"...throughout the nomination process, the Obama campaign did everything possible to curtail the free speech of those who opposed him. Whether it was as simple as harassing supporters at the local metro, or as brazen as intimidating delegates at state conventions and threatening members of the Black Caucus---opposition to Barack Obama put people at risk—to be taunted, insulted and harassed in a way I've never before experienced in a political campaign."
--Paulie Abeles
" Would you be suprized if Obama loses GE? NO, he never won the primary!" --M.Sabori
On the Denver Convention: "...it appeared to me that many other states were subject to this arm twisting stuff also, and I wanted to share what happened to MS...I'm leaving out the part about how I was threatened with assault by a MS Obama delegate/atty. who told me after an interview with a reporter from the the Congressional Quarterly that I was not entitled to my opinions and she wanted us to go outside so she could whip my @ss (Monday night)."
--Kelly Jacobs, MS delegate
"That we all had to work so hard and basically beg for fairness and transparency is a sad commentary on the Presidential selection process. That we were even moderately influential is some consolation, but cold comfort. As an E[lection] W[atch]er wrote: "without the EW, the DNC would not have had to work so hard to rig the results..." --Ricki Lieberman
"We EWs knew that Clinton was far more Electable than BHO, and we know it still to be true..." --Aaron Baxter
"The Democratic Party has made a fatal mistake in nominating Barack Obama to be President of the United States. Now they will do everything fair and foul to foist that mistake on the American People. They will hack voting machines in key states, they will lie cheat and steal, and they will launch the same misogynistic attacks against Palin that they did against you while Obama maintains plausible deniability. No doubt, [Hillary] will do what [she] can to prevent this but it is not in [her] hands. Rather it is in the hands of people like Axelrod who are devoid of moral scruples and in the primary we saw the lengths to which they would go to disenfranchise voters... and if they fail then they will try to make [her] a scapegoat...we are thinking Democrats—not yellow dogs. The party of Barack Obama is no place for centrist democrats. When Howard Dean calls the Republican Party the white peoples party, when the Chairman of the North Carolina Democratic Party tells black voters to not support white candidates, when Obama himself claims that people who live in small town America are bitter, cling to guns and religion, and when former Democratic Chairman Don Fowler hopes a hurricane will hit New Orleans during the Republican Convention, something is clearly amiss.. But the Obama cancer is metastasizing throughout the party." --Bill Boe
"Strategy involved G.O.P. crossover voting to take out Clinton, marketing newcomer Obama, stripping battleground delegates, threatening violence at the convention, and (if necessary) declaring martial law to prevent November's general election. Meanwhile, revelations about the Illinois senator's ties to Chicago political fixer Antoin Rezko and Iraqi war profiteers are downplayed by the press. For their part, Democratic Party leaders have circumvented the official nominating process, declaring Obama the nominee by breaking their own rules and allowing superdelegates to "vote" before the convention." http://www.thecityedition.com/Pages/Archive/Winter08/2008Election.html --Rosemary Regello
[Note: If you read only ONE link today, make it THIS one].
"On television, Obama's spectacle might have looked like The Ten Commandments, but inside the stadium it felt like Night of the Living Dead... The crowd, of course, cheered mechanically at tag lines...But its mood was sour. The air carried the acrid smell of defeat...the crowd took shallow breaths. [author's note: The three who donned Nobama tee shirts and walked determinedly around the podium when he began to speak were copiously ignored by the press despite the furor they caused in the stadium]. It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama ... Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals.By all rights, the Democrats should win this election. They will lose, I predict, because of the flawed character of their candidate." http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JI03Aa02.html
--Spengler
"Orange is the symbolic color of the Ukrainian Revolutionaries who protested the "selection" of the President in a rigged election. There was massive corruption, voter intimidation and direct electoral fraud. In the end the Orange Revolution was successful. There was a re-vote that was watched by world observers (that's what we needed here!) and Yushchenko became the President. I guess only "rigged" elections in foreign countries get world outcry."
--Puget Sound Island Girl
And So: The conventions are over. The DNC and the Obama camp have, for the moment, gotten what they want, despite hard campaigning for the actual winner of the primaries and strenuous objection to voter and caucus fraud. However, this appears to be quite the pyrrhic victory indeed. Once again, the Democratic party has demonstrated its keen ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by insisting on the selection of an inexperienced, unqualified and, apparently, rather lawless individual who, it has recently come to light, has rather clearly violated the Logan Act on several occasions, most notably in negotiating in July with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebarito demand that they stop negotiations with the Bush Administration to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in the hope that he can continue attacking the Bush Administration for not imposing a timetable for withdrawal.