Wednesday 21 May, 2008 at 4:18PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (2)

Lots of concern about who to vote for come elections in November. Regardless of who gets the nod on the democrat side, the choice out of McCain, Obama and Clinton is pretty dismal any way you look at it, in my opinion. I'm rapidly reaching the conclusion that I may not even vote for the POTUS position (President of the United States), and just vote at local and Congressional level and hope the United States survives the following four years.

I'm stunned at how many people are enamored with Obama without actually having any reason to be, I mean heck, the other day he was asked a question about the massive multi-billion dollar Hanford nuclear waste site and what he proposes to do about it. His reply was, and I quote, "I'm not familiar with the Hanford, uuuuhh, site, so I don't know exactly what's going on there." Guess what happened? The crowd broke into applause! I'm not kidding. I've never seen anything like it. It's like there's this huge swath of sheeple who have no clue whatsoever, and just fall over themselves at anything that comes out of his mouth, even if it's complete gibberish.

Earlier this month in Oregon, Obama even managed to mess up how many states there are in the United States: "Over the last 15 months, we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.".And of course complete silence from the media - in their eyes he can do no wrong apparently. In fact it is the media that decides elections here, because it seems the majority of Americans don't actually bother to research anything, they only care if there's a 'D' or an 'R' after the name, and beyond that will vote only according to which candidate seems to be favored by the press. Insane.

If you want an example of media bias, I'll gladly give it. At one point, Hillary Clinton made a claim that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who first reached the summit of Everest in May 1953, along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. As it happens, Hillary Clinton was born in October, 1947. Kind of hard to be named after someone who was unknown at the time. That little claim got plenty of media attention, and became a real rally cry for the Obama fans for a while. Similarly and more recently was the claim Hillary made about landing in Bosnia 'under fire', which the media (and Obama fans) had a field day over.

Last March, on the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Alabama, Obama claimed his parents united as a direct result of the civil rights movement, and I quote: "There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born." Well guess what? Obama was born in 1961. The Selma march took place in 1965. Go figure that one out. Obama's spokesman, Bill Burton, later explained that Obama was "speaking metaphorically about the civil rights movement as a whole." Yeah right. This is almost an exact parallel to Hillary's little birthday gaffe, yet the media of course completely ignored it.

When Obama made a big song and dance about supporting Reverend Wright after the initial uproar over his racist sermons, Obama was portrayed as a great and loyal man of honor and dignity by the media. Later, when Reverend Wright got completely out of control with his comments publicly, Obama did a complete 180° turn and effectively disowned Reverend Wright (so much for the lauded loyalty). Of course the media, instead of pointing out the glaringly obvious, chose to paint Obama as a betrayed victim of his faith in others. What the f..?

In perhaps the most seriously troubling set of gaffes of them all, Obama told a Portland crowd over last weekend that Iran doesn't "pose a serious threat to us", cluelessly arguing that "tiny countries" with small defense budgets can't do the US any harm, and then he promptly flip-flopped the very next day, claiming, "I've made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave." And people just don't see it. It's unbelievable.

This is just a couple of many examples. It's kind of scary, and makes one wonder who's really pulling the strings in this country in light of how the media play this. Great stuff for conspiracy theorists, that's for sure. I'm not saying either Clinton or McCain are necessarily a better option, but the Obama phenomenon is just so far out there that it's, well, it defies explanation. As the saying goes, 'you can't make this stuff up'.