Blogress Ann Althouse who, in 2008, thought Obama “was the better bet, compared to the GOP alternative” recently transcribed this video she watched on Instapundit featuring the sage diva, Camille Paglia, a woman who not just backed, but also contributed to, Barack Obama four years ago:
Not least: I consider him, now, one of the most racially divisive and polarizing figures ever. I think it’s going to take years to undo the damage to relationships between the races.
Read the whole thing. Now, I’m going to watch the video.
UPDATE: Just watched the video and it’s well worth your time. Love what she says early on about art. She’s spot on. Spot on. Segment quoted above is just before 12 minute mark.
NB: In the original version of this post, I neglected to include the name of the person whose remarks Althouse had transcribed.
Big fan of Camille, but believe she is ideologically confused. If she’s going to throw away her vote, it should be for Gary Johnson not Jill Stein.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=sSxDE1QCHA4
LENA DUNHAM: YOUR FIRST TIME PARODY! #MoreFreeCrap
If you haven’t seen it you have to watch ….LOL
It’s going to take more than just years, try decades. I think the same is going to be true of the inadvertent damage he’s going to be doing to the dems word today is O’bama is causing damage to down ticket races with his poor October performance. At the dem Convention the average age of the speakers was 10 years older than ate rep Convention. Lastly the fallout from the Benghazi mess will be much bigger and worse than Watergate ever was.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/10/bombshell-us-troops-would-not-have-been-painting-assets-on-ground-unless-their-was-air-support-overhead-but-white-house-called-off-attack/
Obama had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to narrow the divide; to deliver a little tough love and encouragement to blacks poisoned with racial grievance, dependency, and victim-mindset and to demonstrate to non-black America that the divide can be narrowed.
He’s squandered the opportunity totally and, if anything, has made things worse.
For my part, I could forgive Obama most all his shortcomings if he’d only used this one opportunity well. I’m not certain that it’s possible to close the divide but Obama has surely squandered the opportunity to attempt a great thing and to be remembered as a great president.
Instead, he’s just another race-hustling, crooked pol. A tragedy. A waste on an epic scale.
If you want to know what community organizers do, this is it — rub people’s emotions raw to hype their resentments…. And this has always been Barack Obama in his old community organizer role, a role that should have warned those who thought that he was someone who would bring us together, when he was all too well practiced in the arts of polarizing us apart.
Some, if not most, people in the media have tried to dismiss this and other revelations of Obama’s real character. But the truth is one thing that never wears out.
The Pythagorean theorem is 2,000 years old, but it can still tell you the distance from home plate to second base (127 feet) without measuring it….. And what’s happened over the last four years tells a lot about Obama’s character — or lack of character.
Obama’s true believers may not want to know the truth. But there are millions of other people who have simply projected their own desires for a post-racial America onto Obama. These are the ones who need to be confronted with the truth, before they repeat the same poignant mistake they made 4 years ago when they voted Obama into office.
Nobody can point to anything he’s done that is racially divisive. White republicans are absurdly insecure, paranoid, and prone to believe ridiculous conspiracy theories that have no basis in reality. The tea party was exalting in fantasies about his birth certificate and his secret Muslim religion and and his black liberation theology since before he won the democratic nomination, so you’ll forgive me for taking conservative commentary about the “racial divide” with a big, giant grain of salt.
Republicans complain about the lack of unity as if Democrats are singularly responsible for making it happen. Unity, in this case, means conservatives compromising on nothing and having all of their policies and opinions embraced by everyone. Anything less is considered divisive, so why should we bother? Besides, the democrats have adopted the conservative positions on a great number of issues, from foreign policy to wall street regulation and defense spending. The phrase climate change wasnt brought up once in any of the four debates, for example. The healthcare plan passed by obama borrowed heavily from 90s republicans and this years GOP candidate. It seems to me that the democrats are tryng very hard, and republicans arent trying at all. As for the “racial divide,” i have no idea what you could even be talking about.
Youre hallucinating, all of you.
“— she’s voting for Jill Stein —”
“So I feel the Democratic Party needs to be shattered and remade to recover its true progressive roots. I don’t see progressives. ”
Positions: “Along the lines of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal solution to the Great Depression, Jill Stein advocates a “Green New Deal” in which renewable energy jobs would be created to address climate change and environmental issues with the objective of employing “every American willing and able to work”. Citing the research of Dr. Phillip Harvey, Professor of Law & Economics at Rutgers University, as evidence of the successful economic effects of the 1930s’ New Deal projects, Stein would fund the plan with a 30% reduction in the U.S. military budget, returning US troops home, and increasing taxes on areas such as capital gains, offshore tax havens and multimillion dollar real estate. Stein plans on impacting what she sees as a growing convergence of environmental crises in water, soil, fisheries and forests, through the creation of sustainable infrastructure based in clean renewable energy generation and sustainable communities principles such as increasing intra-city mass transit and inter-city railroads, creating ‘complete streets’ that safely encourage bike and pedestrian traffic and regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture”
The little fascist ordains:
But, the little fascist racist puke has no problem with nailing white Republicans with everything he can dredge up from the sewer he uses for a brains:
This dichotomy of non sequitur imbecility is too ripe with irony to just fester along the roadside of Levi’s circular thinking process.
Helitrope,
Im not ordaining anything. Nowhere in this post, the links within the post, or the comments following the post, is any description of any kind of policy or statement by Obama that can be construed as racially divisive. Being white is no harder under president Obama than it was four years ago. I speak from experience. Meanwhile, large swaths of the conservative movement are enamored with conspiracy theories having to do with obamas skin tone. At any given moment, a conservative is saying something racially divisive, frequently in public. see Sununu’s statement dismissing Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama as being motivated by race, thats less than 24 hours ago. Remember when Glenn Beck accused Obama of hating white people? Its been like this for the past 4-5 years.
This is simply the lay of the land. The Republicans have dedicated themselves to making race an issue, principally as a get out the vote effort, while Obama has done nothing whatsoever to make white people uneasy. So again, you have no room to talk about how Obama is racially divisive. The behavior of conservatism during his first term leaves your side no credibility whatsoever.
Of course he’s polarizing. Why,look at how well “divide and conquer” has worked for progressives over the last 50 years…
So Levi’s the local Troll or Idiot. I’ll remember that.
Wrong. We have more than enough of examples.
Which proves that, at any given moment, “progressives” and the Barack Obama Party are saying something racially divisive in public — namely that all criticism of Obama is race-based, and that anyone who opposes Obama in any way is a racist.
That is because “progressives” like Levi are racist. They believe that government should discriminate based on skin color. They believe that black people are inferior and that it is “racist” to hold them to the same standards that white candidates are held. Furthermore, as we see with people like Mia Love, Clarence Thomas, and Condi Rice, “progressives” are racist bigots who call any black person who disagrees with them names and call for them to be lynched.
The screaming and babbling Levi can’t provide links or facts. All Levi can do is smear and lie, just as his racist Obama does. Conservatives overwhelmingly are far more intelligent and moral than racist “progressives” like Levi, who are incapable of backing up their statements and regularly demonstrate that they have nothing other than lies.
OK, feel free to delete any two of those three repeated posts. 🙂 Darn comment system.
Then what was she 4 years ago, temporarily insane?
(I mean, I wasn’t taken in, 4 years ago. Neither were you.)
Levi – lets just say that the president acted stupidly…. That Reps don’t really want to put y’all back in chains… And that only the Black Panthers could get away with voter intimidation under a Dem administration.
Please look at my comment above and tell me how I’m wrong… Tell me how Obama’s administration has narrowed the divide.
You can charge racism and paranoia all you want but I’ve yet to have anyone even attempt to explain what the benefit to white America is realized by maintaining an underclass or explain to me how 50 years of liberal policy have improved the lot of black people.
Of course Levi doesn’t see anything racist…
After all, it’s clear to him that a black man can’t lie and cover up his complacency in the deaths of Americans. Only white Presidents can (no matter the evidence to the contrary)
Catseye, don’t pay attention to the Levite. He always cuts-and-pastes his arguments and can never back them up coherently.
Just pretend he’s a homeless guy asking for money and treat him with the same disdain.
And yes, trolls, I went there – deal with it.
Regards,
Peter H.
Levi it is pretty racially divisive when a white person is unable to criticize this president without having “racist” tossed in their direction.
“We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us”” – Barack Obama, October 25, 2010.
“Mitt Romney. Not one of us.” – Tagline for Obama Campaign Ad, October 2012.
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” – Barack Obama, June 14, 2008
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. – Barack Obama, 2008
Is Levi the glassy-eyed Obama Cultist seriously claiming that Obama has never said anything divisive??
“The people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!” – Barack Obama, June 2007, telling a black audience FALSELY that they were somehow shortchanged in the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina.
But I having said that, I don’t think much of Paglia (as indicated earlier), and that includes her comments here. They didn’t impress me. For one thing, Obama’s divisiveness on race, although real, is not as great as His divisiveness on class.
In other words, Obama is not primarily a racial demagogue; He is primarily a class warfare demagogue.
That Obama believes in anything other than personal ambition is a premise I suspect to be entirely false. As for Paglia, she has much to say that is worthwhile to any thinking person, particularly if disagreement is allowed. Sadly, that is becoming far too infrequent.
No, I allow for disagreement all the time and I still find that Paglia’s mind to be overrated, frequently even juvenile. Sorry Iggy.
SoCal @16
The point is that you can’t put the onus for narrowing the divide solely on Obama. Your examples are flimsy and the suggestion that they are worse or somehow more racially divisive than the birth certificate/secret Muslim/black liberation theology conspiracy theories that the tea party has flogged for the past 5 years is completely absurd. All of this garbage has been proven completely wrong, yet nobody apoligizes for it, nobody admits they were wrong, and large chunks of the conservative movement still believe it. You tell me how Obama is supposed to soothe these people. Theres no speech he could give, theres no policy he could prescribe, that would narrow the racial divide with people like this. Please take some responsibility for your own side’s efforts (or lack thereof) to unite and compromise before you start accusing the other side of failing miserably.
No links or direct quotes, Levi?
Looks like you can’t even meet your own standards.
Which makes you a hypocrite and a liar, just like your Obama.
“That is because “progressives” like Levi are racist.”
“The poll finds that racial prejudice is not limited to one group of partisans. Although Republicans were more likely than Democrats to express racial prejudice in the questions measuring explicit racism (79 percent among Republicans compared with 32 percent among Democrats), the implicit test … showed a majority of both Democrats and Republicans held anti-black feelings (55 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans), as did about half of political independents (49 percent).”
PB: A racist is someone who believes that people should be treated differently, based on their race (real or imagined).
The Democrats have historically been, and in today’s America it continues to be (only in a different direction), the party of racism.
(continued) It is characteristic of lefties or “progressives”, that they desperately need to project/deflect their failings onto conservatives.
It is also characteristic of lefties that they think truth is a matter of what people say, rather than an objective reality. For example: a matter of opinion polls, rather than the facts of what a given policy or ideology does in practice.
You’ve just given us a perfect example of all that. In reply to the OBJECTIVE FACT that progressives are racists (i.e., the people who advocate policies which treat people differently based on race), you furnish an opinion poll which one left-wing outfit constructed (and another left-wing reported/spun) in order to frame the question in such a way that the charge of racism could be projected/deflected away from progressives, onto conservatives.
The FACT remains that Democrats and left-wingers are the people in America today – as they have been, in the past – who advocate racist policies.
Thank you for playing your appointed part so beautifully, PB you monkey who dances for us 😉
Iggy – I mean really: _Revenge of the Sith_ as “the most powerful, the most signficant work of art in any genre, including literature, in the last 30 years”? (Paglia video 9:53) That’s just stupid. It’s beyond saying “Oh she was being hyperbolic” or even “Oh, get real”; it’s actual human stupidity. I shall leave Plinkett to say the rest.
“You’ve just given us a OBJECTIVE FACT that progressives are racists”
“Overall, the survey found that by virtue of racial prejudice, Obama could lose 5 percentage points off his share of the popular vote in his Nov. 6 contest against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. But Obama also stands to benefit from a 3 percentage point gain due to pro-black sentiment, researchers said. Overall, that means an estimated net loss of 2 percentage points due to anti-black attitudes.”
“Thank you …PB you monkey who dances for us…”
” A racist is someone who believes that people should be treated differently, based on their race (real or imagined).”
“Racism: racial prejudice or discrimination”
“Prejudice: a (1) : preconceived judgment or opinion (2) : an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge”
“You’ve just given us a OBJECTIVE FACT that progressives are racists”
“Overall, the survey found that by virtue of racial prejudice, Obama could lose 5 percentage points off his share of the popular vote in his Nov. 6 contest against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. But Obama also stands to benefit from a 3 percentage point gain due to pro-black sentiment, researchers said. Overall, that means an estimated net loss of 2 percentage points due to anti-black attitudes.”
“Thank you …PB you monkey who dances for us…”
Same old garbage you already gave us, PB. Two can play. I say again:
Opinion polls carefully constructed by left-wing outfits are, PB, in NO way objective facts.
Meanswhile, can you deny the OBJECTIVE FACT that Democrats and other leftists are the people who historically advocated racist policies – policies that would treat people differently, based on their alleged race – in America, and who continue to do so today? No, you sure can’t. LOL 🙂
(“carefully constructed” to advance a particular political ‘narrative’: asking questions to demonstrate a predetermined conclusion, carefully not asking additional questions which would give a deeper insight but blow apart the desired narrative; and so forth)
“can you deny the OBJECTIVE FACT that Democrats are people who historically advocated racist policies in America”
“No”
“Meanswhile, can you deny the OBJECTIVE FACT that Republicans are people who historically advocated racist policies … No, you sure can’t. LOL
You don’t know much about history, do you PB? Sad.
Obama drones like Passing By and Levi are programmed to scream racism at every opportunity by their Obama Party owners.
And that is what makes them amusing. It’s nothing more than the cries of malicious and desperate children, throwing tantrums and screaming “I hate you!” to make their parents weaken. Like hateful, manipulative spoiled brats, they will say and do anything to get what they want.
We are adults, and we know better.
And in just over a week, they are getting a spanking and being sent to bed.
If “Passing By” used a more accurate nic, he’d call himself “Obsessive Stalker.”
NDT, that link is worth quoting from.
So she admits, in effect, that the Left’s strategy is to inject race into issues, even (or especially?) when race is irrelevant. Just like the AP did to people, in its manipulated push-poll that PB is stuck on.
“You don’t know much about history, do you …? Sad“
” a more accurate nic”