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.
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.
...without even trying, really! Here's Allahpundit on the latest collective downward lurch of Obama opponants (AKA Klan-lovin' haters of all things non-white):
A new breakthrough towards the left’s unified field theory of how all criticism of Obama is essentially racist. The last great advance came from Harvard prof Orlando Patterson, scanning Hillary’s pedestrian 3 a.m. ad on Obama’s inexperience and finding the lost sequel to “Birth of a Nation.” Now comes David Shipler, thesaurus in hand, following a trail of synonyms that leads straight to the darkest heart of racist AmeriKKKa...
And be sure to follow the last link in the post for a truly delicious nugget of race-propriety education.
Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn discuss Obama's book, Dreams From My Father. Stanley Kurtz comments:
The Democratic left now believes that the United States is ready for a genuinely "progressive," paradigm-changing president. They are not abandoning Obama, and are not even fully capable of seeing how damaging Obama’s background and underlying worldview seem to many (although they are worried enough to try to cover for him). But the country is changing and we can no longer be certain of the impact all these revelations will have. What I do think is obvious at this point is that cultural issues will not be a sideshow in 2008, but very much at the center of things. And if Obama should win, the culture clash of the Clinton and Bush years is sure to go on at full blast.
Oh, thank goodness Obama fired the starter's pistol in the race to discuss race. Here I'd been under the impression that every major university (and minor one for that matter) in the country already had boatloads of courses -- often entire majors -- dedicated to race in America. I'd even read somewhere that professors had incorporated racial themes and issues into classes on everything from Shakespeare to the mating habits of snail darters. And scratching faintly in the back of my mind, I felt some vague memory that these same universities recruited black students and other racial minorities, on the grounds that interracial conversations on campus are as important as talking about math, science and literature. A ghost of an image in my mind's eye seemed to reveal African American studies centers, banners for Black History Month and copies of books like "Race Matters" and "The Future of the Race" lined up on shelves at college bookstores.
To come full circle with the quote from his speech that I found so irritating on Tuesday, if Obama sincerely believes the great national conversation on race can’t wait a moment longer, why didn’t he use the bully pulpit of being a presidential candidate to start it last year? Why now, if it’s not just a cynical attempt to distract attention from his own scandal? The obvious answer: Because to force a discussion of race then would have it made too easy for Hillary to ghettoize him as a “black candidate” before the primaries. He held off to preserve his chances. That’s fine, but contrast his approach to race with McCain’s approach to Iraq. As far back as eleven months ago, before the surge results were in and doom awaited any candidate who dared take a hawkish line, Maverick was telling audiences that he’d rather lose the election than lose the war. The issue came first, his own political ambitions came second. There’s a little character comparison worth mulling. And since we’ve already had one exit question today that’ll be asked forever, here’s another: If the Wright thing had never blown up, would Obama have ever delivered this allegedly urgently important, historically significant meditation on race? You think?
Michael Meyers is executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and a former assistant national director of the NAACP. Here's his response to Obama's speech:
I'd say that considering the nation's undivided attention to this all-important speech, which gave him an unrivaled opportunity to lift us out of racial and racist thinking, Obama blew it.
I waited in vain for our hybrid presidential candidate to speak the simple truth that there is no such thing as "race," that we all belong to the same race -- the human race. I waited for him to mesmerize us with a singular and focused appeal to hold all candidates to the same standards no matter their race or their sex or their age. But instead Obama gave us a full measure of racial rhetoric about how some of us with an "untrained ear" -- meaning whites and Asians and Latinos -- don't understand and can't relate to the so-called black experience.
Well, I am black, and I can't relate to a "black experience" that shields and explains old-style black ministers who rant and rave about supposed racial differences and about how America ought to be damned.
The pillars of American liberalism — the Democratic party, the universities, and the mass media — are obsessed with biological markers, most particularly race and gender. They have insisted, moreover, that pedagogy and culture and politics be just as seized with the primacy of these distinctions and with the resulting “privileging” that allegedly haunts every aspect of our social relations.
They have gotten their wish. This primary campaign represents the full flowering of identity politics. It’s not a pretty picture. Geraldine Ferraro says Obama is only where he is because he’s black. Professor Orlando Patterson says the 3 A.M. phone call ad is not about a foreign policy crisis but a subliminal Klan-like appeal to the fear of “black men lurking in the bushes around white society.”
Good grief. The optimist will say that when this is over, we will look back on the Clinton-Obama contest, and its looming ugly endgame, as the low point of identity politics, and the beginning of a turning away. The pessimist will just vote Republican.
As one of my black friends, Eddie Huff, has said, “We need to ask some very serious questions of the senator from Illinois. It’s not enough to be black, it’s not enough to be articulate, and it’s not enough to be eloquent and a media darling. . . . The only question will be how deaf an ear, or how blind an eye, will people turn in order to turn a frog into a prince.”
What are we electing here, a faith healer? What is Obama's view of the executive power? How, exactly, does he propose to "bring us together"? Just by being half-black? What if I don't want to be "brought together" with radical socialists who want to jack up my taxes and shut down my freedoms of speech, property, and association? What will Obama do? Steve Sailer has been documenting the astonishing — for a guy with Obama's résumé — absence of any paper trail for Obama's thoughts, ideas, and opinions. There's just his autobiography, which is unreadable (I tried), and The Audacity of Hope which I guess (I didn't try — you can only ask so much of a guy) urges us all to be really audacious and hope a lot.
Is Obama just an empty suit, who never had a thought about anything, other than his own amazing wonderfulness, in his entire life? What, for example, does he think about conservatism? Modern American conservatism is a huge and various body of thought, with many mansions. Has Obama explored it? I'll lend him my Nash if he wants to make a start. Heck, I have read Kolakowski all the way through, all three volumes; has Obama read Hayek? Buckley? Kirk?
I anxiously await something of substance from Obama in response. I am also not getting my hopes up.
...but now that I see the Hollywood/entertainment industry crowd lining up behind him, I can rest easy knowing that those apprehensions were unfounded.
The New York chapter of NOW has this to say about Teddy Kennedy and his choice to endorse Obama:
“This latest move by Kennedy, is so telling about the status of and respect for women’s rights, women’s voices, women’s equality, women’s authority and our ability – indeed, our obligation - to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a President that is the first woman after centuries of men who ‘know what’s best for us.’”
Which Democrat candidate uttered the following line of dreadful populist pandering:
"For those of us for whom summer is not a verb, for those of us who didn't go to fancy boarding schools on the east coast, for those of us who didn't grow up with a silver spoon, who were lucky to have a spoon — ask those folks and they'll tell you the economy is not doing well for them..."
