Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Obama Yaps & Faith Kills



Seems that Barack Obama is bringing his flashy brand of rhetoric down a few pegs. He wants to try and appeal to the middle class working white voter. The New York Times has a good article about the Dem candidates stumping in PA. and how he is lower his yap to try and fit the mind set of the locals there.

"He is grounding his lofty rhetoric in the more prosaic language of white-working-class discontent, adjusting it to the less welcoming terrain of Pennsylvania." states Michael Powell of the Times. He goes on to point out how much like Ohio the working class folks are and the type of "plain speaking" that is preferred, "Mr. Obama’s effort to master a plain-spoken and blunt language that extends back centuries in Pennsylvania is accompanied by no small stakes. Voters here, as in neighboring Ohio, where Mr. Obama lost the white and aging blue-collar vote, tend to elect politicians whose language rarely soars and whose policy prescriptions come studded with detail." I understand that it is mostly election year yabber, but I also want real, tangible meat & potatoes. I took speech classes and love a rousing speech as much as the next guy, but I also want real facts and not just platitudes. Hillary may be nearly boring with the detail in her plans and speeches, but there is content there that I can function with and hear results oriented direction. "A thrill these talks are not, but G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College, noted that politics that attended to the precarious details of life could provide comfort to the hard-pressed.

“If you’re an unemployed steelworker, a former coal miner, you want to know about job training, who pays your health care,” Dr. Madonna said. “Obama’s speeches are uplifting but without much specificity, and that’s a tough sell for working people who don’t live in a world of ideas.”

I am all for an adult following in any religious style that they would like, but when your choice, as a parent, can or does lead to the death of your child then I believe that you should be held accountable. It is a crime and it is neglect! Bottom line. You are the adult that is making choices for care that the child can not do for themselves. Here we have a story, yet another, of parents that belonged to some very strict little religion that allowed them to only pray for their child's illness and they watched the child die when some simple early medical care may have saved the child's life. How utterly sad. "The Worthingtons belong to a small fundamentalist sect, The Followers of Christ Church. The Followers believe that faith will heal all and that death, if it comes, it is God’s will.

In fact, death has come often to the children of the Followers. Before Ava, other children died in circumstances where simple, well-proven medical treatments might have saved them. According to an investigative report done some years back by Mark Larabee of The Oregonian newspaper, at least 38 young children lie in graves in the church’s cemetery in Oregon City. And the Followers have reported a suspiciously high number of stillborn deaths in recent years." All very sad indeed. How can anyone rationalize the death of an innocent child in the name of God? Parents have the right to feed and dress their children as they wish, but I stand firm in the fact that they do not have the right to watch them die.



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