Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Youth Voters Ignorant? More Speculation Paraded as Evidence

Suzanne Fields treats us to yet another case of Republicans substituting speculation for facts.
Obama's appeal is to the educated voters, not the ignorant ones (Hillary got those). And it isn't young Obama voters getting on the air and revealing that they don't know their history, such as what Neville Chamberlain did, or what the Cuban missile crisis was about. No, those were Republicans.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"And it isn't young Obama voters getting on the air and revealing that they don't know their history,"

True, sometimes it's Obama /himself/.


From:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2008/03/29/AR2008032902031.html?
nav=rss_politics


Addressing civil rights activists in Selma, Ala., a year ago, Sen. Barack Obama traced his “very existence” to the generosity of the Kennedy family, which he said paid for his Kenyan father to travel to America on a student scholarship and thus meet his Kansan mother.

The Camelot connection has become part of the mythology surrounding Obama’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. After Caroline Kennedy endorsed his candidacy in January, Newsweek commentator Jonathan Alter reported that she had been struck by the extraordinary way in which “history replays itself” and by how “two generations of two families — separated by distance, culture and wealth — can intersect in strange and wonderful ways.”

It is a touching story — but the key details are either untrue or grossly oversimplified.

Contrary to Obama’s claims in speeches in January at American University and in Selma last year, the Kennedy family did not provide the funding for a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the United States that included Obama’s father. According to historical records and interviews with participants, the Kennedys were first approached for support for the program nearly a year later, in July 1960. The family responded with a $100,000 donation, most of which went to pay for a second airlift in September 1960.

===
This stuff happens.

ScienceAvenger said...

Have you no sense of scale? You are comparing an obscure bit of personal trivia (and the easiest arena in which political hacks can make shit up) to major history that every schoolchild should learn. They are different by orders of magnitude. All Obama's mistake (FTSOA) proves is that everyone makes mistakes. What that ignorant right-wing hack Kevin James proved on Chris Matthews' show was that he was ignorant of basic history.

Anonymous said...

"What that ignorant right-wing hack Kevin James proved on Chris Matthews' show was that he was ignorant of basic history."

I saw that episode. Yeah that was bad. (Of course, Chris Matthews said in that same interview that the USS Cole was attacked under President Bush. Pretty ironic, huh?)
Granted, James was much worse.

ScienceAvenger said...

It's not just that James was worse, it was a different kind of error. All Matthews did, and all most people do, is make mistakes. It's not as though James knew what Chamberlain did and just got a year or leader mixed up. That would be a simple mistake, the sort that Dan Quayle used to get unfair abuse over, and the kind Obama appears to be getting now. James had no idea what he was talking about. That's a completely different sort of sin, and one that should be unforgivable in such an arena. It would be like a football coach not knowing what a touchdown is.