Sorry about not posting anything today. I have been wrestling with a post on our national (non) conversation about race, trying not to be too “resentful” toward African Americans while avoiding the trap of “tribalism” that Glenn Greenwald tells me that I can’t help falling into because I’m a resentful, racist conservative – unless, of course, I accept his idea of how this here national conversation on race is supposed to go.

Truth is, I’m just burned out. Now I know why God rested on the 7th day; even He needed to catch up on His sleep and not have to think about creating anything for a day.

There have been precious few days off these last 9 months or so and it’s beginning to take its toll. It’s been years since I preferred sleeping in the morning to getting online. I’ll try getting to bed earlier tonight and see if that rejuvenates me a little.

If you believe the crackdown by Chinese authorities on pro-democracy demonstrations in Tibet that have killed as many as 100 and injured dozens more are the result of the oppressive and thuggish nature of the Communist government, you’re wrong.

At least, according to the Chinese government:

China accused the Dalai Lama on Sunday of orchestrating the recent anti-government riots in Tibet in a bid to mar the Beijing Olympics and overthrow the area’s communist leaders.

The accusations came as Tibetan areas were swarming with troops and closed to scrutiny from the outside world. With foreign media banned, information barely trickled out of the Tibetan capital Lhasa and other far-flung communities.

The Chinese government was attempting to fill the information vacuum with its own message, saying through official media that formerly restive areas were under control. It accused the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, of trying to harm China’s image ahead of the summer games.

That Lama guy is one fantastic magician. It’s amazing how he can “orchestrate” the beating, clubbing, and shooting, of his own followers by Chinese police.

“The evil motive of the Dalai clique is to stir up troubles at a sensitive time and deliberately make it bigger and even cause bloodshed so as to damage the Beijing Olympics,” said the Tibet Times, calling it “a life-and-death struggle between ourselves and the enemy.”

The attack on the Dalai Lama — who advocates non-violence and denies being behind the March 14 riots in Lhasa — is an attempt to further demonize him in the eyes of the Chinese public, which is strongly supportive of the Olympics.

Most of those injured and killed in the original protests in Llahsa were monks. And we know all about those bloodthirsty, safron eating, sand sculpturing religious fanatics. How dare they march peacefully to commemorate the Chinese crackdown of 1959. What were they trying to prove? That the Chinese government are a bunch of goons?

Yep:

“The Dalai clique is scheming to take the Beijing Olympics hostage to force the Chinese government to make concessions to Tibet independence,” said the People’s Daily, the main mouthpiece of the Communist Party.

China raised its death toll by six, to 22, with its official Xinhua News Agency reporting Saturday that the charred remains of an 8-month-old boy and four adults were pulled from a garage burned down in Lhasa last Sunday — two days after the city erupted in anti-Chinese rioting. The Dalai Lama’s exiled government says 99 Tibetans have been killed, 80 in Lhasa, 19 in Gansu province.

The violence has become a public relations disaster for China ahead of the August Olympics, which it has been hoping to use to bolster its international image.

The “rioting” was a direct response to police beating and clubbing thousands of monks who were marching and chanting peacefully. There is also quite a bit of resentment that has been building up against the ethnic Han Chinese who dominate the economic and political landscape of Tibet. Native Tibetans are second class citizens in their own country.

Not all westerners are blaming China. Where else but the New York Times would we find the victim being blamed because their tactics are putting pressure on the thugs:

It has been clear since the mid-1990s that the popular internationalization of the Tibet issue has had no positive effect on the Beijing government. The leadership is not amenable to “moral pressure,” over the Olympics or anything else, particularly by the nations that invaded Iraq.

The Dalai Lama should have closed down the Hollywood strategy a decade ago and focused on back-channel diplomacy with Beijing. He should have publicly renounced the claim to a so-called Greater Tibet, which demands territory that was never under the control of the Lhasa government. Sending his envoys to talk about talks with the Chinese while simultaneously encouraging the global pro-Tibet lobby has achieved nothing.

When Beijing attacks the “Dalai clique,” it is referring to the various groups that make Chinese leaders lose face each time they visit a Western country. The International Campaign for Tibet, based in Washington, is now a more powerful and effective force on global opinion than the Dalai Lama’s outfit in northern India. The European and American pro-Tibet organizations are the tail that wags the dog of the Tibetan government-in-exile.

I can’t begin to tell you how upset I am with the Chinese losing face because they murder protestors.

And it isn’t just the Times, it is the curious detatchment of the Bush State Department which seemingly is sending the signal “Can’t you handle this problem with a little less noise?”

China’s violent crackdown on protesters in Tibet is having powerful political reverberations in Washington, where the White House is weighing how far to go in condemning the Chinese government, even as it defends President Bush’s decision to attend the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Mr. Bush has long said the United States and China have “a complex relationship,” and that complexity was on full display this week. While his administration has called for an end to the violence, and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, phoned her Chinese counterpart to urge restraint, Mr. Bush himself has remained silent.

In the meantime, the presidential candidates are speaking out, as is the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. On Friday, Ms. Pelosi visited the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, at his headquarters in Dharamsala, India — and poked a finger in the eye of Beijing.

Rather than a poke in the eye, the Bush State Department delivers a nudge in the ribs and a wink. The President wants that photo-op with other world leaders who will similarly ignore the beastly treatment of Tibetans by the Chinese government so that the games can go on unimpeded by any silly, moralistic issues like killing demonstrators.

Somewhere, someone has got to have a backbone and speak a little truth to the powers in Beijing. Bit given China’s up and coming status as a world player, it seems no one wants to take the chance of offending the Commissars lest they retaliate by downgrading your hotel accommodations.

The United States number one ally in the War on Terror appears ready to negotiate with the terrorists in Pakistan and clear the way for what will almost certainly be an entirely different relationship between the government and the Taliban-AQ forces in the Northwest Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

This should be an interesting test of President Bush’s “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” foreign policy:

Speaking in separate interviews, the leaders of Pakistan’s new government coalition — Asif Ali Zardari of the Pakistan Peoples Party and Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-N — tried to strike a more independent stance from Washington and repackage the conflict in a more palatable way for Pakistanis.

They said they were determined to set a different course from that of President Musharraf, who has received generous military financial help of more than $10 billion from Washington for his support.

“We are dealing with our own people,” said Mr. Sharif, who was twice prime minister in the 1990s. “We will deal with them very sensibly. And when you have a problem in your own family, you don’t kill your own family. You sit and talk. After all, Britain also got the solution of the problem of Ireland. So what’s the harm in conducting negotiations?”

Mr. Zardari said: “Obviously what they have been doing for the last eight years has not been working. Even a fool knows that.”

The war against the insurgents has to be redefined, he said, as “Pakistan’s war” for a public that has come to resent the conflict as being pushed on the country as part of an American agenda. It should be dealt with by talks and the use of a beefed-up police force rather than the army, he said.

Like Musharraf before them, the new Pakistani government is coming to the realization that surrendering to the Taliban and AQ is a lot easier and more popular than fighting them. By allowing the tribes backing the Taliban virtual autonomy in the border areas with Afghanistan, they will stop the suicide bombings that have been plauging major cities like Peshwar for the last few months. This will be especially interesting considering that the individual responsible for most of those bombings has been fingered by the US and Scotland Yard investigators as behind the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhuttto:

Neither Mr. Zardari nor Mr. Sharif was specific about whom among the militant groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas they favored talking to. Nor was it clear what kind of formula or quid pro quo the two political leaders had in mind for the talks.

Mr. Sharif, whose Islamic religious background is conservative, refused to say whether he would negotiate with Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader whom the government blames for many if not most of the recent suicide bomb attacks in Pakistan.

American and Pakistani terrorism experts have said they believe that Mr. Mehsud was behind the assassination of the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in December, and that he works in tandem with Al Qaeda. “Nobody gave me any presentation on this subject,” Mr. Sharif said.

Asked whom the negotiations would be held with, Mr. Sharif replied: “With all the concerned elements. I don’t think guns and bullets have so far produced any positive results.”

If the negotiations hold true to form, there will be several fig leaf agreements that will forbid the Taliban from using the tribal areas as a base to launch attacks against Afghanistan as well as strictures against foreign fighters operating in the area.

Perhaps this time, the terrorists will throw in a bridge in Brooklyn and see if the government will buy it.

Such agreements will almost certainly buy some time for the Pakistani government – just as they did for Musharraf – as the political leaders will seek to curry favor with the anti-American population by ostensibly distancing themselves from Washington.

Meanwhile, it may doom Afghanistan. The United States has been begging NATO to commit more combat troops to Afghanistan to help the beleaguered Canadians in Kandahar province who are facing the brunt of Taliban incursions. That will change if agreements in the NWFP with Taliban backed tribes are negotiated. If Pakistan were to withdraw troops from the border area and replace them with the ill trained Frontier Militia, the Taliban will have little trouble opening another front in Afghanistan farther north:

For instance, one element of the stepped-up American aid effort is a $400 million plan to train the Frontier Corps, an underfinanced paramilitary force that is used to patrol the border with Afghanistan.

Mr. Sharif said he had heard about the plan, expected to begin in October, but had no details.

Mr. Zardari favored employing such a force over relying on the army, which he said was the “wrong instrument” to use against the militants. “We need to use the police force,” he said. “They had few guns, made in 1952. You have to upgrade them. You have got to give them modern technology, and they will stand better than anybody else.”

Mr. Sharif, who is regarded as a nationalist — he gave the go-ahead for the explosion of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb in 1998 — said he was not in favor of foreign aid. “I think frankly we should rely less on aid,” he said. “It makes us, you see, lazy. We should generate our own resources.”

The US saw the paramilitaries the same way they viewed the Sunni Awakening in Iraq; as a way for the young men of the tribes who are currently being hired to fight by the Taliban to be employed instead in defense of the Pakistani government. That may still be an option for the government but I would place little faith in their desire or ability to interdict the Taliban’s infiltration into Afghanistan.

There will be many defenders of Pakistan’s new policy here in the United States. After all, talking with the enemy is always preferable to shooting at him, right? And the negotiations may very well accomplish what the government seeks to achieve – a respite from the bombings and less opposition to the government in the tribal areas.

To try and see this as anything less than a total, unmitigated disaster for the United States is to practice self delusion. This too, will probably sit well with those in the US who see any setback for the Bush Administration in a positive light.

But the agreements signed by President Musharraf in the Waziristans in the last 3 years have proven to be little more than green lights for the Taliban to send as many fighters across the border into Afghanistan as they believe necessary to carry out operations against NATO forces. And the strictures against al-Qaeda foreign fighters leaving Pakistan were honored in the breach.

The immediate problem will be Afghanistan. But in the long term, any agreement signed by the government will only strengthen the extremists and bring them closer to Osama Bin Laden’s goal of taking over the Pakistani government – a government that possesses the ultimate weapon against cartoons that insult Islam and those who publish them.

Two low level clerks under contract to the State Department have been let go for snooping in Barack Obama’s passport files on at least 3 separate occasions. Another State Department employee has been disciplined as a result of the incidents.

This is what is known at the moment. But does that stop our intrepid internet paranoids, goofballs, nitwits, and other denizens of the left from creating a grand conspiracy involving evil Bush and his evil minions out of the thinnest of news items?

The ever rational and reasonable Americablog:

This is not good. We know how much we can trust anyone who works for George Bush. NOT AT ALL.

The first Bush administration did the same thing to Bill Clinton.

Please note the absolute, rock solid, dead certainty that the 2nd Bush Administration is guilty. Based on nothing except the paranoid delusions of the author.

The towering intellects at Firedoglake:

They are not saying yet who these people are, which Halliburton subsidiary is involved who the contractor is, and therefore we have no idea which Party they belong to—“The War Mongering Republicans” or the “Rapture Republicans”. However, for each of these two groups the last seven years “imprudent curiosity” usually manifests itself at airport bathrooms or donkey shows. So we really have no idea how this will play out.

This one gets an “A” for mentioning Haliburton and donkey shows in the same post.

Shakesville also gets high marks for including a Yakov Smirnoff joke:

Evidently some low-level patsies staffers were fired for their role in looking for that one time Obama flew to Afghanistan to meet with his al Qaeda overlords. One can only assume they’ve also looked carefully to find all the times Hillary Clinton flew to Novosibirsk in her youth. And if those visits didn’t exist before, they probably do now.

As Yakov Smirnoff might say: “In Soviet Russia, government reads secret passport files on political opponents. But in America, same thing! What a country!”

Sorry if I whetted your appetite for a “joke.” Unless you’re a liberal, such incandescent humor seems to elude the rational among us.

And don’t forget the “patsies!” (Why does the left use so man strike-throughs?) All that’s missing is the grassy knoll and Woody Harrleson’s dad.

In truth, gentle readers, there is a much more mundane explanation than George Bush is lifting a finger to help John McCain; Hillary did it:

I remember hearing their charge that Obama had only visited one NATO country in his life and it seemed pretty hard to believe… out of countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Turkey, etc., Obama had only been to one? The boy who grew up in Indonesia, and visited relatives in Africa, never made it to any of those European countries? The guy who lived in Chicago and went to Harvard never made it to Canada? (I presume Canada wasn’t the site of the brief stopover trip.)

Now, I’m not saying that the Hillary camp did the snooping in the passport file. But in asking that question, they seemed awfully certain that Obama had never been to one of those countries earlier in his life, didn’t they? Note they didn’t say, “you have traveled to only one NATO country as a senator”, (it wouldn’t be all that surprising that Obama had only taken a few foreign trips since taking office in January 2005); they worded the question so that it encompasses his entire life.

The question came from the Hillary camp on March 12; two of the breaches were before that date. One breach occurred two days later.

Maybe Hillary and Bush are working together. Maybe Bush is using Hillary as a cut out to carry out his nefarious plans. Maybe Hillary wears army boots.

Or maybe there’s nothing there. From Hillary booster and spouse of world famous super spy Valerie Plame:

Folks, this is really a non-story. ... .. We know he has not visited Europe. His only real overseas travel before joining the Senate was to Africa. And the passport records do not contain info about that trip, other than the date he made the trip. People with no need to know should not have been checking out his documents, but at the end of the day there is no there there.

The above via Taylor Marsh who adds “No kidding.” Which actually is more to the point.

No one can be this stupid, can they? No one can be paranoid enough to take these two schmucks who were poking around in Obama’s private files and turn them into GOP operatives or even Hillary boosters for that matter, can they?

Whether out of curiosity or, more likely, hoping to find something they could sell to the press or perhaps Obama’s opponents, for a conspiracy to reach down in the bowels of the State Department and pluck these two non entities from total obscurity and charge them with carrying out a super secret operation (where they failed miserably because the computer caught the intrusions right away) is beyond belief, beyond reasonableness, and makes the purveyors of such claptrap beyond hope.

At the end of the day, we will find the State Department isn’t run very well. The fact that it has taken weeks for this to come to light is more a function of the crushing bureaucracy that paralyzes that department than any deliberate attempt to hide or cover up the truth.

By all means let’s have a thorough investigation of the clerks and especially their immediate supervisors who apparently didn’t think it important enough to inform management that Obama’s privacy had been shredded. The fact that a reporter was the person to break the news to the upper levels of the State Department points right back to those two clerks who were so inept at their spying they didn’t seem to know that they had been discovered the minute Obama’s file was breached.

Some conspirators.

Conspiracies are for the weak minded. They are a lazy substitute for reasoned, rational thought. Even a cursory examination of this matter reveals the chances that the Bush Administration or even the Hillary campaign being involved to be next to zero since the perpetrators were identified and caught so easily.

If I were the left, I’d stick with conspiracies involving aliens and Area 51. At least those plots are halfway entertaining.

Another double dip of Watchers Council goodness for ya.

RESULTS OF WEEK ENDING 3/7/08

Council

1. Chicago Rules by Big Lizards
2. The Rape of Rape On American Campuses by Cheat Seeking Missiles - a tie with
2.. The Dershowitz Questions by Wolf Howling
3. Exchange Student Woes by The Colossus of Rhodey

Non Council

1. Dissecting the 60 Minutes Scandal by Power Line
2. Why Don’t Jews Like the Christians Who Like Them? by City Journal

RESULTS FOR WEEK ENDING 3/14/08

Council

1. Change & The Cessation of British History by Wolf Howling
2. Californichusetts by Big Lizards

Non Council
1. Guitar Heroes by Michael Yon

Noted Media Critic for the Washington Post Howard Kurtz was kind enough to link me in his column today on blogger react to Obama’s speech.

That’s where Mr. Kurtz’s kindness ended.

Rick Moran of Right Wing Nuthouse likes the style but not the substance:

Interesting parallel, no?

Interesting? I suppose it’s interesting in the same way that watching a naked Howard Kurtz being tied up and whipped by some leather clad Dominatrix with Swastikas as pasties while ordering him to beg for his mommy is interesting.

But a “parallel” to the Obama-Wright situation?

Only if you believe I am the Reverend Wright and my brother is Obama in Howies little moral equivalence parable.

First of all, I can state categorically that my brother Terry bears little resemblance to Barack Obama. Wait…I take that back. They’re both from Illinois. They’re both tall and handsome. Beyond that, Terry is honest, forthright, regular in his affairs, doesn’t associate with criminals, bigots, racists, or terrorists, and is married to a smart, sweet, gorgeous, American-loving woman.

Obama? Not so much.

As for a comparison of me and Reverend Wright? We’re both tending toward the gut, have greying hair, and have loud, obnoxious voices. Beyond that, Wright is an anti-white, anti-Semitic, conspiracy mongering, race baiting, unity destroying anti-American, Christian preacher.

Somebody get Howie a pair of glasses. And half a brain if one can be found.

For the record: Anybody who would equate my brother’s defense of me – my own blood standing up for me – with Obama not throwing his bigoted preacher and spiritual advisor (a pastor and church he chose to attend) under the proverbial bus is a goose.

There is no “interesting parallel” between Obama-Wright and Moran-Moran. It was silly, stupid, and monumentally insulting for Kurtz to make such a comparison – even in jest (which it wasn’t). If Kurtz is shallow enough to equate conservatism with Wright’s sneering hatred then he has no business commenting on politics – something many from both the left and the right have pointed out prior to me.

If this were 200 year ago, I would more than likely have appointed my second already and gone for my daddy’s dueling pistols. But since we are limited here in the 21st century to firing verbal and blogospheric darts, I guess I’ll just have to settle.

I don’t get it. This is one time I agree with most of the left.

What is the big deal about Hillary’s schedule as First Lady?

Brian Ross, in a mindlboggingly stupid and inane article, breathlessly informs us that Hillary was in the White House when Monica Lewinsky was servicing her husband:

Hillary Clinton spent the night in the White House on the day her husband had oral sex with Monica Lewinsky, and may have actually been in the White House when it happened, according to records of her schedule released today by the National Archives.

An initial review by ABC News of the 17,481 pages of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s schedule as first lady, released today by the National Archives, also finds significant gaps in time and many days containing only “private meetings” at the White House with unnamed individuals.

The public schedule for Sen. Clinton on Feb. 28, 1997, the day on which Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress would become stained by the president, shows the first lady spent the morning and the night in the White House.

The Feb. 28 schedule lists her as attending four “drop-by” events, closed to the press, between 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. and then records her as staying in the White House overnight that fateful day.

I can’t tell you how uninterested I am in knowing this information. It doesn’t even register on my Banal-o-Meter. In fact, I would say without qualification or hesitation that the knowledge regarding Hillary Clinton’s whereabouts on the day that her husband achieved a form of coital bliss with Miss Lewinsky is so far down the list of “Things I wish to know before I die” that I would have to live to be 108 to get to it. It doesn’t even top the query “Is bigfoot real?” or “What brand of chewing gum does Britney Spears chew?”

The Wall Street Journal tries very hard to outdo Brian Ross but ultimately fails because let’s face it, sex is a more enticing lede than murder/suicide:”

The day before Foster’s death, Clinton was in Southern California. She spent the morning at Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, touring the facility and meeting with students, then attended a luncheon in honor of Iris Cantor, the head of a foundation that supports, among other things, women’s health care. She spent the night at a hotel in Santa Barbara.

On July 20, 1993 — the day of Foster’s death — Clinton spent several hours conducting media interviews. She had a live appearance on the “Michael Jackson Show” (with the following rule: “Note: NO Call-in questions”), talked with the WAVE newspaper and later flew from Los Angeles to Little Rock, Ark.

That day, a Tuesday, Foster was reportedly found dead at a park in around 6 p.m. local time. According to her schedule, Clinton would have been in the air at that time (she wasn’t schedule to land in Arkansas for another two and a half hours).

Does this eliminate Hillary as a suspect? Or did she call Foster from the plane and give him the kind of pep talk given by Tom Hagen to Frank Pantangeli in Godfather Part II?

Tom Hagen: When a plot against the Emperor failed… the plotters were always given a chance… to let their families keep their fortunes. Right?

Frank Pentangeli: Yeah, but only the rich guys, Tom. The little guys got knocked off and all their estates went to the Emperors. Unless they went home and killed themselves, then nothing happened. And the families… the families were taken care of.

Tom Hagen: That was a good break. A nice deal.

Frank Pentangeli: Yeah… They went home… and sat in a hot bath… opened up their veins… and bled to death… and sometimes they had a little party before they did it.

I’m sorry to say that the Wall Street Journal failed to discover if such a scenario played out. Why they would think any person who doesn’t believe Vince Foster was murdered by the Clinton’s to shut him up would be interested in Hillary’s whereabouts on that tragic day is beyond comprehension. Perhaps someone should ask the Journal why they are pandering to people who believe in nutty conspiracy theories about the Clinton’s when there’s a financial crisis that could rock everyone in America’s world hovering like the Sword of Damocles over the country at present.

There’s more. We learn from the Washington Post that Bill basically stuck Hillary in a closet after the health care debacle, not giving her much to do and ending (we assume) that “co-presidency” idea that riled conservatives and cheered feminists during the campaign.

I would much prefer to have read about this in Cosmo or even Ladies Home Journal rather than the pages of our nation’s premier political newspaper. What “news” value it has isn’t registering at the moment. Anyone who followed politics at the time knew that Hillary’s role changed after the health care mess so for the Post to devote column inches to the definition of a “non-story” is astounding.

The Brits get into the act with The Guardian scolding Hillary for not being in the “War Room” when we attacked Serbia:

On the day that dozens of US cruise missiles rained down on Serbia in an attempt to punish Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the country’s onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, first lady Hillary Clinton was far from the White House war room: instead she was touring ancient Egyptian ruins, including King Tut’s tomb and the temple of Hatshepsut. And on the day before the signing of the Good Friday agreement in Belfast she was at an event called “Hats on for Bella” in Washington.

In her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton has touted her experience in the Clinton White House as preparation to lead the nation in a time of crisis. “Ready on day one” has been her slogan.

But an initial reading of some of the more than 11,000 pages of Clinton’s schedules from her days as first lady, released today by the National Archives and the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library, shows that she was often far from the site of decision-making during some of the most pivotal events of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

The Guardian being something of a left wing rag, perhaps they are unaware of a modern invention known as “the telephone” or just “the phone” to us Americans. To the extent that Hillary Clinton could advise her husband, I am sure – like every other First Lady who has lived in the White House – she gave him the benefit of her thoughts on the matter. And something as momentous as going to war with Serbia, I would expect that Bill Clinton consulted her for at least her opinion on some of the political ramifications of the attack.

Does Hillary exaggerate her foreign policy “experience” in the campaign? Only the most rabid of Hillary partisans knows full well that she does so shamelessly. Is it news that she was out of the country during big foreign policy decisions and not in the “war room” with Dr. Strangelove and the rest of the “experts?” If you believe that Bill Clinton did not take advantage of consulting with the one person he was sure would tell him the truth about any action he would take, then you should sleep on the couch tonight. Shame on you for not trusting your wife.

With 18,000 pages to go through, I’m sure the press will come up with other vitally important stories on where the First Lady of the United States was and what was she doing during some of the more exciting events in the 8 years the Clinton’s ruled Washington and the country.

The only request I have regarding further revelations is that they be placed in the section of the newspaper most appropriate to their impact and importance:

The comics section.

I’ve read Obama’s speech 3 times and seen it twice while reading a good two dozen takes on it from right and left and frankly, I am at a loss.

I am OverObamad.

My views have whipsawed back and forth between Allah’s incredibly effective, screeching accusation that Obama is a monumental liar and hypocrite to the more staid but equally devastating take by Michael Gerson:

The problem with Obama’s argument is that Wright is not a symbol of the strengths and weaknesses of African Americans. He is a political extremist, holding views that are shocking to many Americans who wonder how any presidential candidate could be so closely associated with an adviser who refers to the “U.S. of KKK-A” and urges God to “damn” our country.

Obama’s excellent and important speech on race in America did little to address his strange tolerance for the anti-Americanism of his spiritual mentor.

Take an issue that Obama did not specifically confront yesterday. In a 2003 sermon, Wright claimed, “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”

This accusation does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an “occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy.” It makes Wright a dangerous man. He has casually accused America of one of the most monstrous crimes in history, perpetrated by a conspiracy of medical Mengeles. If Wright believes what he said, he should urge the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he views as guilty of unspeakable evil. If I believed Wright were correct, I would join him in that cause.

But Wright’s accusation is batty, reflecting a sputtering, incoherent hatred for America. And his pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.

Allah meanwhile, in the most brilliant harangue I’ve ever read from him, gets to the absolute nub of the matter; that this was a speech given out of pure political necessity and that no matter how soaring the rhetoric, the fact is Obama spent 20 years in the pews of a church where this bigoted extremist preached every Sunday:

“[R]ace is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” saith the prophet, politely eliding the fact that he was only too happy to ignore it for 20 years when it was being belched at him from the pulpit in its most wretched form and then for another 13 months as a candidate until ABC dropped it on his plate and rubbed his face in it. Now, with his ass in a sling, suddenly it’s time for the great conversation. If any other politician tried a move this transparently cynical, to nudge the conversation away from his own craven tolerance of racial hatred to some sort of redemption narrative by which to hold that against him is to be, in effect, objectively anti-progress, the media would vivisect him. Instead, expect a full-body orgasm on “Hardball” tonight as the thrill in Chris Matthews’s leg spreads accordingly.

Our commenters laughed at me the other day for calling him a spectacularly shrewd politician. How do you feel now?

Here’s a blank check to white racists to join the restrictive country club of their choice because, after all, they can no more disown white racism than they can the entire white community:

I feel Allah’s pain. As with the rest of Obama’s record, he is asking us to believe that the past simply doesn’t matter; that voters should accept him for who he is now, what he is saying now. It shouldn’t matter that he sat quietly in the pews of his church for 20 years with his wife and children being exposed to the bigoted wrath of a hate filled preacher without confronting the man about the racial divide he now tells us he can bridge. It shouldn’t matter that he sat on his hands and did nothing in the Senate about reaching across the aisle and participating in bi-partisan accords on issues like judges and immigration. Trust him, he asks, and he’ll do that sort of thing once he gets elected president.

Another aspect of the speech I found troubling after going through it a few times has been commented on by several people; the extraordinary number of false equivalences Obama used to dismiss or minimize Wright’s hate speech.

Mickey Kaus on the reference to Obama’s grandmother:

The most disastrous sentence in the speech. If Obama’s saying that those who fear young black men on the street are racists, the equivalents of Rev. Wright in offensiveness, then he’s just insulted a whole lof ot people. If he loses the votes of everyone who fears young black men, he loses the election. People fear black men on the street—as even Jesse Jackson once momentarily admitted—because they cause a wildly disproportionate share of street crime. Does Obama want to be the candidate who says that thought is verboten?

Later, he says:

So when [whites] are told … that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Who would tell them such a thing? Obama, a dozen paragraphs earlier, dissing his own grandmother.

I also found his use of language quite deft when talking about Reverend Wright’s remarks and comparing them to more mundane examples of “controversy.”

From the speech:

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

This is flat out ridiculous. The remarks in question were not “controversial” which implies that there is room for disagreement contained in Wright’s arguments. Only a loon believes the US government created the AIDS virus to kill Black people. And while no one agrees 100% with their pastor or priest about the world, I daresay that not too many of us have been exposed to the level of venom spewing from the mouth of the Reverend Wright. That analogy is flawed as are many others in the speech.

And what about the idea that the speech was a healing salve on the open wound of American race relations? This post by Stanely Kurtz at The Corner shoud open our eyes to reality:

Intellectually, this Newsweek story doesn’t exactly surprise me. Yet part of me still finds it shocking. Here’s the key paragraph:

Last Friday, in an effort to gauge just how “out there” Wright’s sermons are in the context of the African-American church tradition, NEWSWEEK phoned at least two dozen of the country’s most prominent and thoughtful African-American scholars and pastors, representing a wide range of denominations and points of view. Not one person would say that Wright had crossed any kind of significant line.

Newsweek’s finding is totally consistent with Byron York’s story yesterday. The question is, in the wake of Obama’s speech, will the folks who don’t believe Jeremiah Wright “crossed any lines” feel as though they need to rethink — or will they in fact feel justified and affirmed by Obama. The answer is clear. As the Newsweek piece itself implies, the very people who never believed Wright was wrong to begin with feel “defended and explained” by Obama. Rather than pushing radicalism aside, Obama is lending it a sheen of acceptability.

It appears that it is important that Whites “rethink” our views on race and “understand” Reverend Wright’s and other Black people’s pain regarding past sins while Blacks can sit back and judge us on our progress. This, after all, is the view of Wright and Obama is telling us that this view is not mentioned in mixed race company but discussed in barber shops and elsewhere Blacks congregate.

This was, I thought, the major failing of the speech. Obama had an opportunity to speak truth to his race. He nearly got there a couple of times when talking about blacks not taking enough responsibility for their own lives. But he could have issued a clarion call for Blacks to abandon the religion of victimhood from which so many of their problems emanate and embrace the religion of progress and opportunity. I suppose he was constrained for political reasons which is understandable. But he was a lot clearer about what he expected whites to do in this new post racial world.

It’s funny what 24 hours will do to your perspective on something.

Join me from 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central time tonight for another edition of The Rick Moran Show.

Tonight, I’ll welcome Ed Lasky to the show. Ed is a frequent contributor to The American Thinker and a fierce Obama critic. We’ll look at “The Speech” Obama gave today on race as well as Obama’s frequently changing position on the state of Israel.

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My immediate reaction to the speech is up at PJ Media. Generally, I thought it was thoughtful, well delivered, and brutally honest in places.

But I think Obama revealed more than he wanted to about exactly what kind of a candidate he truly is. Having eschewed labels like “liberal” for the entire campaign, the speech left little doubt that Barack Obama is a dyed in the wool Democratic liberal who sees blacks and whites equally as victims of “conservatives” and sees big government, statist solutions to our problems:

More than at any other time in this campaign, Obama forcefully and without qualification endorsed across the board government intervention in every aspect of the lives of American citizens. This includes the prospect of joining whites and blacks together in a “victimhood coalition” to fight the enemy.

Obama spent a considerable amount of time trying to explain that the rage expressed by Wright publicly is echoed in private by most blacks, and that whites cannot therefore understand how important it is for Wright to be allowed to spew his hatred to give voice to that anger.

It should also be pointed out that Obama told an outright lie when he said several times on TV last weekend that he had no knowledge of Jeremiah Wright’s poisonous words until he began to run for President and that he was never in church when those words were spoken.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

The nuance here is breathtaking. Wright’s words were not “controversial.” They were a toxic waste of hatred of whites and hatred of America. I doubt whether too many ordinary Americans have heard their pastors or priests spew that kind of hate from the pulpit of a church.

In the end, as Ed Morrissey points out, the speech succeeded on a superficial level:

Did Obama succeed with this speech in containing the damage? It depends on the intended audience. This speech appears aimed at 795 specific individuals — Democratic superdelegates. Obama needed to show that he can address the racial issues in an inclusive manner, and walk the highwire with Wright by scolding him without alienating the black community. While the delivery was uncharacteristically lethargic, the content probably made the sale.

Unfortunately, he left himself still vulnerable by stubbornly refusing to ‘disown’ Wright; if anything else more incendiary comes up, he will have to address this all over again. He didn’t inoculate himself against future revelations, which is one of the main purposes of these kinds of speeches. We’ll see if that gamble pays off.

Will any reporter have the balls to ask him what “controversial” comments he heard while sitting in church?

In spite of my doubts, I found myself almost being swept away by the speech. But a closer examination of what he was actually saying shows that Obama believes that the burden of improving race relations is primarily on whites – that we must allow blacks to give vent to their resentments and even their hatreds and “understand” where they are coming from.

If you think about it for a minute, it’s almost insulting. Obama is telling whites that we dismiss slavery and Jim Crow and 300 years of discrimination and oppression by not granting Blacks the singular honor of telling us we’re a bunch of redneck racists everytime they get offended. Doesn’t matter if they use such anger for political gain. We’re supposed to just shut up and listen and feel guilty.

If Obama were really concerned about bridging the racial divide he would have critiqued government programs that have contributed mightily to Black poverty and hopelessness. If he were really concerned about bridging the racial divide, he would have come out against political correctness which stifles true debate:

Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Let’s just say that Obama didn’t build any bridges to me with that exaggerated and myopic statement.

To say that white Americans voted for Reagan because of welfare and affirmative action is so far beyond ridiculous as to reside in another sphere of reality. And given the opportunity, he embraced political correctness and defended it. Ironically, Obama sees PC as a way to start “legitimate discussions” of racial injustice when the entire point of political correctness is to close debate off with the liberal winning.

This speech will be chewed over for a few days. Polls will show he probably stopped the bleeding in his own party. But I will be looking closely at independents in coming surveys. I have a feeling Obama may have blown it with them by giving a speech that had some very positive elements but that ultimately may convince many people he is just too liberal to be president.