Civil Rights, The Left & The Legacy Of MLK

Two years ago, I wrote a post on race in America, surveying our history and pointing out the far left's bastardization of MLK's dream of equality for all. It is appropriate to revisit that post today. I predicted at the time that, with the election of Obama, we would fall ever deeper, and perhaps irrevocably, into identity politics and multiculturalism, moving ever farther away from realizing MLK's goal of equality. I was wrong:
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Liberal African American NYT columnist Bob Herbert recently had this to say in extolling the virtues of the left:

Without the many great and noble deeds of liberals over the past six or seven decades, America would hardly be recognizable to today’s young people. Liberals (including liberal Republicans, who have since been mostly drummed out of the party) ended legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination.

Mr. Herbert pretty much sums up what has been the far left / liberal / progressive line for decades. But then how to explain all the vicious, ad hominem and unhinged Palin-bashing coming from the left? To take it one further, how to reconcile that Palin-bashing with the left's acceptance of people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a part of their stable? It seems quite the conundrum unless one knows a bit of history and can identify the massive deceits. Here are some facts, some of which you might not be aware:

- The Republican Party - the party of Abraham Lincoln - was borne in 1854 out of opposition to slavery.

- The party of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan was, as Jeffrey Lord points out in an article at the WSJ, the Democratic Party. And Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) [was the last] member of the Senate who was once a member of the KKK.

- The 13th (abolishing slavery), 14th (due process for all citizens) and 15th (voting rights cannot be restriced on the basis of race) Amendments to the Constitution were enacted by Republicans over Democratic opposition.

- The NAACP was founded in 1909 by three white Republicans who opposed the racist practices of the Democratic Party and the lynching of blacks by Democrats.

- In fairness, it was the Democrat Harry Truman who, by Executive Order 9981 issued in 1948, desegregated the military. That was a truly major development. My own belief is that the military has been the single greatest driving force of integration in this land for over half a century.

- It was Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican Governor of California appointed to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, also a Republican, who managed to convince the other eight justices to agree to a unanimous decision in the seminal case of Brown v. Board of Education. That case was brought by the NAACP. The Court held segregation in schools unconstitutional. The fact that it was a unanimous decision that overturned precedent made it clear that no aspect of segregation would henceforth be considered constitutional.

- Republican President Ike Eisenhower played additional important roles in furthering equality in America. He "proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law. . . . They constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the 1870s." Moreover, when the Democratic Governor of Arkansas refused to integrate schools in what became known as the "Little Rock Nine" incident, "Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent Army troops to escort nine black students into an all-white public school."

- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was championed by JFK - but it was passed with massive Republican support (over 80%) in Congress and over fierce opposition from Democrats who made repeated attempts at filibuster. Indeed, 80% of the vote opposing the Civil Rights Act came from Democrats. Women were added to the Act as a protected class by a Democrat who thought it would be a poison pill, killing the legislation. To the contrary, the Congress passed the Act without any attempt to remove the provision.

- Martin Luther King Jr. was the most well known and pivotal Civil Rights activist ever produced in America. His most famous speech, "I Had A Dream," was an eloquent and stirring call for equality. If you have not read the speech or heard it, you can find it here. I would highly recommend listening to it. Rev. King was, by the way, a Republican.

- "Bull" Connor was not a Republican. . . .

Nothing that I say here is to suggest that racism and sexism could not be found in the Republican party or among conservatives at any point in American history. But if you take any period in history and draw a line at the midpoint of racist and sexist attitudes, you would find far more Republicans than Democrats on the lesser side of that line. And you would find a much greater willingness on the part of Republicans, relative to the time, to effectuate equality. That was as true in 1865 as in 1965 - and in 2008.

Sometime about 1968, the far left movement emerged as a major wing of the Democratic Party. This far left wing hijacked the civil rights movement and made it, ostensibly, their raison d'etre. Gradually, the far left has grown until it is now the dominant force in Democratic politics. JFK, Truman and FDR would recognize precious little of today's Democratic Party.

The far left fundamentally altered the nature of the Civil Rights movement when they claimed it as their own. They imprinted the movement with identity politics, grossly distorting the movement's goal of a level playing field for all Americans and creating in its stead a Marxist world of permanent victimized classes entitled to special treatment. The far left has been the driver of reverse racism and sexism for the past half century. That is why it is no surprise that, with the emergence of a far left candidate for the highest office in the nation, Rev. Jeremiah Wright should also arise at his side and into the public eye preaching a vile racism and separatism most Americans thought long dead in this country. Nor is it any surprise that the MSM, many of whom are of the far left, should collectively yawn at Obama's twenty year association with Wright. Wright is anything but an anomaly. To the contrary, he is a progeny of the politics of the far left.

The far left did not merely hijack the civil rights movement, they also wrote over a century of American history, turning it on its head. That is why Bob Herbert, quoted above, is able to wax so eloquently while spouting the most horrendous of deceits. The far left managed to paint the conservative movement and the Republican Party as the prime repositories of racism and sexism. The far left has long held themselves out as the true party of equality. They have done so falsely as, by its very nature, identity politics cements inequality. Beyond that truism, the far left has for decades played the race and gender cards to counter any criticism of their policies, to forestall any reasoned debate and to demonize those who stand opposed to them. They continue to do so through this very day.

For example, Obama has attempted repeatedly to play the race card so as to delegitimize criticism of his policies. And today we have the Governor of New York calling the McCain camp racist for belittling the executive experience one could expect to be gleaned from the position of "community organizer." Apparently, according to Gov. David Patterson, "repeated use of the words 'community organizer' is Republican code for 'black'." What Gov. Patterson is doing is the well worn trick of taking any criticism of something pertaining to one of the victim class and recasting it as an illegitimate attack on the victim class itself. These tactics, which the left has used with incredible effectiveness in the past, have done incalculable harm to our nation over the decades.

We are either a melting pot wherein "all men are created equal" - the ideal of our Founders for which we have long laboured and are ever closer to succeeding - or we are to become a multicultural nation of pigeon-holed special interests. We are to become a nation where groups are encouraged to remain apart, defining themselves by their victim class before defining themselves as Americans. Multiculturalism is unworkable - we can see it destroying Europe and Britain - but that has not stopped the far left in America from their embrace of the concept. Nor has it slowed their efforts to weave multiculturalism irrevocably into the fabric of our society.

The far left has long pushed forward minorities and women to prove that they are the party of inclusiveness. On the right, the process has been slower. You had the percolation of minorities and women to major positions through the natural process of time and selection of the fittest. Only the most jaded would ever argue that Colin Powell and Condi Rice did not earn their positions solely on merit. And love her or hate her, Kristi Todd Whitman was both well qualified and a very good governor.

I have long been waiting for a self-made and accomplished woman or minority to rise to the very top in Republican politics. It is something that would intrinsically expose the incredibly damaging canard that the far left has pushed for near half a century. I had hoped Colin Powell would be that man a decade ago. As to Condi Rice, had things worked out differently for the Bush administration and had she not selected the Sec. of State slot (a killer for anyone with Pres. aspirations) I thought that perhaps she would have a good shot at running in 2008. I've been waiting for Thomas Sowell to run for any elected office for decades - and yes, I would consider him for beatification. These are people for whom neither their skin color nor their gender makes them a victim. These are people for whom what unites us in common as Americans is more important than what divides us into sub-groups. And these are people who earned their success by virtue of their excellence rather than the distortions of identity politics.

It is inevitable that one of the two concepts I earlier described - a melting pot of equals or a multicultural morass of victim groups - will gain ascendance in America. I have long felt that we are at a crossroads in our nation for precisely this reason, and that the ramifications of how we decide this issue will be existential. . . .
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When I wrote this post, I thought that electing Obama would take our nation irrevocably down the multicultural path, strengthening in America the victim class mentality that defines the left. I did not count on the rise of the Tea Party, nor that the left would go all out with the race card in a concerted and transparent attempt to delegitimize the message of that grass roots movement. Instead of strengthening the victim class mentality, all indications are that it has had a contrary effect, exposing the device to much of America. It is a tremendous irony that Obama, a man whose promise to lead us to racial equality was always without the barest hint of substance, may well inadvertently lead us to that promised land regardless. As the race card loses its ability to stigmatize the far left's political opponents, it spells the beginning of the end to the victim politics of the left. When the last vestiges of its toxin are banished from our land, then will come the day MLK's dream is fulfilled, and all of our children will "live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Update: NiceDeb has a round-up of MLK posts, linking not only to this post, but also to a fine post by Michelle Malkin, asking the left to give the race card a rest on MLK Day. In it, Malkin provides an exhaustive list of the times the left has used the race card in the recent past, concluding with an essay from Jerome Hudson that appears at Human Events:

Like most Americans, I’ve had enough with this administration’s policies. I was fed up and fired up.

I am even more so in the wake of the most moving gathering I’ve ever been privileged to be a part of.

At one point, some of the people attending the Rev. Al Sharpton’s “counter rally,” coined “Reclaiming King,” stopped me. I guess they must have been judging me by the color of my skin not the content of my character, because they asked if I was going to come join them.

“No, I won’t be there,” I told them. “Why?” one of them asked with a grimace on his face. I looked at him and said, “I want to be where the Lord is and the Lord is in this place.”

One of the older black women in the group asked me if I felt like I was “selling out” for being one of the “tokens” in the Beck rally crowd?

I laughed and said “Ma’am, Al Sharpton is a pretender. He is going to tell you to pretend that the color of your skin matters. He is going to ask you to ignore the now overwhelming proof that 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, blacks are now destroying each other faster than the KKK could have dreamed.”

As I walked away, the group stood frozen, not knowing how to reply.

Later, as Sharpton preached a divisive message void of actual solutions on how to “close the education and economic gap” in the “black community,” Dr. Alveda King, Martin Luther King’s niece, invoked the spirit of her slain uncle proclaiming, “I too have a dream, that white privilege will become human privilege and that people of every ethnic blend will receive everyone as brothers and sisters in the love of God.”

Her comments on restoring the “foundation of the family” in America were met, not with boos, but with a thunderous applause.

(What bigots those white folks! Having the audacity to cheer Dr. King’s niece like that. Racists the whole lot of them!)

I was probably the only 24-year old black college student in the crowd. It’s hard to know, because we had over 300,000 people there. But that didn’t matter to me. As we all stood hand-in-hand, American shoulder to American shoulder, our myriad faces streaked with tears as we sang “Amazing Grace.” It was a moment I will be proud to tell my grandkids about one day.

What that moment taught me is this: Something profound is happening in America that runs far deeper than politics. The ground is shifting, and it’s in freedom’s direction.

Update: Welcome ALICU blog readers. Always nice to welcome people from the left side of the blogosphere. Please feel free to read, comment and argue. As to the blog mention from Roy Edroso, one, thanks, two - "honkeys in tricolor hats?" - lol, not too cutting edge there Roy. I haven't heard "honkey" used for 20 years. Let me guess - you're a child of the 60's who hasn't quite broken you're pot habit?

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More On Jared Loughner's Slaughter In Arizona & Leftwing Media Hypocrisy

Two exceptional essays by Byron York and Ed Morissey on the mass murder by Jared Loughner and the media / left's rush to tie this act to Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. Byron York compares this rush to the media / left's actions after the Ft. Hood shooting by Nidal Hassan. Morissey builds on that, pointing to CNN's scurrilous reporting, and points to some words used by the left - the very tip of the iceberg - during the last campaign by Obama and the DNC concerning politics and bullseye's on targets for Democratic pickup.

This from Byron York:

On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire at a troop readiness center in Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going "to do good work for God." There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.

Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not "jump to conclusions" about Hasan's motive. CNN, in particular, became a forum for repeated warnings that the subject should be discussed with particular care.

"The important thing is for everyone not to jump to conclusions," said retired Gen. Wesley Clark on CNN the night of the shootings.

"We cannot jump to conclusions," said CNN's Jane Velez-Mitchell that same evening. "We have to make sure that we do not jump to any conclusions whatsoever."

"I'm on Pentagon chat room," said former CIA operative Robert Baer on CNN, also the night of the shooting. "Right now, there's messages going back and forth, saying do not jump to the conclusion this had anything to do with Islam."

Actually, that was responsible reporting at the time, at least until it became conclusively shown that Nidal in fact was motivated by Salafi Islam to carry out his mass murder. But as York goes on to discuss, in the very hours after this murder, with no evidence initially and then with the mounting evidence to the contrary, the left wing generally, and the left wing media in particular, have been falling all over themselves to tie this to Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and the rise in "hate speech" that the left wants everyone to believe is a phenomena unique to the past two years.

Ed Morrisey points out the massive hypocrisy of CNN to speculate that Palin and the Tea Party were responsible in any way for this mass murder and adds:

. . . as has been repeatedly pointed out in the hours since, Democrats have also used crosshairs and bulls-eye imagery in their own political communications, including one in Arizona “targeting” J. D Hayworth of Arizona. As far as the “reload” comment, it was less than three years ago that Barack Obama himself talked about responding to political opponents with a gun analogy:

Mobster wisdom tells us never to bring a knife to a gun fight. But what does political wisdom say about bringing a gun to a knife fight?

That’s exactly what Barack Obama said he would do to counter Republican attacks

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama said at a Philadelphia fundraiser Friday night. “Because from what I understand folks in Philly like a good brawl. I’ve seen Eagles fans.”

The comment drew some laughs and applause. But it also struck a chord with his Republican rival. John McCain’s campaign immediately accused the Democratic candidate of playing the politics of fear. They also mentioned that Obama said he would use a gun that would be illegal under Obama’s plans to cut down on illegal firearms.

Getting hysterical about the use of war terminology in politics is about as hypocritical as one can possibly get, as Howard Kurtz explained yesterday, especially for journalists covering politics . . .

To add a few thoughts, as to the Tea Party at least, the left would like us to believe that a determination to stop deficit spending, to lower taxes, and an inchoate desire to return to the Constitution at the time of the founding somehow is an invitation to violence. To the contrary, it is a call for a return to law.

The same cannot be said of at least a portion of the violent left wing rhetoric that has been with us since the days of Vietnam. Indeed, that was a world that gave us The Weathermen and many others who called for violence and who, in fact, did commit politically motivated violence, murder and mayhem. And to pretend violent rhetoric is an artifact of the right is ridiculous. The left's violent rhetoric was raised to an art form during the Bush years and, indeed, is still with us.





And on a closely related issue, where is the media outrage when we have seen, over the past few years, vile reverse racism, all of it accepted without comment by the left. Seemingly at the drop of a hat, the left calls virtualy anything they don't like "racism," wholly irrespective of racial animus. These people in fact have motivated mass murders, including the sniper murders by John Allen Mohammed and the murders by Omar Thorton, who last year at a distributorship in Connecticut, killed eight of his co-workers.




Silence.

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2010's Top 40 Obnoxious Quotes

John Hawkins at RWN has up his list for the most obnoxious, outrageous, sophomoric, idiotic, absurd, cretinous, daft, foolish, half-witted, inane, moronic, silly, sophomoric, stupid quotes of 2010. Some of my favorites:

My fear is that the whole island (of Guam) will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.
-- Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga)

We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it."
-- Crazy Nancy

Whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower....
-- Barack Obama

Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.
-- Prof. Mary Frances Berry, Penn. State

In practice, US officials seem to know better than to indulge in the patriotic myth that our constitution is the greatest system of government ever devised.
-- Matthew Yglesias

White folk done took this country. You're in their home, and they're gonna let you know it....You are not now, nor have you ever been, nor will you ever be a brother to white folk and if you do not realize that, you are in serious trouble.
-- Jeremiah Wright

We are owned by propagandists against the Arabs. There’s no question about that. Congress, the White House, and Hollywood, Wall Street, are owned by the Zionists. No question in my opinion. They put their money where there mouth is…We’re being pushed into a wrong direction in every way.
-- Helen Thomas

I know how the "tea party" people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their "Obama Plan White Slavery" signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.
-- The Washington Post's Courtland Milloy

There are many more. Do see them all.

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Blood On Their Hands

Imagine if the KKK were acceptable in polite company. Imagine if the KKK made regular appearances on your television, compliments of a press that viewed them uncritically. Imagine if cable carried KKK-TV. Imagine if the message of the KKK was repeated daily to the people of America. What if there were KKK studies at every major university where their message of racism was taught, contemplated, and made the subject of acceptable academic discourse. Do you think that white racism would be endemic today? Of course.

So what would happen if the roles were reversed?

Well, in fact, they are.

The NAACP calls the Tea Party racist. The Congressional Black Caucus claims to have been subject to repeated acts of racism in March by the Tea Party - something that even the NYT now acknowledges is false. Rev. Jeremiah Wright preaches Black Liberation Theology, an ideology premised on the belief that whites are the enemy and racism in America is pervaisive. When the worst act of violence on our soil hit home on 9-11, Wright called the violence justified as "America's chickens coming home to roost." Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, has been even more vociferous than Wright in pushing these same canards. Indeed, he preaches a degree of racism and vitriol every bit as toxic as that of the KKK. The Nation of Islam is also a major player in prison ministries. Then there is King Samir Shabazz, the leader of the New Black Panther Party, who, when he isn't trying to intimidate voters at Phillidelphia polling stations is advocating the murder of "cracker babies."

In academia, some of the most brilliant black minds teach Critical Race Theory, a belief system that racism is eternal and pervaisive. Others teach that all white Americans alive today are responsible for slavery and oppression that occurred before they were even born. These same academics teach that whites owe the black community penance for their sins in the form of reparations.

Jesse Jackson, a man who makes his millions throwing the race card with wild abandon, wants a new "black national anthem." Al Sharpton, well, he's a class unto himself. If you have not read the bloody history of this race baiter, do see this now decade old column by Katherine Jean Lopez. (H/T Soccer Dad)

The bottom line, what appears to be at least a substantial minority of blacks are taught to view the world through an entirely racial lens. If something happens that they do not like, than it must be racism. It promotes a lack of personal responsibility, mis-placed anger, simmering hatred and a deep-seated sense of grievance. It is toxic.

At best, this leads to massive and daily distortions in our society. At worst, predictably, it leads to violence. Though the reality of racial grievance as a motivating factor in black violence is studiously ignored by the press, it has shown up in some very high profile cases. The first time I noticed it was in the Virginia sniper case. No one seem concerned that it was The Nation of Islam that inspired the snipers John Muhammed and Lee Malvo. No MSM outlet that I am aware of paid any serious attention to the role of the toxic teaching of the Louis Farrakhan in that incident, though it certainly was not hidden in the testimony at trial. This from a local NBC affiliate reporting on the trial in 2006:

Muhammad trained Malvo in weapons, kept him on a rigorous diet that allowed only one meal each day, and introduced him to the teachings of the Nation of Islam, Malvo said. Muhammad hated America and thought white people were "the devil." . . .

Recently, in Knoxville during one of the trials for the subhuman acts of rape, torture and murder of Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian, two white UT students, perpetrated by a gang of four black men, one of the witnesses testified that one of the defendants was "Muslim and hated white people." Whether that hatred was a motivating factor in this crime - a crime itself studiously ignored by the MSM - I do not know. But it would seem likely based on the above testimony.

And now today, there is the following on the motivations of the black man who, the other day, killed eight people where he worked until being terminated for theft:

A black man who went on a shooting rampage at a beer distributor calmly told a 911 operator that it was "a racist place" and that he "handled the problem" but wished he had shot more people.

Omar Thornton called 911 after shooting 10 co-workers - eight fatally - on Tuesday morning at Hartford Distributors Inc. He introduced himself as "the shooter over in Manchester" and said he was hiding in the building, but he would not say where.

"You probably want to know the reason why I shot this place up," he said, his voice steady. "This place is a racist place. They're treating me bad over here. And treat all other black employees bad over here, too. So I took it to my own hands and handled the problem. I wish I could have got more of the people."

Connecticut State Police released the audio of the four-minute 911 call on Thursday, the day company and union officials rebutted suggestions that the company had ignored Thornton's complaints of racism.

Thornton, 34, went on his rampage moments after he was forced to resign when confronted with video evidence that he had been stealing and reselling beer.

The 911 call confirmed suggestions from his relatives and girlfriend that he believed he was avenging racist treatment in the workplace.

Hartford Distributors president Ross Hollander said there was no record to support claims of "racial insensitivity" made through the company's anti-harassment policy, the union grievance process or state and federal agencies.

"Nonetheless, these ugly allegations have been raised and the company will cooperate with any investigation," Hollander said.

The union said 14 of 69 dock workers, or 20 percent, were racial minorities - four black, nine Hispanic, one Asian.

The idea that Thornton's motive may not have been retaliation for losing his job has not sat well with many of the people who knew the victims and have firsthand knowledge of the environment inside the enormous distribution center in Manchester.

"Everybody just thinks this race card is such a wrong thing," said Michael Cirigliano, whose slain brother, Bryan, was Thornton's union representative at the disciplinary meeting and the president of the local union.

Michael Cirigliano also spent three decades working at the warehouse before he retired two years ago.

"The Hispanics and the blacks were telling me they've never seen anything they're accusing the company of in the bathrooms or anywhere else at HDI," he said. "It's never been separated white, black, Asian. It's never been like that."

He said the company had increased its hiring of minorities in recent years.

"They've been bringing in more and more minority people to fill the positions," Cirigliano said. "You could almost go as far as that's reverse discrimination. They were hiring the groups to balance the workplace, because that's what we are in America, there's a balance."

Anthony Napolitano, the son-in-law of victim Victor James, 60, of Windsor, said James treated everyone equally, regardless of race or religion.

Truck driver David Zylberman, a 34-year employee of the company, said that the racism claims "pissed me off because they were good people."

Thornton's ex-girlfriend, Jessica Anne Brocuglio, told The Associated Press on Thursday that he had a history of racial problems with co-workers at other jobs and believed he was denied pay raises because of his race. . . .

Nine people dead because of a black man who saw everything bad that happened to him through the prism of race. That act, like the Virginia snipers and possibly the Newsom-Christian murders noted above, are the extreme but wholly foreseeable results of those who preach racism as their meal ticket.

So this is where I think we are . . .

It is long past time that we on the right start demanding an end to the hatred and reverse racism that pervades and is accepted by so many on the left.

It is long past time for we on the right to stop accepting uncritically the teaching of Critical Race theory and similar canards in our colleges and universities.

It is long past time that we allow people like Rev. Wright and Louis Farrakhan to exist in America without demanding that everyone, blacks and whites alike, denounce them utterly and fully to the point that they are not tolerated on the left or the right.

It is long past time for the MSM be held to account for reporting unsubstantiated claims of racism.

And, I think, it is now time for an end to affirmative action and the use of disparate impact to persecute companies and people for racism where none actually exists.

Bernard Chapin wrote a few days ago, "racial blindness is a conservative thing." It is true. But it is not enough. Conservatives need to demand equality for minorities and condemn racism whenever and whereever it is found. But equally, it is time to vociferously demand the same from the press and from minorities. The current situation is untennable and immoral.

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State of Racial America

Columnist Dennis Prager has written an exceptional essay at NRO on the state of racism and race relations in America today. This from Mr. Prager:

When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, every prominent conservative I know was unhappy that a left-wing Democrat had been elected but very happy that a black American had won. Among conservatives, the general thinking was that it was good for America, good for blacks, and good for the world to see that America, so often (and in the conservative view unfairly) criticized as racist, could elect a black man as president.

True enough, with the caveat that it was obvious prior to the election that, Obama's promise to lead America into an era of post-racial politics was tripe. Everything in Obama's background, from his 20 year association with vile racist, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to his role in law suits to enforce racial quotas in lending suggested otherwise.

For decades, the conservative position has been that the Left’s criticism of America as a racist country — one with “systemic” racism — was a calumny. We conservatives did not merely believe, we knew that America had become the least racist country in the world. That is why, among many other indicators, more blacks have emigrated from Africa to America than came here as slaves (New York Times, February 21, 2005). Apparently, these Africans did not believe the lie about America’s racism. They came here for liberty and opportunity and got both.

When it came to the likely consequences of the election of a black president, conservatives — including this one — were fooled. The election of a black president of the United States has evidently had no impact on the use of the lie about American racism. Just as the American people’s adoration of a black woman, Oprah Winfrey, and the appointment of two blacks — including a black woman — by a Republican president as secretary of state had no impact, so too the election of Barack Obama has had no impact.

If Mr. Prager was fooled, it was the triumph of his hope over objective reality. For more than four decades, the entire raison d'etre of the far left has been to place people in victim classes, demand special treatment, and to claim that every attack on their politics is some sort of illegitimate attack on whatever particular victim class. The flip side of that is the left's zero tolerance for any would be member of a victim class who refuses to toe the far left party line. This has nothing to do with actual racism or sexism and everything to do with political power. Thus, there is nothing that America could do, including the election of a black female lesbian transgendered disabled illegal alien president, that would convince the left to give up its politics of victimhood. They have lived by it. They will die by it. The facts do not matter.

Virtually every liberal commentator who has written or spoken on this issue has described political opposition to Obama — and not only that of the tea parties — as racist.

Now, the NAACP has demanded that the tea parties cleanse themselves of the racist elements in their midst. . . .

One year and eight months after the president’s election, one can say with certitude that the election of a black has done nothing to change the dominant story (because the Left dominates our stories) about American racism. It is as central to the liberal/left depiction of America now as it has been since the civil-rights era.

But there is one very big difference. The vast majority of non-blacks no longer cower before the charge of racism. You can see it in the anger and ferocity of various tea parties’ responses to the false accusation of the NAACP. Before the election of Barack Obama, an NAACP attack on one’s anti-racist credentials might have been debilitating. No more. . . .

That is not just a big difference, it is the unequivocal beginning of a titanic shift in American politics. When the cries of "racism" or "sexism" no longer operate to shut down debate or delegitimize an opponent, the far left will lose virtually its entire power base - and its deeply distorting hold on America's political discourse.

The charge of racism leveled by liberal organizations, whether black or white, is now regarded as the politically motivated falsehood that it is. It is rightly seen, along with its six siblings — sexism, xenophobia, intolerance, bigotry, homophobia, and Islamophobia — as the Left’s way of avoiding argument by demeaning its opponents.

People who are labeled something they know they are not — and conservatives know they are not racist — snap at a certain point. One day the charge loses all its moral power. That happened this past year as a result of the liberal attacks on conservative opposition to President Obama as racially based. Every conservative knows that opposition to the Democratic agenda has nothing to do with the president’s color. Does any liberal honestly believe that if Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid were president and pursued the same leftist agenda Barack Obama has, there would be less conservative opposition because Pelosi and Reid are white?

So, something good has come of this: the de-fanging of the “racist” label. It no longer intimidates conservatives as it once did.

But there remains a major downside. To the extent that black Americans still believe that America is racist, or even merely that conservatives are racist, they pay a terrible price. Nothing is more debilitating than to regard oneself as a victim when one is not.

For that reason, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People not only fails to advance colored people, it inhibits them. And one day most black Americans will know this.

We hoped that day would be Election Day 2008. Many Americans believed that the fact that a black man was elected president — and the fact that among 300 million people there was virtually no identifiable negative reaction to America’s having a black president — would finally prove that this country is essentially race-blind.

But that apparently did not happen.

Therefore, if the NAACP’s preoccupation with white racism reflects the thinking of most or even many blacks, it means that there is nothing white America can do to undo the ongoing perception of endemic racism in this country — a perception that is now considerably more destructive to blacks than to American society as a whole.

Unfortunately Mr. Prager's assessment is spot on. The most ill served by the far left's victim politics are the victims themselves.

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The MSM - America's Fifth Column Laid Bare

Just how dysfunctional is the mainstream media (MSM)? Today we have the answer to that question in the left-wing MSM's own words. They are a fifth column, conspiring to effect political change by twisting the news, burying stories, and attacking the right with baseless charges of racism, sexism, etc..

The right has known this for years. except that none of it has been proven by admissions of these left wing journalists. But today, those charges are given substance in an expose by Johnathan Strong in the Daily Caller. Someone leaked at least a portion of Journolist e-mails to Strong - those that occurred during the time frame that tapes of Rev. Jerimiah Wright surfaced. Journolist, for those of you that have lived in a cave for the past several months or been receiving your news only from the MSM, was Ezra Klein's invitation only internet site for left wing reporters, pundits and academics.

Obama's association with Rev. Wright for 20 years was a huge story that flared on Fox then died in the left wing press. It went directly to issues of Obama's honesty and character. Johnathan Strong today in the Daily Caller exposes how many in the left wing media conspired to kill the story and delegitimize those on the right who followed up on the story. You really need to read the entire article to understand the full extent of coordinated efforts by the Journolist members to kill the Wright story. That said, several points made plain in the story deserve particular attention.

One is how these members of the media plotted to use baseless charges of racism against the right in order to deflect attention away from Wright and end any debate on the topic:

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” . . .

[Ackerman would later write] . . . What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

Using baseless charges of racism to delegitimize opponents of the left wing's agenda and shut down debate has for decades been an indispensable tactic for the left. But when the journalists who are supposed to objectively inform us of the news practice the same tactic, it shows a complete lack of ethics and intellecutal honesty. And on a related note, I sincerely hope that someone with an ounce of honor provides the Journolist correspondence relating to the rise of the Tea Party movement and the outrageous - and at least partially effective - efforts to smear the movement as racist, violent and as an outgrowth of extreme right wing militias. There is no doubt in my mind that there has been a coordinated effort by members of the MSM to do precisely that.

Most of the communications on Journolist dealt with coordinating efforts to bury the Wright story. For instance, the Daily Caller reports that "Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to 'particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media' who were members of the list":

Hayes urged his colleagues – especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way – to bury the Wright scandal. “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” Hayes said.

One journalist who responded to Hayes pointed out, perhaps unintentionally, the utter hypocrisy of the left's defense of their favored politicians:

Katha Pollitt – Hayes’s colleague at the Nation – didn’t disagree on principle, though she did sound weary of the propaganda. “I hear you. but I am really tired of defending the indefensible. The people who attacked Clinton on Monica were prissy and ridiculous, but let me tell you it was no fun, as a feminist and a woman, waving aside as politically irrelevant and part of the vast rightwing conspiracy Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita,” Pollitt said.

No kidding? At any rate, it was left to Spencer Ackerman both to acknowledge the fact that what these Journolist members were doing was unethical - but in his mind, justified. Responding to Ms. Pollitt, Ackerman wrote:

“Part of me doesn’t like this shit either,” agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

So, for the left wing media, the ends - electing their favored politician - justifies a complete abdication of journalistic ethics and a descent into the worst kinds of hypocrisy and outrageous attacks. They truly are a fifth column in America today.

This is perhaps the most important story to be reported in years since it goes to the very trustworthiness of a MSM that asks the nation to trust the honesty and objectivity of their reporting. A story such as this should be making the biggest of headlines. Yet, as one would expect, the MSM has buried this story in a vault miles below ground. For instance, the web-site Memorandum carries the major stories of the day and links to sites, including MSM sites, that have weighed in on the story. Here is the Memorandum entry for the Daily Caller's story as of 12:15 today:

Jonathan Strong / The Daily Caller: It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama's political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. . . .

Discussion: Politics Daily, Another Black Conservative, Left Coast Rebel, Hit & Run, Instapundit, Sweetness & Light, Right Wing News, Stop The ACLU, Le·gal In·sur·rec· tion, Weasel Zippers, theblogprof, Hot Air, Breitbart.tv, Mediaite, Althouse, NewsBusters.org, NewsReal Blog, Moe Lane, The Corner on National Review, Real Clear Politics, sisu, Gateway Pundit, Big Journalism, Say Anything, Pajamas Media, The Future of Capitalism, The Right Scoop and JustOneMinute

Who don't you see there? How about the Washington Post, the New York Times, ABC News, and NBC News among others. Bastards.

Let's give the final word on this to Andrew Breitbart:

Talk radio and the Internet have allowed outsiders the ability to challenge a multiple generational shift from journalism being about the story, to journalism being crafted toward a partisan end. From Newsweek killing the Lewinsky story to the Swift Boat veterans (until the undermedia pressure got too big) to the Dan Rather implosion to the open attempt to keep the Al Gore masseuse story under wraps to the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter debacle to the Van Jones admission of missing the story to the networks ignoring the ACORN video footage to the media playing up trumped up charges of racism in the Tea Party — while ignoring exculpatory evidence — to the mother of all media-as-political weaponry: the non-vetting of candidate Obama, the mainstream media has shown that it is in an ideological death spiral. And the ground is right here.

American journalism died a long time ago; today Tucker Carlson got around to running the obituary. What The Daily Caller has unearthed proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that most media organizations are either complicit by participation in the treachery that is Journolist, or are guilty of sitting back and watching Alinsky warfare being waged against all that challenged the progressive orthodoxy. The scandal predictably involves journalists posing as professors posing as experts. But dressed down they are nothing but street thugs. They deserve the deepest levels of public consternation. We must demand that they do.

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TPM, Slime, Sarah and the Tea Parties

What's the difference between TPM Muckraker and Andy Sullivan when it comes to Sarah Palin? In terms of their obsession with sliming Palin - none. In terms of how they go about their attacks, about the only difference appears to be that TPM is not obsesessed with Palin's genitals.

TPM Muckraker is a left wing site that has long professed their love for Obama and hatred for the right. But they, like virtually all on the far left, hold a special place deep in their dark, dark souls for Sarah Palin - and the Tea Party movement, for that matter. Lacking any semblance of intellectual honesty, they are quite willing to go to great lengths to attack Gov. Palin and the Tea Party movement, while utterly ignoring the screaming cognitive dissonance that creates when one looks at their treatment of the home team.

First up from TPM yesterday was Man Charged With Stockpiling Weapons Was Tea Partier, Palin Fan. It is the story of an obviously mentally unbalanced man,Gregory Girard, who happened to support Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Movement - something upon which TPM focuses upon in this "guilt by association" hit piece.

But there was no indication that anyone in the Tea Party movement supported Girard, nor that Sarah Palin even knew of his existance. The same cannot be said of other murders and radicals who have associated with political figures that TPM seemed to have missed over the past two years.

There was of course the murderer and anti-America radical who quite literally launched Obama's political career in a fund raiser at his home:



Then let's not forget Obama's twenty year association with a virulent racist



And then there are the thugs Obama didn't associate with - but whom his administration did protect in their efforts to commit voter intimidation:



And what of his long association with - and his employment during the campaign of - an organization whose members have been found guilty of vote fraud in numerous states:



TPM Muckrakers hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty hardley ends there. They also ran another story the other day - "'Warning: Tea Party In Danger': Leader Slams Palin As 'Wolf In Sheep's Clothing'." They report that "Dale Roberston," a person they characteris as a "Tea Party leader," is complaining that "the movement 'is becoming nothing more than a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party,' and slamming Sarah Palin as representing 'a growing insider's attack to the heart of the Tea Party.'" The problem with this report is that it has long been known that Robertson is a con artist, he holds no leadership position in any recognized Tea Party organization, and indeed, the local Tea Party organizations have explicitly disowned any association with him.

That said, if TPM wanted to report on real rifts between party leaders and a party's titular head, they certainly could have reported on the criticism of Obama coming from Senator Rockefeller the other day - essentially calling Obama's promises worthless in the video below:



But doing something like that would take a bit of intellectual honesty. TPM Muckraker is all about the spin. And the screaming cognitive dissonance.

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The Racism Of The Left

Racisim is alive and well in America. It is appropiate that the only living one time member of the KKK in Congress today is a Democrat. As I have written in detail here, racism is and has historically been a prime driver of the left. And nowhere is it on display today more than in the NYT editorial on the Ricci case.

The Ricci case, which I posted on extensively here, involved several New Haven, Conn. white and Hispanic firefighters who earned the right to be promoted after passing a test meticulously designed to be race neutral and to test only those areas most applicable to the positions of fire dept. captains and lieutenants. The City threw out the results because no blacks had earned a promotion.

The full facts of how the city of New Haven came to toss out the results is a story of vile race baiting and reverse racism. You have to read Justice Alito's concurrence to get the full facts. You can find those facts here.

The two New Haven Fire Dept. Chiefs, one of whom is black, saw nothing unfair in the test. Both were of the opinion that the test results should have been certified and the promotions granted. None of the many black and Hispanic senior Fire Dept. personnel from outside of New Haven who administered the oral portion of the exam thought that it was discriminatory in any way. And then there was Vincent Lewis:

Vincent Lewis, a fire program specialist for the Department of Homeland Security and a retired fire captain from Michigan. Lewis, who is black, had looked “extensively” at the lieutenant exam and “alittle less extensively” at the captain exam. He stated that the candidates “should know that material.”

The person who most vociferously argued against certifying the results was Rev. Boise Kimber. As Alito makes apparent, Rev. Kimber, a close associate of New Haven's left-wing Mayor, is a clone of Rev. Jerimaih Wright. And now, the NYT joins in the call. What all of these people have in common is that they are children of identity politics that would make permanent victims of minorities.

The penultimate holding of the Supreme Court is that racisim, whether traditional or reverse, is still racism made unlawful under Title VII (they never reached the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.) Moreover, while the Court applauded the efforts of New Haven to create a racially neutral hiring procedure that would not favor whites, to go beyond that, to disregard merit and gerrymander the results to achieve a specific racial mix is unlawful racism.

But that is not how the NYT sees it. While the purpose of the NYT editorial is to provide cover for the nomination of Judge Sotomayor, the authors nonetheless give us their opinion of the Ricci case. According to the NYT, "[o]n Monday, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to diversity in the American workplace." The NYT ignores all of the facts covered above and concludes that throwing out the test did not result in an act of discrimination. The gist of the NYT authors is that a racially balanced result trumps merit. You can read it here.

Not only does such an attitude explicitly condone reverse racisim, but it is deeply racist itself. Implicit in their position is the proposition that blacks are incapable of competing on a level playing field with whites. If that is not the very definition of racism, I don't know what is.

Obama promised us an America where the racial divide is healed. The truth is that this type of racisit identity politics is the far left's raison d' etre. They have no intention of giving it up.

On a different note, the NYT today also has an insightful article on the Supreme Court, making the argument that Chief Justice Roberts is incrementally and methodically inching the Court to the right. Unlike the editorial referenced above, this news analysis piece is a worthwhile read for Supreme Court watchers.

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Casual Marxism & Supreme Court Nominees

The Washington Post, yesterday, published an article on Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears. She is black, female and has a long record of leaning left in her judicial opinions. She is considered in the mix for nomination to take over the post on the U.S. Supreme Court that will open up with Justice Souter's retirement.

The left though, is expressing reservations. It seems that Justice Ward has a very shady association that may, as WaPo puts it, "complicate" her "chances" for nomination. So what is this association? Chief Justice Sears happens to be friends with conservative black U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Think about all the implications of such a mindset for a moment.

Let's try and work through even some of the issues raised by the view, reported casually by WaPo as if a reasonable position, that anyone who would dare maintain a friendship with Clarence Thomas is likely not Supreme Court material.

1. If you are black, you must embrace your skin color as the defining fact of your existence and your politics must reflect your victimhood.

2. To be a part of this victim class means that you must demonize those who do not accept skin color as a defining characteristic.

3. Merely associating with someone who holds differing political views is enough to mark you as not truly a "victim."

Such attitudes reflect how deeply marxian thought has metastasized in today's far left. It really is a horrifying thing that distorts all it touches.

I wrote a post several months ago on the history of race in America, noting that the Republican Party has always led the drive against racism and for equality. It has only been in the last half century that the far left has rewritten history, claiming the mantle of civil rights as their sole property and raison d'etre. They have not sought equal rights or an end to racism, rather they have sought to ensconce inequality in the law, to promote reverse racism, and to distort the concept of civil rights into a marxian vehicle of permanent victim classes. As I wrote in that post:

The far left fundamentally altered the nature of the Civil Rights movement when they claimed it as their own [in the late 1960's]. They imprinted the movement with identity politics, grossly distorting the movement's goal of a level playing field for all Americans and creating in its stead a Marxist world of permanent victimized classes entitled to special treatment. The far left has been the driver of reverse racism and sexism for the past half century. That is why it is no surprise that, with the emergence of a far left candidate for the highest office in the nation, Rev. Jeremiah Wright should also arise at his side and into the public eye preaching a vile racism and separatism most Americans thought long dead in this country. Nor is it any surprise that the MSM, many of whom are of the far left, should collectively yawn at Obama's twenty year association with Wright. Wright is anything but an anomaly. To the contrary, he is a progeny of the politics of the far left.

If we are now at the point that one can cavort with terrorists and the most vile of racists, but still be qualified for the Presidency, while maintaining a friendship with a person who holds conservative political viewpoints is a blockade on the road to appointment to the Supreme Court, what does that say about how skewed we have become as a nation? But to carry that even further is the fact that WaPo can casually report this as simple fact without considering any of the ramifications of what they are saying. At a minimum, it means, to me at least, that the fabric of our country has changed radically and perversely.

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AP Charges Gov. Palin With Racism (Updated)

AP plays their part as the MSM wing of the Democratic Party today. They recast substantive criticism of Obama as an ad hominem attack upon his race. The AP calls Gov. Palin's attacks on Obama as unready to lead and stating that his vision of America is fundamentally negative and out of the mainstream are "racially tinged" and "unsubstantiated."
___________________________________________________

The AP goes over the top today, playing the race card in an attempt to delegitimize Gov. Palin's attacks on the one:

By claiming that Democrat Barack Obama is "palling around with terrorists" and doesn't see the U.S. like other Americans, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin targeted key goals for a faltering campaign.

And though she may have scored a political hit each time, her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.

What, if anything in the above attacks, is a racially tinged subtext?

"Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country," Palin told a group of donors in Englewood, Colo. A deliberate attempt to smear Obama, McCain's ticket-mate echoed the line at three separate events Saturday.

"This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America," she said. "We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism."

A smear is a false or grossly overhyped accusation. The only smear here is AP's labeling of Palin's attack. Obama's whole life has been spent amongst people who see in America a nation that is inherently bad and in need of fundamental change. And that Obama and his spouse share that view regularly slips out into public view in unguarded moments. The most recent example that comes to mind is Obama's answer a few weeks ago to a nine year old child who asked Obama why he wanted to be President. Back to AP:

Her reference to Obama's relationship with William Ayers, a member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground, was exaggerated at best if not outright false. No evidence shows they were "pals" or even close when they worked on community boards years ago and Ayers hosted a political event for Obama early in his career.

You can go to Stanley Kurtz to fact check the AP on this one. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was the brain-child of Ayers that he created to inject his radical views into the classroom. The person who was allowed to head up the board for this project, almost assuredly with the assent of Ayers, was Obama. And when Obama went on from that into politics, the first fundraiser was thrown by Ayers. The importance to all of this is that Obama shares Ayers views that America is not an exceptional nation, it is a bad one bordering on evil that needs to be changed fundamentally and radically to the left.

But all of this is meaningless in the AP's world, where to challenge this or any of Obama's associations on substantive grounds is simply racist:

"The four weeks that are left are an eternity. There's plenty of time in the campaign," said Republican strategist Joe Gaylord. "I think it is a legitimate strategy to talk about Obama and to talk about his background and who he pals around with."

Palin's words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee "palling around" with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn't see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers' day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as "not like us" is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

This last four weeks is going to get ugly. As Republican criticisms of Obama become more pointed and cutting, expect this insipid broadside from the AP to become the norm as the MSM tries to protect their candidate. Obama won't play the race card again - he does not need to. The MSM is holding decks of race cards and is starting to deal on Obama's behalf.

Update: Via Hot Air, the McCain camp responds:

“The last four weeks of this election will be about whether the American people are willing to turn our economy and national security over to Barack Obama, a man with little record, questionable judgment, and ties to radical figures like unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers. Americans need to ask themselves if they’ve ever befriended an unrepentant terrorist, or had a convicted felon help them buy their house — because those aren’t smears, those are true facts about Barack Obama.” —Tucker Bounds, spokesman McCain-Palin 2008

Obama and the MSM are clearly going to play 52 race card pick-up with the McCain camp between now and 4 Nov. With that in mind, there should be absoluteky nothing stopping the McCain camp from coming out swinging over the subprime crisis. Yes, race cards are going to come fast and furious - but, as the above clearly indicates, they are going to get played anyway.

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Radicalism In Soothing Tones

One of Obama's greatest strengths, it seems to me, is his ability make the radical sound perfectly reasonable to the uninformed. Joshua Muravchik, writing at the WSJ, thinks likewise. Mr. Muravchik examines the actions and ideology of The One, finding a man immersed in radicalism.

This from Joshua Muravchik writing at the WSJ:

. . . Throughout his Senate career, according to Americans for Democratic Action, the dean of liberal advocacy groups, Mr. Obama voted "right" 90% of the time. Actually this is misleading, since ADA counts an absence as if it were a vote on the "wrong" side. If we discount his absences, Mr. Obama voted to ADA's approval more than 98% of the time.

This touches directly on the question of what, beyond the platitudes of unity, hope and change, Mr. Obama himself believes in. His voting record is one indication. Another is his intellectual evolution.

Abandoned by his father when he was still too young to remember him and then sent at age 10 by his mother to live in Hawaii with her parents, who enrolled him in a prestigious prep school, Mr. Obama spent much of his teen years searching for his black identity. Late in his high-school career he found a mentor of sorts in Frank Marshall Davis, an older black poet. According to Herbert Romerstein, former minority chief investigator of the House Committee on Internal Security, FBI files reveal Davis to have been a member of the Communist Party not only in its public phase but also when it officially dissolved and went underground in the 1950s.

According to Mr. Obama, Davis told him that a white person "can't know" a black person, and that the "real price of admission" to college was "leaving your race at the door." Perhaps influenced by this, he reports that at college, "to avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets."

. . . Thanks to a grant from a left-wing foundation, he was hired by a small group of white protégés of Saul Alinsky, the original apostle of "community organizing." Alinsky's institutional base was the Industrial Areas Foundation, which he called a "school for professional radicals" and whose goal he announced to be "revolution, not revelation." As Mr. Obama himself would put it, there were "two roles that an organizer was supposed to play . . . getting the Stop sign [and] the educative function. At some point you have to link up winning that Stop sign . . . with the larger trends, larger movements." In other words, "community organizer," to Mr. Obama and his colleagues and mentors, was a euphemism for professional radical.

. . . Mr. Obama's turn to electoral politics signified no change in his basic ideological orientation. As his wife, Michelle, put it: "Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He's a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change." ("I take that observation as a compliment," Mr. Obama said as late as 2005.)

. . . In his campaign for the Illinois senate, Mr. Obama was endorsed by the New Party, a coalition of socialists, Communists and other leftists. According to the newsletter of the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, whose members were said to constitute 15 percent of the Chicago New Party, "Once approved, candidates must sign a contract with the NP [which] mandates that they must have a visible and active relationship with the NP." Apparently, Mr. Obama signed such a pledge. After winning the primary (unopposed because his lawyers had succeeded in knocking all three opponents off the ballot), he appeared at a New Party membership meeting to voice his thanks.

Entering the national political scene eight years later, Mr. Obama did not, to be sure, appear as a radical, but he still bore the earmarks of the world in which he had been immersed for 20 years. He called himself "progressive," a term of art favored by veterans of the hard New Left, like Tom Hayden, as well as by old-time Communists. Early this year his wife, Michelle, lacking his tact, would kindle controversy by saying that his success in the presidential primaries made her feel proud of her country for the first time. The comment, a faux pas that she was soon at pains to explain away, flowed logically from her view, expressed in her standard stump speech, that our country is a "downright mean" place, "guided by fear," where the "life . . . that most people are living has gotten progressively worse."

. . . [Other] radicals, soft and hard, rushed to embrace Mr. Obama, often waxing rapturous in their support. Robert Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel enthused in The Nation that Mr. Obama's was "a historic candidacy," from which "new possibilities will be born." Michael Lerner wrote in Tikkun that the "energy, hopefulness, and excitement that manifests [sic] in Obama's campaign" was reminiscent of "the civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, and the movement for gay liberation." Most remarkably, Tom Hayden himself joined the chorus by breaking a New Left taboo against "red-baiting" and laying bare some of Hillary Clinton's own far-left history—this, in retaliation for the Clinton campaign's revelations about Mr. Obama's radical background.

Even after declaring his candidacy, and despite a certain inevitable sidling rightward, Mr. Obama still reflected the presuppositions of a radical worldview. In one notable remark, he said of voters in economic distress that in their desperation they "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Chastised for his condescension, he responded: "I said something that everybody knows is true." This was elitism of a very specific kind—the mentality of the community organizer, according to which people in the grip of "false consciousness" need to be enlightened as to the true nature of their class interests, and to the nature of their true class enemies.

The same suppositions are again evident in Mr. Obama's stances on international issues. Iraq, as he sees it, is only a symptom. "I don't want to just end the war . . . I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place." And what would that mindset be? In a 2002 speech that he frequently cites, he said the war resulted from

the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors . . . to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne . . . the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income . . . the arms merchants in our own country . . . feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.

In this litany of global perfidy, the issues of Saddam Hussein's murderous dictatorship, of American security, of the future of freedom, shrink to inconsequentiality next to the struggle of the oppressed against their American capitalist overlords.

When it comes to Iran, Mr. Obama has acknowledged that the regime presents a problem. But his actions—he opposed the Kyl-Lieberman amendment designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization—as well as his rhetoric imply that the greater danger emanates from George W. Bush (who is allegedly seeking "any justification to extend the Iraq war or to attack Iran"). Likewise on defeating terrorism, where he rejects the America-centric focus that Bush has given to the issue; instead, in the words of his aides, Obama's main goal is to "restore . . . our moral standing"—that is, to put an end to our aggressive ways.

Even the events of 9/11 could not shake Mr. Obama from the mindset that the enemy is always ourselves. The bombings, he wrote, reflected

the underlying struggle—between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together; and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us.

In this reading, the lessons to be learned from the actions of Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta are that we must accept multiculturalism at home and share our wealth abroad.

Read the entire article. There is much in there about Bill Ayers, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and Rev. Wright. I have pointed out many times before, using much the same reasoning as this author, that Obama sees the worlds problems and solutions through the naive and distorted lens of Karl Marx.

By this paradigm, he divides the world up into victim groups, America the victimizer, and economic concerns as the panacea for all ills. For example, in the wake of 9-11, Obama identified the primary cause of Islamic violence as "a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair." We know that is not true – the typical terrorist is just as likely if not moreso to be educated and middle class. Then there was his comment that the "bitter" folk of our nation, those who take principled stands on their religion and Constitutional rights, only do so because they lack economic opportunity. Obama has expressed a similar view of Iran, positing that between his dynamic personality and just the right economic incentives, the mad mullahs can be divested of their religious principles that now drive their world-wide mayhem and murder. Indeed, he even held out WTO membership as the economic key to defusing the mad mullahs, not realizing that Iran had rejected WTO membership in 2006. They value their religion and their revolution far more than they care about the Iranian economy. For all of his intelligence, it would seem that Obama views the world through a naïve and distorted prism that, in the current circumstance, would prove not merely ineffectual, but highly dangerous.

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A Pattern Of Associations

Here is another segment of Bill O'Reilly's interview of Barack Obama. According to Obama, Rev. Wright never displayed his vile racism or separatism during the 2 weeks out of every month that Obama sat in Wright's pews for ovr two decades. That strains credulity beyond the breaking point. And as O'Reilly, to his credit, notes - Obama's history shows that he regularly chooses to associate with radicals. Obama calls that guilt by association. Yet the wisdom that you shall know a man by the company he keeps is ancient. If anyone can give me examples of how it is inaccurate or tell me why it should be suspended when evaluating Obama, I'd love to hear the argument.

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