My latest column is up at PJ Media. In it, I break down the numbers from last night’s primary win for Clinton and show why Democratic superdelegates should be worried:

Hillary Clinton received 62% of the white vote. Barack Obama received 89% of the African American vote. The question facing superdelegates is: how can they run a candidate who loses the white vote by almost 2-1 in a state they absolutely must carry to win the election? And it wasn’t just the voter’s race that made a difference. Clinton ran up astonishing majorities in the mostly white, mostly rural counties in the northeast part of the state. In Luzerne county she received 75% of the vote. She got 70% of the vote in Wyoming county. Culturally conservative but economically moderate, these blue collar voters in places like Scranton and Wilkes-Barre were considered at one time “Reagan Democrats” – reliable Democratic voters when it came to candidates on the down ballot but Republican when voting for President. In recent elections, they have returned to the Democratic party in greater numbers and have given the party a victory in the state in every election since 1988.

These are the voters Barack Obama told his rich donor friends in San Francisco were “clinging” to religion and guns rather than voting what he feels are their economic interests. Indeed, Clinton bagged 58% of gun owners in the state while taking 58% of those who attend church weekly. Obama received 56% of the votes from those who never attend religious services.

There is no evidence that Obama’s San Francisco remarks cost him any votes. But they certainly didn’t win him any, and the comments may have reinforced the image with these rural white voters that Obama does not share their core values.

The religious divide also tells a story. For the first time since 1976, Democrats won the nationwide Catholic vote in 2006. This vote is vital in several northeastern states and is important in states that lie along an arc that extends from the shores of Lake Erie in New York down through the rest of the Great Lakes, all the way to Illinois and then up through Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. The Catholic vote is decisive in Pennsylvania with nearly 40% of the total vote last night made up of Catholics.

I don’t think the Democrats dare nominate Hillary now that it is a certainty that Obama will win the pledged delegate race. But it is still six weeks to the end of the primary season and Obama seems to be averaging a gaffe every couple of weeks. Perhaps he will really stick his foot in it at some point and force the supers to switch to Hillary.

But his handlers have scrapped the idea of any more debates and the candidate himself is dodging the press as if they all had ebola. Being thus shielded, all we will see of the candidate and read about are the issues he and his supporters wish to highlight.

Which “issues” are those? The adoring crowds. The spine tingling rhetoric. The fainting women. How charismatic he is.

You know…all those important issues the left was complaining weren’t covered at the ABC debate last week.

Join me from 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central time tonight for another edition of The Rick Moran Show – one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, my trusty sidekick is back in the second chair. Rich Baehr, Chief Political Correspondent of The American Thinker will co-host the show and we’ll examine the results of the Pennyslvania primary as they happen as well as look down the road at general election prospects. We’ll be joined by some special guests during the hour to comment on the race.

For the best in political analysis, click on the button below and listen in. A podcast will be available for streaming or download around 15 minutes after the show ends.

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One of the criteria the American people use to judge a presidential candidate is “likability” – a nebulous and indefinable attribute to be sure. Experts tell us that part of the “likability” question is whether the voter wants this guy (or woman) coming into their homes every damn day for the next 8 years via television.

Obviously, this attribute has not played a huge role in determining how people vote – otherwise people would have chosen Hubert Humphrey’s “Happy Warrior” exterior over Nixon’s dourness and certainly Gerald Ford’s steadiness over Carter’s nauseating sanctimony.

But are we really ready to spend the next 8 years with a whiner like Obama?

Chomping down on sausage and waffles at Glider’s Diner in Scranton today, with his Pennsylvania BFF (Sen. Bob Casey) at his side, Obama avoided commenting on former President Jimmy Carter’s meeting with Hamas.

Asked by a reporter if he had heard that Carter reported a positive outcome from the meeting, Obama looked sternly at the reporter in question and said, “Why can’t I just eat my waffle?”

Asked again by the reporter, Obama bit—not at the question but into a butter covered bite of Glider’s specialty over-size Belgian waffles. With a wink this time he said, “Just let me eat my waffle.”

Obama whines about the unfairness of the Philadelphia debate. He whines about Hillary’s attack ads. He whines about an intrusive press (he hasn’t had a press conference in 10 days). He famously whined after a presser about Rezko “C’mon guys. I answered 8 questions already.”

He whines when he’s forced to explain his associations with people like Jeremiah Wright, Rezko, or William Ayers. He whines when the press or other candidates call him out on his lies and exaggerations. And now he has backed up his whines by pulling out of the North Carolina debate. I guess when the going gets tough…the whiners skedaddle.

Then again, perhaps Obama is doing us a favor by running away from another grilling like he received in Philadelphia. He has spared us having to sit in front of the TV and wonder what embarrassing question Katy Couric would be asking next as CBS was scheduled to broadcast the debate. Perky Katy would probably not have asked Hillary this:

Tonight, in an interview with ABC, she took a question on an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel.

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president we will attack Iran,” Clinton said. “In the next ten years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

The move from vague threats to a specific commitment—and the vocabulary seems to suggest nuclear retaliation, if not to actually say that—seems like a substantive change in the country’s approach to the Middle East.

UPDATE: Clinton aide Howard Wolfson says she wasn’t referring to, or suggesting, nuclear weapons.

One can almost imagine Perky Katy screwing up her cutsie pie face and wrinkling her button nose in disgust that we would consider being so beastly to the cutthroats in Tehran – even after they have deposited a nuclear love note on Israeli soil.

It doesn’t matter because Iran won’t attack Israel – with nukes anyway. But it sure is interesting that Hillary feels it necessary to out-gonad Obama which is admittedly a relatively easy task for the former First Lady, she being born with an extra set. Maybe she could loan our metrosexual messiah one of hers – it just may stop his incessant whining.

This actually would be a fantastic general election campaign strategy for McCain – getting Obama to whine about everything – since there are probably going to be more of these “problem associations” to come out in the months ahead:

Donald R. Diamond, a wealthy Arizona real estate developer, was racing to snap up a stretch of virgin California coast freed by the closing of an Army base a decade ago when he turned to an old friend, Senator John McCain.

When Mr. Diamond wanted to buy land at the base, Fort Ord, Mr. McCain assigned an aide who set up a meeting at the Pentagon and later stepped in again to help speed up the sale, according to people involved and a deposition Mr. Diamond gave for a related lawsuit. When he appealed to a nearby city for the right to develop other property at the former base, Mr. Diamond submitted Mr. McCain’s endorsement as “a close personal friend.”

Writing to officials in the city, Seaside, Calif., the senator said, “You will find him as honorable and committed as I have.”

Courting local officials and potential partners, Mr. Diamond’s team promised that he could “help get through some of the red tape in dealing with the Department of the Army” because Mr. Diamond “has been very active with Senator McCain,” a partner said in a deposition.

McCain, of course, has the same problem Obama has; he sets himself up as a different kind of politician who is above mucking around in the political sewers with special interests while carrying on business as usual when it comes to his “special friends.” In the larger scheme of things, this favor for Diamond is hardly a mortal sin. But as an example of campaign hypocrisy? Guilty as charged, Senator.

The campaign claims an aide handled the army base matter under the rubric of “constituent services.” Kevin Drum does the math:

Indeed. A “constituent matter.” McCain’s pal managed to snag this prime coastal land — complete with special water rights — for $250,000 and then sell it two years later for $30 million. That’s some serious constituent service.

Again, this is hardly unusual by Washington standards. But if I were McCain, I’d start to downplay the whole “Straight Talk Express” thing starting now.

Thankfully from McCain’s point of view, Obama won’t be able to make too much of the Republican’s associations because once he raises the subject, Rezko/Wright/Ayers will jump up and bite him on his less than ample behind.

But that is in the future. Today, Pennsylvania Democrats have the opportunity to end this marathon campaign simply by bowing to the inevitable and voting for Obama. Why they probably won’t do that is a mystery to me. Think of how the Democrats have been tearing at each other since shortly before the Texas and Ohio primaries more than 6 weeks ago. Now imagine what they’ll be doing to each other 6 weeks from now when the campaign season ends. It will be the Hatfields and McCoys on steroids with the only thing stopping open warfare is the two candidates firm belief that the second amendment doesn’t exist.

If white voters give Hillary the margins that some pollsters are saying – 57%-60% – superdelegates will be placed in the impossible position of having to make a choice between a candidate that can’t win a majority of Democratic delegates and one that will find it almost impossible to win a majority of general election voters.

That hellish choice can be avoided if Obama can get close enough in Pennsylvania today to deny Clinton her major “electability” argument. But most of the polls say that Democrats just aren’t willing to accept Obama quite yet. And the race, such as it is, will go on.

Here’s a twofer for your reading pleasure of Watchers posts.

Results from 4/11/08

Council

1. “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie”... Accommodating Islam” by Joshuapundit

2. “The Wizard of Ooze” by Bookworm Room

3. “Assumptions & Conclusions About Sadr, Maliki and the Basra Offensive” by Wolf Howling

Non Council

1. “Creating a European Indigenous People’s Movement” by The Brussels Journal

2. “Your federal Government At Work… For Palestinians” by Boker tov, Boulder!

Results for 4/18/08

Council

1. “The Next Moves In An Existential Chess Match” by Wolf Howling

2. “Does America Need a New Enemy? One Brit Thinks So…” by Hillbilly White Trash

3. “Elitism and the Elitist Elites Who Think They’re the Elite” by Right Wing Nut House
Non Council
1. “It’s the “White” Church that Obama’s Talking About (UPDATED)” by Baldilocks

2. “Zombie Chronicles the Olympic Torch Relay in SF” by Pajamas Media.

3. “’This Is How We Lost to the White Man’” by The Atlantic

4. “Hope for Iraq’s Meanest City” by City Journal

5. “The War of Ideas” by Family Security Matters

Once a Catholic, always a Catholic – that’s me, alright. Despite the fact I have long since left the Church, God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost (changed to “Spirit” in my youth; so much for the immutability of the divine), organized religion, and the idea of the supernatural altogether, I am still a Catholic.

I think like a Catholic. My worldview has been shaped – though not dominated – by Catholicism. In this, the nuns, the priests, the brothers, and probably a monk or two have left their mark on my intellectual, social, and spiritual development. And I will thank them for it till my dying breath. There is great beauty to be found in the strands of logic and insightful, penetrating analysis of humanity by Catholic thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, Newman, and other Catholic theologians and philosophers.

Conversely, this makes me a lousy atheist. I don’t hate people of faith although making fun of them is sometimes too much of a temptation to resist. Nor do I see religion as “an opiate of the masses” as Marx and Barack Obama (“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed…”) view this all too human phenomena. Belief in a supreme being does not disqualify someone from engaging in rational thought otherwise, although the contradictions can get hairy at times. To this day, Catholic thinkers have, for the most part enriched our inner dialogue as we struggle with the most basic questions of right and wrong.

After 12 years of Catholic education, it is hard to slough off habits of thought that force me to see the world through a prism shaped by my Catholic upbringing. My parents were what used to be called “good Catholics.” They went to church every Sunday with their 10 children in tow (drawing little amazement from the other boomer families made up of 5,6,8, or more kids). They gave us a Catholic education through high school and college if desired. We followed Catholic rituals and practices. (To this day I will not eat a fish stick thanks to meatless Fridays during Lent.)

They say you can always tell what a man believes and how he thinks by going through his library. I challenge anyone to make that adage good in my father’s case. It would be hard to glean anything specific of my father’s politics or religious beliefs from the astonishing breadth of philosophical tracts that lined the shelves of his 3,000 book library. In this, he did the 10 of us a favor by not foisting any particular political or moral view of the world on us. Free to explore ideas from Marx to Martin Neimoller, the Moran children grew up free thinkers – just as my parents intended.

That said, as I grew to adulthood and rejected organized religion, I nevertheless still thought like a Catholic even though I didn’t live like one. In fact, I trace my conversion to conservatism based largely on the fact that in many respects, Catholic teachings line up very nicely with conservative principles although the Jeffersonian ideal of liberty doesn’t translate very well. But in the establishment of a moral and just society – one being just as important as the other – conservatism and Catholicism seemed to me a match made in, well, heaven.

That is why I feel it necessary to defend the Pope and to some extent the Catholic faith from this kind of attack:

“Whenever a cult leader sets himself up as God’s infallible wing man here on Earth, lock away the kids,” said Maher, comparing the Catholic Church to the polygamist cult authorities raided in Texas last week.

“I’d like to tip off law enforcement to an even larger child-abusing religious cult,” Maher said. “Its leader also has a compound, and this guy not only operates outside the bounds of the law, but he used to be a Nazi and he wears funny hats.”

That was Bill Maher speaking shortly before the Pope came to the United States in case you missed it. Maher continued to put his foot in it:

Now I know what you’re thinking: “Bill, you shouldn’t be saying that the Catholic Church is no better than this creepy Texas cult.” For one thing, altar boys can’t even get pregnant. But really, what tripped up the little cult on the prairie was that they only abused hundreds of kids, not thousands, all over the world. Cults get raided, religions get parades. How does the Catholic Church get away with all of their buggery? Volume, volume, volume!

If you have a few hundred followers, and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If have a billion, they call you ‘Pope.’ It’s like, if you can’t pay your mortgage, you’re a deadbeat. But if you can’t pay a million mortgages, you’re BearStearns and we bail you out. And that is who the Catholic Church is: the BearStearns of organized pedophilia—too big, too fat. When the current pope was in his previous Vatican job as John Paul’s Dick Cheney, he wrote a letter instructing every Catholic bishop to keep the sex abuse of minors secret until the Statute of Limitations ran out. And that’s the Church’s attitude: ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,’ which is fine, far be it from me to criticize religion. But just remember one thing: if the Pope was—instead of a religious figure—merely the CEO of a nationwide chain of day care centers, where thousands of employees had been caught molesting kids and then covering it up, he’d be arrested faster than you can say ‘who wants to touch Mr. Wiggle?’

Now Maher is paid to be a clown so perhaps we should ascribe his outburst more to the fact that he was just doing his job shocking the sensibilities of his bourgeoisie audience who are titillated when an anti-establishmentarian like Maher sticks it to an icon like the Catholic Church.

Maher was forced to apologize about the Nazi crack – a patently untrue charge that anyone with a passing familiarity with the battle in Nazi Germany between the Church and Hitler would never have made. The Pope, as a young Joseph Ratzinger, was forced by law to join the Hitler youth despite Hitler’s signed assurances (the Concordant of 1933) that the Catholic Youth Organization would remain an option for families who did not wish their children to join a secular group.

Predictably, Maher was unapologetic about his other “charges” including his weird interpretation of the letter sent by Ratzinger to all the Bishops of the Church when he was Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.

Maher grossly misrepresented the contents of the 2001 letter then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote to the bishops. He did not tell them to “keep the sex abuse of minors of State of Limitations ran out.” The letter clarified that the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had jurisdiction according to the Church’s law (canon law) to try clerics concerning abuses of the sacraments, and also, as the letter put it, a “delict against morals, namely: the delict committed by a cleric against the Sixth Commandment of the Decalogue [thou shall not commit adultery] with a minor below the age of 18 years.”

What Maher’s criticism fails to take into account is that not everywhere in the world where the comedian’s attitude toward Catholics dominates is the Church protected by a document like the US Constitution. In fact, Ratzinger’s concerns that the Church be allowed to deal with pedophile priests only in extremely narrow circumstances was protection for the Church in those places where authorities share Mr. Maher’s less than expansive view of religious freedom. There are dozens of countries in the world that would take Mr. Maher’s supercilious suggestion that the Catholic hierarchy should be locked up to heart and use either real or trumped up charges of abuse by priests as an excuse to destroy the independence of the Church from government.

The Catholic Church operates in a world that is by and large not very friendly to it. But clearly the abuse scandals here and abroad as well as the actions of individual bishops to cover it up, pay off the victims, stonewall secular authorities, allow pedophiles to continue their abuse from posting to posting knowing their propensity to “sin,” – all of this dark chapter in the Church’s history must be aired out and exposed (with due diligence made to respect the privacy of victims) before the breach that has opened up between the hierarchy and the congregation is closed.

Does this validate Maher’s over the top, exaggerated, hateful rant? As any good satirist, Maher has taken the germ of truth and blown it up into impossibly overstated and wildly embroidered bombast – all for a few laughs and the notoriety that comes to those who deliberately offend people in order to get attention; much like a 5 year old who tells his parents he hates them.

Perhaps Mr. Maher believes religion should be regulated by government. He doesn’t say so outright but the threat inherent in his diatribe is clear. Is that simply part of his shtick? Or does this angry atheist actually believe that government should find a way to “regulate” against these sorts of outrages?

To place those institutional sins in the context of the modern Church is difficult. The Pope, in his visit to the US has tried to reconcile the Church’s interests with those of the victims – pleasing some and not others:

It is in the context of this hope, born of God’s love and fidelity, that I acknowledge the pain which the church in America has experienced as the result of sexual abuse of minors,” Benedict said.

“No words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse. It is important that those who have suffered be given loving pastoral attention.”

During the Mass, the pope said the church has worked “to deal honestly and fairly with this tragic situation” and to ensure that children are safe.

That last has come to pass only recently and ignores the years of neglect prior to the last few years of the John Paul II pontificate and Benedict’s ascension. This doesn’t erase the problem and much more needs to be done. But it does make a start that any fair minded person would have to admit that while long overdue is a necessary and vital step on the road to reconciliation.

I have expressed my admiration in the past for this Pope and his remarkably supple intellect with its subtlety and depth. But this is a case where the Pope needs to show leadership and compassion – a test he has passed to this point. What he does when he returns to Rome will determine whether his American flock continues to distrust their bishops. They certainly have reason to – a fact not lost on this Pope who will seek to heal the breach caused by the abuse scandals and make the Church whole again.

This is the very first thing I read after getting out of bed and before the coffee was ready. Needless to say, it was an eye-opener:

In his portrayal of our second president, Paul Giamatti creates a man perpetually dissatisfied, disgusted by the preening ambition of politics even as he is infected by it. If his relentless crankiness was a bit hard for some of us to take in early episodes, in the second half of the series it makes much more sense. While exhorting angry men to throw off the shackles of tyranny offers many opportunities for rhetorical fabulousness, setting up a new government is a bureaucratic nightmare, with oversized personalities disagreeing over things both petty and fundamental. George Washington (David Morse) so quickly tired of the infighting among his Cabinet and vagaries of public opinion that he stepped down from the presidency after a single term. “I know now what it is like to be disliked,” he says to Adams, his perpetually disliked vice president.

I literally had to read it three times before I convinced myself that it wasn’t the lack of coffee or the fact that sleep was still in my eyes which may have caused me to see something that wasn’t there. I briefly considered the possibility of an hallucinogenic flashback which was causing the letters on the page to re-arrange themselves into words that were not actually printed but imagined.

After dismissing all rational and irrational reasons for anyone above the age of 7 to make such a gargantuan error, the horror finally engulfed me; the Los Angeles Times has hired a 6 year old to write for them – a cost cutting measure sure to please their new owner Sam Zell but would probably not sit well with anyone who possesses an IQ above 60.

I felt compelled to send the following email to the author of this piece, a lass named Mary McNamara:

My guess is that you have received 5,000 emails telling you what every 1st grader in the United States knows – that Washington served two terms as president.

Oh well, not everyone can be a reporter. To take liberties with the quote from John Houseman in Paper Chase:

“Ms. McNamara, here is a dime. Take it, call your mother, and tell her there is serious doubt about you ever becoming a journalist.”

Rick Moran

A word here about the aforementioned Zell, owner of the Tribune Company as well as the Chicago Cubs baseball team. When last we left our hard charging, foul mouthed, bullying, media tycoon, he was busy trying to make himself the most unpopular business executive in the history of Chicago by proposing that the holy shrine of Wrigley Field (home of the hapless but lovable Chicago Cubs) undergo a slight name change. It seems that Sam wanted to open bidding among corporations for the honor of having their company name attached to the ballpark as is the custom for some other ballyards. Such elevating names as “Progressive (insurance) Park” in Cleveland or “US Cellular Field” across town, home to the White Sox, has garnered the owners hundreds of millions of dollars.

That Zell could be so ignorant of the passion that even non-baseball fans have for Wrigley Field in Chicago does not bode well for his efforts to resurrect the Tribune media empire. A poll taken by the Sun Times showed that 53% of fans surveyed would never attend a game at Wrigley Field if it were renamed.

So I wouldn’t put anything past Sam Zell. Perhaps he cut the fact checking department at the Times. Perhaps he had all reference materials like dictionaries and encyclopedias removed – or burned to save money on electricity. Maybe instead of 6 year olds, he hired J-school graduates who may be more expensive than children but demonstrate a similar understanding of the world and current events.

Of course, Patterico weighed in on this gaffe. The long suffering blogger who has forced himself over the years to read the Times while the rest of us riffed off of his excellent analysis of their foibles searches desperately for an explanation beyond pure, unadulterated, sublime ignorance on the part of McNamara:

Straining to give them the benefit of the doubt, I wonder: does the miniseries somehow portray Washington as having served only one term? I haven’t seen it, but I doubt it. [UPDATE: Make that “seriously doubt it.” See the UPDATE below.]

Lefty blogger Steve Smith, who tipped me to this, is beside himself with amazement at how they could get such a basic fact wrong. Go his post for his amusing cries of disgust, which conclude with this:

It’s enough to make a lefty sympathetic to Patterico. Does the fact-checker at the Times have to regularly drink water out of the toilet or lose their back teeth from subsisting on a diet of rocks to get that job?

I don’t know, Steve. But I hear they use the paper to housebreak him.

In defense of McNamara, she is, after all, an entertainment reporter. Her knowledge of shows I’ve never heard of and would never watch in a million years is extensive so perhaps she has filled her brain with so many facts about horrible television shows that it pushed out other, less relevant information like history and such. Or maybe important facts like the number of terms Washington served as president just oozed out of her ears while watching all of the drivel she evidently enjoys viewing to prepare for her scratching out her deep thoughts about a medium that insults the intelligence of anyone with half a brain who partakes in its idiocies.

Then again, she was writing about the success of the best thing on TV I’ve seen since Band of Brothers; the John Adams miniseries which is surprisingly literate, achingly accurate, and marvelously performed by Paul Giamatti in the title role. But if like many under the age of 30, she gets her knowledge of history from films and TV, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us that she hasn’t a clue about how many terms Washington served as president.

As of 7:30 AM Pacific time, the error is still there, standing out like a huge zit on the face of a major metropolitan newspaper whose credibility – already in the pits – has been strained to the breaking point. One can imagine the fate of poor Ms. McNamara once Sam Zell hears of this stupidity. If I were her, I would make sure my resume is up to date and perhaps even look into that editor’s job at the Jackson Hole News.

At least if she makes a ridiculous error there, she won’t have more than a million Sunday readers and countless blogs pointing a finger in her direction and laughing like a baboon over her imbecility.

It has been a tradition at The House to republish my Paul Revere post to honor Revere, Longfellow, and Patriot’s Day which, as Jules Crittenden points out, is celebrated only in Massachussets and Maine. According to my site stats, it is the most linked post on this site next to my Katrina Timeline.

I hope you enjoy it.

This post originally appeared April 18, 2005

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,—One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”

The image has captured the imagination of American school children for almost 150 years. A lone rider, braving capture at the hands of the British, riding along the narrow country lanes and cobblestone streets of the picturesque towns and villages of New England, shouting out defiance to tyranny, raising the alarm “To every Middlesex village and farm,” his trusty horse carrying him on his ride into legend.

To bad it didn’t quite happen that way.

Longfellow’s poem immortalized Revere’s ride in a way that would never have occurred to the silversmith’s contemporaries. It wasn’t so much that the incident went unnoticed. It’s just that Longfellow took so many liberties with the facts surrounding the event as to obscure the real story of that night and by so doing, overshadow the real accomplishments of one of the more interesting characters in the entire revolution.

Let’s forgive Longfellow his myth making. The poet was, after all, using the ride to illustrate American themes – something almost unheard of in literature until that time. Along with his other great narrative poem Hiawatha, Longfellow has been credited with introducing the rest of the world to truly American motifs and myths. Paul Revere’s Ride, while historically inaccurate, nevertheless conveys the breathless spirit of resistance of the colonists to British rule.

Revere himself joined that resistance early on. Born in 1734, Revere has been described as a silversmith. This does him an injustice. He was much more the artist than the craftsman. His involvement in the earliest stages of the revolution was a consequence of his friendship with that scowling propagandist Sam Adams. He was a prominent member of the “Committee of Safety” that was formed to protect the rights of Massachusetts citizens against threats to liberty, both real and imagined, of the colonial government. And he was one of the grand jurors who, in 1774 refused to serve after the British Parliament made the justices independent of the people by having the colonial governor pay the salaries of the judges.

Sam Adams knew a good thing when he saw it and used Revere’s talents as an artist to further the cause of rebellion. He urged Revere to engrave several inflammatory caricatures of British politicians that Adams promptly had copied and distributed. Following the Boston Massacre in 1770, Revere engraved a seditious remembrance of that event that was also widely disseminated. This use of art in the cause of revolution wasn’t necessarily new, but it showed just how imaginative Adams could be.

Revere and Adams were also behind one of the most shocking events of the revolution, the Boston Tea Party. Adams was trying to provoke the British government and succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings. England closed the port of Boston and bivouacked troops in the city.

Which brings us to Revere’s ride. Or, more accurately, the part that Revere played on that momentous night. The redcoats decided that it was prudent to both capture the more radical elements of the Sons of Liberty, the group started by Adams and John Hancock as an adjunct to the colonial militia, as well as disarm the populace. To that end they sent two company’s of elite Grenadiers into the countryside to arrest Hancock, Adams, and Joseph Warren for treason as well as seize the cannon and powder of the local militia being stored at Concord.

Revere was a member of a group known as the North End Mechanics who patrolled the streets of Boston, keeping an eye on British military activity. When it became clear the British were ready to march, Revere borrowed a horse and rode off from Charlestown to Lexington where Adams and Co. were staying. Duly warned, the trio of patriots made ready to flee. Before going, Warren sent both Revere and another friend of Adams’, William Dawes, on the ride that would echo down through the ages. They left Lexington around midnight and were joined by another patriot Samuel Prescott. Making their way to Concord, the three men alerted the farms and tiny villages along the way with the news that the red coats were on the march.

Around 1:00 AM, the little group ran into a road block manned by British regulars who had been told to stop the colonists from trying to communicate with one another. Revere was captured while Dawes and Prescott got away. Prescott eventually made it to Concord and alerted the militia there.

Revere was extremely cooperative with his captors. He told them that he had already warned Hancock and his friends and that 500 militia men were assembling at that moment to resist the British. That last part was pure bluff but the regulars didn’t know that. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, the British soldiers decided to return to barracks, releasing Revere around 3:00 AM.

But what about the lanterns in the North Church, the famous “One if by land, two if by sea?” Revere had actually asked a friend to be ready to do that to warn patriots on the other side of the river in Charlestown. By the time those lanterns were hung, Revere was gone. While he probably saw them, he didn’t need to know how the British were coming, just that they were on their way.

What all this goes to show is that, while the myth may be more dramatic than what actually happened, the reality of what was going on that fateful night is certainly interesting enough. Thanks to Revere, his friends avoided the gallows for they most certainly would have been convicted of treason. And given what happened the following day in Lexington and Concord, the work done by Revere, Dawson, and Prescott to arouse the countryside contributed in no small way to events that became known as “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World.”

Revere’s participation in the revolution was by no means over. He was commissioned a Major of infantry in the Massachusetts militia in April 1776; was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel of artillery in November; was stationed at Castle William, defending Boston harbor, and finally received command of this fort. He served in an expedition to Rhode Island in 1778, and in the following year participated in the disastrous Penobscot Expedition. Upon his return from that fiasco, he was court martialed for failing to obey orders. The charges were trumped up by his commanding officer, trying to absolve himself of blame for the military disaster that cost of the lives of 500 men and 43 ships. Revere was acquitted.

After the war, Revere proved himself a canny businessman and bold entrepreneur. He took advantage of the religious revival sweeping the country after the revolution by manufacturing church bells, a business that made him wealthy. He also pioneered the production of copper plating in America and supplied the young country’s navy with copper spikes for the planking. In effect, he became one of the first successful industrialists in American history.

Where do we place Revere in the pantheon of American heroes? While not a Founding Father in that he didn’t sign the Declaration of Independence or serve in Congress, Revere played a very large role in acting as “the sharp end of the stick” the Founders sought to beat the British with. While not a part of some of the more unruly elements that took part in the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party, he and his friend Sam Adams were not above using those elements to further the cause of revolution, a goal for which he worked more than a decade to achieve. In that respect, perhaps we can call him a “Founding Brother.”

As we celebrate the 230th anniversary of his ride into history (as well as the poem that immortalized it), it’s good to remember that Revere was the quintessential American soul; an artist whose talents and ardent support for the cause of American liberty defined a generation of patriots who, to this day, we stand back and look on in awe, marveling at their accomplishments.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—-
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

The primary campaign became something of a Salvador Dali painting this past week as the canvas on which this surreal process has been rendered revealed an image that has lost all touch with reality and descended into a miasmic dreamworld where up is down, black is white, and consequences are divorced from actions – especially in the case of Barack Obama.

Dali once famously said “The difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.” Something similar could be said for the differences between the Obama on the stump and Obama the real person. This became abundantly clear last night when the largest campaign crowd yet – more than 35,000 by most estimates – thronged to the park in front of Independence Hall to hear the probable/potential/possible next President of the United States chant his “hope and change” mantra while totally ignoring the reality of a man whose past associations include an incredible group of hate mongering anti-Americans, racist pastors, crooked “fixers,” and “politics as usual” politicians who give the lie to his pretty words and noble sentiments:

“In four days, you get the chance to help bring about the change that we need right now,” Obama said. “Here in the city and the state that gave birth to our democracy, we can declare our independence from the politics that’s shut us out, let us down, and told us to settle.”

And he blasted Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his rival for the party’s nomination, even as he called her “a tenacious opponent and a committed public servant.” She is the front-runner in Pennsylvania, as Obama acknowledged last night, even though he leads her nationally.

“She’s taken different positions at different times on issues as fundamental as trade and even war to suit the politics of the moment,” Obama said. “And in the last few months, she’s launched what her campaign calls a ‘kitchen sink’ strategy of negative attacks, which she defends by telling us that this is what the Republicans would do.”

The crowd – the estimate of 35,000 came from officials at the Independence Visitors Center – began assembling early, filling Independence Mall and spilling into the surrounding streets. They waited with relative patience, chanting “O-ba-ma” whenever the music stopped, until 8:45, when the rally finally started. They gave him a thunderous greeting and cheered often throughout a speech that was crafted with the setting in mind.

That’s only the half of it. Marc Ambinder reports on what happened after the rally was over:

It wasn’t so much that Barack Obama had real fight in him tonight, or that more people attended his rally in front of Independence Hall than any other event since he announced his candidacy. It was the spontaneous demonstration of support that happened when it ended.

5,000 people (at least) had nowhere to go but up Market Street. Obama’s charge of the night: “Declare independence!” was with them. They started with the familiar “O-Bam-A.” By 7th and Market, they had graduated to “Yes we can!” By 10th and Market, with hundreds streaming in between cars on the road, they were just cheering. At first, a few Philly cops, killjoys, tried to rough the crowd to the sidewalks. It didn’t work. The cops retreated to the sidewalks. By the time I ducked into my hotel, a full mile away from Independence Park, the Obama crowd was still marching.

Have we become so cynical that despite all the evidence to the contrary – his lack of any track record in effecting change (even eschewing opportunities to do so when the presented themselves), his accepting help from politicians who practice the very kind of politics he rails against, his association with people who have no desire to “unite” the country, only tear it down – that so many would become besotted with “Obamamania” that they deliberately look the other way at this hypocrisy coming from their candidate?

This disconnect became all too visible the last few days as left wing blogs supporting Obama were beside themselves over the efforts by ABC debate moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephenopolous to pull back the curtain and reveal Obama as the hypocrite he truly is. Their primary beef with ABC? The moderators asked questions the candidate didn’t want to answer and his supporters didn’t want to hear. As long as the press coverage limits itself to the “issues,” only the Obama on the stump will be highlighted. As long as the press reports on the incredible crowds, the adoring fans, the candidate’s rhetorical gifts (not “issues” in any sense of the word but hey! – no one ever accused the left of being consistent about anything), Obama’s Legions are satisfied.

But let the press actually do their jobs and ask the candidate why he is on a first name basis with someone who is “proud” he tried to blow up the Pentagon and the crap hits the fan in Obamaland. Any attempt to reveal the life Obama has led outside of politics isn’t relevant. Not because it has nothing to do with why someone would cast their vote for their candidate – an incredibly stupid assumption that bespeaks an ignorance of why people vote – but simply because they don’t want to know and more importantly, they don’t want the rest of us to know.

The candidate himself pushes this idea that the press should only ask questions he wants to answer in North Carolina on Thursday:

With a voice dripping with sarcasm, Barack Obama offered a eulogy yesterday from Raleigh, N.C. “I will tell you [the campaign] does not get more fun than these debates,” he said. “They are inspiring debates. I think last night we set a new record [note to the wordsmith: all records are new when set] because it took us 45 minutes before we even started talking about a single issue that matters most to the American people. It took us 45 minutes — 45 minutes before we [were allowed to regurgitate what we’ve been saying for months] about health care, 45 minutes before we [got to repeat everything we’ve been saying for months] about Iraq, 45 minutes before we heard [a reprise of the tedious argle-bargle] about jobs, 45 minutes before we [got to harangue everybody for the 12th time] about [how we can’t do anything about] the price of gasoline.”

Indeed, Wes Pruden is on to something here. Any discussion of “issues” at this late date in the campaign would have put people to sleep. Now ABC, as you might have guessed, is a for-profit outfit that was horrified at the thought that people might find the candidates’ spouting for the umpteenth time their bullet points about Iraq, health care, jobs, and the price of gasoline so intensely boring that they would flip over to watch a playoff hockey game or perhaps “Deal or no Deal.” Better to make both Hillary and Obama squirm a little by having to answer questions that inquiring minds want to know – like why did you allow a self confessed, unapologetic terrorist hold a fundraiser at his house for you Senator Obama?

Obama’s answer has been recycled time and time again, given when he has been confronted with questions about Wright, Rezko, Daley, Jones, and all the other personalities from Obama’s real life away from the stump that define who he is as a man and not the messianic candidate on the stump who promises so ardently to change things:

Sen. Obama was briefly put on the spot with a question about still another of his shady friends in Chicago, but he was allowed to dance away without the obvious follow-up. What was the extent of his friendship with Bill Ayers, an ex-con and unrepentant member of a ring of cop-killers from the ‘60s? This could have been a fastball but was only a floater, and the Illinois Kid sent it back sharply for a Texas Leaguer. “The notion that somehow, as a consequence of me knowing someone in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, that somehow that reflects on my values, is crazy.”

But that’s not quite the point of the question. The senator knew that Bill Ayers was more than “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and was once a member of the Weathermen when they served together on the board of the Woods Fund, a small but radical Chicago foundation of suspicious provenance. At the behest of the unrepentant Bill Ayers — who boasts that he and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, who both served time after years on the run, didn’t do enough to plant bombs to kill innocents when they had the chance — the foundation awarded $6,000 to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church “in recognition of Barack Obama’s contributions.” Messrs. Obama and Ayers voted to award a generous grant to the Arab-American Action Network, to finance “actions” (not otherwise specified).

Obama’s catch-all excuse for the Wrights, Ayers, Rezkos, Auchis, Daleys, and other less than stellar characters in his past is the same for each; everyone has a Wright/Ayers/Rezko/Auchi/Daley et. al. in their past so what’s the big deal? Wright is everyone’s “crazy uncle.” Ayers is just some guy who “lives in the neighborhood.” Rezko is “one of thousands of contributors” to his campaign. In each case, Obama tries to portray himself as everyman, asking his supporters (who don’t need much urging) to imagine all the characters from their past who are less than upstanding.

My friend Shaun Mullen does the same thing:

I’ll get this turdball rolling by noting that I knew several members of the Weather Underground back in the day and am a longtime friend of one whom I invited into my home when he was a fugitive. But even in the context of those crazy times, the Weathermen were a bunch of zonked-out wannabe revolutionaries who ultimately diverted attention from their occasionally worthy causes by doing a lot of really bad stuff.

All that so noted, I had a hard time getting behind President Clinton’s pardon of two members of the Weather Underground for some very serious criminal acts on the eve of George Bush’s 2001 inauguration but have a whole lot less of a problem with Bill Ayers, a former but never arrested Weatherman and present-day University of Illinois professor who hosted a fundraiser in his home for Barack Obama when the presidential candidate was running for the Illinois Senate.

Allow me to channel Salvadore Dali; “The difference between Barack Obama and Shaun Mullen is that Shaun is not Barack Obama.” Shaun is not running for president. Shaun does not get up in front of 35,000 people and say he is better than every other politician out there because by jing, he’s for a “new” kind of politics while they aren’t. Shaun does not lie through his teeth about the nature and extent of his past associations.

The band plays on, ignoring the discordant chords coming from outside the bandshell because that would disturb their ideal of perfect harmony, perfect syncopation, perfect togetherness. For most of Obama’s supporters, tuning out the sour notes is easy. They hear what they want to hear – Obama on the stump – and ignore the music being made by the candidate in his real life – complete with beautiful melodies as well as dark, minor key atonal counterpoints that for many of us has begun to dominate our opinion of the candidate.

Will they ever gather the courage to hear the entire composition?

The left’s towering anger that exploded onto the internet after the Philadelphia Democratic debate is a little misplaced aggression in my opinion. The fact of the matter is, this is the kind of press the left created, nurtured, supported, and lionized for the last half a century.

The modern American media has its roots in the way news was first delivered over television. And the granddaddy’s of TV journalists – the men most responsible for the way that television, print, radio and now internet news operates in tone and content – were Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly.

In many ways, those two brilliant gentlemen, both with enormous professional integrity and a keen sense of the way that news was important to the American people, made it impossible to escape the “gotcha” mentality that would dominate the news landscape for the next 50 years. Friendly and Murrow were both classic FDR liberals – perhaps a little farther left in Friendly’s case – and saw the drama inherent in media confrontations as the best way to get eyeballs in front of the screen. Beyond that, Murrow especially was on a quest to destroy his ideological foes – and not just McCarthy who Murrow delayed skinning until the beast was already cornered and gravely wounded but also other cold war figures who he believed stood in the way of the naturally friendly relations with Soviet Russia we should be enjoying.

Nixon, Acheson, and the Dulleses were also damned by Murrow and Friendly and thus began a tradition in news reporting that continues to this day; savaging conservatives.

If you can name one prominent conservative figure of the last half century who has not been subject to the most unflattering, scathing, unfair and ultimately dishonest portrayal in the media then I will eat my skimmer. On the other hand, of course, the left has a pantheon of heroes from Kennedy to Kerry who have gotten the kid glove treatment from the press. Yes there was occasional criticism. But this was mostly pro-forma and somehow never quite made it into election campaigns. Curious, that.

The CBS Show “60 Minutes” refined this tactic using new technologies and added “ambush journalism” to the mix. Now it wasn’t simply a case of “gotcha” but also watching the target of the hit piece jump around like a bug on a hot griddle trying to avoid reporters running after them with camera and mike in tow. It made for wildly successful television and “60 Minutes” became the #1 show in the country for decades.

This is not to say that most if not all the subjects ambushed by “60 Minutes” didn’t deserve every squirming second they spent in front of the cameras. But one may have asked at some point, “Is this journalism?” Or is this a circus? The imitators came fast and furious on the other networks followed by investigative reporting outfits at both the national and local levels of broadcast news, radio, and finally newspapers. Much of the work done by these units was vital and necessary. But some of it was trivial and titillating rather than newsworthy. No matter. It all went into the great maw of the information delivery systems of the day and was swallowed up by the people.

The crowning moment for this news culture was Watergate. Ironically, at a point where this creation of the left reached its zenith, real journalists began to ask questions about the power of the press and the potential for abuse. But the pattern had been set and from then until now, news coverage of our politics has become more and more concentrated on digging for dirt and hopng to expose embarrassing facts about a candidate’s past which used to be the job of the political opposition but is now an obligation of the press corps.

The “gotcha” political culture is an outgrowth of all this. So why is the left complaining? They created this creature to devour their ideological enemies. Should they be so surprised that it has turned on them and is now devouring their candidate of choice in the most hotly contested primary race in decades?

Admittedly, both Clinton and Obama are sitting ducks. There literally is no one else to target at the moment. McCain is off in the shadows, largely ignored as Hillary and Obama gore each other. Also, McCain has something of a special relationship with many in the press that for the moment is allowing him to operate as he wishes. I imagine once the outlines of the general election race takes shape that will change and the press will be an equal opportunity destroyer. At least, that’s how it’s been in the past.

Not only are both candidates tempting targets but they themselves have given the press the ammunition to attack them. Hillary’s serial fibbing and Obama’s stammering excuses for his past problem associations have left the candidates wide open to the kind of “How many times have you beaten your wife today” questions that were asked by Gibson and Stephanopolous. Both journalists were doing their jobs – probing and prying, looking for soft spots. In Obama’s relationship with Ayers, they struck jello. And Obama’s dismissive answers as well as his comparing a Senate colleague to an anti-social domestic terrorist only served to highlight the candidate’s lack of understanding of why people might see a potential president of the United States being on a first name basis with Bill Ayers in the age of terror would be a shocking thing.

For those on the left who feel betrayed by the media, I would say don’t worry. By the time the leaves begin to turn the press will be back right where they always have been; standing shoulder to shoulder with the Democratic party and working to belittle, injure, and destroy conservatives and Republicans running for office.

UPDATE: Stupid Liberal Comment of the Decade

The comment by “Bobwire” I am reproducing below will cause any conservative in America to burst into laughter. I reproduce it and urge you to congratulate Bobwire on his perspicuity:

bobwire | bobnoxious@lycos.com | IP: 72.173.105.69

“If you can name one prominent conservative figure of the last half century who has not been subject to the most unflattering, scathing, unfair and ultimately dishonest portrayal in the media then I will eat my skimmer.”

Arlen Spector
Mark Hatfield
Lowell Weicker

You have been pwned. You exist only as a button pusher.

It is a major story in the New York Times, Politico, the New York Post, and the left wing Guardian in Great Britain. It is the most curious of all Barack Obama’s problematic relationships and calls into question not only his judgement but the core of his political beliefs.

How radical are the politics of Barack Obama?

The story is about William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn – two members of the radical 1960’s terrorist group the Weather Underground and the fact that the possible next president of the United States is on a first name basis with a self-confessed bomber of the Pentagon who not only has no regrets for his terrorist action but wishes he could do it all over again.

Larry Rohter and Michael Luo of the New York Times:

On March 6, 1970, a bomb explosion destroyed a Greenwich Village town house, killing three members of the radical Weather Underground and driving other members of the group even deeper into hiding.

On Wednesday night, those events emerged as the focus of a sharp exchange between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama at their debate in Philadelphia. Mr. Obama was asked by a moderator, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, about his relationship with Bill Ayers, a former Weather Underground leader who is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In the early 1970s, the Weathermen, who took their name from a line in a Bob Dylan song, claimed responsibility for bombing the Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department Building and banks, courthouses and police stations.

Charges against Ayers and Dohrn were dropped because the Feds spied on the duo illegally. But the question absolutely must be asked just what was Obama thinking having anything at all to do with this man:

Mr. Ayers is listed as a member of the nine-member board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an offshoot of the Woods Charitable Fund, founded in 1941 by a prominent lawyer and telephone company executive. According to the fund’s Web site, it has focused in recent years on “issues that affected the area’s least advantaged, including welfare reform, affordable housing” and “tax policy as a tool in reducing poverty.”

For a time, Mr. Obama was on the board with Mr. Ayers, though he no longer has a formal association with the group. At the debate, he described Mr. Ayers as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” but “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” Mr. Obama said he was being unjustly linked to “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old.”

What would any other politician have done when he or she discovered that a terrorist was sitting on the same board as they? Wouldn’t just about anyone else have said “no thank you” to such an invitation?

There’s more to this relationship than Ayers simply being a “guy who lives in my neighborhood.” The two were introduced back in 1995 when Obama was presented by outgoing state senator Alice Palmer to Ayers and other far left activists in the University Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park at Ayers house according to this story by Ben Smith in Politico. And RezkoWatch reports on 2 other forums where we know Obama and Ayers participated:

Wondering whether the three may have crossed paths is not speculation. It is a fact that they have. Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama have appeared together at a number of gatherings and academic events. In November 1997, Ayers and Obama participated in a panel at the University of Chicago entitled Should a child ever be called a “super predator?” to debate “the merits of the juvenile justice system”.

In April 2002, Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama, then an Illinois State Senator, participated together at a conference entitled “Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?” sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals and the University of Illinois-Chicago. Ayers and Obama were two of the six members of the “Intellectuals in Times of Crisis” panel.

And Campus Watch reports on a farewell dinner for the radical Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi, who was leaving the Arab American Action Network to take the Edward Said endowed chair at Colombia University, where Obama, Ayers, and Dohrn all gave glowing testimonials to Khalidi – whose group received $75,000 from the Woods Foundation

In bringing professor Khalidi to Morningside Heights from the University of Chicago, Columbia also got itself a twofer of Palestinian activism and advocacy. Mr. Khalidi’s wife, Mona, who also served in Beirut as chief editor of the English section of the WAFA press agency, was hired as dean of foreign students at Columbia’s SIPA, working under Dean Anderson. In Chicago, the Khalidis founded the Arab American Action Network, and Mona Khalidi served as its president. A big farewell dinner was held in their honor by AAAN with a commemorative book filled with testimonials from their friends and political allies. These included the left wing anti-war group Not In My Name, the Electronic Intifada, and the ex-Weatherman domestic terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. (There were also testimonials from then-state Senator Barack Obama and the mayor of Chicago.)

This information along with the fact that Obama served with Ayers on the Board of the Woods Foundation, gives the lie to Obama’s claim that he doesn’t know Ayers very well. And both of those forums at U of C were set up by none other than Michelle Obama in her capacity as University of Chcago PR executive; evidently she too saw nothing wrong in glad handing with terrorists.

It is beyond belief that the press is just now getting around to this, the most incredible of all Obama radical associations. And the scary thought is that it will change few minds about Obama and his hypocritical brand of “new politics.”

Much of this blog post originally appears at The American Thinker