In the short lead up to Barack Obama's speech on race March 19 in Philadelphia, the Left's reaction to hatemonger Jeremiah Wright was a) creative and b) revealing.
Typical was The Capital Times' take on the day before the speech:
"This is the week when we are all supposed to blather on about Barack Obama's former pastor. Pardon us if we think there are bigger issues out there."
You will be pardoned if you did not guess that the bigger issue than American race relations was... Tibet? Who knew?
This triumph of misdirection has the imprint of John Nichols about it. It's one of his favorite tactics. Trap him in a rhetorical corner and watch him change subjects faster than a meth addict. "What about Tibet?" It's got to be one of the great non-sequiters in history.
I've got to remember that. If my long-suffering wife demands to know where I have been ("Tibet") or my boss at work wonders where is that report, I can always counter with, "In Tibet." Perhaps throw in the Dalai Lama for good measure.
Why so protective? Well, of course, they want Barack Obama to win the Democrat(ic) nomination. But that's only the half of it. The other reason is that they agree with Jeremiah Wright.
On Tuesday, The Nation's Washington editor, Christopher Hayes, was apoplectic that anyone could take umbrage at the Rev's remarks:
Alongside some mildly nutty conspiratorial innuendo, Wright was offering, in heated even, hyperbolic terms, a set of fairly standard left critiques ...
Hayes lets it be known his verdict on America if his man Obama doesn't make the cut:
If, of all things, it is his pastor's heated denunciation of American injustice that undoes the candidacy of an African American with a legitimate chance at the White House, any conscientious observer could be forgiven for thinking: God damn America indeed.
My guess is it is a thought that has occurred to The Nation's writers before.
"We blew it, man"
- Captain America to Billy, Easy Rider.
The Left has been having an Obama-gasm over the Philadelphia speech. However, Michael Meyers, in the Los Angeles Times says Obama "blew it." (No, not the "Wayne's World" Michael Meyers; he is executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and a former assistant national director of the NAACP.)
Obama's "momentous" speech on race settled on merely "explaining" so-called racial differences between blacks and whites -- and in so doing amplified deep-seated racial tensions and divisions. Instead of giving us a polarizing treatise on the "black experience," Obama should have ... presented us a pathway out of our racial boxes and a road map for new thinking about race.
He should have depicted his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as a symbol of the dysfunctional angry men who are stuck in the past and who must yield to a new generation of color-blind, hopeful Americans and to a new global economy in which we will look on our neighbors' skin color no differently than how we look on their eye color.
The March 19 Blaska's Blog said that Obama may not have agreed with Wright's rants but kept his eloquent mouth shut:
Barack Obama may not have agreed with the naked racism of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright but that he filed his reservations away in the corner of his brain, between hallelujahs, as the price of doing business in the inner city. Given that Wright and his church were pillars of the community, this very ambitious politician knew when to fold his hands in order to build a base from which to launch his political career.
Is the Pope Catholic?
This insight may have been a case of the blind squirrel happening upon acorn. I just found this from the Hoover Institution academic, Thomas Sowell:
Shelby Steele's recent book on Barack Obama (A Bound Man) has valuable insights into both the man and the circumstances facing many other blacks -- especially those who were never part of the black ghetto culture but who feel a need to identify with it for either personal, political or financial reasons.
Like religious converts who become more Catholic than the Pope, such people often become blacker-than-thou. For whatever reason, Barack Obama chose a black extremist church decades ago -- even though there was no shortage of very different churches, both black and white -- in Chicago.
Some say that he was trying to earn credibility on the ghetto streets, to facilitate his work as a community activist or for his political career.
The speech Barack Obama could have given ... may have been the one Bill Cosby gave at the 50th Anniversary commemoration of the Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court Decision. I am indebted to Charlie Syke's blog for this.
Exhilaration: being shot at without result
I read Brenda Konkel's blog regularly to keep up on Progressive Dane. She has paid me the high honor of taking exception to my characterization that the Madison Common Council added the 30 extra police officers over the objections of PD. She says only four of the six PD council members voted to cut the chief's request for more cops. You do the math.
Yes, Brenda there are only six PD members on the Dane County Board. (I am convinced there are others who are cheating PD out of their dues.) But four of those six were among the six supervisors who went very public in the extraordinary Op Ed in the October 31, 2007 edition of The Capital Times to extol their catch and release criminal policies. That is why I referred to "PD's influence on the Board."
Finally, Brenda says I misspelled Megin McDonell's first name. Guilty. But then she disavows Megin's continued involvement in PD saying "To call her an operative is a tremendous stretch of the truth ... she had two sweet little girls and simply doesn't have time, unless she's somehow masterminding things between bottles and reading stories to and cleaning up after her kids."
But she still has time to front for a mysterious prog-lib front group called "Citizens for Dane County's Future."
On sale at supermarket checkout lanes:
This just in from The Progressive, Madison's own rival to The Onion (in humor, not relevance): "Cindy Sheehan: Press Gives Bush Ovation, I Want Him in Handcuffs."
And I want Cindy in a straitjacket.
