Bob is rightly impressed that Obama addressed both black and white resentment in his speech. Even Mickey can't fault it as civics; he just thinks it's a disaster for electoral politics. That distinction seems to me to be part of the problem.
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers had hoped that the uproar over inflammatory remarks made by Mr. Obama’s longtime pastor that has rocked his campaign for a week might lead voters and superdelegates to question whether they really know enough about Mr. Obama to back him. Although it is still early to judge his success, the speech Mr. Obama delivered on race in Philadelphia to address the controversy was well received and praised even by some Clinton supporters.
...the Obama campaign has met the challenge of Rev. Wright, perhaps sufficiently, perhaps not. But from the perspective of wavering superdelegates, it's hard to find a level of panic among them. Obama has four weeks to recover until Pennsylvania; assuming that the bad news evens out the good news, the attitudes of these superdelegates will regress to the mean and they won't be a position to rethink the entire premise of Obama's candidacy.
...the analyst's emotional brain feels momentum for Hillary; the analyst's analytical brain can't quite figure out how Obama loses.
Some see the enormous potential that Obama has to transform global politics:
"We Israelis traditionally look at the candidates of a US election through the very specific prism of "whether or not he or she would be good for Israel." Some of my friends were surprised that I was so enthusiastic about Obama: "Clinton would be much better for us," they claimed. But I believe that what is good for Israel is a US president who is good for the world. A US president with whom the Palestinian boys would identify would make Israel, and the whole world, more secure. It would inspire people everywhere to embrace what America represents - modernity, freedom, civil society, and democracy. I will be watching this election very closely because all six billion of us will be affected. And while I can't vote for Obama myself, I will certainly pray that Americans will."
The Weekly Standard reacts to the Washington Times article:
...let me just say to Ron Paul supporters everywhere, and on behalf of the New Right (by which I assume Paul means the Jew Right), get lost.
There should be plenty of room for the Paulnuts in Obama's big tent. If Rev. Wright isn't exactly a 9/11 Truther, at least he's breathed new life into the Pearl Harbor Truther movement. Imagine a newsletter coauthored by the Reverend and Lew Rockwell--now that's racial harmony.
The pledge reads, in part, "I shall not campaign or participate (emphasis added) in any state which schedules a presidential election primary or caucus before Feb. 5, 2008, except for the states of Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina..."
Today, Clinton's memo argues "Let's remember that the point of the early state pledge was to protect the role of the four states that held early nominating contests. Well the contests in those states were protected and the people in Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire and Nevada got a chance to vote... Senator Clinton signed the pledge and kept it... Senator Obama decided to go further and made a voluntary decision to remove his name from the Michigan ballot."
So the issue would seem to be, what does the word "participate" actually mean?
The Green Republican meets the Green Tory. Money quote from Cameron:
“It was a fascinating and very productive meeting which covered a wide range of subjects including Iran, Iraq, the global economy and climate change. Our conversation centred on Afghanistan where the Senator praised the incredible work being carried out by British troops. We also discussed the need for greater co-ordination among the military and various authorities there. The Senator and I also spent time discussing our shared interests and how we can broaden the appeal of moderate Conservatism.”
The Obama campaign is opposed to a Michigan re-vote mainly for reasons of politics. That's a descriptive truth I arrived at from reporting and talking to numerous sources within the campaign. It may well be true that there are legitimate grievances and obstacles to a new primary that the campaign has found -- indeed -- there appear to be some. Pointing out that the main reason for the opposition is political has pushed some readers to conclude that I have a pro-Clinton bias. Think what you wish.
I would say this, wouldn't I?, but Marc strikes me as one of the fairest reporters out there.
The veteran Clintonite writes on the Huffington Post:
1. If a white minister preached sermons to his congregation and had
used the "N" word and used rhetoric and words similar to members of the
KKK, would you support a Democratic presidential candidate who decided
to continue to be a member of that congregation?
2. Would you support that candidate if, after knowing of or hearing
those sermons, he or she still appointed that minister to serve on his
or her "Religious Advisory Committee" of his or her presidential
campaign?
If one of my mistakes was to trust men like August Hanning, another larger mistake was to put my trust in the Bush administration, not so much on matters of intelligence—faulty intelligence was a near-universal phenomenon—but on matters of basic competence. I will admit to a prejudice here: I believed—note the tense, please—that Republicans were by nature ruthless, unsentimental, efficient, and, most of all, preoccupied with winning. It simply never occurred to me that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would allow themselves to lose a war. Which is what they have very nearly done.[...]
What the world is confronting five years after the invasion—the mess that Gen. David Petraeus is attempting to clean up today—was almost entirely preventable. It's not only my encounters, inside Iraq and outside, with senior figures of the Bush administration that have convinced me of this; the investigations conducted by George Packer, Tom Ricks, Bob Woodward, and Michael Gordon, among others, have unearthed thousands—literally thousands—of mistakes made by this administration, most of which were avoidable.
McCain campaign advisor Lawrence Eagleburger unloads on the religious right:
On the Christian hard right, I live in Charlottesville now and I can't tell you I'm surrounded by it," Eagleburger said. "I must tell you we fought it there, fought hard against it. There's no question that in the Republican Party it is a serious problem...Among the hard-right conservatives in the Republican Party John McCain was, shall we say, less than enthusiastically received...What you see is what you get. You are not going to see him moving to assuage the concerns of these conservatives.
Paul Waldman discusses Code Pink's absurd approach to ending the war:
...this week, which will see the fifth anniversary of the start of the war, Code Pink plans to "step up the pressure," as its leader Medea Benjamin said. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "Code Pink has a full roster of activities planned for the week, including: yoga every morning at 8:30; organic potlucks every noon; nightly movies and popcorn; a bike ride around Berkeley on Tuesday; an open-mike musical jam on Wednesday; and a 'send-off' to the Marines on Friday, when protesters will bring suitcases and pink berets for traveling." How the Bush administration will be able to resist is anyone's guess.
A mash-up video conflating Obama with the most radical and inflammatory of black radicals and separatists is now being linked by Powerline and Hewitt. No big surprise who is behind it:
Rather the incendiary video -- which also includes footage of Malcolm
X, the U.S. Olympians who raised their hand in the black power salute
and the song "Fight the Power" -- is in part the amateur work of Lee
Habeeb.
A co-founder and former producer of the Laura Ingraham Show, Habeeb is
the director of strategic content at Salem Radio Network, the
conservative talk radio powerhouse that airs programs hosted by figures
such as Bill Bennett and Hugh Hewitt.
"The fact is that U.S. Marines will find more deadly weapons in the
first hours of war than the U.N. did in three months," - Victor David
Hanson, March 18, 2003. Yes, this is an old one, but this week's five year anniversary makes it more relevant.
Me too. An American Journal of Psychiatry editorial says Internet addiction should be added to the official guidebook of mental disorders:
Like other addicts, users experience cravings, urges, withdrawal and tolerance, requiring more and better equipment and software, or more and more hours online, according to D. Jerald Block, a psychiatrist at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. Dr Block says people can lose all track of time or neglect "basic drives," like eating or sleeping. Relapse rates are high, he writes, and some people may need psychoactive medications or hospitalization.
Rather curiously, the editorial mentions the figure that 86% of people with 'internet addiction' have another mental illness. What this suggests is that heavy use of the internet is not the major problem that brings people into treatment.
Arthur C. Clarke's fiction embodied a fundamental optimism about the future, tempered by a healthy skepticism about the human condition and an ongoing fascination with certain forms of spirituality. Unlikely to indulge in dystopic visions, but rarely sentimental or unrealistic, Clarke was, quite simply, curious about the world.
Ross disagrees with my saying that part of the right's reaction to Obama's speech was fueled by fear and opportunistic racism:
The conservative idea of a candidate who's "transformational" on race is someone who sounds like Bill Cosby and works with Ward Connerly, and that just isn't what Obama's doing; hence the Right's disappointment, which in many cases is curdling into dismissiveness
and outright dislike. Instead, Obama's trying to be a transformational figure on the following two counts: First, as John McWhorter suggests in his response to the speech, he's trying to free African-American politics from the vice grip of grievance and resentment, breaking away not only from the Sharptons and Jacksons but from the NAACP line of Julian Bond and Kweise Mfume as well, and bringing black Americans out of racialism and radicalism and into the liberal mainstream; at the same time, he's trying to bring the country, which has heretofore tilted right, into the center-left mainstream as well. (The latter achievement, obviously, depends on the former, which is why the Wright affair is potentially so damaging: It calls into question his promise as a new kind of a black politician, without which his hope to be a new kind of American politician more or less collapses.) [...]
As everyone from Rod Dreher to Mickey Kaus to Steve Sailer have noted, [Obama's] practical concessions to present-day conservatism are vanishingly small. But he isn't trying to win over the gang at the Corner, or movement conservatives more generally; he's trying to win over those voters (and writers) who sometimes think that conservatives make a lot of sense, but whose ideological commitments are ultimately malleable. So of course if you're an ideological conservative you don't like what you hear from him; he's talking to everybody else, but not to you.
Sullivan didn’t need readers to update him that Obama’s speech would be received poorly, would be viewed as condescension and would be ridiculed widely on the right. This is not because of “fear and racism,” but on the contrary reveals the degree to which what George Will called the “exquisite” sensitivity we have all been conditioned to possess has completely consumed the modern conservative movement to the point where many mainstream conservatives are, if anything, more preciously p.c. than university speech code enforcers. In an expression of “turnabout is fair play,” rather than denounce these anti-racism witch hunts in principle as ludicrous thought policing, many conservatives have decided that it is fine to play this game so long as a Democratic ox is being gored.
I don't think I've ever believed or written that Obama's approach to race is like Connerly's or Steele's. And I don't think he's an ideological conservative, even if he is at times a temperamental and pragmatic one. I think his approach is more effective, because it both integrates their points - he doesn't hesistate to tell black audiences about responsibility and family and faith - while refusing to leave other parts of the black experience behind. It is a both-and strategy. And that's what actually makes it new. I admire Connerly and Steele and Rice and even Thomas after a fashion. But they have obviously not brought black America along with them - or much of white America either. And all of them have failed to be elected nationally or even locally.
Obama is therefore a more integrative candidate, a broader bridge. Whether this turns out to be mush or whether it is something real is unknowable right now. But I don't believe a black candidate who is not merely a token has any other choice. And I haven't come across a black politician who has managed to do this with quite this level of thoughtfulness, talent and integrity.
An internally displaced woman carries her daughter on March 19, 2008 near a bombed building in Baghdad, Iraq. An internally displaced Iraqi family has taken a bombed building as its home in Baghdad, Iraq. Photo by Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images.
"We've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names; being told you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie; you have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant; you can't sit out there with everyone else, there's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office; here's where you sit on the bus .. . And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder, and resentment, and you have to just say, "I probably would, too. I probably would, too. And in fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me."
A man waiting for a car repair sees the Obama speech on TV. People come and go and watch. Not everyone in this country is like the National Review crowd:
I've watched the speech again since this morning, and it didn't disappoint, but just at that moment I stopped watching it ... and started watching the people around me. The young black man.
The elderly white couple. The two white women, one college-aged, one
in her late-20s. One middle-aged white woman. Two white men, one
college-aged, one in his late-30s. One Asian couple. All of them were
watching the speech. Rapt. Nodding.
Gradually, the twentysomething white woman went back to her laptop,
but kept smiling when Obama would say something important. The elderly
white couple whispered in their Southern accented way: "He's really
good... He's saying good things... He's a good young man..." The young
black man chuckled when Obama said that Sunday morning was the most
segregated hour in America, but was otherwise simply watching. And at
one point, the middle-aged white woman asked one of the dealership
folks, in another thick, thick Southern accent if she wouldn't mind
turning up the volume, because she really wanted to hear this speech.
She, this white Southern woman from the suburbs, wanted to hear this speech, delivered by a Black man with a funny name running for President. And she was nodding.
A German fighter ace has just learned that one of his 28 wartime 'kills' was his favourite author. Messerschmidt pilot Horst Rippert, 88, said he would have held his fire if he had known the man flying the Lightning fighter was renowned French novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
American Footprints on the Chinese attempt to marginalize the Dalai Lama:
By linking the Dalai Lama to the unrest—which he opposes (and the Chinese know he opposes)—the Chinese are forcing the Dalai Lama either to repudiate the Tibetan militants and split the emigre Tibetan movement, or endorse the insurrection and permit the Chinese to portray him as an impotent captive of extremist forces.
For those unfamiliar with the Chinese pattern of denunciation, polarization, division, and destruction this is a classic tactic--call it Police State 101--intended to isolate the target of a purge by forcing him to denounce his associates—or force the target to incriminate himself by not forswearing alliance with a vulnerable, isolated, and discredited element that the Chinese government is about to land on like a ton of bricks. [...]
I thought that one of the few things all us Christians agreed on was the maxim "condemn the sin but love the sinner." Obama's description of his relationship to Rev. Wright, the man and his opinions, was a model of this goal for all Christians living in a tainted world. So how can Christians such as Michael Gerson (whom I otherwise respect) continue to demand Obama sever himself from Wright and Trinity Church? What am I missing?
These repeated gaffes about al Qaeda being helped by Iran are beginning to make me wonder. I assumed he was more cognizant of the complex realities of Iraq than our current president. And it's staggering to me that it hasn't even occurred to McCain that exploiting some of the divisions between Shiite and Sunni Islam might actually be a tactic worth considering in our increasingly complex battle over there. Was this more Bush-Rove dumbing-don for the American public? Or is he really that ignorant?
Having watched and listened to her give evidence, having studied
the documents, and having given in her favour every allowance for the
enormous strain she must have been under (and in conducting her own case) I
am driven to the conclusion that much of her evidence, both written and
oral, was not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid.
Overall she was a less than impressive witness.
"[Y]ou can't hold the candidate responsible for everything that
people around him may say or do. It's interesting to
me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very
uncomfortable with what ... Wright said, when they all were all over a
Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found
very awkward and uncomfortable, years ago. Many times those were
statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after
all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Rev. Wright, who
are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of
the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put
them on paper and looked at them in print, you'd say 'Well, I didn't
mean to say it quite like that...
As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say
'That's a terrible statement!' ... I grew up in a very segregated
South. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I'm gonna be
probably the only conservative in America who's gonna say something
like this, but I'm just tellin' you — we've gotta cut some slack to
people who grew up being called names..." - Mike Huckabee. YouTube here.
It's all so old news isn't? One of the more appalling aspects of the president's current cheery, goofy demeanor is that he has clearly sealed off from any psychological absorption that he is and will always be the president who authorized and enforced a new torture regime - torture that, despite all the spin, spread like wildfire after given permission at the top, and involved far, far more than "three" waterboarding sessions. Read Philip Gourevitch's and Errol Morris's profile of Sabrina Harman, the woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib, in the current New Yorker. These were no rogue improvisers; they were implementing policy - as the torture and murder and rapes in almost every theater of combat and every branch of the armed services are now a matter of the historical record. An excerpt:
“You also had stress positions, and you escalated the stress
positions,” Davis said. “Hand-cuffs behind their backs, high up, in
very uncomfortable positions, or chained down. Then you had the
submersion. You put the people in garbage cans, and you’d put ice in
it, and water. Or stick them underneath the shower spigot naked. They’d
be freezing.” It was a routine, he said: “Open a window while it was,
like, forty degrees outside and watch them disappear into themselves .
. . before they go into shock.”
The Gestapo and Stalin techniques - excruciating stress positions, imposed and brutal hypothermia, extended sleep deprivation of the kind Menachem Begin once decrobed as the worst of all torments, sexual abuse, beatings - all these were enforced not just at Abu Ghraib but at Camp Cropper, Bagram, Gitmo and many other informal detention centers, and authorized and overseen by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. and as so often they never are held accountable. That's what low-level grunts are for, isn't it? Again:
The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United States policy. The authorization of torture and the decriminalization of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have been among the defining legacies of the current Administration; and the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses documented on the M.I. block in the fall of 2003 were the direct expression of the hostility toward international law and military doctrine that was found in the White House, the Vice-President’s office, and at the highest levels of the Justice and Defense Departments.
I have just listened to it for the third time. Damn, this is
impressive. It is the diametric opposite of the Romney speech.
Romney presented a masterpiece of political triangulation, a speech fabricated
by pollsters and political consultants. Obama spoke from the heart and
spoke truly, assuming great political risk for his actions. He spoke on
the assumption that Americans were adults, that they could think for themselves,
and that they were prepared to actually think about the dark problems that
millions confront every day and yet can't or won't confront
socially. I watched the media coverage of this speech on several cable
services and news networks. The media flunks. It continues to view
everything through the optic of manufactured political firestorms. Indeed the
media shows how thoroughly it is a part of the problem, not of the
solution.
The
story of Obama and his critics truly has become a tale of the sublime and the
ridiculous. Perhaps the thing that most inspires me is that this
occurs during Holy Week and Obama has woven the true message of that momentous
experience into his speech, in a fashion both subtle and powerful. (Who
could fail to think of that when listening to his statement about "denying"
Wright and "denying" the Black population of America? But most importantly
his message was positive, and it focused on redemption.)
I really don't know if Obama has the right tools and experience to
govern. But one thing is increasingly clear: he has the message that this
country needs to hear.
""I would eat this up like cake," - GOP media consultant Rick Wilson, who crafted the ad in 2002 tying then-Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden, on the Obama-Wright connection. This last week has persuaded me even more profoundly than before that I could never be a Republican.
Cramer is RIGHT. The caller had an ACCOUNT at Bear
Stearns. His question was, “should I take my money out?” Cramer’s
answer was: “don’t be silly.” There’s no reason to do
that. And Cramer was right about that. The caller doesn’t go down with
BSC, if it goes bankrupt. He still owns what he owns. He would just have to
move his portfolio over to Fidelity. Now, his portfolio is with JPMorganChase.
"I think Michigan is not going to have a revote. I think the Obama
people are going to play a game of chicken on this, and figure they're
going to make Michigan Democrats mad. I think you're going to see a
hopefulness by the Obama people that they put this away by May 6th,
which is the day of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, and then
go ahead and seat Florida and Michigan fully as the nominee, with
nothing to fear. That's the Obama hope," - Race For The White House, MSNBC.
I believe he might have pulled off something that seemed almost
impossible: He not only ventured into the minefield of race and made it
back alive, but he also marked a path for the rest of us to follow.
Michael Gerson somehow manages to say that this was "one of the finest political performances under pressure since John F. Kennedy at the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960," and yet damns Obama all the same. According to Gerson, nothing Obama can say now can remove the taint of some of Wright's worst moments, and nothing else that Wright has said and done for the good can be weighed in the balance. This from a man who flaunts his Christianity as a job credential.
Zealous atheism renews some of the worst features of Christianity and Islam. Just as much as these religions, it is a project of universal conversion. Evangelical atheists never doubt that human life can be transformed if everyone accepts their view of things, and they are certain that one way of living - their own, suitably embellished - is right for everybody. To be sure, atheism need not be a missionary creed of this kind. It is entirely reasonable to have no religious beliefs, and yet be friendly to religion. It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion.
A friend who is a journalist was teaching radio journalism in Bahrain last week. When the subject turned to American politics, his translator said "Is it true that Barack Obama is Jewish?". This genuinely seems to be the latest conspiracy theory in the Middle East. I googled it to the font of all knowledge.
It seems to be based on the name Barack being like Ehud Barak. So his first name makes people this he's Jewish and his middle name makes people this he's a Muslim. Lucky for him his pastor is there to speak up for him as a Christian.
Foofighters frontman Dave Grohl announces his bid for presidency:
I'm just going to come clean, I have inhaled bags of 'shrooms. I haven't done drugs for the past 20 years, to be really honest. I've smoked, [expletive], like six hits off a joint in the last 20 years. I have never done cocaine, ever in my life. I have never done heroin, I have never done speed. I have had my share of acid and mushrooms and I have smoked fields of marijuana, but by the age of 20 I realized, if I don't stop now, I'll never have the chance to be the President of the United States of America. This dream is a long time in the making, it's been almost 20 years of preparing to run silently. Gathering my ideas and support. I haven't done drugs in a long time. Because they are against the law.
March 16, 2008 - March 22, 2008
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