You know, I watched this snippet in context and I still don’t really know what the hell she was trying to say.
What do you think her point was supposed to be?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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She is clear: richesse oblige. The blessed rich deserve the opportunity to maintain the social order. She sure sucks up to the man. The lady says ‘bless’! She’s big on all this blessing stuff.
I went through the roof when I read the transcript on the Huffington Post.
That was what I got from it…camaraderie between the rich and ruthless privileged elite at it’s finest.
agree Quentin. It has to do with her involvement with The Family and pastor Coe, in which evidently she strongly believes – it’s an oligarchic point of view. There’s a new book on it by Jeff Sharlet: The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, to be released may 20.
Feudalistic, as well as oligarchic.
So is Hillary saying she’s not a regular “workin’ the nightshift” kinda gal? And Bill O’Reilly isn’t just one of us average Joes either? Now I’m totally confused. And god blesses the rich? Wow how things have changed.
That’s because you haven’t been keeping up with prosperity gospel! Your wealth is a sign of God’s favor; your lack of it, and well…you’re simply not trying hard enough as a Christian.
It’s a bastardized the concept out of John 10:10:
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Which is why liberation theology as I understand it and the “prophetic” word–and no, Rev. Wright wasn’t the first to come up with this–“scares” people.
It’s basic: a theology that justifies what people steal and kill for to be comfortable vs. a theology that says you will rot for doing so.
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So true … see my comment below. The red states people will understand her remark.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Hi Oui! How are you and your family? I know, I haven’t e-mailed in forever. I can e-mail you more offline, but we’ve been a bit busy volunteering. It’s good to have a few weekends to ourselves.
somehow this seems appropriate:
Thanx for the pic – it will be used extensively…
Hey there! I love it. LOVE it.
I live out in nowhere coastal NC and I’m surrounded by these heretics. There isn’t a single church around here that hasn’t be corrupted. I didn’t know the John 10:10 justification so thanks for the insight into yet another pick and choose approach to the New Testament.
I still can’t understand how they sell this shit to poor, hard-working people. Praying harder is not going to raise your pay in a town with only one industry. So they must all be praying to win the lottery.
In one of yesterday’s Open Threads, idredit offered a link to this. In that You Tube there is more of the interchange between Clinton and O’Reilly which has me open to a different interpretation.
In that You Tube, O’Reilly is saying she is waffling. Clinton responds by saying she isn’t, that she will not raise taxes on the middle class.
O’Reilly jumps in and says he’s not middle class, he’s rich. That’s when Clinton says what she does in the above clip.
Watching O’Reilly’s response in the other You Tube, I think Clinton was mocking O’Reilly. After Clinton speaks, O’Reilly begins with something about saving.
yeah, I don’t think she meant to say what she actually said. My problem is I can’t really figure out what she was trying to say.
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god bless rich people … Does God Want You To Be Rich?
Better believe it Boo, she said what she said and it’s her conviction! It’s something religious, just like GWB.
“What are you doing for Lazarus?”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."a great find. Thanks.
Hillary has a public persona and a private persona. On O’Reilly, she got carried away – lost it and the private persona was exposed.
I thought it was obvious she was mocking him. He had pointed out earlier that the Clintons were now rich, so when he said (in so many words) I’m rich and I don’t care about the middle class, she was saying Yeah, that’s right Bill, we rich people – it’s all about us. In a mocking way.
btw I thought she was terrific in that interview. I thought she did take him on — over taxes. Exactly as a Democrat should. She was much better than Obama was on Fox, from my point of view. OF course my pov isn’t what either of them were aiming for by going on Fox and Fox vieweres aren’t going to like her point of view on taxes.
The problem is that she said this while she was denouncing the idea of lifting the cap, and she continued to propagate the absolute lie that it would represent a middle-class tax increase. $102,000 is not a middle-class salary. It puts you well into the top 10%, close to the top 5%.
She’s essentially pulling a Chuckie Gibson here.
There certainly is a larger context to the exchange. I was just expanding from the very narrow You Tube clip BooMan posted. I didn’t watch the program so I don’t have the “whole” of it at all.
I was appalled to see on Clinton strong-hold blogs very narrow clips of Rev. Wright’s sermons and then read commentary that built on those very small clips, imo, getting more and more distorted.
Seeing the clip BooMan posted has been narrowed even further from the earlier clip I saw, my thought was that the same thing that was done to Rev. Wright could be done to Clinton with this.
Um, do you mind terribly if I just skip the watching the clip part?
and miss Howard Wolfson’s parsing? For shame.
imho, can’t be taken out of context..the Clintons are among the 14,500 richest people in America.
JUST IN: via TPM
Bound to backfire. Governors, state legislatures are lining up against this idea. Business and economists see this ploy helping the oil companies.
seems to me it’ll backfire (the gasoline plan) because before the ‘final summer fun in the t-bird’ ends everyone will buy it up to hoard it against the price rise.
course the sales will profit the oil companies cash flow…
they play a variant of this in italy every summer, the gas stations threaten a strike just before the summer holiday driving season, everyone stocks up, then they call it off just in time, cash registers plump and happy…
everybody wins, italian style!
you can tell john mcCain likes the beach boys, huh?
Enough about Hillary. What’s going to happen in Guam “tomorrow”, i.e., tonight????
I heard Bless. It really doesn’t make a difference if it was Bless or Blessed to me. Both are inappropriate from two different perspectives. God bless us, means that the rest of us don’t count. God blessed us, means the rest of us don’t count. Or, am I missing something??
“God bless us, means that the rest of us don’t count. God blessed us, means the rest of us don’t count. Or, am I missing something??”
Exactly right.
“Screw ’em” is another refrain of hers.
As Molly Ivins would say:
“Bless her little heart.”
keepinon, Yes, by definition the club is small. Some commentators above think she’s mocking O’Reilly. Well that would give her credit for irony and courage which we have not seen her display before. The idea that she said what she ‘seems’ to have said is too much for them to handle. Right, we don’t have two great candidates who are equal. We have Obama and, on the other hand, Clinton. Take your choice, but don’t tell me there is no difference between them. She could simply have said that the fortunate ueber-wealthy have a moral obligation to help improve the country and its people. But that might have insulted O’Reilly, whose approval she was fishing for. She went on his program to find favor with voters who admire him. Not to mock him. No one forced her to suck up to O’Reilly. Besides with great riches, she is blessed by the same source with free will.
I watched this snippet in context and I still don’t really know what the hell she was trying to say.
who cares? i mean, i support obama no matter what she meant. and if i supported clinton, i would probably still support her no matter what she meant. why does this matter at all?
b/c Clinton, in a private setting, says “Screw em” meaning..the working class and in public, she’s the one that’s in touch, is the friend who cares about their interests.
it seems to me that this is about as substantive as the obama “bitter” kerfuffle.
if you want to see if clinton will care about your economic interest, look at what she says about economic policy. this is just parsing.
not quite. Obama’s “bitter” was churned into bittergate. It continues to be churned….replete with bumper stickers from Clinton.
As far as I can tell, discussion of this out-take from the O’Reilly interview – “Rich People. God Bless us” is confined to the blogosphere –
exposes Hillary’s dual persona.
I’m not sure but her elitist slip may be showing.
It’s interesting, I read the comments BEFORE listening to the clip (my rig loads slow, so I wanted to get an idea what the point was first before taking the time), and I assumed that the “God bless[ed] us” must have been some kind of muffled interjection, so it wasn’t clear what she had said. But no, she clearly says “God bless us,” and with great emphasis.
I’m not in any doubt as to what she meant, Boo. She meant “GOD BLESS RICH PEOPLE.” It’s Calvinism 101. The fact that we are rich is a sign of God’s favor.” The corollary is, “the fact that you are poor is a sign of God’s disfavor.” I guess a lot of people on the left don’t understand it, cause they weren’t brought up that way. I wasn’t either.
It sounds awful, until you get to the punch line: “Accept Jesus Christ in your heart and you too can be rich!” (Because you did it not through your own will, but through the Grace of God, which proves that you are in his favor. So even if you’re lying in the gutter piss drunk without a nickel to your name, you can come to Jesus and become a millionaire.
Now, why she actually SAID it is another story. I didn’t see the interview, but from the context I get from people who are describing it here, I imagine it was because O’Reilly raised the issue and she was talking to one of her own, and forgot for a second that it may not be the best thing to say to the Democratic electorate.
Remember, this is a gal that belongs to Doug Coe’s “The Family.” The two things are very much connected, and she doesn’t go around publicizing that membership either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_(Christian_political_organization)
That’s why her handler there is trying to parse it as “God BLESSED us.” It’s interesting to try to analyze why “God blessed us,” would be more “acceptable than “God bless us,” when the actual meaning is pretty similar. But I suppose “blessed” sounds more humble, since it acknowledges that it’s something that’s happend THUS FAR, but one never knows what’s coming. Whereas “God bless us” in that context, and especially the way she delivered it — a bit scary, frankly — almost sounded like she thinkgs God owes it to her from here to eternity, for making all that money.
Isn’t there supposed to be a book coming out this month on The Family, by whoever wrote the article in Mother Jones? I’ll be fascinated to see how that plays out, because the article is just so bizarre. Why in the world would she be hanging out with that crowd?
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In fact, Clinton’s God talk is more complicated–and more deeply rooted–than either fans or foes would have it, a revelation not just of her determination to out-Jesus the gop, but of the powerful religious strand in her own politics.
Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection.
Clinton’s faith is grounded in the Methodist beliefs she grew up with in Park Ridge, Illinois, a conservative Chicago suburb where she was active in her church’s altar guild, Sunday school, and youth group. It was there, in 1961, that she met the Reverend Don Jones, a 30-year-old youth pastor; Jones, a friend of Clinton’s to this day, told us he knows “more about Hillary Clinton’s faith than anybody outside her family.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Some people are saying that she’s openly mocking O’Reilly. If that was true, then why is Wolfson stumbling over himself to lie, lie, lie about what she actually said?
First, because he’s stupid.
Second, because he knows that clips will be played out of context, because that’s standard operating procedure by candidate supporters on both sides of this campaign.
Three, he knows that Obamabots everywhere will immediately latch on to the out of context clips and push their anti-Hillary memes exactly as the Hillarybots latch on to out of context Obama clip and push their anti-Obama memes.
Four, he decided to do damage control for Two and Three.
Five, he opened his mouth to do damage control and proved he’s stupid.
because they didn’t think of that excuse first and Tuzla was still on their mind
maryb2004, You do tie yourself up in knots. Would you at least agree that it was not the brightest or friendliest remark she has ever made?
Of course I would admit that. She was mocking Bill O’Reilly. It wasn’t meant to be friendly. That in fact is my entire point.
Hillary reminds me of Barbara Bush, bless her heart. But At least Barbara Bush may understand her comments are demeaning and is a Republican.
I took Hillary’s “God Bless Us” to mean exactly the same thing as your “Barbara Bush, bless her heart” remark. It isn’t really asking God to bless anyone’s heart – it’s a mild form of self-deprecation.
That’s what I thought when I first heard & that’s what I think now. And I’m an Obama supporter.
Where O Reilly was trying to present the appearance of two rich people – part of the club – Hillary backed away from that as much as she could – not gracefully, not courageously, but also not wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
In context of a person who has a 109 Million Dollars, like Hillary, I think she knows exactly what she’s saying and why. And what’s with “pass it on to the next generation”..oh the rich stay rich and lets keep the Paris Hilton Tax Cut, is what i hear.
I would want to pass on something to my kids if I had any. That’s hardly the worst of sins. Read into it as you like – that’s not what I heard.
An again – I’m an Obama supporter.
She’s pandering to the rich. “Back me and I won’t raise your taxes.” “Back me and I won’t point out how you’re ripping the public off.”
If John Edwards was the decent man his supporters believed him to be, he’d speak out right now and support Obama against this crap.
But he stays silent, because he wants his cabinet post. I knew he was a phony.
To my grief, I must admit you’re right.
To my great sorrow, it’s looking that way.
Crap, didn’t mean to paraphrase you, Quentin. LOL Obviously, you comment rang true to me.
LOL at the ditto marks, but condolences to both of you. It is hard when someone turns out not to be who you hoped they would. We’ve all been there, politically and otherwise….
Believe whatever you like. Just a couple of days ago, Elizabeth Edwards said of endorsements:
read between the lines. it’s obvious, at least to me, that the implication that the edwards’ are not in camp hillary. that aside, were his early, and aggressively populist, campaign statements an indication of his core beliefs, then this is nothing more than a cya political maneuver.
as an early, and active supporter of edwards, and one who was grossly offended by his handling of his campaign’ “suspension”, l’m even more offended by this transparent b.s.
as for gore?…wtf has gore got to do with it? they’re [edwards] nothing more than opportunistic poseurs, looking out for no. 1. he could just as easily come forward and embraced obamas message at a time when it would have been significant, and solidified his chances for being an influential part of the next administration. instead, he’s tried to place himself in the position king maker. good luck with that. it’s too late.
whatever relevance he may have once enjoyed has been lost. his 19 delegates sure isn’t a position of power.
my 2 ymmv
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non-stop media grinder that consumes us all …
a free pass for white supremacy
we’re free, we’re free at last, unaware
the iron shackles have been replaced
today’s hurdles put in place by the elite
wait, you wait and get back in line
religion, gender, sexual and racial emancipation
not this century in pax americana
not a just cause in white society
exempt to shed blood for oil in Iraq
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Rev. Wright is a non-issue, anyway he served in the Military which is more than Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney or Karl Rove every did.
That is the operative part of the message.
To be charitable, that was her way of guilting the rich into not consuming their children’s inheritance. And if given the chance, I think she would not have limited that to easing the Estate Tax, but rather an obligation to make sure the next generation has a viable environment, economy and means to thrive as well.
At least that’s what I hope she meant by it, even if I can never support her