I heard this on Rush this afternoon, and frankly, it floors me. No liberal bias here eh? Jack Cafferty and Jeffrey Toobin both claim Obama was right to say that rural Pennsylvania voters ‘cling to god and guns’ because they are bitter.
In fact they agree that these same voters agree with Obama and themselves!
BLITZER: All right.
Gloria, he’s already being hammered by Hillary Clinton and John McCain, for that matter, for supposedly being an elitist and speaking ill of the people of Pennsylvania by suggesting that the economic problems there are causing them to become bitter and buying guns and becoming xenophobic and all of that.
What do you think? Is this a real issue out there?
BORGER: Well, Hillary Clinton said today, you know, I don’t see bitter people out there, I see struggling people or whatever it is. But she said that people aren’t bitter.
I think the people are angry. And maybe — and maybe Obama’s terminology was inartful, but I think he’s expressing a sentiment of mad as hell voters not going to take it anymore that we’ve seen throughout this election. And that’s why, perhaps, voters are saying over and over again that they want a change.
CAFFERTY: Yes. ~cnn.com
How’s that for spin? Of course these voters agree with Obama. They’re mad as hell and want change!
Cafferty actually goes on to say that these rural voters turn to bitterness (and violence?) for the same reasons that muslims join al Qaeda!
CAFFERTY: Look, Jeff’s right. They call it the rust belt for a reason. The great jobs and the economic prosperity left that part of the country two or three decades ago. The people are frustrated. The people have no economic opportunity.
What happens to folks like that in the Middle East, you ask? Well, take a look. They go to places like al Qaeda training camps. I mean there’s nothing new here.
And what Barack Obama was suggesting is not that the people of Pennsylvania are to blame for any of it. It’s that the jerks in Washington, D.C. , as represented by the 10 years of the Bushes and the Clintons and the McCains, who have lied to and misled these people for all of this time while they shipped the jobs overseas and signed phony trade deals like NAFTA, are to blame for the deteriorating economic conditions among America’s middle class.
I mean I’m a college dropout and I can read the damn thing and figure it out.
Let’s go back to what Obama said:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. ~politico.com
“They go to places like al Qaeda training camps.”