These people are why Obama must win.
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For fuck's sake, how embarassing. The people in this video are like the relative whose invitation to holiday gatherings seems to get lost in the mail more often than plausible, because you just can't stand to hear what comes out of their mouth. How is it that ANYONE still believes the whole "Obama is Muslim" thing?! I gotta hand it to Al Jazeera though … not only was it brave as fuck for them to wander into this sort of town, they even have the guts to release the footage!
Or, translated into LOLspeak:
White McCain/Palin Kitteh is a Wee Bit Racist
Yeah. This video shows why, in a nutshell, Obama must win. The US really is still racist as fuck in far too many quarters, and we like to ignore it as much as possible. If Obama gets elected, the elephant in the room (namely these brain-damaged, inbred, backwards-ass witless racists) might actually make enough noise that the rest of the country can't just politely look aside and pretend there's nothing wrong.
Man…
This election is the best entertainment ever! My wife and I are totally hooked - have been for months. We're British, so the outcome of the election won't affect us directly. But, in as much as the US has a huge effect on the world, it will affect us indirectly in many ways.
Like you, I can't believe the ignorance of so many people, spouting the lies about Obama being a Muslim, a terrorist, etc. The video makers obviously cherry-picked the interviewees for the piece. There is no way that more than a fraction of McCain's supporters are that stupid. However, I am astounded that McCain, who has made so much of his honesty as a politician, has stood by and said nothing when these idiots speak at his rallies (until very recently that is).
Palin's behaviour, in whipping up this type of hatred, is unforgivable. She really does seem to be a truly spiteful and vindictive person. My wife, when watching any video depicting Palin, is really funny to watch - she instantly begins to rant and gibber - she can't stand the woman! I'm always passing YouTube links to her just to enjoy the reaction!
17th October 2008 at 12:56 am | permalink |@Copley: Sad thing being, in a small midwestern or southern US town they wouldn't have to cherry pick very much. Honestly. I would bet if you interviewed 50 people out of a Palin rally in a small town like that, you'd probably find 25 quotes you could easily use. The hard part would be picking which out of that 25 to keep in the final edit. ;-)
And Palin? Yeah, she's one of those people who operate on the particular variety of the "any means to an end" mentality unique to religious extremists. Sort of a Psychopath for Jesus. hehe
17th October 2008 at 2:08 am | permalink |Here's an article in a UK newspaper today…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/17/uselections2008-barackobama1
It's not just us hoping Obama wins - it's the whole world!
17th October 2008 at 4:06 am | permalink |@Copley: Here's the bit I found particularly interesting: "[Obama] is most popular among more prosperous voters, where he has 71% backing, and least popular among people at the bottom of the socio-economic scale, 54% of whom want him to become president."
I wonder what the corresponding education levels are between the "prosperous voters" the the "bottom of the socio-economic scale" in the UK? In the US, you tend to see far less education and far more racism at the bottom…
But yes, after 8 years of Bush, I can only imagine that us electing not only the "liberal" anti-war candidate, but a racial minority, would somewhat ameliorate the damage we've done to our international reputation in the recent past. ;-)
17th October 2008 at 4:15 am | permalink |Education - or lack thereof - is always going to have an impact on levels of racism: aside from the very basic 'ohnoes, different = bad' reaction, ignorance would be the top factor.
17th October 2008 at 5:33 am | permalink |i can not believe that there are still such ignorant people left in this country. How can anyone stand there and say such blatantly incorrect things about anyone?? It will be a sad day for this country if Obama does not win. We don't need more of the same in the White House for another four years.
17th October 2008 at 6:39 am | permalink |Yeah, I live here and Ohio can be a pretty embarrassing place. My job makes make travel to virtually every county in the state. When you're around a big city here, they are as cosmopolitan as the biggest cities in the U.S. Go 25 miles from those cities and its like 1840 again.
This is the 8th state I've lived in. Every other state I've been to pays the same amount of lip service as Ohio does to religious fundamentalism, but this is the first place I've ever lived where I have the feeling the majority of people actually believe what they say (and I've lived in Nebraska, for Christ's sake!)
17th October 2008 at 5:39 pm | permalink |@Copley - "We're British, so the outcome of the election won't affect us directly."
Really? Do you mean the British in general, or your family specifically? I'm sure the families of your British soldiers killed in Iraq feel they were directly effected by our last presidential election. Maybe?
17th October 2008 at 6:46 pm | permalink |I think that would be classified as an indirect impact.
17th October 2008 at 9:43 pm | permalink |@Rick
Our Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, needn't have jumped on Bush's let's-get-Saddam bandwaggon. Many other UN/NATO countries didn't. Blair made the choice, so, yes, indirect.
But, as you point out, many people in the UK have been touched by the consequences of G.W.'s policies and actions. Hence the poll figures in the link I posted above - they see McCain's sabre-rattling ("Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" - how hillarious!) as being way too similar to Bush's aggression. The UK, and the world, really want's someone with a fresh attitude at the helm of the US military machine.
17th October 2008 at 10:36 pm | permalink |@grimbles & Copley - Yes, I agree. I wasn't really referring to the technical classification/definition. I guess I was thinking about the mothers/fathers feelings. Who do they feel is directly responsible. Blair, Bush, the voters, the bomber, the bomb maker…etc. Probably all of the above I suppose.
18th October 2008 at 5:40 am | permalink |I was alarmed by the video of the reporter standing near OBAMA signs. I think he was very lucky he was not attacked or killed in a drive-by shooting.
We live in Northern MInnesota, some of which is Democratic, and some of which is red neck. Apparently our little homestead is in the redneck part.
We just had a truly horrifying thing happen, and I don't want to keep quiet about it. People need to be warned that the depths of hatred that have been stirred up by the McCain/Palin campaign may be spurring people on to do horrific things. There was a Todd Palin rally in Duluth last week, and it got rather ugly.
Sunday afternoon, (October 19th) we were in our yard with our two dogs, peacefully puttering around, when all of a sudden our puppy began to yelp out on the street. I ran out to her immediately. She was on the road, bleeding, and her entire front palate with the teeth still attached was hanging out of her mouth. There was absolutely no one on our country road except me and the dog by the time I got there. I picked her up and carried her into our yard. I screamed hysterically and then pulled myself together, then my husband and I brought the puppy to the Emergency Vet Clinic. The vet on duty put I.V.'s in her to deaden the pain, then examined her. Eventually he came out to talk to us. He said he'd never seen anything like it, and he'd been practicing for ten years. He had even called another vet who was a specialist, and that vet had also never seen any injuries like those. One must assume that most vets have seen a lot of dogs that have been hit by cars. Our puppy's hard palate was completely fractured, her upper jaw was broken, and all the small bones in her nasal passages were pulverized. The vet told us what might be able to be done to save our dog, but there were no guarantees, and there was a strong likelihood that small bone fragments would not have enough blood flow and would get infected and need to be surgically removed later. We decided not to torture the poor little thing any more, and decided to have her put to sleep.
Our puppy was only six months old and weighed thirty-four pounds. We had just weighed her that morning and had been surprised that she weighed that much, because she was quite small. She was hit right in front of our OBAMA SIGN. After she was hit, a man riding a four-wheeler off-road vehicle passed by our driveway a couple of times, but didn't say anything. My husband later wondered whether that man was the one who hit her.
After we returned home last night, with the tiny body in a cardboard coffin, our car lights shone on the OBAMA sign, the scene of the hit-and-run. The next morning the sign was gone. I was beginning to suspect that our puppy's death wasn't accidental. She was a very noisy girl, and always barked vigorously when chasing anything, yet there had been dead silence until she began to yelp in pain. No barking, no tires squealing, nothing. And, there had been no bloody tire tracks, as there should have been if she had been run over. Then our own vet called to tell us how sorry she was. The emergency vet had sent her the report, and our vet said reading it made her sick. She'd never seen anything like it, in fact, she said the injuries didn't sound anything like those one would expect when a dog is hit by a car. The only part of our dog's body that had any injuries at all was her muzzle. Our vet said that judging by the report from the emergency vet, the injuries didn't match what she would expect from a car accident, they were more like what would happen if the dog had been hit by a baseball bat. Our vet knew our puppy quite well, because we were taking the same obedience class with her and her dog. Our puppy was training so well that I had recently decided to try to join the county Search and Rescue Squad with her.
We have no proof of anything, but the whole thing seems very odd and very suspicious. I did make a report with the Sheriff's Office.
I fail to see what is American about murdering a puppy because she is standing in front of a political sign that disagrees with you.
Warn dog owners that you know. If they have Obama signs up, tell them not to allow their dogs out of their sight or off-leash if they are not fenced in!
When my friend, who owns a nursery in a very red neck part of the state, found out about our puppy, she wrote: "Major condolences your way in the loss of your dear puppy! Sounds to me like a vicious 4-wheeler driver indeed. Keep and bear arms my tukas… Not if they're used for bashing pups that's for sure. I live in a way too redneck a neighborhood to even put up a political sign. We have had a lot of our business signs run over lately and had a robbery too. Creeps!"
24th October 2008 at 10:55 am | permalink |@Laverme: I don't even know what to say. :-( I'm so very very sorry … I have a puppy who's almost 9 months old, and I can't even imagine what I would do if something like that happened to her!
And I'm sick to my stomach to say this, but it's true … I fervently hope Obama wins the election, but if he does, I'm also waiting to see the news coverage immediately afterward of widespread violence against Obama supporters' homes in certain areas of the country. It'll be the Democratic voters in a lot of places who'll want to be keeping and bearing arms, I'm afraid.
25th October 2008 at 3:07 am | permalink |@Laverme - I too am at a lost for words. Sickening!! I'm very very sorry for your loss!!
25th October 2008 at 5:22 am | permalink |Sorry, still working on my first cup of coffee, "loss" not "lost".
25th October 2008 at 5:26 am | permalink |all i have to say about that video is that i've never been more ashamed about living in ohio.
sorry bout your dog.
25th October 2008 at 11:12 pm | permalink |wow…just wow…as a Canadian I really have to wonder why anyone in your country would vote for the Christian Fascist(err…republican)Party…Like ive been telling my friends down there…Up here we tend to let our religous nuts rant in parks and generally laugh at them…for some reason you put an "R" beside their names and elect them…
28th October 2008 at 2:59 pm | permalink |They did let them rant in parks, but then they formed a critical mass and founded Texas and Utah, and infected the rest of the country from there.
28th October 2008 at 5:16 pm | permalink |Thank you all for your kind words. Now every time I see a loose dog near a road, I flinch. Please watch your animals closely.
Laverme
29th October 2008 at 6:49 am | permalink |@Laverme: When I get home tomorrow night, all three of my dogs are getting the biggest hugs they've ever gotten in their lives. :-( Every time I look at this thread, it makes me cry.
30th October 2008 at 2:33 pm | permalink |I have a friend who does a lot of work finding people who did this kind of thing. I can let het know about this if you;d like.
30th October 2008 at 5:24 pm | permalink |Larry,
Yes, please.
Thank you!
Laverme
31st October 2008 at 6:42 am | permalink |@Laverme: If you want to email me the specific details (where you live, what date it happened, anything else that might help someone track down the bastard that did it), I can forward them to Larry for you … or you could contact him through the website linked to his username.
1st November 2008 at 1:44 pm | permalink |My friends think I'm crazy but, I've decided that if the Republicans win again I'll have lost all faith in American society's ability to do what's best for it's citizenry, and I'm getting the hell out.
Myself, I'm far too progressive to take it anymore. I hear things like "Obama is the most liberal person in the Senate", but compared to liberal parties in Europe, he's downright conservative. It's sad that in the US the Neo-Cons have tried to make liberal synonymous with Communist, and have only succeeded in making Conservative equate to Fascist.
But come November 5th, if there's not a clear mandate for Obama, I'm just going to be so disappointed in this country. And should McPalin win, I'm moving to Helsinki if they'll have me.
1st November 2008 at 8:05 pm | permalink |*guffaw*
23rd November 2008 at 5:20 pm | permalink |