Religious Resignation

[Jester]

Well, what does having much more than "even a passing connection" tell you then? link It appears to be a relationship that began in 1991, and remained close until Rezco got in trouble. Then suddenly he was an old acquaintance, and Obama says "This is not the Tony Rezko I used to know". So, if you believe as Obama characterizes it, that he made bonehead moves and can't figure this stuff out, what does that tell you about him? What does that tell you about his ability to become the Commander in Chief of one of the worlds super powers? What does it tell you about his ability to choose people of character to be in his inner circle, or in his Cabinet?

I don't think it's unreasonable to say that Obama, a relative political neophyte at the time, did not know much about Rezko's back room deals. This is not to say that he escapes this unscathed. It is either damaging to his honesty or his judgement of character, you are correct. However, politics is a dirty game, and none of the players are squeaky clean. You make friends who might not turn out to be your friends after all. You take money that you need to campaign without really understanding where it came from.

Obama is thus of a kind with "Whitewater" Clinton or "Keating 5" McCain, no longer able to claim he's pure as driven snow. If there's even a single politician in Washington who claims that, it's probably because someone near them hasn't been caught yet. But I think Obama has been clear and candid about his connections to Rezko, has given the money to charity, and strongly rejects lobbyist support for his campaign. (A luxury of convenience, perhaps, given that he doesn't need it, but he rejects it all the same.)

We could, but I doubt any of them made direct deals with him, dined with him, spent time at his summer cabin. Rezko and Obama are close, very close.

That closeness is well demonstrated, at least in the past tense, and Obama has admitted as much. I think, regardless of whether you trust him or not, he has left that connection behind him, as it is no longer necessary, and is tremendously costly. All we can do is look to who he associates with during the campaign, and in the future. If, in the end, he's no better than Clinton was, then I won't be surprised. But he's not there yet.

It's more than a non-issue, but I agree its merely a data point. You might also swallow the part about Obama checking up on Alsammarae in Iraqi jail as described, "just an inquiry for a constituent", but I mark it as another data point here.

His father phoned up his Senator's office and asked for a status check on Alsammarae. Obama's office did so. He would have done the same for any constitutent, it's part of the job to act as a conduit for this kind of information. What should they have done, yelled at him for being the father of a scumbag and hung up the phone? I don't see how this is suspicious.

Careful with the data points, there is such a thing as overfitting your data.

Here is an example of where your skepticism seems absent. I don't trust politicians, even the ones I like. But you swallow up the swill like a drunken hog.

(I believe Mav already warned us once. If we want to continue this conversation, I don't think "drunken hog" is the kind of thing we should be calling each other.)

Skepticism is not synonymous with suspicion. Skepticism is about wanting solid evidence for claims. If the evidence is just a scattergun of inconclusive "data points", then I try not to make solid judgements. We do not yet know Obama well. Perhaps he is a disaster waiting to happen, although I doubt it, from what I've seen. But, listening to the right side of the internet, you'd suspect we had a feature-length film of him and Louis Farrakhan at a Mujhadeen training camp, grabbing money from Rezko in one hand and forking it over to suicide bombers in the other. This is the kind of conspiracy theory that happens when you play connect-the-dots, rather than weigh the evidence.

The only thing that would have been sadder, and more humiliating for the Office would have been photos or video tapes of his trysts published in Hustler.

And that's grounds for impeachment now? Plenty of presidents in the history books had trysts that would have been humiliating if they were published in Hustler. They are well known. Kennedy? Jefferson? The Presidency does not come with an oath of celibacy. Previous generations, however, seem to have had the sense to let the private be private.

-Jester