A Republican Official Comes to Obama’s Defense

It took a republican to defend Barack Obama. Well why don’t you tell us who it is?

A one liner compared to entire speach is apples and oranges. Respond to the GOP guy who wrote you and ask him why he would rather face Obama then Hillary. Why else would he care?

Tapper once again, with an article slanted to support Obama.
Thanks, Jake.

Firefighter…you need to go back and read the rest of the article. At the bottom, it clearly stated this Republican thought Obama would be a more formidable candidate for the Republicans. I am paraphrasing here of course…go back and read the article.

I totally agree with your Republican friend. All political speeches through the years have familiar lines with words like “change” and “make a difference.” Depending on the environment and the voters’ priorities, they get flipped around and switched all the time. Why else do we voters call it “same old, same old”?
It appears the Clinton campaign staff are trying to pull Obama off message and spend time and energy defending irrelevant minutae.
There are a lot of pessimists in this country right now that just may buy into these negative attacks and I believe the Clinton campaign hopes this will work, since nothing else has seemed to. However,IMO I think the majority of Americans will see this as political maneuvering done from desperate people who are becoming more frantically reckless with each passing day.
If this is all the Clintons can focus on instead of putting forth Hillary’s positive aspects, they are in deep trouble.

“They know they can beat Obama but they are afraid of going up against Clinton.”
After Hillary has managed to make so many in her own party hate her? They would love to go against Hillary. She’s running one of the most self-defeating, depressing, tone deaf campaigns I’ve ever seen.

Firefighter… Hillary will have to get past us yellow dog democrats first if she is ever going to have to worry about the Repugnants!
Obama is the best choice in November, and I will be proud to call him Mr. President in January 2009.

kate, texas ,
Are you so blind to see the point she was making?
Obama was making a statement that words mean a lot of things. She was making the statement that if words mean so much , why are you using someone elses words!
u people it’s right in front of your faces, does the hammer have to hit the nail for you to see that it can?

What is interesting here is the fact that the Republicans claim it would be tougher to compete against the Ill. Senator. Yet when the opportunity is there for arguments that weaken the Senator, thus making the challenge beneficial to Republicans, they come to his defense. Continuing their attacks against Hillary Clinton. I am no psychologist, but the real fear is blatantly obvious.

Thank your Republican friend for his honesty and candor by defending Barak Obama in this sad maneuver to discredit him. I knew there were some good Republicans out there. That’s one reason I am an Independant. :-)

Firefighter, I and many of my friends think that you are wrong, personally I think that they are more afrraid of Obama, because of his honesty, which is hard to beat.

You know it’s pretty sad when Clinton has nothing better to do with her time than this! REALLY sad!
Lady:
1) fight on the basis of your OWN proposals, not take others’ ’cause you can’t come up with your own!
2) if you are going to quote someone’s stand on the issues, GET IT RIGHT!
3) stop treating the American voters like they are SUTPID!
4) stick with the issues! The only one you damage with stuff like this is YOURSELF!

Hillary doesn’t have to borrowed words, to make a
good speech, the republicans are aware, of her talent
that;s why are attacking her.

Thanks for the compliment. You get used by a GOP operative to boost Obama, since the GOP clearly wants to run against the ultra liberal Obama. And then when I offer my observation, you delete it. Nice freedom of speech. The GOP wrote the book on ruthlessness. They don’t help any Democrat unless they want to sabotage another. Period.

Clinton, take two: Hillary steals husband’s best lines
Independent, The (London), Apr 7, 2006 by Rupert Cornwell in Washington
The evidence that she is after her husband’s old White House job grows stronger by the day. Hillary Clinton has long been stealing her husband’s policies. Now she’s (almost) pinching his best lines.
“There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by what is right about America,” Mrs Clinton, former first lady and currently junior Democratic senator from New York, said in the peroration of a speech to a Hispanic group this week.
Sound familiar? It was. Scroll back to Bill’s first inaugural address and his peroration then, to which Hillary was obviously listening very closely. “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America,” the 42nd President told the nation on 20 January 1993.

June 07, 2005
Hillary Steals Gingrich Speech, Substituting Republicans for Democrats
NEW YORK, New York — Hillary Clinton attacked the GOP at a “Women for Hillary” speech in New York, but Newt Gingrich has identified her speech as his own with the words changed to reflect Republican bashing instead of Democrat bashing.
“I read the article about her speech this morning and said ‘My God, that’s my speech!’” said Gingrich. “I’m looking into legal action right away. I gave the speech at a Republican meeting in 1994 in order to rally the troops.”
Senator Clinton’s notes were confiscated by the police, and some excerpts are shown below:
Left unchallenged, Republican leaders could ram through extremist judges, wreck Social Security, and make unacceptable concessions to China, Saudi Arabia and other nations that finance the United States budget deficit.
- There has never been an administration, I don’t believe in our history, more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda .
- I know it’s frustrating for many of you, it’s frustrating for me. Why can’t the Democrats do more to stop them? I can tell you this: It’s very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they’re doing. It is very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don’t care. It is very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth.
- We can’t ever, ever give in to the Republican agenda. It isn’t good for New York and it isn’t good for America.
- It’s shocking when you see how easily they fold in the media today. They don’t stand their ground. If they’re criticized by the White House, they just fall apart .

eleven22,
My point was that this whole issue is irrelevant.
I am a teacher and I take a charge of plagiarism very seriously.This isn’t plagiarism.I was agreeing with the Republican defending Obama in this article, that in the world of politics everyone borrows lines and catch phrases from everyone else…and the general public expects it. I didn’t feel this subject even warranted a response from Obama. Certainly, not something like, Well she stole my lines, too. It shows immaturity in both cases and doesn’t reflect well on Democrats at all. Sounds like kids on a playground…”He said…No, she said…But, he said…” What a waste of time!!!
What’s important to me and how I vote is a candidate’s stand on the issues.Not some pretty words they use in a stump speech. Things like the 4,000 “dead” soldiers from this asinine war. There’s a word you can’t put too much spin on. “Dead” is “Dead” isn’t it? Little room for misinterpretation or blindness there.
So, give it a break and let’s move on to the real issues that this country needs to deal with and not get into infighting over semantics and borrowed cliches.

We look more like the Divided States of America!
Someone make the lady sit down and just be still!
John McCain will be president because the dem party can’t seem to keep their ‘house’ in order. The dem candidate will not have unity behind him or her come November.
The republicans already see the hand writing on the wall.

This funny thing I’ve noticed through watching the whole democratic campaign is that the media is the one making the big deal out of everything, and when you look really closely (as I have), it’s nearly always Obama responding to Clinton’s attacks, but I have not seen him go after her, except on policies (which I agree is fair game), and it’s always been with a very civil tone of debating why he thinks his positions are better than hers. The way I see it, he seems pretty even tempered and focused on his message of bringing people together around a common purpose. It seems like it’s the media always stirring things up because they think it’s what we all want. Who knows, maybe a lot of people do, but frankly I’d rather focus on getting things done that are important, not this petty stuff.

Hillary is graping at straws….she knows she is facing a losing proposition and hasn’t found anything substantive to challenge Obama. Maybe it’s time for her to cry again for sympathy votes. I for one am not only impressed with Barack’s vision and honesty, but also his remarkable restraint from Clinton’s smarmy attempts at criticism. Obama 2008!!!

Obama borrows from more. German Chancellor around 1933, when he was young.
Also many many red book quotations. You look at book, I see many very very resemblance.Now AM happy happy China is really like US.

Thank you for posting this

I say NO ONE will care ANYTHING about this. Not when the option is Hillary Clinton. Are you kidding us? Please.

Obama is a plagiarizer – just words.
College kids get kicked out of college all the time if they plagiarize anyone.
Obama is running to be the president of the United States.

Who is this republican official? Why not give his name? Obama should address this mistake, and not use “everybody is doing it” excuse. He should stop using “The Little Engine That Could” at all his stops. It gets to be stale. This is another article attempting to give Obama a pass. Would a media person get a pass if he co-opted some of his colleagues articles or phrases? It’s sorta like copying from someone’s paper, and submitting it as your own.

For one, Patrick and Obama are good friends who borrow off each other at times. They even spoke about it in the Boston Globe last April.
Actually, it was Patrick who suggested that Obama use the lines.
I have also come to rethink that whole right wing conspiracy thing that democrats bought into back in the 90s. I was never a big Bill fan but, felt as a democrat that it may be true about that rwc.
However, as the campaign has progressed I wonder how much was right wing attacks and how much was simply the truth about the Clintons.
They have proven over the past months that alot of what the right was saying may have been true at least 50 to 70% of the time.

When quoting at least know who said what. It was Senator Bensten who said “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.” Not Reagan. This was during a vice presidential debate against Dan Quayle.
That being said, these charges of plagarism against Biden and Obama are both way out of line and to quote another great British writer “much ado about nothing” (Shakespeare)

We’ll see with the election results tomorrow but this is petty. This isn’t plagerism because Obama had the permission of the speechwriter, and the person who originally gave the speech, to use the line. If folks think that every single word out of a candidate’s mouth is an original idea, you need to take political campaigning 101. Every candidate, from the local city council candidate to folks running for President, have a staff of speechwriters and advisors who provide speeches for candidates. Many of these political pros work for various candidates so it’s understandable that a candidate could give a speech with a line or two used in another’s campaign. Every time Hillary has attempted to go negative on Barack it has backfired, we’ll see what impact it will have on the race. My guess is that the voters will see this move as another move by Hillary to do anything to win.

I am usually a temperate and rational citizen and professional woman. But the Clintons’ nasty negative attacks on Senator Obama are so egregious that I am fit to be tied. As the Clintons continue to campaign in such unseemly manner as to make us Americans ashamed of having them once in the WH and still possibly back in 2009 for another eight years, I believe more and more that I will have no choice but to drop out of the Democratic Party and register as an independent. The Clintons’ legacy will be to lead to finally the emergence of a third independent party. Enough with the power-entrenched and blood-sport of the Democratic Parry machine. I understand now why NY Mayor Bloomberg has been reputed to say that he would not run as an independent should Senator Obama be the Democratic candidate but would do so if Hillary should be. He will become by default our standard bearer.

Since Patrick and Obama are friends–and Patrick himself said he suggested to Obama that he use those speech lines–why is this news? Because Hillary and her circus said it was? I’m fed up with all things Clinton at this point. She steals Obama’s regularly and he’s made no big deal about it, so she and her campaign are desperate hypocrites.

The irony is, the point of the supposedly plagiarized phrase was that others’ words, e.g. famous sayings, are easily understood to be important. (So why does Clinton pretend to think that words are never important? Oh ya, it’s for her own negative rhetorical purposes and personal gain. I suppose rhetoric is acceptable to her as long as it’s used to attack rather than to inspire.) It is obvious that this is not plagiarism (can you imagine politicians footnoting their speeches – as Regan said…, as Lincoln said… ugh!). Well, the outcome of this primary will show is whether Americans are generally as stupid as in myth and whether there is any hope that America can overcome its current downward spiral.

Clinton says she has Solutions but the Solution she offered, when it really matterd to millions of lives of young people and to our country, was the Solution and Authorization to go to War –the Iraq War. In the Most Important Policy Decisiion of Our Times, the Iraq War, Hillary Clinton got it Wrong. Her 35 years of experience didn’t get it Right then, and that speaks Volumes…..
Let’s talk about getting Real. Just because Obama used a few lines from a political advisor and friend for a speech, they now want to muddy and cloud the issues by stating Obama is a Plagarist, which by definition means you are stealing someone’s words or lines without their knowlege, which is a very serious Charge. Is that her Solution to make this non-issue into something it’s not, to offer more Spin and Illusion, when they know full well exactly what it was and is, and because they too are guilty of the same thing, this borrowing of lines in political discourse and is common practice.
Her solution is to insult the intelligence of every day average, citizens by distorting this situation, which is total hypocrisy, because they too have done the same thing and are doing it NOW. They should apologize to the Country, for turning away from being so-called Real, as she likes to say, to puting out this kind of Slime, Distortion and Illusion into the water, trying to Cloud the issues — to Cloud Reality! If you are going to raise doubts about an oppenent, it should be about real facts and not about illusions, about truth and not about falsity.
And Words Do Matter, Words are Not Cheap!

As an independent, I decided long ago to vote for someone other than Clinton. Let’s hope that he Republicans in Wisconon, Texas, etc. vote for Obama. Then we can have a civil campaign between Obama and McCain.

I believe we should have a female president of our country, but not Hillary Clinton. And, yes, she does remind me of Kerry Healey, down and out and embarrassing her party.
Obama’s words are Patrick’s words are our nation’s words to our founding documents. Therefore, there is no improper misuse of words. I was there when Patrick made that speech and I’m so glad Obama is reminding us of his words. Let all of America know them well.

If “other countries will know they are dealing with a rookie,” why is that ALL of the European nations — with the exception of Great Britain — want Obama to win the White House?

The British don’t want Obama in the WH because their whole Empire was based on the subjugation of “brown and black” people. The Brits are the cornerstone of assumed white supremacy (Rudyard Kipling poems?) and their ambivalence about Obama is obvious. America inherited the same assumption only a white person should be a leader.
They only got rid of slavery because they lacked a large land mass to use it as effectively as the US. All of those colonies and Ghandi’s struggles weren’t for show. The Brits still have parades called “Darkie Day” to mark the end of slavery there. They wear blackface and honestly believe its not offensive.
And for all of you terrified of Obama going up against the Rethuglicans, I think your real fear is that white bigotry will be exposed for what it is. Because in reality, that’s ALL the Rethuglicans can use.
And that makes you uncomfortable. What Rethuglicans will say about Obama will expose the guilt of your own racial feelings. Be honest.

It was noted in a political roundtable that McCain prefered to run against Hillary Clinton because he respects her, and he has little respect for Obama because he had given his support on a bill and then backed out, not a man of his word. gosh i can already hear the wailing in the background..trust me McCain won’t have to keep the gloves on against Obama like Hillary has, and what he can’t say the Swift boaters will, there will be “hussein ads” asking americans if they want a president with a terrorist name..and here we go back to the fearmongering that has allowed Bush 8 years. there are so many negatives in making Obama our nominee. America will be so scared that he will lose in a lanslide. so if you can’t take any heat now you better put your diapers on for the big one

Anyone ever reasoned that McCain only wants to set Clinton’s up as he would bring out the old cloak of Monica Lewinski… that will be a landslide reminder that he is back if not close to the oval office. For this reeason alone, Obama is WELL GUARDED!

HRC has been ephasizing expirence more than a thousand times.
I am lost here, she has never been a president, how could she have had expirience. She has only been a senator as long as Obama was, where is she getting this from…
Except she will be the figure head, with Bill runing the show, b’cos that is the only person closest to her with Expirence.
…So here is the thing, she has a meeting with “her” cabinet and has an issue that does not seem to have a resolution. She tells the cabinet to sit back while she goes in a coner and call Bill who is by sitting at the beach for an answer… Men this is twisted!