One Reason to Consider Obama....

[long island leprechaun]

He's simply in another intellectual league from the near drop-out John McCain. Not in a hundred years would John McCain offer anything like the following analysis, whether you agree with it or not. He simply is not smart enough. Period. In this, he shares common ground with his new model, Geroge W. Bush. Stupidity is a serious deficit for a president....

[I]Constitutional Vision

Obama also may have the most sophisticated understanding of the U.S. Constitution and how the Founders structured this complex system of checks and balances to protect individual liberties and to compel reasoned debate.

A Harvard-educated lawyer who has lectured on the Constitution, Obama devoted a chapter in his memoir The Audacity of Hope to a discussion of how constitutional principles apply to today’s political challenges.

In the chapter, Obama doesn’t do what many politicians do, cite the Constitution to support some favored position. He views the Constitution instead as an ingenious device that compels debate and compromise, while protecting individual liberties.

“The answer I settle on – which is by no means original to me – requires a shift in metaphors, one that sees our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation to be had,” Obama writes.

“The genius of Madison’s design is not that it provides us a fixed blueprint for action, the way a draftsman plots a building’s construction. It provides us with a framework and with rules, but fidelity to these rules will not guarantee a just society or assure agreement on what’s right. It won’t tell us whether abortion is good or bad, a decision for a woman to make or a decision for a legislature. Nor will it tell us whether school prayer is better than no prayer at all.

“What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way by which we argue about our future. All of its elaborate machinery – its separation of powers and checks and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights – are designed to force us into a conversation, a ‘deliberative democracy’ in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent.

“Because power in our government is so diffuse, the process of making law in America compels us to entertain the possibility that we are not always right and to sometimes change our minds; it challenges us to examine our motives and our interests constantly, and suggests that both our individual and collective judgments are at once legitimate and highly fallible.”

Obama continues: “The historical record supports such a view. After all, if there was one impulse shared by all the Founders, it was a rejection of all forms of absolute authority, whether the king, the theocrat, the general, the oligarch, the dictator, the majority, or anyone else who claims to make choices for us. …

“It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or ‘ism,’ any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.

“The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstractions and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history, theory yielded to fact and necessity.”[/I]

[url]http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/020408.html[/url]

[sackdance]

[QUOTE=long island leprechaun;2531973]Stupidity is a serious deficit for a president....[/QUOTE]
It kind of kills your posts, too.

[BronxDan]

[QUOTE=long island leprechaun;2531973]He's simply in another intellectual league from the near drop-out John McCain. Not in a hundred years would John McCain offer anything like the following analysis, whether you agree with it or not. He simply is not smart enough. Period. In this, he shares common ground with his new model, Geroge W. Bush. Stupidity is a serious deficit for a president....

[I]Constitutional Vision

Obama also may have the most sophisticated understanding of the U.S. Constitution and how the Founders structured this complex system of checks and balances to protect individual liberties and to compel reasoned debate.

A Harvard-educated lawyer who has lectured on the Constitution, Obama devoted a chapter in his memoir The Audacity of Hope to a discussion of how constitutional principles apply to today’s political challenges.

In the chapter, Obama doesn’t do what many politicians do, cite the Constitution to support some favored position. He views the Constitution instead as an ingenious device that compels debate and compromise, while protecting individual liberties.

“The answer I settle on – which is by no means original to me – requires a shift in metaphors, one that sees our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation to be had,” Obama writes.

“The genius of Madison’s design is not that it provides us a fixed blueprint for action, the way a draftsman plots a building’s construction. It provides us with a framework and with rules, but fidelity to these rules will not guarantee a just society or assure agreement on what’s right. It won’t tell us whether abortion is good or bad, a decision for a woman to make or a decision for a legislature. Nor will it tell us whether school prayer is better than no prayer at all.

“What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way by which we argue about our future. All of its elaborate machinery – its separation of powers and checks and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights – are designed to force us into a conversation, a ‘deliberative democracy’ in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent.

“Because power in our government is so diffuse, the process of making law in America compels us to entertain the possibility that we are not always right and to sometimes change our minds; it challenges us to examine our motives and our interests constantly, and suggests that both our individual and collective judgments are at once legitimate and highly fallible.”

Obama continues: “The historical record supports such a view. After all, if there was one impulse shared by all the Founders, it was a rejection of all forms of absolute authority, whether the king, the theocrat, the general, the oligarch, the dictator, the majority, or anyone else who claims to make choices for us. …

“It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or ‘ism,’ any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.

“The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstractions and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history, theory yielded to fact and necessity.”[/I]

[url]http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/020408.html[/url][/QUOTE]

I wonder if McCain knows how many States there are.

[Come Back to NY]

this thread should be titled liberal elitism 101....

BO is so smart he hung around rev wright for two decades, and the likes of william ayers and rashid khalidi...and voted against giving infants protection outside the womb....

just the type of intellectual who should be running the country.......

[nuu faaola]

Both Obama and McCain are infinitely smarter than GWB. We're getting an intellectual upgrade in the Oval Office regardless of who wins.

Bush's lack of intellectual curiosity explains a lot about his woeful performance in office.

[long island leprechaun]

[QUOTE=sackdance;2532024]It kind of kills your posts, too.[/QUOTE]

Coming from you, that's unquestionably a compliment.

P.S. I'll hold to my point. McCain is not in the same intellectual league as Obama. Call it elitist if you like, but the truth is some people really are smarter than others. That's not a liberal/conservative issue, although I'm amused that CBNY seems to suggest it is by his defensiveness. Do you really think, CBNY, that liberals are smarter than conservatives? Or can we assume that liberals hold clear title to being the intellectually elite ;)

[Come Back to NY]

[QUOTE=long island leprechaun;2532170]Coming from you, that's unquestionably a compliment.

P.S. I'll hold to my point. McCain is not in the same intellectual league as Obama. Call it elitist if you like, but the truth is some people really are smarter than others. That's not a liberal/conservative issue, although I'm amused that CBNY seems to suggest it is by his defensiveness. Do you really think, CBNY, that liberals are smarter than conservatives? Or can we assume that liberals hold clear title to being the intellectually elite ;)[/QUOTE]

liberals are easily much more elitist than anyone else in their own minds....and they admit they amuse themselves with their elitism....all one needs to do is look at this thread and your response....:yes:

hussien's got lots of nice plaque's hanging from his wall as does his bitter wife...hence in the mind of an elitist he must be in "another intellectual league from the near drop out John McCain".....

[crazyeffinjetsfan]

[QUOTE=long island leprechaun;2531973]He's simply in another intellectual league from the near drop-out John McCain. Not in a hundred years would John McCain offer anything like the following analysis, whether you agree with it or not. He simply is not smart enough. Period. In this, he shares common ground with his new model, Geroge W. Bush. Stupidity is a serious deficit for a president....

[I]Constitutional Vision

Obama also may have the most sophisticated understanding of the U.S. Constitution and how the Founders structured this complex system of checks and balances to protect individual liberties and to compel reasoned debate.

A Harvard-educated lawyer who has lectured on the Constitution, Obama devoted a chapter in his memoir The Audacity of Hope to a discussion of how constitutional principles apply to today’s political challenges.

In the chapter, Obama doesn’t do what many politicians do, cite the Constitution to support some favored position. He views the Constitution instead as an ingenious device that compels debate and compromise, while protecting individual liberties.

“The answer I settle on – which is by no means original to me – requires a shift in metaphors, one that sees our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation to be had,” Obama writes.

“The genius of Madison’s design is not that it provides us a fixed blueprint for action, the way a draftsman plots a building’s construction. It provides us with a framework and with rules, but fidelity to these rules will not guarantee a just society or assure agreement on what’s right. It won’t tell us whether abortion is good or bad, a decision for a woman to make or a decision for a legislature. Nor will it tell us whether school prayer is better than no prayer at all.

“What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way by which we argue about our future. All of its elaborate machinery – its separation of powers and checks and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights – are designed to force us into a conversation, a ‘deliberative democracy’ in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent.

“Because power in our government is so diffuse, the process of making law in America compels us to entertain the possibility that we are not always right and to sometimes change our minds; it challenges us to examine our motives and our interests constantly, and suggests that both our individual and collective judgments are at once legitimate and highly fallible.”

Obama continues: “The historical record supports such a view. After all, if there was one impulse shared by all the Founders, it was a rejection of all forms of absolute authority, whether the king, the theocrat, the general, the oligarch, the dictator, the majority, or anyone else who claims to make choices for us. …

“It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or ‘ism,’ any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.

“The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstractions and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history, theory yielded to fact and necessity.”[/I]

[url]http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/020408.html[/url][/QUOTE]

Just because you hire good speech writers and can express yourself eliquently doesn't make you smart or a good candidate. I would much rather have for [U]my[/U] President, a true American who fought for and believes in his country, than a radical muslim extermist reverse racist who despises it.

[asuusa]

So an "intellectual" prez who doesn't understand the Constitution is better than one with common sense who understands it?

Amazing!

So bo lectures on the Constitution but supports the clearly unconstitutional decision of Roe v. Wade.

[QUOTE]if there was one impulse shared by all the Founders, it was a rejection of all forms of absolute authority, whether the king, the theocrat, the general, the oligarch, the dictator, the majority, or anyone else who claims to make choices for us. [/QUOTE]

Hmm..that statement is false unless he forgot a word and meant the Founders rejected "all forms of absolute [b]human[/b] authority.

They certainly embraced God as their absolute authority!

[long island leprechaun]

From Charles Pierce in this month's Esquire (an interesting article, by the way):

[I]The cynic wondered if Obama was smart enough, so he went to Harvard Law School, where Obama went and shone more brightly than he ever had before, thriving in a lush rain forest of towering egos in which every second person already has the Supreme Court in his eyes. Students bustled between classes, heads bowed, ambition fairly crackling from every pore. He stopped by the office of Professor Laurence Tribe, Obama’s mentor at the place and someone who is on the short list every time a Democratic president gets a chance to appoint someone to the Supreme Court. In 1989, Tribe took Obama on as a research assistant, putting him to work on a paper entitled, “The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics,” which sounds like something Learned Hand wrote from Mars. “To deal with it, one had to get a reasonable command of the general theory of relativity and Heisenbergian physics,” Tribe explained. “So I got to know him in a context that really tested the qualities of his mind. It wasn’t a grinding kind of a job. It required a very wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and imagination.” Heisenbergian physics, the cynic believed, was smart enough. Harvard Law was smart enough.[/I]

[long island leprechaun]

[QUOTE=crazyeffinjetsfan;2532177]Just because you hire good speech writers and can express yourself eliquently doesn't make you smart or a good candidate. I would much rather have for [U]my[/U] President, a true American who fought for and believes in his country, than a radical muslim extermist reverse racist who despises it.[/QUOTE]


The only bigot in this room is you. What is a "true American?" What makes someone who was in the Navy inherently more patriotic than someone who didn't? What evidence is there that Obama is "radical" or a "muslim" or an "extremist" or a "reverse racist" (whatever that may be)? And if you really believe that Obama is merely a cardboard stooge for some speechwriters (like George Bush), you're really fooling yourself.

Keep an eye on CBNY's comments. He's working his Carl Rove best to try to dismiss smart people as being "elitists," as if stupidity was a constitutional right of all patriotic Americans. Everything I've read and seen of John McCain tells me he is a pretty average intellect. And while there are certainly things to admire about John McCain at points in his history, I fear that he has utterly sold out to his party handlers to become a winning Republican candidate. The one lesson he learned well from 2000 was that honesty and being your own man will get you destroyed by the party machine. He has become almost unrecognizable now.

[long island leprechaun]

[QUOTE=asuusa;2532178]So an "intellectual" prez who doesn't understand the Constitution is better than one with common sense who understands it?

Amazing!

So bo lectures on the Constitution but supports the clearly unconstitutional decision of Roe v. Wade.



Hmm..that statement is false unless he forgot a word and meant the Founders rejected "all forms of absolute [b]human[/b] authority.

They certainly embraced God as their absolute authority![/QUOTE]


Thank you for showing us you know absolutely nothing about the religious beliefs of the "founders." And how is Roe v. Wade "clearly unconstitutional? This one I've got to hear....:rolleyes:

[long island leprechaun]

[QUOTE=Come Back to NY;2532174]liberals are easily much more elitist than anyone else in their own minds....and they admit they amuse themselves with their elitism....all one needs to do is look at this thread and your response....:yes:

hussien's got lots of nice plaque's hanging from his wall as does his bitter wife...hence in the mind of an elitist he must be in "another intellectual league from the near drop out John McCain".....[/QUOTE]


You missed my sarcasm as usual. In fact you have an absolute genius for missing most people's points here. I guess that is a kind of "elitism." :rolleyes:

There are brilliant conservatives and brilliant liberals. No ideology holds sole possession of intelligence. The simple fact that Obama is much smarter than John McCain rankles robot-conservatives. The only solution is to attack intellectual superiority as "elitism." Same old routine. If the roles were reversed and Obama was a conservative, trust me we would be hearing about how much smarter he is than his opponent.

[bigalbarracuda]

[QUOTE=crazyeffinjetsfan;2532177]Just because you hire good speech writers and can express yourself [B]eliquently[/B] doesn't make you smart or a good candidate. I would much rather have for [U]my[/U] President, a true American who fought for and believes in his country, than a radical muslim extermist reverse racist who despises it.[/QUOTE]

This is perhaps the most ridiculous post I have ever read. The other partisan hacks regurgitate Limbaugh's talking points but you seem like you BELIEVE them. I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.

Holy crap you should be ashamed of your ignorance.

P.S. By the way it is spelled "el[B]o[/B]quently." I guess I'm an elitist now huh?

[Sharrow]

I agree with McCain being an idiot. He's too old too. Why can't the republicans put up people who are really smart? I mean, I'm sick of being defaulted out of voting for a republican because I'm smarter than the guy they're putting up. Its really annoying, tbh.

[long island leprechaun]

[QUOTE=bigalbarracuda;2532207]This is perhaps the most ridiculous post I have ever read. The other partisan hacks regurgitate Limbaugh's talking points but you seem like you BELIEVE them. I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.

Holy crap you should be ashamed of your ignorance.

P.S. By the way it is spelled "el[B]o[/B]quently." I guess I'm an elitist now huh?[/QUOTE]


Yup, you're an elitist. Spelling, reading, and actually knowing something about history seems to be the equivalent of being unpatriotic to some of the boobs on this site. Give me a solid, simple-minded, combat-tested "patriot and forget all that brainy, ivory tower stuff. What we need in the White House is a real, cowboy-boot wearing, beer-drinking moron who don't take no back-talk from those furiners and city-dudes. ;)

[sackdance]

[QUOTE=long island leprechaun;2532197]The simple fact that Obama is much smarter than John McCain rankles robot-conservatives.[/QUOTE]

You are simply making things up as you go along.

First of all, no one but knee-pad wearing Democrats thinks Obama is any kind of brainy genius. Secondly, McCain himself, not Obama's intellect, is what rankles "robot-conservatives". John McCain, as you clearly don't realize, is not a conservative hero. You're too steeped a world of "us vs. them" to grasp these basic nuances.

[sackdance]

[QUOTE=bigalbarracuda;2532207]

P.S. By the way it is spelled "el[B]o[/B]quently." I guess I'm an elitist now huh?[/QUOTE]

No, you're a pioneer. No one [I]has ever [/I]pointed out a misspelling before.

[Sharrow]

[QUOTE=sackdance;2532219]You are simply making things up as you go along.

First of all, no one but knee-pad wearing Democrats thinks Obama is any kind of brainy genius. Secondly, McCain himself, not Obama's intellect, is what rankles "robot-conservatives". John McCain, as you clearly don't realize, is not a conservative hero. You're too steeped a world of "us vs. them" to grasp these basic nuances.[/QUOTE]

Exactly, I think a lot of Democrats wouldn't actually mind voting for McCain if he wasn't such a pandering flip-flopper and stuck to what he actually believes in. Probably not though considering he is so gung ho for the war.

[JetFanTransplant]

FWIW...

I know a lot of people that are incredibly intelligent, book smart, well-educated. This, however, does not preclude them from being ignorant and lacking of common-sense.

There is A LOT to be said of being WISE and truly WORLDLY.

Just putting that out there.