Do you respond to right wing smear emails?

yurbud

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Sat Jun-14-08 01:16 PM
Original message

Poll question: Do you respond to right wing smear emails?

My dad is a conservative not just by choice but by personality and sends me all those unsourced or inaccurately sourced emails they send around.

I respond to about one out of twenty.

Usually, the most I'll get my dad to admit is ''both parties are crooks'' and say he's not going to vote anymore.

I got the one about Obama's racist quotes from his book, and sent two responses, one with the debunking from http://my.barackobama.com/page/invite/therealquote">Obama's anti-smear page.

and the other was more persona as follows:

From the right wing email:

From Audacity of Hope: 'I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.'

Replace "Muslims" with "Jews" and think of Nazi Germany, and you have the correct interpretation of this passage.

Growing up, I can remember a couple of people who got this email saying far more blatantly racist things than anything Obama has ever said, and yet I don't doubt that you deal fairly with black people you do business with, have as employees, or students.

Obama is a few years older than me, so there is no doubt he heard equally ugly things from his white relatives who raised him. He is also old enough that his life overlaps the tail end of Jim Crow when blacks still didn't have the right to vote in the South.

Even if those passages on race had the ominous interpretation you mentioned, helping middle and lower class blacks would end up helping white people of similar economic circumstances.

In case you haven't noticed, Bush's solidarity with white folks has only extended to those of similar economic background.

Did he fight the energy traders to keep them from blackmailing California out of billions and turning out our lights?

Did he fight a bankruptcy bill that made it harder for consumers (but not big businesses) to file but did nothing to credit card companies and health insurance companies that help caused the problem?

When the subprime mortgage crisis caused an epidemic of foreclosures, did he help people who lost their houses or the Wall Street scammer Bear Sterns that helped engineer the crisis?

If he had succeeded in privatizing Social Security, do you think you'd be getting a check or that the money would end up in the same off-shore account where the savings & loan scandal money went, the Enron money went, and the bailout of scammers like Bear Sterns will end up?

Did you get more tax cuts or more service cuts like crowded classrooms for your K-12 kids and less financial aid for your college kids?

Is he fighting to get oil prices down to help you, or making token protests while his friends at Exxon and Chevron rake in record profits at our expense?

To Bush and people at the top of the Republican Party, you are white only until you vote for them and turn your attention to other things, and then he takes care of his own kind.

As he said in a dinner with top contributors:

"This is an impressive crowd, the haves and have mores. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base."

http://youtube.com/watch?v=mn4daYJzyls">on Youtube

And because of all the things I listed above, he has made it more unlikely that you will be at that dinner of the haves and have mores.

To assume that John McCain will do any different when he has voted with Bush and his backers most of the time would be like dropping the soap in prison a second time, bending over to pick it up, and wondering the next day why your ass hurts again.