evil, evil bastard.

so the answer is there are stupid people on both sides of the aisle?


Nothing to see here.

... that Ladies and Gentlemen is the typical voting public.

Yeah, that one's pretty brutal, FarSky. I think Romney's chances basically died when that 47% speech leaked.

If you listen to the MSM(which you do), yeah. But to folks who understand what he is talking about, not really. It's sad when a guy basically tells the truth and is killed for it....

However, Romney’s figures aren’t that important here – he was generalizing to a sympathetic audience who knew where he was coming from. What’s more disappointing about his remarks is the suggestion that he’s given up any hope of reaching out to those Americans who rely on the government for various forms of welfare, notwithstanding the fact that some of them do actually vote Republican. While his comments about the mindset of many of those individuals are not necessarily wrong, rather than writing them off he should be placing the blame for creating that mentality squarely where it belongs, by pointing out how Democrats have spent the past 60-plus years cynically and methodically hooking millions of Americans on welfare in order to secure their vote. At the same time, Romney should articulate a positive message for those on welfare, encompassing not only his plans for jobs and the economy (we’d all like to hear more detail on those subjects) but other issues that impact on poverty and dependency, such as education reform. He should also talk about the moral implications of mass dependency, as well as the economic ones, and the countervailing benefits of what Arthur Brooks calls “earned success.”

How much of the black population voted for Obama last time? Like 93-97%? And they did that simply because Obama had great ideas right? Right?

Before Barack Obama, the “black president” lived in the African American imagination as a kind of cosmic joke, a phantom of all that could never be. White folks, whatever their talk of freedom and liberty, would not allow a black president. They could not tolerate Emmett’s boyish gaze. Dr. King turned the other cheek, and they blew it off. White folks shot Lincoln over “nigger equality,” ran Ida Wells out of Memphis, beat Freedom Riders over bus seats, slaughtered Medgar in his driveway like a dog. The comedian Dave Chappelle joked that the first black president would need a “Vice President Santiago”—because the only thing that would ensure his life in the White House was a Hispanic president-­in-waiting. A black president signing a bill into law might as well sign his own death certificate.

And even if white folks could moderate their own penchant for violence, we could not moderate our own. A long-suffering life on the wrong side of the color line had denuded black people of the delicacy necessary to lead the free world. In a skit on his 1977 TV comedy show, Richard Pryor, as a black president, conceded that he was “courting an awful lot of white women” and held a press conference that erupted into a riot after a reporter requested that the president’s momma clean his house. More recently, the comedian Cedric the Entertainer joked that a black president would never have made it through Monicagate without turning a press conference into a battle royal. When Chappelle tried to imagine how a black George W. Bush would have justified the war against Saddam Hussein, his character (“Black Bush”) simply yelled, “The nigger tried to kill my father!”

Thus, in hard jest, the paradoxes and problems of a theoretical black presidency were given voice. Racism would not allow a black president. Nor would a blackness, forged by America’s democratic double-talk, that was too ghetto and raw for the refinement of the Oval Office. Just beneath the humor lurked a resonant pain, the scars of history, an aching doubt rooted in the belief that “they” would never accept us. And so in our Harlems and Paradise Valleys, we invoked a black presidency the way a legion of 5-foot point guards might invoke the dunk—as evidence of some great cosmic injustice, weighty in its import, out of reach.

And yet Spud Webb lives.

When presidential candidate Barack Obama presented himself to the black community, he was not to be believed. It strained credulity to think that a man sporting the same rigorously managed haircut as Jay-Z, a man who was a hard-core pickup basketball player, and who was married to a dark-skinned black woman from the South Side, could coax large numbers of white voters into the booth. Obama’s blackness quotient is often a subject of debate. (He himself once joked, while speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists in 2007, “I want to apologize for being a little bit late, but you guys keep on asking whether I’m black enough.”) But despite Obama’s post-election reluctance to talk about race, he has always displayed both an obvious affinity for black culture and a distinct ability to defy black America’s worst self-conceptions.

The crude communal myth about black men is that we are in some manner unavailable to black women—either jailed, dead, gay, or married to white women. A corollary myth posits a direct and negative relationship between success and black culture. Before we actually had one, we could not imagine a black president who loved being black. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama describes his first kiss with the woman who would become his wife as tasting “of chocolate.” The line sounds ripped from Essence magazine. That’s the point.

These cultural cues became important during Obama’s presidential run and beyond. Obama doesn’t merely evince blackness; he uses his blackness to signal and court African Americans, semaphoring in a cultural dialect of our creation—crooning Al Green at the Apollo, name-checking Young Jeezy, regularly appearing on the cover of black magazines, weighing the merits of Jay-Z versus Kanye West, being photo­graphed in the White House with a little black boy touching his hair. There is often something mawkish about this signaling—like a Virginia politico thickening his southern accent when talking to certain audiences. If you’ve often been the butt of political signaling (Sister Souljah, Willie Horton), and rarely the recipient, these displays of cultural affinity are powerful. And they are all the more powerful because Obama has been successful. Whole sections of America that we had assumed to be negro­phobic turned out in support of him in 2008. Whatever Obama’s other triumphs, arguably his greatest has been an expansion of the black imagination to encompass this: the idea that a man can be culturally black and many other things also—biracial, Ivy League, intellectual, cosmopolitan, temperamentally conservative, presidential.

It is often said that Obama’s presidency has given black parents the right to tell their kids with a straight face that they can do anything. This is a function not only of Obama’s election to the White House but of the way his presidency broadcasts an easy, almost mystic, blackness to the world. The Obama family represents our ideal imagining of ourselves—an ideal we so rarely see on any kind of national stage.

What black people are experiencing right now is a kind of privilege previously withheld—seeing our most sacred cultural practices and tropes validated in the world’s highest office. Throughout the whole of American history, this kind of cultural power was wielded solely by whites, and with such ubiquity that it was not even commented upon. The expansion of this cultural power beyond the private province of whites has been a tremendous advance for black America.

On the contrary, Romney's statement is so damaging because it really doesn't have to be spun to make him look bad. Sure, the average voter isn't going to realize that the "My job is not to worry about those people" line was a reference to campaign tactics rather than Presidential priorities, but it's the rest of the statement that I think does the real damage. Romney said that 47% of the country consider themselves victims, feel they're entitled to have everything handed to them, and can never be convinced to take responsibility for their own lives. I mean, holy ****! That noise you hear is the sound of hundreds of campaign strategists simultaneously banging their heads against their desks.

Forget that he dishonestly implied that not paying federal income tax equates to being dependent on government (hint: payroll taxes, state taxes, property taxes...). Forget that he erroneously conflated those who don't pay federal income tax with Obama's base (hint: a lot of them are retirees, a majority of whom vote Republican). Forget the question of whether electoral priorities are likely to reflect and/or influence Presidential priorities (hint: they are). The simple, uncut, unspun fact is that he said roughly half the people in this country think of themselves as victims, feel entitled to everything, and are unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives. That's both factually dubious and politically suicidal, with no spinning from "the MSM" needed to make it so.

As Joe Scarborough would say:

"Oh, sweet Jesus!"

Also, by Romney's own admission of paying only 13% in taxes, anyone who is employed pays more taxes than Romney does. And Romney is crapping on them for being dependent.

The release of Mitt Romney’s 2011 tax returns shows that he freely gave away more than $4 million to charity last year (about 30 percent of his income). In comparison, when Joe Biden was first running for vice president, his tax returns showed that he had given away just $3,690 to charity over the previous ten years (about 0.2 percent of his income). In other words, Romney gave away a thousand times as much to charity in one year as Biden gave in a decade.

There are folks on this board that won't vote for Romney simply because he has an R after his name. How much of the black population voted for Obama last time?