Heh . . .

It's taken a few months, but we are finally able to starting defining a previously, seemingly inchoate word:



(H/T No Oil For Pacifists)

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The Fierce Urgency of How - Part II

I blogged below that while the Obama campaign may have been started on the basis of “the fierce urgency of now” – his campaign is now consumed by the “fierce urgency of how.” How will the juggernaut that was The One stop the the juggernaut of the moose hunting Sarah Palin?

We’ve seen several failed attempts from his campaign to date. His latest shows the conundrum – that Sarah Palin, when she was a mayor, sought earmarks. Obama’s problem – he lives at the trough. Thus while his attack may open a small crack in Palin's armor, it exposes the wide chasm in his own.

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This at the Politico:

Barack Obama took his first direct swipe at Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin on Saturday, criticizing her for supporting congressional earmarks before opposing them.

“I know the governor of Alaska has been, you know, saying she is change,” Obama said at a town hall meeting here. “And that is great. She is a skillful politician. But when you [have] been taking all these earmarks when it is convenient and then suddenly you are the champion anti-earmark person.

“That is not change, come on,” Obama continued. “I mean, words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up. You can’t just make stuff up. We have a choice to make and the choice is clear.”

The comments were his harshest attack yet on Palin, who sought millions of dollars in earmarks as mayor of Wasilla but later began criticizing them as governor. The Obama campaign has been searching for an effective line of attack against Palin since she burst onto the national scene a week ago as John McCain’s running mate.

The McCain campaign issued a statement that accused Obama of distorting the Republicans' record on earmarks, and hit back at him for pursuing the spending requests as an Illinois senator.

"Barack Obama has requested the equivalent of $1 million in new pork barrel spending for every working day he's been in the U.S Senate, while John McCain has never once asked for an earmark, and Gov. Palin has vetoed hundreds of millions in government spending, including killing the infamous 'bridge to nowhere,'" spokesman Tucker Bounds said. "Just like so many other issues, Barack Obama is all talk, has no record to back it up and isn't ready to make change."

Obama also took on McCain’s inner circle Saturday, saying the presence of former lobbyists at the highest tier of his campaign makes him incapable of meeting his pledge to shut down special interest influence.

“Suddenly, he’s the change agent,” Obama said of McCain. “He says, ‘I’m going to tell those lobbyists that their days in Washington are over.’ . . .

“Who is it that he’s going to tell that change is coming?” Obama asked. “I mean, come on, they must think you’re stupid!”

Read the entire article. You can find Sarah Palin’s take on earmarks in her own words in an Anchorage op-ed.

Obama rails against special interests is the equivalent of Larry Craig speaking out against soliciting sex in public restrooms. Obama's support for Democratic special interests is near perferct. I have only seen one vote from him against any Democratic special interest to date. That was his vote to allow immunity for telecom companies who helped in the wake of 9-11 - and even that was done with an eye clearly on November. And as to earmarks, Obama has requested $740 million worth of them, including, as Hot Air points out, the one for his wife's employer that was followed almost immediately by a tripling of her salary. Add to that Obama'a embrace of lobbyists once it became clear that the DNC could not fund the convention without them and you have hypocrisy writ on a grand scale.

At any rate, to answer Obama, clearly somebody thinks we’re stupid. It's just not John McCain or Sarah Palin. The fierce urgency of how indeed.

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Change To What?

Change is a neutral word. All things change. It is a constant. The question is whether the change is positive or negative.

Obama tosses out the vague word "change" and accuses McCain of being a clone of Bush. Of course, there is also a question what "change" Obama has in mind. Factcheck.org takes a look at both.

In terms of their records, McCain is a conservative willing to break from his party and President on occasion. Obama is a doctrinaire liberal who votes the straight party line. This from Factcheck.org:

. . . According to Congressional Quarterly's Voting Studies, in 2007 McCain voted in line with the president's position 95 percent of the time – the highest percentage rate for McCain since Bush took office – and voted in line with his party 90 percent of the time. However, McCain's support of President Bush's position has been as low as 77 percent (in 2005), and his support for his party's position has been as low as 67 percent (2001).

. . . Obama voted in line with fellow Senate Democrats 97 percent of the time in 2007 and 2005, and 96 percent of the time in 2006, according to CQ.

. . . To sum up, McCain has indeed voted to support the unpopular Bush 95 percent of the time most recently, but less so in earlier years. And Obama has voted pretty close to 100 percent in line with fellow Democrats during his brief Senate career.

Read the entire article. The change Obama promises is not a bi-partisan one. It is a hard turn to the left.

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Democratic Convention Day 4 - Stepping Down From The Mountain

This was about the best and safest speech that Obama could give. He did not speak of the oceans parting tonight. Nor, despite the Grecian motif, did he claim the powers of Zeus. This was a very well delivered speech, but it was uninspiring - and did nothing more than dust off the liberal wish list.

You can read the entire speech here. The guy is really good from a teleprompter. We will have to see how he does when really pressed in a debate. He did not fare well at all in Philly. At any rate, here were my notes from his speech -

We are in a second depression.

It can only be solved by

- massive increases in government programs and spending.
- cutting taxes
- taxing corporations heavier
- some cut in the capital gains tax for small businesses

A lot of anti-business rhetoric in here.

It can all be paid for by a massive reorganization of the entire government.

No drilling. Push alternative energy.

McCain = Bush on all things

He will solve all of our foreign policy problems, though he does not explain how. He gets real opaque here. No specifics at all beyond repairing alliances broken by Bush.

Obama again tried to inoculate himself from charges that he places ambition over country. He acknowledged that McCain is patriotic and expects the same in return. Don’t question his patriotism, irrespective of whether you believe he places ambition over the best needs of the country.

Abortion rights – he didn’t say much here, just a mention that we have too many in America. He ignored his vote on partial birth abortion.

Gay rights – same as abortion rights, Obama was supportive but very hazy, again not taking a real position.

Gun Rights - Obama differentiated between hunters and everyone else. This ought to set off the spidey sense of everyone watching from NRA headquarters.

He can’t wait to debate McCain. Someone hold him back . . .

Change. Change. And more change. We need change. Can anyone spare some change?

Most incredible line of the night: "If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from." The amazing thing was that Obama was saying this about McCain. I believe our phsychologist friends call this "projection."

Update: One interesting point raised by Obama in his speech. This from CNN:

If John McCain wants to have a debate about who has the temperament, and judgment, to serve as the next commander in chief, that's a debate I'm ready to have," he told supporters at the Invesco Stadium in Denver, Colorado.

I mentioned the bit about debate earlier. I only point out this entire quote since I have seen a series of attacks recently on McCain and his supposedly mecurial temperment. Harry Reid raised this two days ago. Time Magazine, an operation that has run five covers of Obama, ran a similar story the other day, and now we hear this from Obama. I do not think that this argument will go anywhere, and indeed, it got no traction when tried out two months ago. But it is interesting to see the argument gaining new life and see it being made by seemingly unconnected parties. This has the distinct smell of a deliberate strategy. If so, we will hear much more about McCain's temper from various sources in the near future.

Final thoughts:

He will get a bump because he really reads well from a teleprompter.

The bump will not be permanent because there are just too many holes in his resume and some of his key factual claims are just too outlandish.

There was nothing motivational about this speech. It was a vague laundry list.

On to Minnesota.

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Democratic Convention Day 1

A pretty dull night over all. I was looking forward to listening to Jimmy Carter open the festivities and speak about Obama serving out Jimmy's second term, but the DNC wisely pulled the plug on that. The only thing better would have been having Rev. Wright giving the opening prayer - but he is being held by David Axelrod bound and gagged deep in the jungles of Ghana with labels plastered all over his body saying "Do Not Release Until December 2008."

Pelosi spoke - and no one paid any attention. Heh. You couldn't hear her over the chatter from the floor. It was good to see Ted Kennedy make an appearance also. He looked remarkably healthy and gave a stump speech that was vintage Kennedy. We may have been given a hint of how dire is his prognosis when he promised to be at the January swearing in.

The main focus of the night was the speech by Michelle Obama, Barack's bitter half. She gave a very well rehearsed speech that was well delivered and, I thought, a good speech. It checked all the boxes and sounded the utopian hope and change themes. At least it was positive and did no harm. Karl Rove gave it a failing mark for being too much a stump speech and not enough an introduction into she and her husband.

Michelle Malkin has both the first draft of Michelle Obama's speech (heh) and the text of the actual speech.

The real fun was apparently outside of the Convention where the nations breakfast people - assorted nuts and flakes - gathered en masse. Gateway Pundit has all the stories, including:

- An anarchist riot outside the Sheraton Hotel resulting in sixteen arrests.

- Michelle Malkin getting chased about by screaming lefties.

- A Soros funded group has a bus containing a shrine to the evils of Bush and a film showing Americans being attacked by roadside bombs in Iraq.

- Midwest Jim enjoys the accomodations made available to our guests at Club Gitmo, compliments of Amnesty International.

- The People's Press Collective has video highlights of some of the demostrations. You will find some friendly faces in the crowd, including Cindy Sheehan and Ward Churchill.

Stay tuned tomorrow - its PUMA day.

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Is This An Effective Ad?

The ad attacks the grandiose and vacuous "hope" and "change" themes posited by Obama, exposing them to be what they are - calls from and to unadulterated narcissim. It does so by contrasting those calls with cold reality and the spirit of service and self-sacrifice. That is what seperates McCain's attack on Obama's vacuous themes from those of Hillary, who only attacked Obama's siren song without providing the stunning contrast.

Is the ad effective? Yes, but given the situation, more is required.

To add, Obama, the chameleon candidate, is infinitely flexible depending on the expediencies of the sitution. He changes principles at the same speed that a chameleon changes colors in response to the environment of the moment. A necessary characteristic to be able to pull this off is an amoral disdain for the truth. In an earlier century, Obama would have been the penultimate snake oil salesman.

McCain is insufficiently flexible - which is a blessing and a curse. He is highly principled and thus, when he makes a decision such as on the environment, he imbues that decision with the belief that it with moral and ethical meaning and an inclination therefore to stand with the decision through thick and thin. This does not foreclose reviewing the issue in response to changing facts, but it does slow his response down immensely. Thus, when the issues of energy and the economy have come into conflict, we have seen him slowly inch off of his position against off-shore drilling and the exploitation of our natural resources.

On a grand scale, to any student of leadership and human nature, this puts McCain light years ahead of Obama in terms of fitness for the Presidency. But given that many Americans do not view these two through that prism, it gives Obama the immediate tactical advantage. Thus, as blogged below, Obama has once again lied to the public - this time on his support for welfare reform - and we are still waiting for McCain to call him on it. McCain, intent on running an "honorable campaign," has not yet responded to the lie, instead coming out with the above ad.

McCain does not seem to grasp that part of running an honorable campaign is demanding the same degree of honor from your fellow candidate. He and his campaign need to demonstrate far more tactical flexibility while still maintaining his principled stands. This should be easily accomplished, but I don't see it yet. Thus as I view the above ad, while it is good, he is ceding to Obama the ground to rewrite history into a false and utopian fairy tale. Snake oil if you will. In a campaign with only four months remaining, this could be a fatal error.

(H/T Hot Air)

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Wright Matters & A New Definition of Hope

Barack Obama's Wright problems did not end when he denounced Rev. Wright two weeks and claimed, yet again, that he flatly had heard no racism, anti-semitism, nor anti-Americanism from Rev. Wright while sitting in Wright's pews for twenty years. It is a defense that may prove as damaging as his actual connections to Rev. Wright. Recently released exit polls showed that the Rev. Wright connection was a significant factor in the votes of many who voted in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. And Stanley Kurtz has examined Rev. Wright's magazine, The Trumpet. He finds further reason to believe Obama is lying about what he knew and when he knew it. Further, Kurtz finds that "hope," as defined by Rev. Wright in his sermons, itself takes on a distinct layer of racism.
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The Washington Post reported on a recent exit poll that shows the issue of Obama's twenty year relationship with Rev. Wright played a major factor in the votes of many in Indiana and North Carolina, suggesting that Obama's speech on race and then his denunciation of Wright in a subsequent news conference have in no way put this issue to bed:

. . . In network exit polling, about the same number of voters in each state said they considered the situation with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. "very important" to their vote as those who said it was "not at all important." And most who gave the issue a heavy weight voted for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), while those who said it was not a factor went for Obama, the Illinois senator, by wide margins.

In both states, frequent churchgoers were more apt to say they were influenced by Wright than were less actively religious voters. In North Carolina, among those who said they attend religious services weekly, nearly six in 10 called Wright important to their vote, almost double the figure among those who never attend services. Even among Obama's own supporters in the Tarheel state, 45 percent who attend services weekly called the controversy important to their vote; among those, a third who rated it "very important." . . .

Read the article. If the above is any indication, Obama's Wright problem are not going to fade into obscurity. To the contrary, it may well be fatal in the general election, particularly if there are any further revelations to call into question the truthfulness of Obama's frankly unbelievable claims. In this vein, Stanley Kurtz, writing at the The Daily Standard, has been examining Rev. Wright's magazine, the Trumpet. What he finds goes beyond simply establishing that racism and anti-Americanism are at the heart of Rev. Wright's black liberation theology. It calls into question how, if Obama learned the "audacity of hope" from Rev. Wright, how Obama defines "hope:"

To the question of the moment--What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it?--I answer, Obama knew everything, and he's known it for ages. Far from succumbing to surprise and shock after Jeremiah Wright's disastrous performance at the National Press Club, Barack Obama must have long been aware of his pastor's political radicalism. A careful reading of nearly a year's worth of Trumpet Newsmagazine, Wright's glossy national "lifestyle magazine for the socially conscious," makes it next to impossible to conclude otherwise.

Wright founded Trumpet Newsmagazine in 1982 as a "church newspaper"--primarily for his own congregation, one gathers--to "preach a message of social justice to those who might not hear it in worship service." So Obama's presence at sermons is not the only measure of his knowledge of Wright's views. Glance through even a single issue of Trumpet, and Wright's radical politics are everywhere--in the pictures, the headlines, the highlighted quotations, and above all in the articles themselves. It seems inconceivable that, in 20 years, Obama would never have picked up a copy of Trumpet. In fact, Obama himself graced the cover at least once (although efforts to obtain that issue from the publisher or Obama's interview with the magazine from his campaign were unsuccessful).

. . . If you've heard about the "Empowerment Award" bestowed upon Louis Farrakhan by Wright, or about Wright's derogation of "garlic-nosed" Italians (of the ancient Roman variety), then you already know something about Trumpet. Farrakhan's picture was on the cover of a special November/December 2007 double issue, along with an announcement of the Empowerment Award and Wright's praise of Farrakhan as a 20th- and 21st-century "giant." Wright's words about Farrakhan were almost identical to those that, just four months later, led a supposedly shocked Obama to repudiate Wright. The insult to Italians was in the same double issue.

I obtained the 2006 run of Trumpet, from the first nationally distributed issue in March to the November/December double issue. To read it is to come away impressed by Wright's thoroughgoing political radicalism. There are plenty of arresting sound bites, of course, but the larger context is more illuminating--and more disturbing--than any single shock-quotation. Trumpet provides a rounded picture of Wright's views, and what it shows unmistakably is that the now-infamous YouTube snippets from Wright's sermons are authentic reflections of his core political and theological beliefs. It leaves no doubt that his religion is political, his attitude toward America is bitterly hostile, and he has fundamental problems with capitalism, white people, and "assimilationist" blacks. Even some of Wright's famed "good works," and his moving "Audacity to Hope" sermon, are placed in a disturbing new light by a reading of Trumpet.

. . . Wright is the foremost acolyte of James Cone's "black liberation theology," which puts politics at the center of religion. Wright himself is explicit:

[T]here was no separation Biblically and historically and there is no separation contemporaneously between 'religion and politics.' .  .  . The Word of God has everything to do with racism, sexism, militarism, social justice and the world in which we live daily.

. . . [T]he pages of Trumpet resonate with enraged criticism of the United States. Indeed, they feature explicit repudiations of even the most basic expressions of American patriotism, supporting instead an "African-centered" perspective that treats black Americans as virtual strangers in a foreign land.

Although the expression "African American" appears in Trumpet, the magazine more typically refers to American blacks as "Africans living in the Western Diaspora." Wright and the other columnists at Trumpet seem to think of blacks as in, but not of, America. The deeper connection is to Africans on the continent, and to the worldwide diaspora of African-originated peoples. In an image that captures the spirit of Wright's relationship to the United States, he speaks of blacks as "songbirds" locked in "this cage called America."

Wright views the United States as a criminal nation. Here is a typical passage: "Do you see God as a God who approves of Americans taking other people's countries? Taking other people's women? Raping teenage girls and calling it love (as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings)?" Anyone who does think this way, Wright suggests, should revise his notion of God. Implicitly drawing on Marxist "dependency theory," Wright blames Africa's troubles on capitalist exploitation by the West, and also on inadequate American aid: "Some analysts would go so far as to even call what [the United States, the G-8, and multinational corporations] are doing [in Africa] genocide!"

. . . Again and again, Wright makes the point that America's criminality and racism are not aberrations but of the essence of the nation, that they are every bit as alive today as during the slave era, and that America is therefore no better than the worst international offenders: "White supremacy undergirds the thought, the ideology, the theol-ogy, the sociology, the legal structure, the educational system, the healthcare system, and the entire reality of the United States of America and South Africa!" (Emphasis Wright's.)

One of Wright's most striking images of American evil invokes Hurricane Katrina. Here are excerpts of a piece in the May 2006 Trumpet:

We need to educate our children to the reality of white supremacy.

We need to educate our children about the white supremacist's foundations of the educational system.

When the levees in Louisiana broke alligators, crocodiles and piranha swam freely through what used to be the streets of New Orleans. That is an analogy that we need to drum into the heads of our African American children (and indeed all children!).

In the flood waters of white supremacy .  .  . there are also crocodiles, alligators and piranha!

The policies with which we live now and against which our children will have to struggle in order to bring about "the beloved community," are policies shaped by predators.

We lay a foundation, deconstructing the household of white supremacy with tools that are not the master's tools. We lay the foundation with hope. We deconstruct the vicious and demonic ideology of white supremacy with hope. Our hope is not built on faith-based dollars, empty liberal promises or veiled hate-filled preachments of the so-called conservatives. Our hope is built on Him who came in the flesh to set us free.

Given Wright's conviction that America, past and present, is criminally white supremacist--even genocidal--to its core, Wright is not a fan of patriotic celebration. Predictably, Columbus Day is a day of rage for Wright. Calling Columbus a racist slave trader, Wright excoriates the holiday as "a national act of amnesia and denial," part of the "sick and myopic arrogance called Western History."

. . . Hostility to capitalism is another of Trumpet's pervasive themes. As we've seen, Wright blames multinational corporations for conflict and poverty in Africa. Trinity Church urges parishioners to boycott Wal-Mart, and Wright decries what he calls "the "Wal-martization of the world." In another one of his regular Trumpet columns, Reginald Williams criticizes McDonald's for failing to heed leftist advocacy groups by voluntarily raising the price it pays for tomatoes (so as to raise the wages of tomato pickers). Williams apparently wants to replace market mechanisms with a pricing system dictated by "human rights groups."

. . . Wright's swipe at Italians is actually directed toward the Romans who crucified Jesus (in what James Cone calls a "first-century lynching"). Following black liberation theology, Wright emphasizes that the black Jesus was "murdered by the European oppressors who looked down on His people." In a sense, then, disclaimers notwithstanding, Wright turns the crucifixion into a potential charter for "anti-European" anger.

. . . Wright opposes "assimilation," expressing displeasure with the likes of Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, and Colin Powell. He dismisses such blacks as "sell outs." Wright's hostility to assimilation goes beyond classic American expressions of pride in ethnic or religious heritage. For example, Wright claims that "desegregation is not the same as integration. .  .  . Desegregation did not mean that white children would now come to Black schools and learn our story, our history, our heritage, our legacy, our beauty and our strength!" This, for Wright, is genuine "integration."

One of the most striking features of Wright's Trumpet columns is the light they shed on his longstanding theme of "hope." Wright's "Audacity to Hope" sermon is built around a painting he describes of a torn and tattered woman sitting atop a globe and playing a harp that has lost all but a single string. In that sermon, Wright's allegory of hope amidst despair concentrates on our need to soldier on in faith amidst personal tragedy. Yet the "Audacity" sermon also features allusions to South Africa's Sharpe-ville Massacre (1960) and "white folks's greed [that] runs a world in need."

In Trumpet, the political context of the "hope" theme is harsher still. Instead of counseling determination amidst personal tragedy, Wright uses "hope" to exhort his readers to boldly carry on the long-odds struggle against white supremacist America: "We deconstruct the vicious and demonic ideology of white supremacy with hope." Here's another passage in the same mode:

[O]ur fight against Wal-Mart's practices has not been won and might never be won in our lifetime. That does not mean we stop struggling against what it is they stand for that is not in keeping with God's will and God's Kingdom that we pray will come every day.

In that earlier striking passage on the post-Katrina flooding in New Orleans, Wright speaks of his determination to "drum into the heads of our African American children (and indeed, all children!)" the idea that America is flooded with the "crocodiles, alligators and piranha" of white supremacy. That image creates the context for one of Wright's most energetic invocations of "hope":

We are on the verge of launching our African-centered Christian school. The dream of that school, which we articulated in 1979, was built on hope. That hope still lives. That school has to have at its core an understanding and assessment of white supremacy as we deconstruct that reality to help our children become all that God created them to be when God made them in God's own image.

The construction of a school for inner city children undoubtedly falls into the category of the "good works" which nearly everyone recognizes as a benefit bestowed by Trinity Church on the surrounding community, Wright's ideology notwithstanding. But is a school that portrays America as a white supremacist nation filled with predatory alligators and piranha a good work?

. . . Radical politics is no sideline for Wright, but the very core of his theology and practice.

There can be no mistaking it. What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it? Everything. Always.

Read the entire article.

(H/T Dr. Sanity)

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