Quotes of the day

“I’m not surprised the NY Times chose to sensationalize this story. In fact, the New York Times, the AP, and other news organizations ran with the ‘sensationalized story’ despite being specifically told by Steve Malzberg himself that they were incorrect in their assessment of the sound bite. You just can’t help but laugh when my simple slip of the tongue, becomes a huge story – and a certain Presidential candidate claiming to visit all 57 states, gets widely ignored.”

***
“Is the idea that Obama’s intellectual history should be tied to his personal narrative and to a father whom he barely knew really all that crazy or racist? I recall some guy writing a book along those lines once. Obama has also spoken himself about the impact growing up in the developing world has had on his views.

“More broadly, the line that Serwer’s dismissing here is the fringe of an argument that’s worth taking seriously: Obama’s roots in politics, to the degree he thought about foreign policy at all, are on the left, in the campus anti-nuclear movement and in an academic Chicago milieu in which Palestinian activists recalled him as sympathetic. He moved right on all sorts of things as he approached the national stage, but as he puts a very personal stamp on American foreign policy at a turbulent moment, it’s legitimate to look at his personal education.”

***
“Huckabee’s claim that he misspoke when he said–twice–on the Steve Malzberg radio show that President Obama grew up in Kenya raises more questions. That’s because of the context in which Huckabee made his claim…

“Try substituting Indonesia into [his original] comments and it makes little sense.

“Indonesia used to be a Dutch colony, known as the Dutch East Indies. The British controlled Malaysia, which is kind of close to Indonesia, but the Mau Mau uprising took place in Kenya in the 1950s. Churchill, the British prime minister when the uprising erupted in 1952, put it down and Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was detained during the conflict…

“So Huckabee’s whole statement kind of falls apart, especially when Kenya is replaced by Indonesia. What was he really thinking?”

***
“Somewhere in the midst of all this, I’m considered guilty of hate speech, incompetent to be president. It’s really one of those things where it must be that there are people in the media who are afraid that I might end up getting some traction running for president and beating Barack Obama. I can’t figure out any other reason that they would be so exorcized over a verbal gaffe that I have immediately not only acknowledged but corrected and am in print being very clear as to exactly what I meant.”