http://youhavetobethistalltogo.....-ante.html

The Audacity of Hope Barack Obama

19)”… No wonder then that upon my arrival in Washington that January, I felt like the rookie who shows up after the game, his uniform spotless, eager to play, even as his mud-splattered team-mates tend to their wounds. While I had been busy with interviews and photo shoots, full of high-minded ideas about the need for less partisanship and acriomony, Democrats had been beaten across the board – the presidency, Senate seats, House seats. My new Democratic colleagues could not have been more welcoming toward me; one of our few bright spots, they would call my victory…”

(Savior Obama informs us how they all went to him for support and a shoulder to cry on)

“And then there was the small matter of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: the shocking efficiency with which a few well placed ads and the chants of conservative media could tansform a decorated Vietnam war hero into a weak-kneed appeaser.”….

21) “I happened to run into the retiring Senator Zelll Miller, the lean, sharp–eyed Georgia Democrat and NRA board memeber who had gone sour on the Democratic Party, endorsed George Bush, and delivered the blistering keynote address at the Republican National Convention – a no-holds-barred rant against the perfidy of John Kerry and his supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange, filled wih unspoken irony – the elderlly Southerner on his way out, the young black Northerner on his way in,…Later, I would happen upon an excerpt from his book, A Deficit of Decency, in which he called my speeh at the convention one of the best he’d ever heard,…”

(Obama suddenly switches to his statments on how his wife will tell you (the reader) how Ann Coulter, nor Sean Hannity could get under his skin when he watched them, and his pity for people who waste their precious evenings doing so. Obama missed his daughter’s growing, so don’t be fooled)

354) “Some of the hyperbole can be traced back to my speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston, the point at which I first gained national attention. In fact, the process by which I was selected as the keynote speaker remains something of a mystery to me.”

(uh? uh? he disguised his dialect? uh duh?)

354)” had met John Kerry for the first time after the Illinoise primary, when I spoke at his fund-raiser and accompanied him to campaign event high-lighting the importance of job-training programs. A few weeks later we got word that the Kerry people wanted me to speak at the convention….
After I hung up, I turned to my driver, Mike Signator.
“I guess this is pretty big, I said.”
“Mike nodded.’ You could say that”. ‘

(Obama tells he hadn’t planned on going, was broke, had neglected his law practice and rarely seen his wife or duaghter for 6 monthes, but he knew John desparately needed his talented speech, Besides everyone told him it would be fun and good experience for next time he tried to run. He booked a flight to L.A., only once there, the Hertz car rental lady’s face became embarrassed and she told him his credit card didn’t work after re-trying it for him. After 30 minutes on the phone, explaining how important Obama’s mission was, a kindhearted supervisor authorized the car rental.
Things got worse. As Obama was not a delegate he was not allowed a floor pass.

355)” I ended up watching most of the speeches on various television screens scattered around the Staples Center, occasionally following friends or acquaintances into skyboxes where it was clear I didn’t belong.”…

“Given the distance between my previous role as a convention gate-crasher and my newfound role as a convention keynoter, I had some cause to worry that my appearance in Boston might not go very well…”

(worked on speech drafts, and then a spark and brought to his mind a phrase that his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., had once used in a sermon; the audacity of hope, and he hammered out his speech)

357)”…I arrived in Boston…my first appearance on Meet the Press. …Tim Russert put up on the screen an excerpt from a 1996 interview…I had forgotten….the reporter asked me – as someone just getting into politics as a candidate for the Illinois state senate – what I thought about the Democratic Convention in Chicago?
The convention’s for sale, right…You’ve got these $10,000-a-plate
dinners, Golden Circle Clubs. I think when the average voter looks
at that, they rightly feel they’ve been locked out of the process.
They can’t attend a $10,000 breakfast

After the quote was removed from the screen, Russert turned to me. “A hundered and fifty donors gave $40 million dollars to this convention,” he said. “It’s worse than Chicago, using your standards. Are you offended by that, and what messge does that send the average voter?”

I replied that politics and money were a problem for both parties, but that John Kerry’s voting record, and my own, indicated that we voted for what was best for the country. ….

358) “… I spent most of the first three days at the convention fulfilling my role in this pagent.,,,I practiced my speech in front of a video monitor, did a walk-through of how it would be staged, received instruction on where to stand, where to wave, and how to best use the microphones…..

359) I WOULD BE lying if I said that the positive reaction to my speech at the Boston convention – the letters I recieved, the crowds who showed up to rallies, …- wasn’t personally gratifying…
the torrent of publicity that followed the speech reinforces my sense of how fleeting fame is, ….

Why people listen to him is beyond me. His relativistic BS is not only tiresome, it’s juvenile.

“DeLong and Franks didn’t fail in Tora Bora. Moreover, there was neither a failure of the Afghan forces nor any “outsourcing.” Instead, there was careful planning and the use of Afghan forces to great effect, in places and in ways our own forces couldn’t function.

The plan for Tora Bora employed the same methods that had worked elsewhere in Afghanistan. DeLong said, “It goes back to the beginning of the war.” In the north of Afghanistan, “We used the Northern Alliance — which was in fact then the rebel force — to act as Gen. Franks’s army on the ground and using their generals as Gen. Franks’s ground generals. We would embed with each of their medium size ground forces a rather large special forces team with the capability of calling in air [strikes] and the CIA came because they knew the terrain and they knew the people, they knew the languages and it forced the Department of Defense and the CIA to work closer together, so it was a perfect fit.”

SOVIET LESSONS
DeLong said, “There were so many tunnels up there, that we knew that no matter how many people we put up there, we could put millions, you wouldn’t find all the tunnel entrances and openings.” (The Soviet Union, in its decade-long war against Afghanistan in the 1980s, shattered its army by throwing masses of troops into the Afghan mountains trying to trap the mujahideen. They failed, and retreated with tens of thousands of dead. Fortunately, Franks and DeLong studied the lessons of that war.)

Mr. Kerry seems to conveniently ignore this in his recycled assessment of Tora Bora, ironic as it’s the cornerstone for the left’s crusade against the possibility of even attaining victory in Afghanistan. “Graveyard of Empires” right Bill Handel?

He is the only person on earth who can rival the Moron as a liar.

Although the CRUddites are emerging as rivals for the throne.

John Kerry’s Tora Bora Campaign

President Obama unveils his new Afghanistan strategy today, and in the nick of time Senator John Kerry has arrived with a report claiming that none of this would be necessary if former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had only deployed more troops eight years ago. Yes, he really said more troops…

http://online.wsj.com/article/.....32788.html

So, to paraphrase a famous statement, Kerry was against more troops before he was for them.

How surprising.