Obama Explains His Remarks

When I asked what Obama really meant by his statement that caused such a blaze of news media coverage I really wanted to know. But I’m not sure that he has explained anything even though he seems to be trying. The damage control people are working overtime and Obama supporters seem utterly blind to common sense. But we are allowed our opinions in this country still. I’m still looking for a Candidate I can believe in. See, I haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid everyone else seems to be drinking and these Candidates we are supposed to choose from are not to my liking at all. Each seems to be nothing more than some Corporate greased palm lackey. And Obama has shady connections that need to be investigated instead of concentrating on the show man!

From AlterNews.org I have a transcript of Obama’s supposed explanation of his “bitter” remarks. They don’t satisfy me at all. Let’s take a look…

Here’s a full transcript of what he said:

The problem actually with this most recent episode is not that I was saying one thing behind closed door and saying something else in public. The truth is actually that I’ve made these same comments in a similar way on “The Charlie Rose Show” back in 2004 or 2005, and I had said it in town hall meetings in small towns.

The problem is that I just mangled it, which, you know happens sometimes. The point that I was making was actually two separate points that got conflated. Number One, that people who had felt abandoned by Washington and political leaders when it comes to an economy that’s falling apart, they find stability in those things that they count on – their faith, the traditions that have been passed down generation to generation and in many rural communities that includes hunting, their family, their community – those are positive things.

They also are vulnerable to, you know, explanations for why the world has changed and politicians seek to divide them,. And sometimes politicians over the last decade have used anti-gay sentiment, they’ve used anti-immigrant stuff, and there’s a long history of quote unquote “wedge issues” that I think distract from the very difficult issues that we have to deal with.

And so my syntax was poor but as a wise older woman who was talking to me the other day said, ‘You misspoke but you didn’t lie,’ and I think that’s how I feel about it, and as I’ve said these are things that I said as I was campaigning in Iowa — and when people would talk to me about immigration and some of these other hot button issues, I’d say I think these are distractions from our failure to deal with some very critical issues.

While this may sound like an explanation it really is no such thing. It is a JUSTIFICATION for what he said. That is different. And what issues are more pressing Senator Obama than illegal immigration? Or outsourcing American Jobs? The Senator’s original comments were:

SEN. BARACK OBAMA, (D-IL) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been done now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration and each successive administration has said that these communities are going to regenerate but they have not.

And it’s not surprising that then they get bitter, they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

So we still have no explanation and only a justification for them. That people out there cannot distinguish the difference between the two explains the state of affairs in the United States today. More Kool-Aid please! The media spin doctors are touting this as a fine example of a simple misunderstanding. I don’t think I misunderstood anything. The fact that he can’t explain it, only justify it, speaks volumes. Seems like if enough news casters say it, American’s will believe it. Talk about the dumbing down of America!

That last comment about how he “misspoke but didn’t lie” was a telling one, because it was in this same room two weeks ago that his rival Sen. Hillary Clinton also acknowledged that she “misspoke” about landing in the line of Bosnian sniper fire, which had been shown by tapes of the event to be untrue. Obama is more or less, pardon the pun, sticking to his guns here, with the caveat that he never meant to suggest that firearms or the church were bad things to “cling” to. Somehow I doubt this new nuance will satisfy his critics, either on the political right or within the Clinton campaign.

This person is right, I don’t accept this and it doesn’t satisfy me in the least. For me this is nothing more than a politician doing political double speak and the fans swooning in ecstasy over nothing.

Obama doesn’t distinguish between LEGAL immigrants and ILLEGAL immigrants. He tries to lump the two together and seems to be making a race issue out of it by calling them “people who aren’t like them.” This concerns me greatly because Legal Immigration is and will always be, welcome. It is those who break the laws of this Great Nation, who break the Sovereignty of the United States, who owe no allegiance to this Country, who are unwelcome regardless of whatever reason they are doing it for. But not because they aren’t like us, because they are. This Nation was founded by all the different races of the world. How can anyone not be like us?

I reject this so called explanation and call on Obama to give full meaning to his words. Let those who drank the Kool-Aid understand your profit is flawed. It is too bad your passions overwhelm your reason and you accept bullshit for truth. That it took his team this long to come up with such a lame excuse is really telling to me. I find the whole thing unacceptable.

~ by justmytruth on April 16, 2008.