Right Wing Nut House

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.

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

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 

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Well, so much for any advantage relating to “elitism” the Republicans may have had with regard to Obama’s “God, guns, and racism” remarks at the San Francisco fundraiser.

Only on a planet inhabited by such ignoramuses, such geese as this GOP Congressman from Kentucky would Obama be about ready to skate on his extraordinarily arrogant and dismissive attitude toward the white middle class.

This idiot has just handed Obama the advantage:

U.S. Rep. Geoff Davis, a Hebron Republican, compared Obama and his message for change similar to a “snake oil salesman.”

He said in his remarks at the GOP dinner that he also recently participated in a “highly classified, national security simulation” with Obama.

“I’m going to tell you something: That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” Davis said. “He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country.”

Davis all but call’s Obama a stupid n*****.

Okay, now the elitist in me is about ready to emerge. But one look at this guy’s picture says it all. The Gomer Pyle ears, goober eatin’ grin, and something inbred around the eyes bespeaks a throwback. Put a uniform and a badge on this guy and I can see him aiming the fire hose at women and children in Selma.

This man should be censured by the House. Everybody in America knows by this time how hurtful and just plain wrong it is to refer to a black man as “boy.” It doesn’t matter if he calls white men “boys.” The connotations are entirely different and everyone knows it.

If the guy is so ignorant that he didn’t think it was wrong, then he’s too stupid to serve in the House - even for a Republican.

Needless to say over the next 24 hours the debate on the Obama gaffe will shift. It will no longer be how arrogant and dismissive of the white middle class is the Democratic candidate for president but rather how much did he get right in his little rant?

UPDATE: 4/15

There appears to be a gap in the commenters between those who see the word “boy” as a problem when applied to blacks and those who don’t.

My - what a surprise.

I learned not to call grown black men “boy” when I was about 5 years old (I am 54 years old). Maybe younger. The fact that many of the commenters to this post either didn’t learn that lesson or reject it because it is somehow “politically correct” doesn’t surprise me. The most casually racist stuff gets deleted by me on a regular basis if only because I don’t want my site polluted with such abnormality.

Look - most of what we on the right call “politically correct” deserves every criticism thrown its way. PC has become a straitjacket for free speech. Anyone who reads this site knows full well my opposition to most examples of PC and its debilitating effect on political dialougue in this country.

However…

There are some things you cannot say without revealing yourself to be a closet case. The “N” word is one of them. “Gook” is another. “Spic, greaser, wetback” and a few others are also verboten.

There might be 10 words in the English language out of 50,000 whose connotation is just too hurtful to others and should simply never, ever, ever be used. This is not “PC.” This is what we call “common courtesy” at the least or better yet, being aware of other people’s feelings and sensibilities. In other words, being compassionate.

One of those words that cannot be used without offending someone is “boy.” The Congressman recognized it. Most real conservatives recognize it. Why many of you in the comments cannot is simply beyond my comprehension and experience.

More than any other presidential candidate in recent years, forces beyond John McCain’s control will determine whether or not he is the next president of the United States.

With an astonishing 81% of the American people believing that the United States is on the wrong track, it seems incredible he is even in the race much less leading in some polls. With that many voters convinced that a change of direction is necessary, they usually don’t cast their ballot for the candidate representing the party of the president in power.

But thanks to a healthy assist from the Democrats who seem intent in tearing themselves apart, McCain’s lofty numbers have given the GOP hope that all is not lost and that perhaps their nominee can squeak past either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the fall.

There’s only one problem with that scenario - actually two problems - that haunt the nightmares of McCain and his staff; the fact that John McCain’s success or failure will depend on both the War in Iraq and the economy not going south between now and the election.

I can’t recall a candidate being held hostage to events to this extent. On some level, a candidate is always at the mercy of what is going on in the world. But either Democratic candidate will almost certainly have an advantage when it comes to both the state of the economy and the lack of progress in bringing our troops home from Iraq. Only dramatic improvements - not anticipated or likely - would alter that dynamic.

The economy may begin to recover in the final quarter this year if the housing crisis bottoms out and the credit crunch eases. Whether it will be noticeable enough to aid McCain is an open question. The key here is that any recession be short and mild. A spike in unemployment above 6% along with a crash in consumer confidence might doom McCain’s candidacy - as would a sudden turn for the worse in the battlefield situation in Iraq.

Iran seems to hold the whip hand in Iraq at the moment. Their militias, their “special groups,” and whatever hold they have on Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army will determine the level of violence in Iraq for the foreseeable future. If the Iranian government believes it can influence the American election by ratcheting up the violence - and is disposed to do so - then there isn’t a whole helluva lot McCain can do about it.

And that brings us to the wildcard in this campaign season - the one real unknown that no one can guess how it will play out if it comes to pass.

A pre-emptive attack by the Bush Administration on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure or on some other target relating to their interference in Iraq prior to the election will raise screams of protest from the left and no doubt force the Democratic candidate into a posture of firm opposition to such a military operation. And given McCain’s rhetoric in the past, it would conversely force him to be a strong supporter of such action.

This is a given. The question is, what would the American voter think of such an attack? Polls conducted late last year were mixed but a bare majority would support such a strike if diplomacy and sanctions failed to deter the Iranians from building a bomb. Of course, the American people will generally back the President if he decides to use force anywhere. But would that support translate into votes for McCain if Bush decides to bomb?

It is a huge unknown. Personally, I believe any threat to attack Iran before the election to be receding and is now not very likely. But circumstances may change - especially relating to Iran’s continued support for the perpetrators of violence in Iraq. If the situation becomes intolerable, a limited strike against specific targets in Iran like the Qods Force or factories manufacturing IED’s might be in the offing.

So McCain is not only beholden to news on the economic front and Iraq, he is also somewhat at the mercy of the Bush Administration and any action they may deem necessary to protect our troops from violence encouraged by the Iranian government.

This is a very weak position for a candidate to find himself despite McCain’s current robust numbers vis a vis the Democrats. We’re liable to see those poll numbers yo-yo between now and election day as the public’s perceptions whipsaw between hope and despair on the economic and war fronts.

In a rather mean-spirited article on McCain in The New Yorker, John Heilerman nevertheless correctly diagnoses some other problems for the candidate that begs the question “Is John McCain Bob Dole?”

Yet for all the hosannas being sung to him these days, and for all the waves of fear and trembling rippling through the Democratic masses, the truth is that McCain is a candidate of pronounced and glaring weaknesses. A candidate whose capacity to raise enough money to beat back the tidal wave of Democratic moola is seriously in doubt. A candidate unwilling or unable to animate the GOP base. A candidate whose operation has never recovered from the turmoil of last summer, still skeletal and ragtag and technologically antediluvian. (“Fund-raising on the Web? You don’t say. You can raise money through those tubes?”) Whose cadre of confidantes contains so many lobbyists that the Straight Talk Express often has the vibe of a rolling K Street clubhouse. Whose awkward positioning issues-wise was captured brilliantly by Pat Buchanan: “The jobs are never coming back, the illegals are never going home, but we’re going to have a lot more wars.” A candidate one senior moment—or one balky teleprompter—away from being transformed from a grizzled warrior into Grandpa Simpson. A candidate, that is, who poses an existential question for Democrats: If you can’t beat a guy like this in a year like this, with a vastly unpopular Republican war still ongoing and a Republican recession looming, what precisely is the point of you?

John McCain has many fine qualities both as a person and a candidate. There is no doubt he is as qualified to be president as either of the Democrats. He is the first Republican candidate in a long time who actually receives decent press coverage on occasion (New York Times and a few others excepted). And the Democrats are in the midst of the bloodiest primary campaign either party has seen since the Democratic contest of 1968.

But as Heilerman points out, McCain has some enormous disadvantages as well. And it doesn’t help that the Republican candidate for president is being held hostage by events over which he has no control and which may prove to be the undoing of his campaign.

Well we’re living here in Allentown
And they’re closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line
Well our fathers fought the Second World War
Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore
Met our mothers in the USO
Asked them to dance
Danced with them slow
And we’re living here in Allentown

But the restlessness was handed down
And it’s getting very hard to stay
(Words and Music by Billy Joel, 1982)

Once upon a time, American industrial might was unchallenged the world over. It wasn’t necessarily because our companies were any better or because our workers were more productive. It was because in order to build an 8 million man army and all the weapons and equipment that it required to defeat two of the 20th century’s most powerful militaries in Germany and Japan, we had to build the industrial infrastructure that went along with it.

Plants sprung up like grass across what is now known as the rust belt - an arc of cities from Chicago up through the shores of Lake Erie in New York. And following World War II, when there was hardly a stick or a stone left standing in Germany, France, Great Britain, and Japan, the US enjoyed a near monopoly in industries like steel, textiles, automobiles, and rubber while being able to make for ourselves a wealth of consumer products that became the envy of the world. Household electronics, appliances, furniture, clothing, - everything was made in America because the rest of the world’s economies were prostrate as a result of the massive damage caused by the world being at war.

The post war world we helped shape was a much freer world with a big reduction in trade barriers that helped the devastated economies of Europe recover more quickly than anyone had dared hope. This was a part of the Marshall Plan that integrated the European economy so that French wheat for instance could be exchanged for German steel with little in the way of protective tariffs to stand in the way.

It was a remarkably stable system - as it was designed to be since one of the major goals of the Marshall Plan was to get Europe back on its feet economically as quickly as possible so that the various European Communist parties would not be able to get much of a toehold in the post war governments on the continent.

This ridiculously simplified thumbnail sketch of post war economic history nevertheless highlights the absolute dominance of American manufacturing at the time. The Marshall Plan was a success because we allowed it to be by virtually guaranteeing economic stability with our dollars and regional security with our military.

For more than a quarter century following the war, US industries were unchallenged. The world used American steel to build its bridges and skyscrapers. They drove American cars. They bought American textiles. They purchased American consumer goods.

The world was America’s oyster and it would always be that way, right?

Not hardly.

That same world we built from the ashes of World War II began to fall apart in the 1970’s thanks to a variety of factors largely beyond our control. The blast furnaces of Japan, Germany, and France - much newer and more efficient than the aging plants in America - were out-competing us in our own country. With the oil shocks of the mid 70’s, America discovered Japanese cars. Korean textiles flooded our markets - the same Korea we had rescued from Communism a scant two decades earlier. The world was pounding on our door wanting to sell us everything from new fangled stereos and TV’s to shoes, to appliances, to auto parts and there was little we were doing to stop them.

Could we have halted the decline of our industrial base? Tariffs no doubt would have saved some jobs - for how long is anyone’s guess. And of course, the subsequent loss of jobs as a result of retaliation by the rest of the world when they raised their tariffs would have cost a lot of jobs also.

The point is simple; the world was changing. And American business, grown fat and happy under the old system, was too slow to respond. When companies tried to adjust they invariably ran smack into furious opposition from unions - understandably so since the first thing companies tried to do was cut wages and benefits while laying off thousands. Unions are not in the business of seeing their membership diminish or standing by while their members’ wage packages were slashed. Hence, a ruinous conflict between labor and management ensued that, in the end, destroyed them all.

One by one, the Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania steel towns, so dependent on one company’s economic viability, succumbed to the overseas onslaught. It wasn’t just steel and it didn’t just happen in a few states. The textile industry in the south was also devastated. Rubber mills in Ohio, auto plants in Detroit, parts suppliers all over the Midwest, and all the satellite industries that supplied them began to disappear from the landscape.

The consequences of this catastrophe are still being felt today. But the immediate problem was in those communities that were made into ghost towns by the closing of the town’s main employer. Hopelessness descended like a black cloud over hundreds of towns and cities. It was this hopelessness that Billy Joel was writing about when he penned his anthem to the death of American industrial hegemony in “Allentown.”

Well we’re waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found
For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard
If we behaved
So the graduations hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all
No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coke
And chromium steel
And we’re waiting here in Allentown
But they’ve taken all the coal from the ground
And the union people crawled away

This is the essence of Barack Obama’s critique of the American middle class. It is the betrayal by nameless, soulless corporations, unions - the “system” - and has led to bitterness and frustration.

Or has it?

What Joel is singing about is loss. It was a given in those towns that if you graduated from high school, a job would be waiting for you at the mill. And if you worked hard, put in your 35 years, you could retire on a decent pension free from want.

What was lost wasn’t jobs or a company or even the unions; it was a loss of faith, of certainty in life. Obama, as Marc Ambinder points out, was not necessarily wrong in his analysis because he recognized that in those towns that have failed to adjust in the interim by encouraging a much more diverse economic base, there is indeed a sense of things going off the rails and never being put right.

In Obama’s version, working class voters in the Midwest have been inured to promises of economic redress because both Democrats and Republicans promise to help and never do; since government is a source of distress in their lives, they organize their politics around more stable institutions, like churches or cultural practices, like hunting. The outlet for their economic duress is in lashing out, in giving voice to their grievances; In Obama’s formulation, Republicans are especially eager and willing to exploit cultural trigger points.

[snip]

The elite media and most Democrats will say… “yeah.. .So? Obama is simply describing world as we know it.” His opponents and people who are inclined to view Obama as an elitist will say, “he is dismissing the culture and religion of working class whites.”

Indeed, the responses to Obama’s words have proven (to Obama allies) a part of his argument. Conservatives are already portraying Obama as liberal, elite, out of touch with the values of ordinary Americans — exactly the type of legerdemain that Obama was pointing to.

So there’s a debate to be had about substance.

But the politics are unquestionably dangerous for a candidate whose appeal depends on him transcending traditional political adjectives like “liberal” or “elite.”

Obama’s problem is that he is applying a classic deterministic analysis to what is, at bottom, a question of faith. Indeed, see if you don’t recognize the standard liberal argument in this verse from “Allentown:”

Every child had a pretty good shot
To get at least as far as their old man got
But something happened on the way to that place
They threw an American flag in our face
Well I’m living here in Allentown
And it’s hard to keep a good man down
But I won’t be getting up today

And it’s getting very hard to stay
And we’re living here in Allentown

Obama ecapsulated, his ideas already put to song in 1982, complete with the ubiquitous “they” (conservatives? Republicans?) throwing a flag in the face of voters (cultural values like guns and God) and a bitterness that is so debilitating that it keeps them from getting up in the morning - or voting their own economic interest.

Ezra Klein, in defending Obama, inadvertently fleshes out this deterministic view of the Middle Class:

I’m not really sure what the big deal over Obama’s comments in SF is supposed to be (save that the media and Clinton and McCain are saying they will be a big deal, and thus making them a big deal), but Marc Ambinder has the least hysterical rundown I’ve seen, and does the best job separating the substance of the remarks from their expected political impact. As far as I can tell, few actually find the argument underlying Obama’s statement controversial. It’s a pretty standard thesis, and has been delivered, in various forms, by everyone from John McCain to Bill Clinton. It’s that the way Obama phrased it is politically damaging, particularly the inclusion of guns and religion (though I think the crucial ambiguity in his comments is that he’s talking about guns and religion in their role as conveyors of political identity and social unrest, rather than in their more natural roles of shooting at things and believing in God). Obama’s has fired back, but it’s one of the depressing realities of our media landscape that it is both a) totally predictable that they will devote hundreds of hours to this story in the next few days and b) utterly unimaginable that they will give the candidate 3 minutes and 44 seconds to clarify his comments. And why would they? That might kill the story!

It sounds to me as if Mr. Klein is whistling past the graveyard in his expectation of how this story will play out. He may be right but he is dead wrong when he tries to tie McCain and Hillary to Obama’s analysis - as if either had gone so far as to ascribe the closely held political and religious beliefs of ordinary Americans in such casually dismissive terms.

No one finds the remarks themselves “controversial?” There is no one that I have read on this subject who has been more articulate, more analytically spot on, or more passionate in their denunciation of the substance of Obama’s comments than Allah and Ed at Hot Air.

Allah:

What’s most offensive? The condescension displayed here by the intelligentsia’s candidate of choice? The sheer breadth of the stereotype, which would send Team Obama screaming from the rooftops if a white politician drew a similarly sweeping caricature of blacks? The crude quasi-Marxist reductionism of his analysis, which he first introduced in his speech on race vis-a-vis the root causes of whites’ “resentment” — namely, exploitation by the bourgeoisie in the form of corporations and D.C. lobbyists? Or is it the shocking inclusion of religion, of all things, in the litany of sins he recites? What on earth is that doing there, given His Holiness’s repeated invocations of the virtues of faith on the trail? Note the choice of verb, too. Why not just go the whole nine yards and call it the opiate of the masses?

Ed:

What makes this so breathtaking is the mindless, casual way in which Obama reveals his snobbishness and elitism. We saw hints of this from Michelle Obama, in her assertions about never being proud of her country until her husband ran for President. (Soren Dayton has more on this.) We had not seen it from Obama himself in such a blatant and unmistakable manner. The matter-of-fact style in which he spoke this shows the unthinking contempt he has for people he has never engaged — an acceptance of stereotypes without questioning them that shows his own bigotry, not to mention foolishness and poor judgment.

Asked and answered, Mr. Klein.

Others on the left defend Obama’s deterministic analysis by pointing to the response by the right as evidence that he is correct:

If I were advising the Obama campaign, I’d actually embrace the controversial quote. Of course folks in small towns are clinging to their guns; they’ve been led to believe the state is coming to take away their 2nd Amendment rights. Of course they cling to their faith; given the economic turmoil in their communities, they have to cling to institutions that give them strength and hope. Of course they’re bitter; while millionaires and wealthy corporations have been well represented in corridors of power for as long as they can remember, they’ve been working harder, making less, and feeling like they’ve been left behind.

That’s not an un-American sentiment. That’s not reflective of poor values. That’s not elitism. That’s reality.

I’m sorry but I must disagree. Perhaps only liberals “cling” to religion. Most people of faith I know (I’m an atheist) embrace their faith, they welcome it into their lives. It is just plain wrong - in any reality - to say that Middle Class voters are scared little puppies cowering in their economically devastated communities, being swayed by the hypnotic fear mongering of Republicans with regard to guns (no one has to be scared into believing anything when liberals themselves constantly denigrate and mercilessly mock those who exercise their right to bear arms).

And Obama’s contention that Republicans jack up fear of “the other” to get votes presupposes that the Middle Class has no strong feelings about border security - that they are being manipulated by conservatives who use the issue to gin up racist feelings and not because people are passionate about the subject. This isn’t elitist thinking? This isn’t holding people in utter contempt who disagree with you?

Spare me.

The question isn’t whether these issues spill over into the realm of politics. Of course they do. The problem is Obama and much of the left believes people are so ignorant and easily swayed by GOP appeals to their values that the reason they don’t vote Democratic is that they are fooled into voting otherwise. In other words, these bitter, frustrated voters can be had simply by “throwing a flag in their face.”

Not recognizing why this is monumentally wrong is why the Democrats have such a hard time winning elections. The GOP connect(ed)s with voters on an emotional level while the Democrats refuse to engage. It is not by ginning up fear that the GOP succeed(ed)s it is because the party doesn’t dismiss their values as some kind of mental disorder to be cured by “right thinking.” You’re a stupid yahoo if you own a gun. You’re a superstitious moron if you take religion (and its teachings on abortion and gay marriage) seriously. You’re a racist hater if you don’t allow unfettered access to America by illegal aliens.

And the left wonders why people don’t vote for them?

Even if this flap blows over for Obama (and I believe it will), I am quite confident the issue will rear its head again sometime down the road. He can’t help it. It’s who he is. And because of that, the next time Obama shows his contempt for the voters by uttering some manner of elitist nonsense, a similar blow up will occur.

Only next time, he may not be able to get out of the box he puts himself in so easily.