Rudy Giuliani is having too much fun. He is laughing at his own supposed cleverness.
Laughing openly at Barack Obama's having been a community organizer was unseemly. I agree with Giuliani that it's a relatively lightweight job for a future President, but it should have been handled with a much more subtle touch -- not open mockery. Actually, the words of Giuliani's speech on this point were subtle enough, but Giuliani read them much too broadly. (Further, community organizer is not Obama's last position (the Senate is), but it does seem to have been his most formative job.)
Much of the rest of the words of Giuliani's speech are OK -- and there are some good lines -- but the tone of his speech is a bit off, especially in the first 5-10 minutes.
BTW, what feed are you getting? I'm watching a live feed and he's still talking. It sounds like you've seen the end already
Agreed. When I heard this on the radio, I cringed. Very tacky...
I tend to agree. A milder Reaganesque jibe would have been better. But Giuliani is a New Yorker after all.
I thought the "Drill Baby Drill" groupthink chant was horrific, though.
I thought Guiliani was spot-on.
It's like being a PTA mom.
I loved Rudy' speech. He was fairly responsive to the crowd, especially on the "community organizer... WTF?" line. Crowd got ALL up in that.
Sarah is actually doing better than Rudy. My only complaint - where the hell was this Rudy the last 18 months? Goddamit.
-I always assumed it was some sort of Saul Alinsky-inspired, communist party vanguard thing. Based on the Annenberg-Ayers connection, I'm pretty sure I am correct.
To my friend DNL, if you found the "Drill Now" chant off putting, perhaps you remember the "No Justice, No Peace" chant? That is the preferred one of the Community Organizer's. I agree that all people deserve justice, but what that chant is more in line with is a lynch mob. I bet Obama has used it more than once himself.
Swift Boating = telling it like it is.
You hit the nail on the head, I have always thought the phrase "community organizer" was tinged with communism. Seriously.
People who go to church probably have an idea.
The gloves are off. Nobody has wanted to ridicule Obama - because of his historic importance - but what goes around comes around and it's time to call and empty suit an empty suit.
McCain and Giuliani have a lot in common when it comes to divorces. What's your favorite "Family Values" joke?
I go to church and I've never heard of a "community organizer."
"Out of the GOP speeches so far, have they mentioned any accomplishments over the last 8 years?"
Gee, I don't know, how about keeping America safe in the face of international terrorism? How many suicide bombings have there been in the United States since September 11th?
I learned in Kindergarten that two wrongs do not make a right. I have no idea what a chant of "no justice, no peace" has to do with the unseemliness of "drill baby drill".
Okay, other than not protecting us from 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, has anything else been mentioned in the GOP speeches?
I guess you missed the part where Bill Clinton dropped the ball on capturing Osama bin Laden.
But why would actual facts make a difference to a guy (girl?) like you?
Probably in response to Palin being mocked as a small town Mayor. Not her current position either.
Great point. That's another accomplishment the GOP should be mentioning at the convention.
I didn't find is unseemly at all. I've been trying to figure out what kind of a BS job this is since I first heard about it.
Yeah, cause Osama has been out in the open during the Bush Administration like he was during the Clinton Administration.
Get your head out of your ass.
You know, one more thing. If you can honestly deny that the Bush Adminsitration has done a good job containing international terrorism, you are absolutely living in a world of unreality. It's surprising to me that there are people out there who as that clueless.
Spare me. The whole idea of a community organizer is laughable. Thinking that it is a real job for an ivy league grad is deserving of nothing but mockery. Claiming it as a qualification for anything is just plain silly.
Yabbut...you can kinda figure it out, right?
I don't know what "left" you are talking about. The Obama campaign itself did very little in way of criticizing Palin. In fact, just today Biden repeatedly stated that he has no reason not to respect Gov. Palin and that he would debate her on the issues. Obama compared his campaign to her time as mayor because he was told that "the right" has argued that she has more executive experience than he does and would be better equipped at handling a natural disaster. The media has given her a hard time, but it would do so to any politician new to the national stage.
Who in a community needs "organizing"? I've never had someone drop by my house and try to organize me. Call me clueless, but I don't get it.
OK, you're clueless. Republicans do this kind of stuff all of the time too.
And if Obama can't keep his supporters at least a little bit in line, then I don't see how he can hope to be competent as president.
City Journal revealed that Obama's project in the 1980s was founded by churches but ended up funded 80% by the government.
Hmm - if he was our employee, can we give him a bad review? Did he "organize" people to attend Rev Wright's hate whitey seminars?
Politicians are supposed to have control over all the fanatics in their party? This is not better for the GOP than the Dems.
Like those hard hitting exposes on the Obsiah on whether he would heal the lepers before raising the dead or raise the dead before healing the lepers?
When Bill Buckley made his famous comment about preferring to be governed by the first thousand names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty, he made an excellent point. There are a lot of us who are suspicious of Ivy League educations. In my experience, the best leaders are not typically intelligent enough to get into an Ivy League school. I suppose that's another way of saying that leadership and intelligence are not particularly well correlated.
Keith Olberman did the same thing on MSNBC. McCain clearly lost the community organizer vote, hahahahahaha.
One of Obama's spokesmen charged (falsely, it turned out) that Palin supported Pat Buchanan in 2000, calling Buchanan a Nazi sympathizer (which, needless to say, is also false). This was a repeat of a charge initially leveled by a Democratic member of the House from FL.
Accusing someone of supporting a Nazi sympathizer seems pretty gloves-off to me.
Except for the iceberg, the Titanic had a successful voyage. He became president on 1.20.01 and was amply warned of the risk which actually caused harm. He simply ignored the warnings.
For the apparent few where who are litigators, these are opening statements. Each side gets them, then the trial really starts. The jury doesn't vote until after the presentation of evidence, and is instructed that argument is not evidence. It is for this reason that the evidentiary record of the last eight years, or the McCain record of the last 26 years, is not going to be mentioned by the McCain-Palin campaign.
Yes, I'm sure that McCain-Palin thought "Wow, this is like a big trial, now what is the judge going to instruct the American people?"
Lame comparison. (And yes, before you attack me, I am a litigator.)
Until then, the treatment Governor Palin (and Mayor Giuliani) gave him was exactly what he deserves.
I ask, again: What has Barack Obama ever accomplished in his life? How has he made the world a better place?
???
I honestly dont know, what has McCain accomplished in his life besides winning elections?
While not a "real world" accomplishment, graduating magna cum laude from HLS certainly is an "accomplishment."
Well, that certainly sums up certain groups' perception of the military, and a few peoples' of aviation technology.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20080904/cm_huffpost/123755
It is difficult to review Pat Buchanan's voluminous spoken and written record and not come away convinced that he is at the very least bigoted and horribly uninformed about the history of Nazi Germany. Except that he's too intelligent for the latter, so, sadly, the best explanation is that he's deliberately deceptive. The charge of sympathizer seems pretty accurate to me.
This comment is silly on four levels:
1. Relatively compared to what? Harry Truman was a haberdasher. Ronald Reagan's profession was an actor in "grade B" motion pictures. Community organizer is lightweight compared to those?
2. Time of life: Barack Obama was a community organizer between earning his bachelor's degree and entering Harvard Law School. Teens and young adults often take occupations that aren't as "substantial" as their subsequent ones.
3. Community organizing is what Sarah Palin did when she was working, as she said in her speech, on the PTA. Community organizing is what many conservative organizations such as the Christian Coalition do. The idea seems to be that when liberals do it, it's [sneer] community organizing [/sneer] but when conservatives do it, it's, uh, uh, [mind explodes].
4. Community organizing as practiced by Barack Obama during 1985 to 1988 was director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP) &mdash not flunky, but director. Under his leadership, a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization were set up. Conservatives no less than liberals should support at least the first two if not all three of these.
Community Organizer: a serious profession, more serious than that of at least two post-WWII presidents, occurring anyway before Obama went to Harvard Law, and where he managed significant achievements. It's what conservatives (Including Sarah Palin) do no less than liberals. What an idiotic attack on the part of Mr. Giuliani and other Republicans.
Most likely, a community organizer's salary is auto-deposited into his or her checking account, so there is no paycheck, but I think the intent of your question is something like, "what sort of organization employs community organizers?"
The answer is, some are faith-based, including churches, synagogues, dioceses, organizations within one religious grouping (e.g. Jewish federations), and interfaith organizations. Some are issues-based, such as environmental action groups.
The organization that hired Barack Obama was Developing Communities Project, a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes on Chicago's far South Side.
Jane, I don't think you've tried very hard. You could have read the Wikipedia article on Barack Obama and read the summary details of his work as a community organizer, and you could have clicked on "community organizer" in the second paragraph. You could also have gone to Wikipedia and searched on "Community organizer" — which would take you to Wikipedia's article on Community organizing.
There are over 500,000 Google hits for "Community organizer" (with the quotes). Jane, don't be so helpless. In this Internet age, it's easy to find out stuff like this.
I deny that the Bush administration has done a good job containing international terrorism. To support this, I point out that, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq, but thanks to the Bush administrations's blundering us into Iraq (at the cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of American casualties), Al Qaeda now does have a presence in Iraq. (I'm not making this up, it comes from the Bush administration's own State Department.) The Bush administration failed to secure Afghanistan before blundering into Iraq, forfeiting substantially all of our early accomplishments in overthrowing the Taliban regime. The Bush administration opposed legislation that would have stepped up inspection of container freight entering U.S. ports. The Bush administration promotes the use of torture, and fosters a culture of disdain for preventing torture, in our own military, which has increased hostility towards America and American values and made us more likely to be targets of terror.