That’s what some guy named Charley James, on a website called The Progressive Curmudgeon, claims that Sarah Palin said in a restaurant full of people upon hearing Barack Obama had secured the nomination. Charley says Lucille the Waitress told him, but didn’t really want him to tell anybody.
This is how Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin described Barack Obama’s win over Hillary Clinton to political colleagues in a restaurant a few days after Obama locked up the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
According to Lucille, the waitress serving her table at the time and who asked that her last name not be used, Gov. Palin was eating lunch with five or six people when the subject of the Democrat’s primary battle came up. The governor, seemingly not caring that people at nearby tables would likely hear her, uttered the slur and then laughed loudly as her meal mates joined in appreciatively.
Okay, that’s enough of that. Here’s Charley on Charley:
If you’re born in Milwaukee, you are born a Democrat. And so I gravitated naturally to liberal politics, first as journalist and then an activist. I’ve been writing since I was eight years old and, after working in newsrooms for far too long, I have devoted much of the past decade as an independent investigtative jouralist. When not writing about politics or George Bush, I scribble out essays on the peculiarites of modern times.
The Progressive Curmudgeon on The Progressive Curmudgeon:
A progressive (read: liberal) look at US political, foreign policy, social, law and war-and-peace issues through the eyes of a politically concerned and somewhat deranged ex-pat Yank writing from the relative safety of Canada.
Hey, I just report ‘em, you gotta read ‘em.
Or not.
UPDATE: I had hoped to convey my contempt for this article and “journalist,” (I would never call myself such, I’m a chick with a blog.) but in case I didn’t, here are a couple of other takes on Charley and his story, and there’s always Michelle Malkin. This is the website credited with “breaking” Charley’s story. Sounds like a “whisper campaign” to me.
Hillary Rodham Clinton has no intention of becoming a Sarah Palin attack dog — but has no qualms about going after John McCain, people close to the former first lady say.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton marched for labor and stumped with Democrats on Saturday, but sidestepped questions about the woman who has taken her place as the nation’s most-talked-about female leader.
In three stops on the campaign trail Clinton mentioned Palin once.
“No way, no how, no McCain, no Palin,” she said.
While I’m glad Clinton is staying above the fray, it is rather cruel to leave Obie on his own like that. In Terra Haute today he sounded pretty pathetic.
“I know the governor of Alaska has been, you know, saying she is change,” Obama said at a town hall meeting here. “And that is great. She is a skillful politician. But when you [have] been taking all these earmarks when it is convenient and then suddenly you are the champion anti-earmark person.
“That is not change, come on,” Obama continued. “I mean, words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up. You can’t just make stuff up. We have a choice to make and the choice is clear.”
The choice was clear Obie; you, Pelosi, Brazile and the rest of the DeaNC gang just made the wrong one. Sarah’s gonna clean your sorry clock. She dissed you good in Wisconsin this morning:
Palin said: “Just last night, Senator Obama finally broke and brought himself to admit what all the rest of us have known for some time, and that’s thanks to the skill and valor of our troops, the surge in Iraq has succeeded,” she said. “Senator Obama said, and I quote, ‘it succeed beyond our wildest dreams.’
“‘I think,’ Senator Obama said, ‘that the surge succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated.’ I guess when you turn out profoundly wrong on a vital national security issue, maybe it’s time to pretend that everyone else is wrong, too,” Palin said.
Oh, well, I guess you’re stuck with the old reliable race card, Obie. It’s getting pretty old though, besides, you just used it yesterday:
“I know that I’m not your typical presidential candidate,” Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told executives and employees of the Schott glass company Friday afternoon, “and I just want to be honest with you. I know that.”
“And I know that the temptation is to say, ‘You know what? …The guy hasn’t been there that long in Washington.,’ You know, ‘he’s got funny name,’ You know, ‘we’re not sure about him,’” Obama continued. “And that’s what the Republicans, when they say, ‘This isn’t about issues, it’s about personalities,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘We’re going to try to scare people about Barack. So we’re going to say that you know, maybe he’s got Muslim connections or we’re going to say that, you know, he hangs out with radicals or he’s not patriotic.’
Or something like that. At least, that’s what the Obamaniacs want you to believe. That, and he can raise the tides and heal the world. But then, as far as I can tell, that’s what community organizers do.
Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment—this was the time—when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.
I included this quote just so we could all be on the same page as far as Obamaman’s stated goals are concerned. I thought it would be helpful to keep in mind as we go forward on this journey of discovery toward enlightenment to reveal the truth about just what the hell does a community organizer do? After scouring the left, right, center and sideways views available on the internet, I must be honest and tell you that I still have no freaking idea.
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago during the Civil Rights Movement, attended public schools, joined my first union at 16, was Baptized in a Missionary Baptist church, and have relatives representing every Christian faith known to black America, some who are very actively involved in their respective churches. Yet, to my knowledge, I have never in my life met a community organizer. Even after learning that Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King and Ghandi were also community organizers, I still can’t think of one I’ve met personally.
Community organizing is a process by which disempowered people – most often low- and moderate-income people – are brought together to act in their common self-interest. Most often these organizations seek populist goals and the ideal of participatory democracy. Community organizers create popular movements by building a large base of concerned folks, mobilizing these community members to act, and developing leadership from and relationships among the people involved.
“The nation’s largest community organization of low- and moderate-income families, working together for social justice and stronger communities,” the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, says they too are involved in “empowering low- and moderate-income people to improve their communities.”
ACORN has been building organizations and developing leadership among low- and moderate- income residents in neighborhoods throughout the United States for 38 years. During that time, ACORN chapters have worked individually and collectively to organize innovative grassroots campaigns on a number of critical issues. As the nation’s largest grassroots community organization with more than 400,000 member families, ACORN employs 400 organizers that carry a huge responsibility of helping disenfranchised people in their communities.
# Largest radical group in America, with 175,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 850 chapters in 70 US cities
# Implicated in numerous reports of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams during the 2004 election
# Maintains close ties to organized labor
Many sites examine Obama’s ties with ACORN though given their various perspectives, it’s hard to know whether ACORN is a noble enterprise or the Devil’s Disciples. Judge for yourself. It can be said though that “agitating” is a core principle of Saul Alinsky’s community organizing model, upon which all community organizing appears to be based. As far as I can tell, when it comes to community organizing, Alinsky’s “da man.” After reading quite a few articles, I’ve come to the conclusion that Alinsky-style community organizing boils down to sticking your nose into other people’s business and trying to make them do what you think they should do to make their miserable lives better. I admit, I could be wrong.
But words like “agitator” keep popping up, a word which evokes childhood memories of school-yard “instigators” who would try their best to incite violence between reluctant combatants. When I was growing up, most often the violence was turned toward the person trying to egg on the fight. So, what is the real benefit to the community organizer or the communities organized?
In return, organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people. Through the songs of the church and the talk on the stoops, through the hundreds of individual stories of coming up from the South and finding any job that would pay, of raising families on threadbare budgets, of losing some children to drugs and watching others earn degrees and land jobs their parents could never aspire to – it is through these stories and songs of dashed hopes and powers of endurance, of ugliness and strife, subtlety and laughter, that organizers can shape a sense of community not only for others, but for themselves.
Great, really, great. But, what the hell do they do? I still don’t know for sure. I do know that Obamaman’s most famous efforts involving asbestos removal from the Altgeld Gardens Housing Project was pretty much a failure. And I’m pretty sure that most of the conditions he described back in 1990 still exist in the communities he organized, pretty much the way they were when he started. To be fair, organizing successful voting drives, which by all accounts he did and was good at, is a very good thing. But who has benefited more, the register (Obamaman) or the registrees (the people still living in the conditions Obama found so compelling)?
“ ‘We are not making large-scale change, and I want to be involved in doing that,’ ” Mr. Kellman said Mr. Obama had told him.
I still don’t have a really good grasp on what a community organizer does, but I’m not sure it’s the noble, heroic profession-on-a-par-with-the-accomplishments-of Jesus that Obamamaniacs suggest. In fact, I’m not even sure Obama is good at it. It seems to me, every job he left, he left seeking that “just one more” element that would allow him to actually make a difference. So, far from swooping into troubled situations and making them right with a single Superman-like act, he seems more like the Superman Big Bank Hank of the Sugar Hill Gang famously described:
“He may be very sexy or even cute
But he looks like a sucka in a blue and red suit”
And I’m not even sure the Naked Emperor’s wearing that much.
Whoopi Goldberg is not only “aggravated” by Sarah Palin, she thinks the woman is “very dangerous.” On the View and in an article on the website, WOW (Women On the Web) Ms. Whoop let it be known that when it comes to Sara P., Whoopi got issues. She said Sarah gave an “amazing speech,” she’s a “tough chick and a babe” and a “mom” who gave the Republicans the “message they wanted to hear,” which I suppose, was all well and good, until she stepped over the line.
“…I thought once she began her discussion about community organizers and that they don’t have real responsibilities … I guess I can’t say I don’t know where she’s been living, because she’s been living in Alaska and maybe they don’t have community organizers there but they do in Chicago. Anyone who leaves their gig from school and goes to the people who most need help, that seems to me an admirable American way of thinking. It used to be in America that you helped people if you could, you organized them you made sure their rent was paid, made sure they had heat and all those other things and that helps to build character. If you want to become a politician you can at least say, “I understand how people live, I understand what happens when people lose everything and this is how we can work on it.”
WOW is right! There are so many things wrong with this take on things, I don’t know where to start. In the proverbial “interest of full disclosure,” let me be very clear, I am not a Republican. I don’t think I could possibly care less whether Sarah Palin is John McCain’s running mate or the next contestant on Dancing With The Stars. (Okay, I would care about that, but you get the point.) On the face of it, given that I am a black woman with a pretty good sense of humor, you’d think I would have much more in common with the Whoopster. But not on this.
Second, Palin’s point was not that community organizing is not worthwhile, it was that it is not as demanding as being mayor of even a small town. Given that Obama’s efforts affected relatively small enclaves of a large city, with no governing responsibility, I don’t see how you can argue with that.
Another thing that got Whoopi’s panties in a bunch was Palin’s assertion that her daughter’s pregnancy is a family affair, which Whoopi agrees with, but kinda doesn’t because if it was a black teenager or Chelsea Clinton, it would be different. Okaaaay. She goes on and on about that.
Whoopi also said on The View that McCain’s POW experience is no more “adverse” than the crises Obama, Biden or any other American has had to face in life. I’m not sure I buy that, but I don’t think that was Palin’s point, anyway. In relating McCain’s experience, she was saying that the only guy in the race who has had to put his life on the line for his country was John McCain. As far as I know, neither Biden or Obama served in the military.
There are many reasons not to support Palin. She’s a Republican who supports the Republican platform. That does it for me. But as far as I’m concerned, she’s no more “dangerous” than Obama. And he’s running for president.
Whoop, that makes all the difference in the world.
That’s what some guy named Charley James, on a website called The Progressive Curmudgeon, claims that Sarah Palin said in a restaurant full of people upon hearing Barack Obama had secured the nomination. Charley says Lucille the Waitress told him, but didn’t really want him to tell anybody.
