• Buyer's Remorse
  
• Blame the media
  
• Full Steam Ahead, Wright's a non-issue or right.
  
• Can we get Gore or Edwards to run?
  
• Ugh. I'm sitting this one out.
  
• Why, why, why? Disbelief.
  
• Anger. Clinton is behind this.
  
• Don't Worry, Be happy. Obama can do anything.

Obama's associations aren't a fraction as "bad" as what anyone in office has had and he should be judged on his record and qualifications. His defenders have shown more fortitude here than their "leader" deserves.

What I've come to deeply dislike about Obama -- there I've said it (and I used to be neutral leaning towards positive) -- is his tendency to smear everyone and anyone who's helped him, at the first sign of criticism. A slight distancing, okay I could see that if it's political necessity.

But the kind of repelling he does revolts me. His own mother and grandmother too? They become typical problematic white racist women -- um, who only raised him and stuff -- when he needed the African American vote solidly behind him.

YMMV, but you don't speak ill of your parents and other caretakers, even rotten ones, even when they ARE around to have their say, because it's just plain chickensh!t. (If you need to work it out for personal peace and justice, do it outside of the spotlight.)

Then Obama dusted Mama off again when he needed a character to get the violins playing for the media, and suddenly she was a teenaged mom on food-stamps.

I don't like that flexing in anyone, and not just the way Obama has done it to people who contributed mentorship in Obama's life, but even smearing people who neither helped nor wronged him in any way.

There's a reason Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as "The "Fellowship," also known as The Family. But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May. ...

Clinton fell in with The Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker. When she ascended to the Senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's "most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has not been a casual connection for Clinton. She has written of Doug Coe, The Family's publicity-averse leader, that he is "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."
Hillary's Nasty Pastorate

McCain has Hagee too.

As far as I'm concerned, these contrived religious controversies are a wash, and we should move on to talk about real issues.

But if Clinton supporters are going to fall in with the GOP and put religious associations on the  table, then we should look at Clinton's as well.

She doesn't regret having had my youngest sister, of course. Not that any of us was actually "planned."  I myself (a "honeymoon baby")caused my father to drop out of college and get a full-time job and go to night school, from which he graduated when I was eight.  Apparently, the fact that my grandparents were married for five years before my uncle was born, and then another five years passed before she was born, led her to believe that you could get pregnant quite so fast. I owe my life to my parents' extreme ignorance.

His church?  What did this man who claims to be able to unite the nation do to unite his church, to help his pastor see that his divisive and angry sermons were not helping people "come together?  What committees did he serve on?  I heard Reverend Wright talk about a slew of programs his church is involved in - feeding the hungry, HIV programs, mentoring - which ones was Obama involved in?  Why does he never say, "as a member of the church, I worked with young people who needed a role model, I worked in the soup kitchen, I donated legal services to the elderly?  See, that would be service and it would go a long way to bolster his commitment to service.  I don't see a commitment to anything other than Barack Obama.

His state legislature job was a 4-months-a-year commitment - it seems odd to me that in the other 8 months he didn't see the horrific conditions in which many of his constituents were living, did not know those conditions existed in buidlings developed by his friend Tony Rezko, and did nothing to address them.

We all know that he did little in his years in the Illinois legislature, until that last year, when he got the gift of being credited with sponsoring legislation that others had spent years working on - and that is a pattern that has continued in his short tenure in the US Senate - showing up for the pressers and taking credit for work that others did.

And must we bring up, once again, his utter failure to carry out his duties as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's subcomittee on Western Europe and NATO?  Not a single hearing until the last month, and only - only - because he had been caught out on national TV in a debate.

Now, I think Obama is a smart guy who clearly has some gifts, but he is also someone with questionable judgment and suspect work ethic, who has yet to prove to me that he is willing to work his a$$ off for the Democratic agenda - something we desperately need.

Is that "swiftboating?"  Not in my book - what's happening now is nothing more than putting someone through a vetting process that got lost while the media was reveling in the leg tingles.

we should leave a candidate's religion alone

And he doesn't think far enough to think, hey, maybe when he's president, I'll get "stuff".

Instead, the jealousy permeated his being, and he recognized this as an opportunity to make a name for himself, and he's going for it.

Some friend, that reverend.