Posted on 07/31/2009 9:18:48 AM PDT by Schnucki
EVEN Barack Obama had trouble clearly articulating what was achieved by a much-hyped "beer summit" in the Rose Garden of the White House yesterday.
As host, he played the role of peacemaker: Obama invited a black Harvard professor and the white cop who arrested him to bury the hatchet over a drink.
It was an extraordinary intervention by a US President with a pressing agenda that includes combating the world recession and climate change.
But the event, which attracted so much interest that cable TV networks ran countdown clocks, had the taint of political theatre from the start.
Obama was the main intended beneficiary, sitting in full public view at a picnic table under a magnolia tree with professor Henry Louis Gates, police sergeant James Crowley and Vice-President Joe Biden as a surprise late addition.
It was Obama who injected himself into the incident last week by accusing police of "stupidity" for arresting Gates after the academic broke into his own home because he had lost his keys.
It was Obama who escalated public debate to national proportions by linking the incident to a pattern of racial profiling by police.
And it was Obama, in an unusual lapse of judgment, who allowed public attention across the US to be distracted from his preferred topic of promoting a new healthcare system, to which he had devoted the previous fortnight in an attempt to force a deal on the US congress.
The US President inflamed tensions over race and reignited the culture wars at the very time he least wanted it. Now he needed a circuit-breaker to stem the damage and make the issue disappear.
An opinion poll released yesterday by Pew Research found 41per cent of Americans disapproved of Obama's action in coming out strongly in favour of the Harvard academic
(Excerpt) Read more at theaustralian.news.com.au ...
The word president Barry used was “STUPIDLY”, which afaik, is not a real word.
What type of beer did they consume? There was an USA Today article about all the beer preferences being foreign-owned (i.e. Red Stripe, Blue Moon, Bud Lite).
It is real.
Biden would never miss a drinking party!
i have wondered about that and gotten sidetrack everytime i was going to look that up. so adverb for stupid is not stupidly. i promise i have never heard it used before. thanks
It’s a real word.
So he is stupid and racist but we know that, the beer brand consumed does not hide that fact.
But...but...Geraldo said this was a grand moment in US history! He called it a tremendous success for Obama.
(Why does Fox keep him around? Sheesh)
Yes. Stupidly is as stupidly does. ;)
It was Billy Beer from Plains, Ga.
It’s all about image, slight of hand, symbolism, PR, not about substance.
Again we have to go to foreign papers to see the real “transparency”.
I did not watch the Beer Summit, but I was told that only the police Sargent touched the beer- is that right?
Not used by a real president though.
The interesting feature about this meeting is why was it held at all? “The Divine One” is a busy man; healing the sick, walking on the water in the Mall etc. and yet he has time to bring in a cop for a meeting with his black buddy. Could it be that his own Whit House tracking polls demonstrated he really “blew it?”
"Ahh, magnolias ..."
It was a condescending stunt designed to gin up some fake moral equivalence between Gates and the cop. The cop was in the right and did his job and Gates is a racist rabble rouser who’s gotten every conceivable goodie from the liberal elitist bubble and plays his phony victim status to the hilt. Obama loves to play the race card every chance he gets so naturally he came to the aid of his pal Gates.
Yes, I think he felt the need to perform a magnanimous gesture as a way of making an unspoken apology. I think he was hoping that Gates and Crowley would agree that “this was all a big mistake” and leave it at that.
The real symbolism of this charade was to let obama once again act as if he was “ all of our fathers”, he alone knows whats best......the man isn’t an empty suit, his suit is frankly full of himself, in short obama is full of shit.
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