How is it that Bill Ayers can be considered "mainstream"? Only in Chicago:
Turn on the TV news when John McCain is picking up undecided voters by invoking Barack Obama's relationship with unrepentant American terrorist William Ayers and, invariably, some liberal talking head will sniff in disgust and say Ayers is no big deal where Obama comes from.
Unfortunately, that's true. Ayers is a terrorist. But this is Chicago.
Obama and Ayers are neighbors and they worked together on school issues with the same foundation. Obama's political coming-out party was held in Ayers' living room when Obama was running for his first political office.
And the boss of Chicago is Mayor Richard Daley. Mayor Shortshanks has thrown his protective embrace around both men. These are facts.
But the reason Ayers is not a big deal in Chicago has to do with the Chicago Way, and the left fork of that road that has been bought and paid for by the Daley machine, subsidized by taxpayers who foot the bill for public relations contracts from City Hall.
Today, on the threshold of the presidency, Obama concedes the odiousness of these associations, which is why he has severed them. But for the years in which he sat in Wright's pews and shared common purpose on boards with Ayers, Obama considered them a legitimate, indeed unremarkable, part of social discourse.
Do you? Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect. There is a difference between temperament and character. Equanimity is a virtue. Tolerance of the obscene is not.
about damn time. Obama's biggest problem is his ideology. Time to start pointing out where it comes from:
The Republican campaign, falling behind Obama in polls, plans to make attacks on Obama's character a centerpiece of presidential candidate John McCain's message with a month remaining before Election Day.
Palin told a group of donors at a private airport, "Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." She also said, "This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America."
Who gives a crap what the media says about this line of attack. It's the truth. Hit Obama hard; he deserves it.
There was a similar moral deficit when it came to foreign policy. The xenophilliac 68ers, could by and large, never grasp that there were two competing truths about Vietnam. Yes, we, the Americans shouldn't have been there. But yes, the Communists were brutal thugs. When after the war had ended and a million and half people went into the sea to escape the regime of the North Vietnamese Stalinists, the famously voluble moralising associated with the 68ers was replaced by sustained silence. Today, aided by the Bush administration's extraordinary meld of simple mindedness and incompetence, the 68ers are similarly unable to come to grips with Jihadism. Too self-absorbed to be self-reflective, they both denounce the neo-conservatives for assuming that everyone wants freedom and democracy, yet insist that we can negotiate without conditions with terrorist regimes on the grounds that we share a great deal in common.
The truth is that Congressional Republicans, responsible for turning principles into governance, deserve to lose—unless they craft clear positions that won’t be compromised and then offer them as alternative choices to the voters this fall.
The conversation bothers me at the same time it fascinates me. It strikes me that what I am auditing is not so much "the banality of evil," but "the banality of sedition;" a banality we see acted out daily on our television screens and on the op-ed pages of our newspapers.
The banality of sedition is now so well established that it is, well, banal and goes forward without a great deal of remark or trouble. In the last few years, the phrase that has arisen to describe this phenomenon is "The Culture of Treason." I'm not sure who originated the phrase, but its use is proliferating across the Internet for the reason that all such phrases proliferate when the time is ripe; it somehow rings true.
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.
Who's bitter? It ain't Americans, according to Mark Steyn:
Europeans did “vote for their own best interests” — i.e., cradle-to-grave welfare, 35 hour work-weeks, six weeks of paid vacation, etc — and as a result they now face a perfect storm of unsustainable entitlements, economic stagnation, and declining human capital that’s left them so demographically beholden to unassimilable levels of immigration that they’re being remorselessly Islamized with every passing day. We should thank God (if you’ll forgive the expression) that America’s loser gun-nuts don’t share the same sophisticated rational calculation of “their best interests” as Thomas Frank, Obama, too many Democrats and the European political establishment.
