quote:Originally posted by Lisa: He still sucks. He sucked before the birther thing, he still refuses to release any of his transcripts, and... oh, yeah, he sucks.
- A person whose fixative dislike of Obama wouldn't be swayed an iota by the content of said transcriptsPosts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I work as a college registrar. If anyone should think that college transcripts are relevant, I'd think I would.
But why on earth would someone's transcripts from decades prior be remotely relevant? I question Bush Jr.'s intelligence because of things he did during his political career, not especially because he was a lousy student.
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I've been to college twice. The first time around my grades were abysmal. The second time they are straight As. This had everything to do with my organizational skills and level of maturity at the time and precious little to do with intelligence.
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quote:Donald Trump already brought this one up, but the new frontier in questioning the president's legitimacy is asking about his college years. Because, in their minds, there is simply no way a black man gets into a good school without receiving special favors or somehow cheating, the Schoolers are developing weird, complex theories about how Barack Obama transfered from Occidental to Columbia (and then got accepted into Harvard Law). The new rallying cry will be "release the transcripts."
This will probably be the most popular of the new avenues of birtherism, though may not bleed into the mainstream discourse with as much ease as the birth certificate stuff, because it has no bearing whatsoever on the president's qualifications to be president. Schoolerism is simply about proving that the president's a phony who duped the world with his hoodoo, "the biggest affirmative action baby in history" in the detestable words of Mickey Kaus.
In the imaginings of the crowd desperately searching for evidence that Barack Obama is who they wish he was, the president was obviously, transparently unqualified to go to an elite university, because just look at him.
So birtherism will survive. It will mutate and adapt. There's no satisfying some people.
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You know, if it turned out that he got into college because of affirmative action and was then able to use that as a foundation to go on to be President of the Harvard Law Review then have a successful career in politics culminating with the presidency of the United states, then I'd say that's a win for affirmative action.
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How can someone who only gets into law school because of affirmative action graduate magna cum laude?
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Affirmative Action, from how I most often have heard it described, has been less about underqualified minorities than it has been about equally qualified minorities simply getting preference. I've never really researched AA, and from what I can tell, implementation varies by institution anyway, so there's no one policy, but it doesn't automatically mean "Less qualified."
Interesting how plainly this morphed into a race thing. Before they at least had the guile to use code words.
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quote:Originally posted by theamazeeaz: How can someone who only gets into law school because of affirmative action graduate magna cum laude?
I'm sure it's because of something patently unfair; let's just work on that as we make more and more insistent calls like "why hasn't he shown his transcripts yet? what is he hiding!"
Oh god i'm already watching it happen, too.
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Wow, talk about a 180.
Since when has Beck been a birther hater?
As soon as it stopped making him money?
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quote:Originally posted by rivka: I work as a college registrar. If anyone should think that college transcripts are relevant, I'd think I would.
But why on earth would someone's transcripts from decades prior be remotely relevant? I question Bush Jr.'s intelligence because of things he did during his political career, not especially because he was a lousy student.
I think the issue is more what classes he took and who taught them.
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: No. But he's spent an inordinate amount of money to resist their release.
Um, no. The birthers have noted the entire legal bill for his campaign (~$1.7M) and made the unsubstantiated claim that this was the cost of addressing birther-related legal matters because they can't conceive of a presidential campaign having any other legal costs.
It doesn't cost very much to have a lawyer write a motion to dismiss and for the judge to say "OK".
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Please note that Lisa isn't saying much about the much greater sums Obama's detractors have spent criticizing him about it, or tying up the courts in attacking him over it. No. He sucks because he hasn't (supposedly) done more to pander to debunking conspiracy theories.
This has nothing to do with Lisa's very substantial grudge against the Obama Administration in general, and I'm sure we'll hear a, "Whoops, my bad," on the 'he's spent so much money on this' talk from her in short order.
Yeah. I used to respect that you came at discussing politics with at least good intentions, Lisa. I mean I frequently, and I mean frequently disagreed with you but I didn't think it came from a really personally nasty place or anything. You came at things from a very different perspective than I did, one that I thought bore thinking about-an 'in the trenches' attitude. I just can't say that anymore. You're sticking up for birthers here. I mean, it's not as though this crap wasn't put to bed ages ago anyway - and it was, for people who weren't just looking for a serious axe to grind - but what do you say when it's killed like a stake through the heart of a vampire?
"Well, he still sucks. And he spent a whole lot of money on this anyway." I've frequently disagreed with you, but I don't know when over the years your approach to politics turned so chicken@#$t. That's very coarse and harsh, and it might be edited by JB-but it really feels accurate to me and I mean it as an attack on your method of approaching this issue.
People who've been attacking Obama on this have been wrong on this issue. They've been wrong for years. Ridiculously, xenophobically wrong-and what's more we didn't just know that now, when this was released. It's been known since newspapers, lawyers, judges, and hostile politicians investigated this and the only people who gave this stuff any credence are the ones who we'd likely cross the street to avoid in many circumstances. Who would quite often cross the street to avoid you, in fact.
It's only because I like the word, not to instruct you in Yiddish, but the mensch thing to do would be to say, if you were gonna say anything at all, "Yeah, that whole business was dumb." But to say, "He still sucks, and all that money he spends on it, man! He sucks!"
Chicken@#$t. That's just cowardly politics, and it's really pretty silly because it demeans you and the politics you endorse and elevates him by making him look better. He's supposed to, what, help his conspiracy-mongering opposition?
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Presumably he took a bunch of classes on Marxism, banning guns, socialized medicine, appeasing terrorists, etc.
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With a name like Barak Hussein Obama, that sort of thing is likely inborn. He probably taught those classes, not took `em.
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: I think the issue is more what classes he took and who taught them.
??? and that would be relevant WHY?!?
Don't you know? When you take a class with someone, you automatically subscribe to all of their beliefs, forever.
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quote:Originally posted by MattP: Presumably he took a bunch of classes on Marxism, banning guns, socialized medicine, appeasing terrorists, etc.
Of course he did. We don't need the transcripts to prove that. I mean, that's all they teach at college these days right?
And yes, I don't like the guy but even I can see that many of the attacks on him are pretty ridiculous.
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: No. But he's spent an inordinate amount of money to resist their release.
I think I have you figured out now.
Between assuring us that the mavi marmara totally had missiles on it, obama surrendered land to mexican criminals, and ron paul is totally coming up from behind to win, maybe you need to wake up and discover that you are so gullible and easy to string along on hopelessly biased, totally BS information that you need to fix that or it is impossible to take you seriously
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: With a name like Barak Hussein Obama, that sort of thing is likely inborn. He probably taught those classes, not took `em.
Well, he was tutored in those subjects by William Ayers, first. THEN he taught them - to an entire generation of innocent grade schoolers! WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN
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quote:Not really, I wasn't really sure what to believe before and still don't Nothing the president can do will make me believe he's eligible to be president No, I already thought he was American-born so this doesn't change my mind Yes, I didn't believe it before, but I'm now convinced he's American-born
And apparently "nothing the president can do will make me believe he's eligible" is the winner. Posts: 1757 | Registered: Oct 2004
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Look, I hate to admit it, but sometimes you just have to give credit where credit is due.
quote:Looks Like Trump's Right: How the Hell Did This President Get Into Those Ivy League Schools?
- "The dean looked over Barack's transcript and college boards and then suggested in a kindly way that he apply to some less competitive colleges in addition to Columbia." - "There were no class rankings at his high school, but Barack never made honor roll even one term, unlike 110 boys in his class." - "His SAT scores were 566 for the verbal part and 640 for math. Those were far below the median scores for students admitted to his class at Columbia: 668 verbal and 718 math." - "At Columbia, Barack Obama distinguished himself primarily as a hard partier, and he managed to be detained by police twice during his university years: once for stealing a Christmas wreath as a fraternity prank and once for trying to tear down the goalposts during a football game at Princeton." - "Obama's transcript at Columbia shows that he was a solid C student. Although a history major, he sampled widely in the social sciences and did poorly in political science and economics while achieving some of his best grades (the equivalent of a B+) in philosophy and anthropology. The transcript indicates that in Obama's freshman year, the only year for which rankings were available, he was in the twenty-first percentile of his class—meaning that four-fifths of the students were above him. Yet at the same time that he was earning Cs at Columbia, Obama displayed a formidable intelligence in another way. At his induction into the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity, he and others were asked to name all fifty-four pledges in the room. Most were were able to name only five or six. When it was Obama's turn, he named every single one. Later he rose to become president of DKE, and he was also tapped into Skull and Bones, an elite secret society to which his father had also belonged." And then he somehow got into Harvard for graduate school.
Oh, wait. My bad. I made a mistake. Please replace the reference to "high school" with "Andover." Please replace "Columbia" with "Yale." Please replace "Barack Obama" with "George W. Bush." Thanks.
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As funny as the above is, I guarantee that pieces of it will soon be quoted out of context and used in a serious manner.
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: Look, I hate to admit it, but sometimes you just have to give credit where credit is due.
quote:Looks Like Trump's Right: How the Hell Did This President Get Into Those Ivy League Schools?
- "The dean looked over Barack's transcript and college boards and then suggested in a kindly way that he apply to some less competitive colleges in addition to Columbia." - "There were no class rankings at his high school, but Barack never made honor roll even one term, unlike 110 boys in his class." - "His SAT scores were 566 for the verbal part and 640 for math. Those were far below the median scores for students admitted to his class at Columbia: 668 verbal and 718 math." - "At Columbia, Barack Obama distinguished himself primarily as a hard partier, and he managed to be detained by police twice during his university years: once for stealing a Christmas wreath as a fraternity prank and once for trying to tear down the goalposts during a football game at Princeton." - "Obama's transcript at Columbia shows that he was a solid C student. Although a history major, he sampled widely in the social sciences and did poorly in political science and economics while achieving some of his best grades (the equivalent of a B+) in philosophy and anthropology. The transcript indicates that in Obama's freshman year, the only year for which rankings were available, he was in the twenty-first percentile of his class—meaning that four-fifths of the students were above him. Yet at the same time that he was earning Cs at Columbia, Obama displayed a formidable intelligence in another way. At his induction into the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity, he and others were asked to name all fifty-four pledges in the room. Most were were able to name only five or six. When it was Obama's turn, he named every single one. Later he rose to become president of DKE, and he was also tapped into Skull and Bones, an elite secret society to which his father had also belonged." And then he somehow got into Harvard for graduate school.
Oh, wait. My bad. I made a mistake. Please replace the reference to "high school" with "Andover." Please replace "Columbia" with "Yale." Please replace "Barack Obama" with "George W. Bush." Thanks.
This was pretty funny. About 2 bullet points down I thought to myself, "This sounds more like Bush, not Obama."
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quote:People who've been attacking Obama on this have been wrong on this issue. They've been wrong for years. Ridiculously, xenophobically wrong-and what's more we didn't just know that now, when this was released. It's been known since newspapers, lawyers, judges, and hostile politicians investigated this and the only people who gave this stuff any credence are the ones who we'd likely cross the street to avoid in many circumstances.
What's disappointing is how seemingly impossible it is for some of these politicians to simply admit "I was wrong".
I wish there was a Republican candidate who could simply say "Obama is an intelligent, respectable, patriotic non-Communist, non-fundamentalist, natural-born American who has done a reasonably good job at running the country... but I can do it better... and here's how I will...."
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quote:People who've been attacking Obama on this have been wrong on this issue. They've been wrong for years. Ridiculously, xenophobically wrong-and what's more we didn't just know that now, when this was released. It's been known since newspapers, lawyers, judges, and hostile politicians investigated this and the only people who gave this stuff any credence are the ones who we'd likely cross the street to avoid in many circumstances.
What's disappointing is how seemingly impossible it is for some of these politicians to simply admit "I was wrong".
I wish there was a Republican candidate who could simply say "Obama is an intelligent, respectable, patriotic non-Communist, non-fundamentalist, natural-born American who has done a reasonably good job at running the country... but I can do it better... and here's how I will...."
I'm very liberal, but I really wish this was the way our dialog would work.
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Such a candidate would never win an election. He or she would get the tiny sliver of folks who are (a) Republican or independent conservatives, (b) sane non-idealogues, and (c) not swayed by platitudes and attack advertising. That's like... 20 people nationwide, half of whom are posters on Hatrack.
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quote:What's disappointing is how seemingly impossible it is for some of these politicians to simply admit "I was wrong".
One of my biggest disappointments with GW Bush was his pronouncement, on leaving the office, that he had no regrets. In his memoirs, he reports that the low point of his Presidency was when people called him racist for failing to respond adequately to hurricane Katrina. What?? Even with years to reflect on the subject he still was more upset about being called a racist than that thousands of people were left for days suffering without aid in New Orleans under his watch. It makes me want to scream.
quote:I wish there was a Republican candidate who could simply say "Obama is an intelligent, respectable, patriotic non-Communist, non-fundamentalist, natural-born American who has done a reasonably good job at running the country... but I can do it better... and here's how I will...."
Absolutely!! Elections in the US focus way to much on personality and too little on substantive policy issues. I want to see a candidates who will say.
quote:My opponent is a capable, honorable person but we disagree in fundamental ways about the best course for this country. Here are the issues I think are important, how I would approach them and why?
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: What?? Even with years to reflect on the subject he still was more upset about being called a racist than that thousands of people were left for days suffering without aid in New Orleans under his watch.
Yeah, that was weird. I wouldn't expect him to say that invading Afghanistan or Iraq was a mistake, but no regrets at all about the decisions during those wars, and the consequences involving hundreds of thousands of people dying? Or even a, maybe I should have managed Abu Ghraib or Guantanimo differently? Not even a, I would have fought this with a different strategy?
The regret was I got called a name by some entertainer. Bah.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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The issue about Barack Obama's college records is that most thoughtful people would like to be able to read his master's thesis, where he sets forth his basic philosophical views. This is surely highly relevant to a person's desirability to hold the office of president. Did he espouse Muslim beliefs? Did he make blatantly racist statements? What is he trying to conceal? Most people would want their masters' theses to be as widely read as possible.
The claim one person made that all the evidence was on Obama's side is plainly not true. Obama's own grandmother who lives in Kenya said he was born in her village, and she was present in the room when he was born. Video recordings of an interview where she said "Barack nate dhalani" (Barack born [in] this village) has long been available on the Internet for anyone to listen to and watch for themselves.
For those who actually have sufficient quality of mind to go by the evidence rather than by majority opinion, here is one link where this video may be viewed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bloHSojeLAw
Now, this may not constitute conclusive proof. But it is largely on the basis of this that many people have had serious questions about whether Obama was born in Hawaii, or in Kenya. Why would his grandmother lie about where he was born? Surely anyone with even the least bit of intellectual honestly must admit that the testimony of Obama's grandmother does raise a legitimate question that deserves to be considered.
Obama's long-standing refusal to release his long-form certificate of live birth has and could only add fuel to the fire, especially considering all the other things it has been proven that he has lied about.
For example, he told the American people in a nationwide broadcast during the campaign that William Ayres (former Weather Underground terrorist who planted bombs that killed people) was "just a guy who lives down the street." In fact, eyewitnesses have stated that Obama launched his campaign for Illinois Congressman in William Ayer's living room. Literary analysis strongly suggests that Obama's books were ghost-written by William Ayers. Then of course there is the outlandish claim that Obama was not really aware of nor influenced by the preaching of Jeremiah Wright, when he was a member of Wright's church for 20 years, and never objected to or disagreed with Wright's outlandish claims that AIDS was created by the CIA to wipe out the black race, and that the US deserved the attack on 911, and multiple cursings of the USA from Wright's lips--all of which were preserved on recorded sermon tapes, on sale in the church lobby. Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel got hold of some of these tapes, and played them on air.
It never ceases to amaze me how so many people can flatly reject evidence, turn away from even fairly considering it, and prefer apparently to just go by the emotional feelings of the majority.
Obama has been proven to be a deliberate, knowing liar about so many substantive issues, it is incredible that anyone could believe anything he says about anything. And yet the mainstream majority media believes what he says worshipfully, and most of the time does not even report the contrary evidence. And the majority of Obama's supporters just blindly continue to go along with the idea that he is in any way a good man worthy of anyone's trust.
Let me be the first to ask, how hard would it really be for the long-form birth certificate to have been faked? They had plenty of time to make one that looked convincing. If you think that doctors and hospital administrators cannot ever lie or be a part of a criminal conspiracy to deceive, then tell me how you think that Obama's own grandmother lied about where he was born?
Anyone who claims there is not still an issue is being dishonest.
Then, going beyond where Obama was born, there is the question of school records in Indonesia, where Obama attended school, that list his citizenship as Indonesian, and his religion as Muslim. Shrugging one's shoulders at these things, and presuming to ignore them as if they had no weight and did not matter, is inexcusable.
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quote: If you think that doctors and hospital administrators cannot ever lie or be a part of a criminal conspiracy to deceive, then tell me how you think that Obama's own grandmother lied about where he was born?
As I understand it, you're appealing to an inaccurate translation of that video.
But even if that weren't the case, recall that BHO's father had the same name. How do you know she wasn't talking about Barack Senior?
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: Shrugging one's shoulders at these things, and presuming to ignore them as if they had no weight and did not matter, is inexcusable.
Almost as inexcusable as pretending you don't know that, far from "shrugging one's shoulders" every single point you bring up has already been addressed time and time again.
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quote:Surely anyone with even the least bit of intellectual honestly must admit that the testimony of Obama's grandmother does raise a legitimate question that deserves to be considered.
Was she testifying under oath? Because I don't know about you, but my grandmother gets things wrong sometimes, and that doesn't mean there is a conspiracy to cover things up, just cause she's old and gets confused now and again.
Is that all this is based on?
quote:Obama has been proven to be a deliberate, knowing liar about so many substantive issues, it is incredible that anyone could believe anything he says about anything.
That sounds like a very big accusation to make without substantive evidence, which I would like you to produce please.
quote:Let me be the first to ask, how hard would it really be for the long-form birth certificate to have been faked? They had plenty of time to make one that looked convincing. If you think that doctors and hospital administrators cannot ever lie or be a part of a criminal conspiracy to deceive, then tell me how you think that Obama's own grandmother lied about where he was born?
Anyone who claims there is not still an issue is being dishonest.
You're saying that because it is possible, it must be? Almost anything is possible, it doesn't mean it's true. Sure it can be a challenge to come up with evidence of a conspiracy, as if it is truly a conspiracy then steps would be made to hide that fact, but to say, "It could have happened, there for it did" just sounds silly to me.
And as for anyone who claims this is not still an issue being dishonest, how about this...we don't care. You can care. We don't. We think it's silly and been dealt with. Honestly. This is what we think.
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posted
Addressed? No. They were dismissed irrationally, with the primary arguments being insult and ridicule, that only showed an unwillingness to deal with the issues responsibly. The evidence is still there, and no one has convincingly refuted any of it.
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Stone_Wolf_, I already gave examples. How many things has Obama said about anything important that you can show were true?
You failure to care about things you should care about only idicts your own capacity as a responsible elector. My only comfort is that people who think the way you do generally are too apathetic to vote.
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Edit: You know what, I'd rather not get into another argument with Hatrack's resident lunatic fringe.
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