[lit-ideas] Re: Ayers and Palin
- From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2008 12:45:42 -0700 (PDT)
Just a statement out of context regarding coincidence: coincidence is nature's
way. I don't know if I'm supporting Obama or hurting him with that statement,
but it's just a scientific fact.
As far as Christians not talking about their religions, are you kidding?
Religion is as important to this country as in countries with madrasses.
And religion crosses way deep into politics for Christians and Jews (the Israel
Lobby, which has Christians in it as well as Jews; something to do with the
Apocalypse). Why else is maverick SP a right wing Christian conservative? And
praying for guidance? Bush prayed for guidance and it wasn't exactly extremely
helpful. How about getting all the facts instead? If religion weren't
important, why aren't there any atheists in politics? Boy is the Enlightenment
over. BTW, Neocon Granddaddy Straus was an atheist who believed religion was
politically necessary. Sorry, that's just a fact.
--- On Tue, 9/9/08, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Ayers and Palin
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tuesday, September 9, 2008, 3:40 PM
Marlene,
I normally like to leave the entire message I’m responding too, but yours came
close to breaking the “generous” length allowance of Yahoo as it was.
Your take on how Obama got “launched” is different from what I’ve managed to
discover thus far. I did quite a bit of internet searching and posted
everything I found which wasn’t much. Wikipedia had something that they
presented as authoritative which I quoted.
One other thing that weighs against your view that they just happened to be in
a lot of same places at the same time and had no influence on each other (did
you listen to Ayers say he was always looking for a mentor, by the way?) is
that his, Obama’s, political position is not inconsistent with Ayer’s and
Dohrn’s present political positions. Now I suppose you can argue that
everyone who lived in that social milieu, that just happened to hang around
near each other without actually being “with” each other or necessarily liking
each other (although Obama complimented Ayers and said he was “highly
respected”) or chatting together (although Obama said he did share ideas with
Ayers, just not regularly) had more or less the same political views; which may
or may not relieve our minds. Actually, from my own standpoint I can’t see
myself thinking, “ah ha, everyone in Ayers, Dohrn’s and Obama’s neighborhood
thought just like they did
–not just Obama, Ayers & Dohrn; so I guess it’s okay to vote for Obama..”
I don’t know, Marlene . . . If I were reading a mystery story, and we are
trying to solve some mysteries here, I would expect to read about now some
senior detective saying “I don’t believe in coincidences,” or “there are no
coincidences.”
Your narration doesn’t answer all the issues I brought up. It does portray
Obama’s official position in regard to Ayers; which I read, including his
irrelevant statement that he was only 8 when Ayers was blowing stuff up.
Your portrayal of Palin is interesting. The Obama campaign is trying to
portray her as too inexperienced and ignorant to do the job. Your take is that
she is excessively competent, too competent in fact for McCain to withstand her
steam-rolling modus operendi. A lot of women are taking a different view of
her. A Reuters article this morning is entitled, “Poll shows big shift to
McCain among white women.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN097920080909 ; One would presume
that these women aren’t as frightened of her as you are.
One of the chief causes of your fright seems to be her religious style – all
that praying, asking God for help, guidance and success, but that sort of
thing is pretty common in our still predominately Christian nation. We know it
offends atheists so we don’t usually talk about it, but if you held us down and
tortured us, or sent a pack of Left Wing reporters to investigate us, you’d
find that most of us pray regularly and are either worried about what God might
think of our actions or actually trying to do what we think God would approve.
So what you see as a negative won’t necessarily appear that to women across our
Christian heartland.
In short, I am still alarmed at Obama’s political associations including his
choice of mentors, for if you cross off Ayers and Dohrn as mere coincidences
(which I’m not willing to do at this point), you still have the Reverend
Jeremiah Wright to deal with, and then you have the coincidence of Obama’s
actual ideas being in the same Ayers/Dohrn ball park.
On the other hand, I am not alarmed over Palin’s ideas. I can’t see how her
praying for guidance or for success in some economic or military endeavor would
be a bad thing.
Lawrence Helm
In Rural San Jacinto
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