>>>>>You may have heard that Barack Obama defended himself yesterday against charges that he is unpatriotic. He also criticized a top advisor, Wesley Clark, for disparaging John McCain's military service.
>>>>
>>>>Did you hear what Clark actually said and in response to what he said it? He did it poorly, but the basic idea of his comment wasn't wrong. McCain's service, being shot down, and being a POW don't, a priori, qualify him to be president. That is, not everyone with the same record could or should be president. That's not to say that those things didn't help form McCain's character, nor to disparage those experiences. Just that they're not, _by themselves_, qualifications for president. They're part of a bigger picture.
>>>>
>>>>All that said, I agree with you on how offensive it is to question someone's patriotism because he or she questions the behavior of the government. Our founding fathers would be totally baffled by this behavior (or, more likely, would put it down to politics as usual--some of those early elections were brutally nasty, even by our standards).
>>>>
>>>>Tamar
>>>
>>>Our founding fathers would have eliminated Obama long ago.
>>
>>You want to expand what you mean by that? If you mean he would have been enslaved, yeah, that's a definite possibility. If you mean something else, I'm totally missing your point.
>>
>>Tamar
>
>Someone with an Islamic background would not make it anywhere in the US in the early days.

It appears you're wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_States

(Note that the relevant info is footnoted, so not just someone's opinions.

>A black man with a pastor who espouses what Obama's did would not have survived (literally). Neither woul dhis pastor.
>

And you think the fact that people would have murdered others for their opinions is a positive statement?

FWIW, lynching was pretty much a post-Civil War phenomenon.

>As far as slavery - he may or may not have been captured by his countrymen in Africa and sold into slavery.

Given his personal background, he actually likely wouldn't have been born. While there seem to have been lots of offspring of white men and black women, the reverse was much less common.

However, none of these arguments, spurious as they are, explain your original statement about the _founding fathers_.

Tamar