But apparently Clinton has been claiming in her campaign speeches that she had to duck sniper fire when she landed in - was it Bosnia? - a decade ago. She told the story several times at different campaign stops. Of course, a clip of the landing was found and there was absolutely no sniper fire - in fact, there were military guys standing around taking pictures, and she greeted a little girl on the tarmac. Her reaction to being caught in the lie? "So I made a mistake. I'm human." Haha!

Then they moved to Obama. He claimed at a campaign stop in Selma that his parents met on a civil rights march in Selma in 1965, and that when they "got together" he was born nine months later. Only problem is - he was born FOUR YEARS EARLIER in 1961. Ha!

Liars, liars, pants on fire!

[ 30 March 2008: Message edited by: Michelle ]

Whoops, I'd better add an emoticon to ensure no one takes this as a literal comment.

[ 30 March 2008: Message edited by: unionist ]

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton is talking about events that occurred just over a decade ago when she was an adult.

[Edited to add: Hillary Clinton was also caught saying that she was named after Edmund Hillary... but she was born before he climbed Everest and came to prominence. I think that this one is a little more comparable to Obama's remarks.]

[ 30 March 2008: Message edited by: Scott Piatkowski ]

My father's mother's surname was Ramsey. And he told us when we were pretty young that was for Ramses and that we were Egyptian.

I thought this was pretty cool, and used to occasionally tell my friends this. Somewhere in my teens I figured out that my father must been pulling our legs. Someone who wasn't a geography/culture/history freak might never have figured it out.

If you think they're lying now wait until they've been in office a term. Anyone wanna bet that NAFTA will be re-negotiated, troops will be out of Iraq, and all Americans will have healthcare?

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Originally posted by KenS:
I thought this was pretty cool, and used to occasionally tell my friends this. Somewhere in my teens I figured out that my father must been pulling our legs. Someone who wasn't a geography/culture/history freak might never have figured it out.

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Obama never said what you claim he did. The full text of Obama's speech in Selma is available.

He said:

[QUOTE]So the Kennedy’s decided we're going to do an air lift. We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is.

This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves; but she had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided that we know that the world as it has been it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child. There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama. [QUOTE]

text of speech

Or, at 5:00 on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r-XG_VJZDw

"Some folks were willing to cross a bridge" is a description of a new attitude towards racial matters which was "stirring across the country".

Quietly, the storm over the hateful views expressed by Sen. Barack Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has blown away the most insidious myth of the Democratic primary campaign. Obama and his surrogates have charged that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has deliberately and cleverly played the race card in order to label Obama the "black" candidate.

Having injected racial posturing into the contest, Obama's "post-racial" campaign finally seems to be all about race and sensational charges about white racism. But the mean-spirited strategy started even before the primaries began, when Obama's operatives began playing the race card - and blamed Hillary Clinton.

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Originally posted by remind:
Thanks Jeff, interesting that some will go so far to discredit Obama, eh!

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Originally posted by remind:
Thanks Jeff, interesting that some will go so far to discredit Obama, eh!

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Yeah. I went as far as seeing a few clips on the news and posting about them. About BOTH candidates.

Besides which, I'm not as convinced as Jeff is by his actual quote.

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There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born.

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"Because of what happened in Selma, Alabama"? What happened in Selma, Alabama that stirred across the country? What would be the most logical assumption people would make about what he was referring to in that comment?

I don't really care at this point which one of them wins, so I am certainly not "going far" to discredit either Obama OR Clinton. I am amused, however, to see Obama partisans accusing others of unfairly "discrediting" him when they themselves go "so far" to excuse any stupid thing he utters.

[ 31 March 2008: Message edited by: Michelle ]

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Originally posted by martin dufresne:
by Sean Wilentz, professor of history, Princeton University

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"Because of what happened in Selma, Alabama"? What happened in Selma, Alabama that stirred across the country? What would be the most logical assumption people would make about what he was referring to in that comment?

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There is a BIG difference between meeting "the most logical assumption" and lying.

Yes, you could "most logically" assume that Barack Obama was claiming to be born four years after his actual birthday, despite having a book on the New York Times Bestseller list which discusses exactly how and where his parents got together, far from Selma.

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Originally posted by jeff house:

It reminds me a bit of that other big fat liar, John Kennedy, who falsely claimed "Ich bin ein Berliner", when he was REALLY born in Massachusetts!

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Hmm, you may be on to something.

Does Obama's musing about invading Pakistan remind you of JFK's invasion of Cuba and Viet Nam?

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Obama is smart, but his basic game plan is quite simple. Knowing full well the group most hostile to Black progress in the U.S. has always been white males, he aims to neutralize much of this demographic by assuring them an Obama presidency would be aggressively race-neutral. In practice, that means Obama ascribes all racial offenses to the past, where the only guilty white people are dead. The accumulated white wealth and privilege that is the result of hundreds of years of racist exploitation also was due to actions (crimes) of people now mostly dead. Obama forgives the dead racists, and has never expressed any intention of readjusting the ten to fifteen to one disparity in median white to Black household income. Yes, Obama knows perfectly well that wealth disparity, if not aggressively dealt with as a racial problem, will take centuries – if ever – to disappear. But Obama accepts the racial status quo as a fait accompli that can only be altered by methods that do not penalize living white people who benefited from their dead ancestors’ crimes. In practice, this means Obama would leave American race relationships frozen in time.

White men, the recipients of the most unearned privilege, wealth and power over the four centuries of English-speaking settlement (theft) in North American, therefore have nothing to fear from Barack Obama. Obama makes it quite clear that he not only considers white men’s riches to be sacrosanct, but he believes every word of the mythical origins of the white settlers who seized power from the British Crown. These men were “farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787,” said Obama. No mention of slaveholders or slave traders in the bunch. By dishing out a historical narrative of race in America that omits the theft of the continent and genocide of Native Americans Obama tacitly accepts the lie that most European settlers were escaping religious persecution – a fairy tale that even children’s schoolbooks seldom tell anymore – and pretends that the whites acquired Indian lands by legal means. But what’s the point of arguing about such matters, since everyone involved – especially the Indians – is dead.
….

Obama’s central message for white consumption, here, is that everybody’s story is equally compelling, whether you are the grandchild of slaves or slaveholders. This is sometimes called “moral equivalence,” and is especially favored by whites of European immigrant descent who remember how hard their fathers worked at jobs that wouldn’t hire native-born, English-speaking Blacks. But hey! Everybody’s families have had problems, right? Forgetaboutit!

Obama claims his political beliefs are based on an “unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people.” Of course, he never asks white people to acknowledge, let alone give up an iota of privilege in order to even the score after all these years, so we’ll have to accept the existence of this vast reservoir of decency on faith. - Glen Ford

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Does Obama's musing about invading Pakistan remind you of JFK's invasion of Cuba and Viet Nam?

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No, because musing is different from invading. It reminds me more of the "all the glory in the world fits into a grain of corn" controversy.

Approved world leaders get to wax all poetic, while those disapproved are allowed no metaphors; they're "lying" about their date of birth.

[ 31 March 2008: Message edited by: jeff house ]

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Originally posted by martin dufresne:
And when the Wright stories and videos finally did break through in the mass media, they came not from Clinton's supporters but from Fox News Network. (...)

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This of course assumes that Clinton supporters didn't bring it to Fox's attention behind the scenes while publicly remaining aloof. Or it could have been McCain supporters though such a move would have made more sense in a few months time once Obama is the nominee - unless of course the GOP is more scared of Obama than they are of Clinton and wanted to make a move against him now. Or it could have come from random right wingers. Fact is we don't know where the information came from and may not for some time but it is somewhat presumptuous to clear the Clinton campaign when they had the most to gain at that particular moment. Just to be clear - I think that cui bono (who benefits) is overused by people to rush to judgments. Just because someone benefits from a situation (or is seen to) doesn't mean they were the cause of it. Cui bono is the basis of far too many conspiracy theories. It may help direct one to determining who is a responsible party but it is not in itself conclusive nor justification to rush to judgment.

[ 31 March 2008: Message edited by: aka Mycroft ]

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This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great-great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves; but she had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided that we know that the world as it has been it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child. There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.

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He doesn't actually say his parents met at Selma but that they got together "because of what happened in Selma". He is taking a bit of poetic license here to say that his parents got together as a result of the civil rights movement (and he's using Selma as a reference to the broader civil rights movement) but I think it's a bit much to say he's fabricating anything - more of a poetic allusion and not quite the same as Clinton saying she faced down sniper fire when getting off an aircraft in Bosnia (though even that is the sort of embellishment that's pretty typical of politicians, or indeed almost anyone, relaying anecdotes)

[ 31 March 2008: Message edited by: aka Mycroft ]

Rene Levesque claimed to be present as a war correspondent to witness Mussolini's body hanging from a lampost (after his memoirs were published some pesky person went back through Levesque's war correspondence and found that he never filed a report from the site of Mussolini's execution and was not in Milan when it happened or afterwards)

[ 31 March 2008: Message edited by: aka Mycroft ]

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Every few years New York City cops hear the growl of clear and present danger and subdue the threat with powerful volleys of lead. With Sean Bell, an African-American, in November 2006 the fusillade rose to 50 shots, deemed necessary by the men in blue to lay low Bell outside a nightclub in November 2006.

In Queens last week a judge ruled that the cops who turned young Bell into a sieve on his wedding day had been filled with most understandable apprehension though Bell turned out to be unarmed. As usual the cops walk and sometime later the victim’s family may get a settlement from the city. The important thing is that justice is seen not to have been done. Power needs the periodic buttress of irrational, uniformed violence.

The crowds protesting in Queens after Judge Anthony Cooperman let Bells’ killers go free a week ago were orderly, as instructed by an African American. "We're a nation of laws, so we respect the verdict that came down," Barack Obama said when asked about the case by reporters in Indiana. "Resorting to violence to express displeasure over a verdict is something that is completely unacceptable and is counterproductive."

Spoken like a president of the Harvard Law Review, at least in this era! In fact Obama’s white rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, put more juice into her press release: "This tragedy has deeply saddened New Yorkers - and all Americans. My thoughts are with Nicole and her children and the rest of Sean's family during this difficult time. The court has given its verdict, and now we await the conclusion of a Department of Justice civil rights investigation.”

Obama is now well advanced along the path of reassurance, where each candidate nearing the White House make clear their fidelity to the standard of irrational violence. As with McCain and Mrs Clinton this year he has affirmed his willingness to wipe out America’s enemies with nuclear bombs and missiles, though he draw some rebukes for saying he was not in favor of nuking the Hindu Kush, thus casting a disquieting flicker of reason across the path of reassurance.

Since he is, though half white, black in appearance - and in such matters appearance counts for everything – Obama has dealt with the pigmentation problem by declaring that race is no longer a troubling factor in America, and should be low on the fix-it list of any incoming President. In Selma, Alabama, he declared that blacks "have already come 90 percent of the way" to equality. Indeed he’s already issued white America a loss damage waiver. "If I lose, it would not be because of race. It would be because of mistakes I made along the campaign trail."

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Originally posted by aka Mycroft:
Ronald Reagan, famously, used to refer to movies he saw or appeared in as if they were real incidents in his life - there was a hilarious 60 Minutes report on this which would show a clip from a Reagan speech where he'd tell a "real story" either from his own life or someone else's followed by the old clip from a Reagan movie showing exactly the same anecdote played out.

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There was a Saturday Night Live sketch shortly after the Reagan assassination attempt where the premise was that Reagan didn't realize he was really President - he thought it was a movie. He complained about being knocked down during the shooting of the shooting and said he wanted a stunt double next time.

[ 05 May 2008: Message edited by: Malcolm French, APR ]

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Wall Street, known variously as a barren wasteland for diversity or the last plantation in America, has defied courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for decades in its failure to hire blacks as stockbrokers. Now it’s marshalling its money machine to elect a black man to the highest office in the land. Why isn’t the press curious about this?

Walk into any of the largest Wall Street brokerage firms today and you’ll see a self-portrait of upper management racism and sexism: women sitting at secretarial desks outside fancy offices occupied by predominantly white males. According to the EEOC as well as the recent racial discrimination class actions filed against UBS and Merrill Lynch, blacks make up between 1 per cent to 3.5 per cent of stockbrokers -- this after 30 years of litigation, settlements and empty promises to do better by the largest Wall Street firms.

The first clue to an entrenched white male bastion seeking a black male occupant in the oval office (having placed only five blacks in the U.S. Senate in the last two centuries) appeared in February on a chart at the Center for Responsive Politics website. It was a list of the 20 top contributors to the Barack Obama campaign, and it looked like one of those comprehension tests where you match up things that go together and eliminate those that don’t. Of the 20 top contributors, I eliminated six that didn’t compute. I was now looking at a sight only slightly less frightening to democracy than a Diebold voting machine. It was a Wall Street cartel of financial firms, their registered lobbyists, and go-to law firms that have a death grip on our federal government.

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It reminds me a bit of that other big fat liar, John Kennedy, who falsely claimed "Ich bin ein Berliner", when he was REALLY born in Massachusetts!

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In anycase I also agree with Jedd, its 90 percent sure that Obama is speaking poetically about "Selma" as it has become a established in the public imagination as an icon of the civil rights movement and the general period of social "transformation" and is not specifically speaking of Selma and the events at Selma on a specific date. Once a phrase becomes blurry like that its really its easy to say things that sound inaccurate because its metaphor as much as anything, and metaphor is never accurate by nature.

What happened at "Selma?" New social mores evolved. What social mores were these? The acceptance of interacial marriage was one. Growing acceptance of interacial sex allowed for Barak to be born "...because some folks are willing to march across a bridge."

[ 06 May 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Hillary Clinton's recent tough talk, stating that the U.S. could "obliterate Iran" if it were to attack Israel, gives us a glimpse of the kind of foreign policy we could expect if she was to become the next president.

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But, but... if Clinton wins the nomination, babblers will be urging the US voters to overlook all that and support her.