A quite long and very intellectual examination on the Obama phenomenon over at City Journal:

Yet if Obama has made redemptive communitarianism attractive in an age of sagging sperm counts, he has done nothing to correct the underlying flaw of the collectivist ideal: its incompatibility with the older morality of limits. The politics of consensus that Obama favors is incompatible with the Founders’ adversarial system, which permits those whom he disparages as “ideological minorities” to take stands on principle that, at times, frustrate the national consensus. Obama makes it clear that there is no place, in the politics he advocates, for those “absolutists” who would defy the community. The “ideological core of today’s GOP,” he writes, is “absolutism, not conservatism,” an absolutism driven by those who prize “absolute truth” over “communal values.” This commitment to absolute truth, he argues, stands in the way of a politics that can solve our problems and change our lives.

Obama goes so far as to argue that the Constitution itself is “a rejection of absolute truth.” His moral relativism is intimately bound up with his conviction that we can transcend those limitations in human nature that the Founders acknowledged when they drafted the Constitution. This rejection of older moral standards, Machiavelli observed, is a tactical necessity for the charismatic redeemer. It is not simply that adherence to the West’s traditional morality would prevent such a leader from being properly ruthless in the pursuit of his ideal; it is that the old morality, with its emphasis on the limits of man’s fallen condition, makes his communitarian paradise seem quixotic—an instance of utopian overreaching.

Machiavelli was ready with a solution. He helped prepare the way for the politics of redemptive healing by working to overturn the older morality. In particular, he undermined the West’s most potent myth of diabolic amorality and delusory hubris. Two years after he completed The Prince, Machiavelli composed a fable, Belfagor, or the Devil Who Took a Wife, in which he ridiculed the idea that the devil can take possession of a man’s mind and corrupt those around him. In assuming (correctly) that the diabolic qualities of his redemptive prince would be easier to swallow once the devil himself became a joke, Machiavelli blazed a path that Voltaire, Diderot, Goethe, and Shaw afterward trod. No one fears the devil that Voltaire refused to renounce on his deathbed. (“This is no time to be making enemies,” he jested.) Goethe’s Mephistopheles is charming, as is Shaw’s (in Man and Superman). Even those characters whom modern European artists have intended to be diabolic (such as Balzac’s Collin) arouse sympathy in a way that older devil-characters (Shakespeare’s Iago, for example) do not.

Dostoyevsky was among the few who grasped the momentousness of the change that Machiavelli initiated in the West’s conception of diablerie. Near the end of The Brothers Karamazov, he describes an encounter between the devil and Ivan Karamazov. The devil appears, not with claws and horns, but in the guise of an elegant man of the world: he phrases his mordant taunts in French and laughs at modern intellectuals who believe that he doesn’t exist or who worry that to admit his existence would harm their “progressive image.” Dostoyevsky implied that it was precisely when the devil became a wit that the intellectual classes of the West succumbed to the most familiar form of diabolic temptation: the belief that men can transcend the limits of their condition and “be as gods”—demiurges with the power to heal the world’s pain and reshape it in accordance with a beautiful idea.

Via Milt Rosenberg at WGN Radio, who tasted the wrath of the Obama Cult for daring to examine the Leader's past.

Ace has a very good list of things that the MSM has "decided" for us about the Obama!/Jeremiah Wright mess:

Obama's 20 year political partnership with Wright may raise questions about his judgment, but it is wrongful for his political opponents to raise such questions in campaign ads. Some questions, it seems, are properly raised, but silently, in deep personal meditation, perhaps on an alpine hill while reading Rilke. Certainly we do not need to audibly ask questions about a presidential candidate. That's just hurtful and corrosive of our political process, which relies, at its core, of utter trust in our political leaders without question.

Via Hot Air.

The whole Wright thing - or more specifically, the way that Obama has responded to the whole Wright thing - disgusts me. Barack Obama is lying when he says he didn't know about Jeremiah Wright's extreme views. You don't sit under the pastorate of a man for 20 years without getting to know that person's beliefs pretty well. And Wright is no shrinking violet, obviously. In the end, all of this puts the lie to the stupid spin that Obama is a "post-racial" candidate. Just the opposite - he's the racial candidate.

As for Wright, his teachings are a disgusting perversion of Christianity. Christianity is not a political religion. Christianity should, however, influence politics. But not the other way around, which is what Wright and his fellow Black Liberation Theologians do by viewing their "Christianity" through a purely political lens.

I've been studying Matthew at bible study this year, and it seems to me that the Black Liberation Theologians make the same error that the Jews of Jesus' time did, in that they both want Jesus to be a political revolutionary. To be sure, Jesus' teachings have consequences for how his followers should view the political realm, and over time they did lead to revolutionary changes in how nations were governed. But Jesus isn't a political figure. He transcends politics. To reduce him to the level of a political revolutionary denies him the honor that he truly deserves, and ultimately denies us the true meaning of his life and teachings - which leaves us in peril of missing out on the gift of salvation that he offers. My hope is that Wright will realize the error of his ways before it's too late.

FREEDOM! TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE FREEDOM!

Couples who live together are gambling and losing in 85 percent of the cases. Many believe the myth that they are in a “trial marriage.” Actually it is more like a “trial divorce,” in which more than eight out of ten couples will break up either before the wedding or afterwards in divorce. First, about 45 percent of those who begin cohabiting, do not marry. Those who undergo “premarital divorce” often discover it is as painful as the real thing. Another 5-10 percent continue living together and do not marry. These two trends are the major reason the marriage rate has plunged 50 percent since 1970. Couples who cohabit are likely to find that it is a paultry substitute for the real thing, marriage.

Of the 45 percent or so who do marry after living together, they are 50 percent more likely to divorce than those who remained separate before the wedding. So instead of 22 of the 45 couples divorcing (the 50 percent divorce rate) about 33 will divorce. That leaves just 12 couples who have begun their relationship with cohabitation who end up with a marriage lasting 10 years.

Turns out there's a reason for that whole "wait 'til marriage" thing...

It turns out that young people aren't "self-entitled, coddled slackers":

Young Americans have a reverence for national institutions, traditions and family values, a U.S. survey indicates.

A survey of so-called "millennials" -- those between 21 and 29 -- revealed the group overwhelmingly said they support monogamy, marriage, the U.S. Constitution and the military, The Washington Times reported Sunday.

"We were completely surprised. There has been a faulty portrayal of millennials by the media -- television, films, news, blogs, everything. These people are not the self-entitled, coddled slackers they're made out to be. Misnomers and myths about them are all over the place," said Ann Mack, who directed the survey and is the official "director of trend-spotting" at J. Walter Thompson, the nation's largest advertising agency.

Via the Corner, where Mark Steyn notes:

The movie biz in particular seems to believe the big bucks are in unpopular popular culture. One day someone will figure out the flaw in that formula.

May that day come soon.