The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
UPDATED Barack: Nice Try
NRO has a nice symposium of Obama's lame attempt to extricate himself from the horrendous judgment he has shown in his 20 year association with a race-baiting bigot. Allvin Felzenberg's take in particular rang true:
UPDATE: On second thought, Shelby Steele's contribution may be the Obama must-read of the day.
Today we may have witnessed the beginning of the end of Barack Obama’s once-stunning campaign for the presidency. Not for the first time, the Illinois senator demonstrated, for all to see, that he is not qualified to service as the nation’s president — at least, to paraphrase Mr. Obama, “not this time.”But Thomas Sowell, probably the greatest living economic intellect and philosopher today--who also happens to be black--is masterful in his analysis, and powerful in his condemnation:
What the nation saw today was a candidate too self-absorbed to fulfill the promise of national unity and reconciliation he has repeatedly made since he launched what has to have been the longest-running ego trip in the history of presidential politics. Rather than tell his listeners precisely what he finds so objectionable in his “former pastor’s” remarks (other than his having to account for his friendship with a bigot), Obama repeatedly resorted to the old standard that political charlatans have used through the centuries: ideological equivalence.
He condemns with equal vigor a stupid remark that Geraldine Ferraro — a self-admitted “affirmative action” vice-presidential candidate of yesteryear — made during an interview for a publication that no one can name, with a series of sermons delivered from the pulpit by a man who (as Obama reminds us) has lectured at some of the most prestigious seminaries in the world. He equates public declarations of hate (including a prayer that the nation Obama proclaims to love and wants to lead should be damned) with a private remark his grandmother purportedly made. (What does it say about the character of a man who would “out” as a racist a dead relative whom he credits with helping to raise him, just to make a political point — and a bad one at that?)
Senator Obama revealed just how little he knows about the nation he will not be privileged to lead next year when he described the coalition that twice elected Ronald Reagan president in record landslides as the coming together of angry and resentful whites. In Obama’s world, double-digit inflation, high interest rates, high unemployment, a 13-month “hostage crisis,” and accelerated Soviet adventurism had little or nothing to do with it.
Anyone who believes that is not qualified to serve as the nation’s next president. But I repeat myself.
... Wright’s actions matched his words. He went with Louis Farrakhan to Libya and Farrakhan received an award from his church.Read all of the symposium and especially read Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson's An Elegant Farce.
Sean Hannity began reporting on Jeremiah Wright back in April of 2007. But the mainstream media saw no evil, heard no evil, and spoke no evil.
Now that the facts have come out in a number of places, and can no longer be suppressed, many in the media are trying to spin these facts out of existence.
Spin number one is that Jeremiah Wright’s words were “taken out of context.” Like most people who use this escape hatch, those who say this do not explain what the words mean when taken in context.
In just what context does “God damn America” mean something different?
Spin number two is that Barack Obama says he didn’t hear the particular things that Jeremiah Wright said that are now causing so much comment.
It wasn’t just an isolated remark. Nor were the enthusiastic responses of the churchgoers something which suggests that this anti-American attitude was news to them or something that they didn’t agree with.
If Barack Obama was not in church that particular day, he belonged to that church for 20 years. He made a donation of more than $20,000 to that church.
In all that time, he never had a clue as to what kind of man Jeremiah Wright was? Give me a break!
You can’t be with someone for 20 years, call him your mentor, and not know about his racist and anti-American views.
Neither Barack Obama nor his media spinmeisters can put this story behind him with some facile election-year rhetoric. If Senator Obama wants to run with the rabbits and hunt with the hounds, then at least let the rabbits and the hounds know that.
The fact that Obama talks differently than Jeremiah Wright does not mean that his track record is different. Barack Obama’s voting record in the Senate is perfectly consistent with the far-left ideology and the grievance culture, just as his wife’s statement that she was never proud of her country before is consistent with that ideology.
Senator Barack Obama’s political success thus far has been a blow for equality. But equality has its down side.
Equality means that a black demagogue who has been exposed as a phony deserves exactly the same treatment as a white demagogue who has been exposed as a phony.
We don’t need a president of the United States who got to the White House by talking one way, voting a very different way in the Senate, and who for 20 years followed a man whose words and deeds contradict Obama’s carefully crafted election-year image.
UPDATE: On second thought, Shelby Steele's contribution may be the Obama must-read of the day.
