“But as I said during the campaign, we can’t just talk to our friends. As hard as it is, we also have to talk to our enemies, and I’ve begun to do exactly that.”
– President Obama at the White House Correspondents Association dinner
“If Obama was serious about change he would stop saying ‘God bless America’ and instead end every speech with ‘The Spice must flow.’”
– Matthew Baldwin
Like “Joe the Plumber” — who is not a licensed plumber, whose first name isn’t Joe, whose boss’s business makes $100K, not $250K and isn’t for sale, and who couldn’t afford it if it were for sale based on his own income of $40K and his outstanding tax lien — a certain sad proportion of white blue-collar men I know are wealth groupies.
Like Joe, they imagine they’ll make big money some day. They imagine themselves rich some day. And so they doggedly vote as if they were rich already, voting over and over again against their own self-interest, because they don’t want to identify with their own economic class — not in their hearts, and not in the voting booth, either.
– Lisa Small on the popularity of Joe the Plumber
“I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, ‘Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, ‘He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America.”
– Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama (via Emptyage)