Right Wing Nut House

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.

So, Barack Obama has finally revealed himself as an elitist? This is news?

I daresay anyone who has been paying even a smidgen of attention to this presidential campaign knows that Obama’s appeal to the Democratic party is as a kind of patrician wise man whose soaring rhetoric places him on a pedestal far above the faithful, looking down on the rest of us with a benign smile on his face. The unspoken message of Obama’s candidacy is that he is better than the rest of us and that we should aspire to emulate his “post racial,” “post partisan” example.

Let me emphasize that there is nothing inherently wrong with this notion that our president is a better man than the rest of us. Hell, you couldn’t put yourself on the line and run for that office unless you had a supreme confidence in your own abilities not to mention a raging ego that kept telling you that you were the only one in America who can deal with the problems that face us.

But the question of our leaders being out of touch elitists is one that’s been debated since the beginning of the republic. The patricians who dominated the presidency for the first 36 years of our existence as a nation felt themselves entitled to make decisions for the benefit of the “mob” - the great mass of people that so terrified many of the Founders including Jefferson. The Founder’s reaction to Shay’s rebellion in 1786 - where ordinary citizens rebelled against unjust tax and debt policies - was to convene the Constitutional Convention, partly to make sure that the chaos of the mob did not threaten men with property.

The convention did not allow for direct election of the president and placed the election of senators in the hands of state legislatures because at bottom, our Founding Fathers had a profound mistrust in the ability of ordinary people to make reasoned judgements about such weighty matters as politics.

Talk about elitism.

They were very well meaning sorts, our Founders. They sincerely believed that they were serving the people by looking down on them as a bunch of morons. It was part of what historian Page Smith calls the “Classical Christian Consciousness” of many of the them. They saw man as born into mortal sin and therefore an imperfect being who couldn’t be trusted with too much power over others. Our balance of powers among the three branches of government is derived from this mindset.

Strangely enough, the Classical Christian Consciousness collided with the very beginnings of the Enlightenment in America which saw humans as perfectible creatures with the potential to perfect institutions like government - a vision eventually embraced by the Jeffersonians who took a significantly different view of people and their role in a free society.

While the Jeffersonians placed a little more trust in the masses, they were far from being supporters of pure democracy - allowing for the people’s “betters” to still make the big decisions that affected ordinary people’s lives. It wasn’t until the election of Andrew Jackson that the common man developed a political consciousness of his own and found a man they could elevate to hero status.

Elitism has a long and honorable history in the United States so the question is why come down so hard on Obama? Or other liberals for that matter. Democratic strategist Kirsten Powers is brutally honest in why liberals feel Obama’s comments are no big deal:

“It comes off very badly,” Democratic strategist Kirsten Powers said of the small-town America remarks. “They are things that I think in a liberal world sound totally normal, and outside of that world I don’t know that he appreciates how it sounds. And it just sounds very elitist, and it sounds like he’s looking down on people.”

Ann Althouse also thinks that Obama’s elitism is nothing unusual:

I must say that the original statement sounded like a typical law-school-liberal remark. I think it was quite sincere, and I’m rather sure he believed he was being admirably intellectual and raising politics to a new, higher level. Within a liberal law school environment, that statement would be heard as a thoughtful, compassionate insight. Some of your colleagues might think you were excessively, squishily tolerant of what they see as ignorant, bigoted people, but I don’t think they’d push you to be more understanding of the alien culture you were observing.”

Are liberals then the intellectual descendants of the Founding Fathers?

I’m sure they’d find the comparison somewhat flattering but they’d be offbase if they believed it. At bottom, liberalism is about control - controlling markets to make them “fairer,” controlling businesses to make sure they follow acceptable practices in labor relations, marketing, and environmental policy, and controlling ordinary citizens to make sure that their thinking is correct about anything and everything they deem important.

The Founders, on the other hand, were interested in granting as much freedom to the masses as their patrician hearts felt was safe. The Jeffersonians felt the Constitution didn’t go far enough in granting ordinary people liberty. The Federalists felt it may have gone too far. And therein lay the first divisions in American history - two sides made up of elitists arguing over how much power with which folks could be trusted. Not very edifying nor does it reflect well on our national icons. But as in most things at the beginning of the United States, our leaders meant well.

Here we are 220 years later and we’re still discussing elitism. I find it amusing that this argument has exploded across the internet - surely one of the most elitist of all American venues that such a conversation could take place. Both right and left have been known to denigrate the tens of millions of ordinary citizens who don’t read blogs, barely know the internet, and eschew the minutia of political debates in favor of following every twist and turn on American Idol. Both sides see this mass of uninformed, easily misled voters as a beast to be moved and manipulated with images, propaganda, and the white hot rhetoric of political combat.

It is not only elitist but also delusional to believe that this great amorphous mass of citizens cares a whit about the daily goings on here in blogland or the internet. What whispers might come their way is the result of these internet foo foo rahs spilling over into the mainstream media. Even then, if it doesn’t appear on Entertainment Tonight or if Jay Leno doesn’t make a joke about it, it simply doesn’t exist.

Does that sound elitist? You betchya. So what’s the difference between our putting on airs of superiority over the rest of the population and Obama’s belief that many middle class whites don’t vote their interest but their values, “clinging,” in his words, to guns, religion, and bigoted notions of immigration and the dreaded “other” in their communities?

The difference is that Obama is running for president and we are not. And no man who wishes to be president can be so ignorant, so insensitive, so denigrating of the deeply held values of the American people. Obama may not like it that ordinary people use a different criteria to decide who to vote for than he and his liberal friends use. But recognizing its legitimacy is at the very least smart politics and at most the mark of a man who can connect with the average voter at more than a superficial level.

Both John Hinderaker and Ed Morrissey believes this incident finishes Obama as an electable candidate. I would say that such talk is premature. After all, as an elitist, I believe that most people will accept the candidate’s explanation and move on because they don’t understand the egregious nature of Obama’s remarks.

I suppose come November, we’ll find out.

It’s true. Obama actually said it. Here’s the exact quote:

Do we feel confident that the Iraqi government is behind the aid to these “special groups” or do we believe they are just tacitly tolerating it?

Still don’t believe me? It’s about 1:15 into this video:

THIS IS THE MAN THAT MIGHT GET ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES? A MAN WHO BELIEVES THE IRAQI GOVERNMENT IS BEHIND A GROUP BENT ON ITS DESTRUCTION?

No. Of course Obama doesn’t believe that. But if this site were named “Think Progress,” (whose motto is “When you Think Progress, think idiocy”) we could create a nice, splashy headline screaming across the page accusing Obama of having exactly one more brain cell than the morons who who write for the most easily debunked lefty website on the planet.

Not surprisingly, other lefty blogs have picked up on McCain’s brain cramp and are trumpeting the idea that the Arizona senator is some kind of dunce when it comes to foreign policy. Given their own paltry understanding of how the world works (hint: gathering in a circle with the thugs of the world and singing “Kumbya” is not a foreign policy), it is laughable that they would accuse a senator who has sat on the armed services committee for 17 years, visited more than 90 countries, met dozens of world leaders, and written on the subject for some of the most prestigious foreign policy publications around of having an inferior understanding of events compared to a former street organizer and lawyer for a slumlord.

Even with all his gaffes, Obama makes McCain look like George Fricking Marshall when it comes to knowledge of matters regarding national security. And yet, the ignoramuses at Think Progress believe every time McCain proves he’s human and his mind gets ahead of his mouth, this bespeaks someone as ignorant as they are about the world around us.

Truly remarkably, unbelievably ridiculous.

Unlike McCain, who misspoke about al-Qaeda earlier in the day (and corrected himself immediately - something that the dolts at Think Progress just couldn’t bring themselves to include in either the transcript or video of McCain’s gaffe), Obama never corrected himself with regards to his belief that the Iraqi government is behind the Iranian “special groups.”

Using a single, operating brain cell as the marmosets at Think Progress, we can only deduce from Obama’s words that he actually believes the Iraqi government is bent on its own destruction and is in charge of “special groups” of terrorists who are murdering their own citizens not to mention members of their own government.

Thankfully, most of us use considerably more brainpower than the nincompoops at Think Progress. Otherwise, the world of Idiocracy would move from the realm of fantasy to the reality of left wing Utopia.

I never would have thought it possible to say but I believe now it is a powerfully good thing that our presidential nominating process is such a long, drawn out affair.

How else were we ever going to confirm that Barack Obama is a most accomplished and shameless liar?

Obama lies with an ease that bespeaks a comfortable familiarity with the practice. At first, when his lies about his friend Tony Rezko were revealed and then confirmed by the candidate himself, I thought to myself that every politician lies at some point and that Obama telling the press that he barely knew Rezko, that he was one of a thousand contributors, and that he only raised around $50,000 for his campaigns could be written off as a candidate simply blowing smoke about a problematic associate. (It turned out that Rezko was Obama’s most important fundraiser, a patron, and that he raised closer to $275,000 for the candidate.)

And then came the lies about the house he purchased with the help of Rezko. Obama addressed most of the questions in a sit down with the Chicago Tribune and Sun Times reporters - where further information came to light once again contradicting Obama’s previous statements about the extent to which he and Rezko cooperated in securing the home.

In Obama’s original statements about the purchase, he denied coordinating anything about the purchase with Rezko. He also denied knowing that Rezko was under investigation at the time when the entire city of Chicago knew that the “Fixer” was in trouble due to his fundraising activities for Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. (He admitted during the Trib interview that he had heard of Rezko’s troubles.) He also tried to paint Rezko as some eager beaver lobbyist who was just trying to get close to him.

In fact, one could say that Obama’s original explanation of his relationship with Rezko and much of what he said about the purchase of his house was nothing but a tissue of lies - swallowed for the most part by the national press. It was left to local reporters to ferret out the true story and put the pressure on Obama to come clean.

Again, when most of these revelations came to light, I was inclined to give Obama a break. Nothing unusual about a politician faced with an indicted associate trying to distance himself from the dirt. But I should have made note of the ease with which Obama first lied about his relationship with Rezko and then corrected the record without apolology and with zero damage to his credibility with his supporters.

But then came the Reverend Wright fiasco and Obama’s lying took on an entirely different character. His speech on race - done out of political necessity but nevertheless a thought provoking and wonderfully crafted address - contained many statements about Wright and his relationship with the preacher that strain credulity. John Derbyshire pointed out several of these “sleight of mouth” prevarications by Obama. And Obama’s biggest fibs about whether he heard Wright utter his hate filled sermons were given a pass by almost everyone.

It is breathtaking the way Obama has changed his narrative about Wright. He has done it with an ease and slipperiness that should disturb anyone who believes a president telling the truth must be placed fairly high on any list of qualifications for office. We’ve just spent 16 years dealing with Presidents who proved to be less than honest on big issues. Can’t we do better this time around?

Lies about Wright, about his grandmother, about the context in which he heard Wright’s remarks when attending Trinity Church - and finally, this whopper Obama blurted out in an interview scheduled to air today:

“Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable staying at the church,” Obama said Thursday during a taping of the ABC talk show, “The View.” The interview will be broadcast Friday.

Let’s leave aside the extraordinarily self serving notion that Obama would have left the Church after 20 years of sitting in its pews listening to the hate spewing from the mouth of Reverend Wright not because he found the words objectionable but because it would have complicated his run for the presidency. Let us instead look at the ease with which he lied on a very popular TV show watched by millions of women by stating that Wright had “acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people” and that the remarks “were inappropriate.”

Did he indeed?

Tom McGuire:

So, when did Wright acknowledge that what he had said was deeply offensive and inappropriate? The AP story recounts some of Wright’s controversial comments but oddly omits to mention his apology, as does all other news coverage with which I am familiar. And I am strangely certain that a Wright apology would have made the news - unless he never made it publicly.

So what are we supposed to believe - that Wright apologized to Obama, who is now apologizing to the rest of us on Wright’s behalf? For heaven’s sake, this really does show that Obama is made of Presidential stuff - maybe he can do an Apology Tour, just as Bill Clinton did.

But why is Wright apologizing to Obama, who only heard these remarks second hand - well, “second hand” if we still believe Obama’s insistence that he missed every service with these controversial comments (Huffington Post) but heard others (The Speech) but didn’t hear anything at all (town hall). Shouldn’t Wright be apologizing to those of us who took offense? Or after thirty years of delivering three sermons per week, has Wright developed a fear of public speaking?

Is this a little lie? Or a big one? Considering the fact that if Wright had indeed issued this tepid apologia it would place Obama’s defense of his minister in an entirely different, more palatable light, it certainly is not insignificant.

But what concerns me more than the lies themselves is the ease with which Obama employs them. Most politicians are pretty good liars but Obama, like Bill Clinton (unlike George Bush who is a horrible liar) is very, very good at it. And what’s even worse is his ability to turn 180 degrees and embrace the truth when he is discovered while barely acknowledging or ignoring the lie.

I will probably end up doing a post soon on McCain’s whoppers as well. The guy can’t keep his story straight about his support for amnesty, the Iraq War, or campaign finance reform, or any number of issues he has dealt with over the years. McCain doesn’t have quite as much to lie about - or at least about his personal associations.

For two guys running on how honest they are, it’s depressing to think that if these guys are the straightest talkers we have in the political class, our republic is in deep trouble.

I’m sure most of you have heard this little ditty at one time or another. It’s from Monty Python’s scathingly blasphemous satire The Life of Brian.

The plot is too involved to get into here but it involves a 1st century AD Jew by the name of Brian Cohen who is mistaken for the Messiah. Brian is a reluctant savior and keeps trying to tell everyone that he’s just an ordinary guy but to no avail.

Of course, the Romans crucify poor Brian. And while on the cross, another victim being crucified breaks into song:

Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you’re chewing on life’s gristle
Don’t grumble, give a whistle
And this’ll help things turn out for the best…

And…always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the light side of life…

If life seems jolly rotten
There’s something you’ve forgotten
And that’s to laugh and smile and dance and sing.
When you’re feeling in the dumps
Don’t be silly chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle - that’s the thing. (Words and music by Eric Idle)

The song has become wildly popular in Britain. It is the single most requested song to be played at funerals. It was sung by the chaps on the HMS Sheffield after their destroyer was hit during the Falklands War by an Exocet missile and they were awaiting rescue. It’s become a popular ditty sung at soccer games as well.

But you really have to see it in the film to understand the full scope of its irony. There are about 25 guys being crucified along with Brian, including the magnificent Eric Idle who is hanging next to him. Out of the blue, Idle breaks into this tune complete with a whistling interlude in the chorus. He is soon joined by the rest of the condemned men who whistle along on their crosses - some even trying to dance a bit.

I realize that there are probably quite a few of you who find nothing funny about the film. It skewers organized religion and excessive religiosity but not Christianity - a film I believe that Christ himself would have found funny since the Pythons were not mocking him at all.

At any rate, apropos of the times we live in, the song is perfect.

If Iraq has got you down
or you think Obama’s a clown,
or Hillary a danger to our nation and a witch.
There’s something you can do
to make your dreams come true
Just drink a fifth of scotch and drop some “X.”

And…always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the light side of life…

Al-Sadr’s out a-thuggin’
His pals are run and gunnin’
Malki’s really kickin’ ass and taking names.
C’mon now, don’t be blue
Just sniff a little glue
And things will soon be almost right as rain.

And…always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the light side of life…

Your mortgage is balloonin’
Foreclosure is a-loomin’
The housing market’s tanking something bad.
Just read a funny joke
And snort a gram of coke
Soon your troubles won’t make you feel so sad.

And…always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the light side of life…

Liberals are a-droolin’
The right a-feared of losin’
McCain he is a wooden headed chump.
Just take your .38
No real need to wait
Just say goodbye and kiss your ample rump.

And…always look on the bright side of life…
Always look on the light side of life…

My latest article is up at Pajamas Media. It’s about the Tuzla Affair - Hillary’s fib about how she had to dodge sniper fire on a 1996 trip to Bosnia and why the incident will remind Democratic voters about what they hate about the Clintons.

A sample:

The reason why we might indeed inquire about a lack of curiosity about the story from the press is because this is not the first time that Hillary Clinton or her surrogates have told the story of the First Lady parachuting into Bosnia…er, that is, coming under sniper fire.

According to the Obama campaign, Clinton made the exact same claim on December 29th in Iowa and again on February 29th in Waco, Texas with retired General Wesley Clark. Not a peep from our vaunted press corps who apparently don’t have as much curiosity as a stand up comedian about the incident. They just swallowed this fish story hook, line, and sinker.

Maybe Hillary should have really gone to town in recalling the incident. She could have told the press that she rappelled down a line dangling from a hovering Huey with an M-16 slung across her chest, a knife in her teeth and Chelsea on her back. Such a story told to our incurious press corps and dutifully printed as the truth would have been worth 100,000 votes at least.

This story has some legs as it is ricocheting around the blogosphere again today. I think it will damage Clinton because everyone wants to get beyond the last 16 years of partisan strife and Hillary’s easy way with the lie reminds us all of how things were during the 8 years of the Clinton Administration.

And here’s another reminder; Clintonian ruthlessness:

The delegate math is difficult for Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, the official said. But it’s not a question of CAN she achieve it. Of course she can, the official said.

The question is — what will Clinton have to do in order to achieve it?

What will she have to do to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, in order to eke out her improbable victory?

She will have to “break his back,” the official said. She will have to destroy Obama, make Obama completely unacceptable.

“Her securing the nomination is certainly possible - but it will require exercising the ‘Tonya Harding option.’” the official said. “Is that really what we Democrats want?”

Democrats are jumping all over her this morning for her remarks yesterday about Pastor Wright in which she said that she would have left her church if her pastor had made remarks similar to those made by Obama’s racist preacher:

Clinton’s decision to question Obama’s choice of church is a bigger problem than her personal tastelessness. Her decision is an arrow aimed directly at the heart of the black community. It is one of the worst acts of public betrayal I have ever seen committed by a Democratic politician in my lifetime, and the most shortsighted and toxic decision I can recall.

White Americans may be surprised by their introduction to the style of black sermonizing in the figure of Rev. Wright, but the black community sees nothing particularly out of place in his rhetoric. This may or may not be a political vulnerability in the general election, but a far greater vulnerability is opened up by telling the black church-going community that Rev. Wright is the equivalent of Don Imus and his ‘nappy-headed hos’. The suggestion that Rev. Wright was engaged in ‘hate speech’ of a kind so loathsome as to require leaving his church is deeply offensive. The black community is feeling besieged by the national spotlight on Rev. Wright and the ensuing white backlash. They are looking around for allies, and find Hillary Clinton piling on and throwing them under the bus.

Note two things: First, Clinton has obviously written off the Black vote and feels free to pile on with regard to Wright. Second, also note how the left feels perfectly at ease defending Wright now that the controversy has faded into the background. The revulsion to his racist, anti-American comments is now consigned to being nothing more than “white backlash” - code words for white racism. In other words, criticizing racist talk from a Black preacher is in and of itself racist.

This is the kind of “conversation on race” the left wishes to have. They define the parameters. They define what is suitable to discuss. They define who transgresses and steps over the line. They are the final arbiters in this so-called “conversation” and woe betide the luckless conservative who strays from their rigid, illiberal, orthodoxy on race.

In other words, if you don’t accept their construct of anything and everything having to do with race, you are de facto, a racist.

Obama would be proud of you.

We’re still a month away from the Pennsylvania primary and Hillary Clinton is beginning to throw everything at Obama within reach. Whether anything sticks is not the point. By tossing so much dirt up in the air, she obscures the fact of her own minuscule chances to win the nomination based on most delegates pledged and the popular vote while making it appear Obama is unelectable.

“Tonya Harding?” More like Gozen the Gozarian from Ghostbusters who wants to destroy the earth and rule over a wasteland.

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

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

The ever rational and reasonable Americablog:

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

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

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

The towering intellects at Firedoglake:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some conspirators.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The comics section.

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

I am OverObamad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mickey Kaus on the reference to Obama’s grandmother:

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

Later, he says:

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

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

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

From the speech:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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