Saturday, March 22, 2008

In The Echo Chamber: The Destruction Of The White Enemy

clipped from www.boston.com

The problem for Obama is that Wright, the spiritual leader he has so long embraced, is a devotee not of King, - who in that same speech warned against "drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred" - but of the poisonous hatemonger Louis Farrakhan, whom the church's magazine honored with a lifetime achievement award. The problem for Obama, who campaigns on a message of racial reconciliation, is that the "mentor" whose church he joined and has generously supported is a disciple not of King but of James Cone, founder of a "black liberation" theology that teaches its adherents to "accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy."

Above all, the problem for Obama is that for two decades his spiritual home has been a church in which the minister damns America to the enthusiastic approval of the congregation, and not until it threatened to scuttle his political ambitions did Obama finally find the mettle to condemn the minister's odium.

Friday Night With The Owed And The "Non-Minorities"

In a fit of despair after failing most of his classes, M.J. wandered into my office one Friday afternoon in the middle of the semester and asked if I could help him out.
At 6pm M.J. showed up, and for the next twenty minutes we wandered silently through the stacks, lounges, and study areas of the library.  When we arrived back at the entrance I asked M.J. if he noticed anything interesting.  As we headed up the hill to a popular burger joint, M.J. turned to me and said:

"They were all Asian.  Everyone in there was Asian, and it was Friday night."   

Nothing I could do, say, or show him, however, could match the fire power of his support system favoring anger.  I was sad to hear of M.J. dropping out of school the following semester.

During my time teaching in the writing program, I watched Asians get transformed via leftist doublespeak from "minorities" to "model minorities" to "they're not minorities" in precise rhythm to their fortunes in business and education.

Their Heads Shaking In Unison

clipped from www.nypost.com

But don't tell this to those who define sophistication and nuance by a work's ability to confirm preconceived notions. A writer in The Independent frets that "so complex and profound and gifted a playwright should now seek to reduce his own work and his own politics to simple concepts." People like this see more complex hues in, say, George Clooney than in a painter's color wheel.

Mamet has committed the sin of free-thinking in a world that defines it as "ideological rigidity" while dubbing conformity "diversity." Already, critics are saying his work is slipping. Soon, they will say his work was never that great to begin with (that's what they've been doing to Dennis Miller for his heresy). The more Mamet rejects the divine pieties of the left and thinks for himself, the more the Greek chorus of straitjacketed "free thinkers," their heads shaking in unison, will tsk-tsk Mamet's rigidity.

Point Proven

clipped from hotair.com
Update: Please do read that Wash Times article and reflect on the fact that a movie of such immense public interest as to have drawn comments from heads of state and NATO officials before it’s even been released is struggling at this moment to find a single western media outlet, of any sort, to distribute it. Wilders’s point has already been proved, hasn’t it?

Happy Easter!

clipped from instapundit.com

"CRUCIFIXION FOR YOU?" "No thanks, it might be too disturbing for pre-schoolers."

Mark Steyn comments: "So now the story ends with the Last Supper - and presumably afterwards Jesus and His friends watch Elmo and then go to bed. That the foundational event of your faith is now excessively 'disturbing' is almost too parodic a reductio of the Wimp Christianity of the mainline churches."

UPDATE: Reader Greg Kemnitz emails: "A passion play without the Passion! How postmodern..."

But I think it's become obvious why progressive post-moderns can't understand Easter, hasn't it? It doesn't fit with PC -- the post-modern religion and its "sensibilities", does it?

And you wonder why they have this wild-eyed, overpowering urge to remove the cross from public display?

Sorry, but I'm not having any.

Happy Easter! He died on the cross. It was ugly and brutal at the hands of mankind. Because that's what we do and if we don't work to keep the sinners in check that's what we'll keep getting.

But he rose again. And if we can't absorb and grow the hope from that then the ugly despair and nihilism of post-modern totalitarianism will be our fate.

No thanks. I'm not having any of that either...

Puleeze (Part 23476)

clipped from instapundit.com

SO "PASSPORTGATE" LEADS BACK TO THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN? "The State Department investigation of improper computer access to passport records of three presidential candidates is focusing on one remaining employee — a contract worker with a company headed by an adviser to the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama." I suspect this is a case of idle curiosity and coincidental connections -- but had the coincidental connection been with the McCain campaign, people would be making a big deal out of it.

UPDATE: More: Chief of firm involved in breach is Obama adviser.

MORE: Reader Michael Gebert emails: "I heard they found out from McCain's passport file that as a young man, he spent several years in a Communist capitol. And with no entry stamp!"

The Long, Long Road To Denver

OBAMA: Well, I'm not familiar with the quote. So, here -- what I -- and I suspect that that wasn't the entire sentence, so that may not have been the -- I don't know what the context was in which was stated. What I've said consistently is that the American people need straight talk in their elected officials, and that's what we're going to try to provide in this campaign.


This quality of Obama's--pretending to be above the fray while in fact conducting a bare-knuckled political campaign--has understandably infuriated Hillary Clinton and her supporters. The Clinton campaign did a teleconference with reporters yesterday, too, which included a number of attacks on Obama:

Senator Obama talks about voter participation while he actively disenfranchises millions of Americans. He calls for high-minded debates while practicing low-down politics. He promises a different kind of campaign, while attacking Senator Clinton's character.
And don't forget that none of this is actually happening. Because, you know, it's only Republicans that do it. Puleeze.

Thomas On Plessy, Brown And Stare Decisis

clipped from online.wsj.com

History would seem to vindicate Mr. Thomas and his insistence on "getting it right" -- even if that does mean questioning precedent.

The perfect example is Brown v. Board of Education (1954), where the Supreme Court overruled the racist "separate but equal" rule of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which permitted legally enforced segregation and had been settled precedent for nearly 60 years.

It is the Plessy dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan to which Mr. Thomas points for an example of a Justice putting his personal predilections aside to keep faith with the Constitution.

"But," Harlan continued, "in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its citizens."

RTWT.

Welcome To Obama's "Post Racial" Fever Swamp

Asked about the sin of racism beating within Gran’ma’s breast, Obama said on TV that “she’s a typical white person.”

Which doesn’t sound like the sort of thing the supposed “post-racial” candidate ought to be saying, but let that pass. How “typically white” is Obama’s grandmother? She is the woman who raised him — that’s to say, she brought up a black grandchild and loved him unconditionally. Burning deep down inside, she may nurse a secret desire to be Simon Legree or Bull Connor, but it doesn’t seem very likely.
But America is not Ahmadinejad’s Iran. Free societies live in truth, not in the fever swamps of Jeremiah Wright. The pastor is a fraud, a crock, a mountebank — for, if this truly were a country whose government invented a virus to kill black people, why would they leave him walking around to expose the truth?

If It Works Right. Heh.

clipped from hotair.com

In an interview with the Oregonian, posted here but confirmed by me through its purchase from the archives, McPeak essentially makes the exact same argument that John McCain makes about staying in Iraq — and which Obama ridicules:

Is Iraq the last country we confront in the Middle East?

Who wants to volunteer to get cross-ways with us? We’ll be there a century, hopefully. If it works right.


Isn’t this the exact argument McCain has made repeatedly, and which Obama derides as “a hundred-years war”? Of course it is. The interview makes repeated references to American presences in Germany, Japan, and South Korea as models of the engagement McPeak envisioned in 2003, exactly as McCain has explained it in 2007 and 2008.

This should raise some eyebrows on the Obama campaign’s willful deception on this point. Didn’t McPeak bother to explain to Obama the exact same reasoning he had in March 2003, at the start of the war? Did Obama not bother to listen?
It'll be interesting to see if he gets thrown under the bus...

But Don't Forget To Contrast With Clintonite "Reality"

JOHN adds: I'm not sure just what it tells us about the Clintonite style, but my favorite aspect of the Gennifer Flowers story has always been that at the same time Bill Clinton was claiming the Flowers audio tapes were fakes, he apologized to Mario Cuomo for calling him a "Mafiosi" on one of them. Somehow, Clinton's supporters didn't seem to mind the contradiction.

Gets Stoned

We Are Asked To Believe In

clipped from www.youtube.com

Redux: The Living Embodiment

clipped from www.atimes.com

Senator Barack Obama is not a Muslim, contrary to invidious rumors. But he
belongs to a Christian church whose doctrine casts Jesus Christ as a "black
messiah" and blacks as "the chosen people". At best, this is a radically
different kind of Christianity than most Americans acknowledge; at worst it is
an ethnocentric heresy.



What played out last week on America's television screens was a clash of two
irreconcilable cultures, the posture of "black liberation theology" and
the mainstream American understanding of Christianity. Obama, who presented
himself as a unifying figure, now seems rather the living embodiment of the
clash.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Why Not Us?

This, therefore, brings us to the final concept of this treatise, which is the "Double Wheelbarrow Effect". 

For a society with untapped wheelbarrow potential to achieve prosperity within the confines of its own culture, it becomes necessary to see examples of members of their culture doing well en masse.  This permits traditional inferiority complexes vis-a-vis whites to vanish and permit previously disenfranchised people to gather the courage to ask "Why not us?".  The prosperity of the first few wheelbarrows can then be multiplied.  This can also be called 'globalization'.

Taiwan and Hong Kong were extremely poor in the 1950s, but rapid wheelbarrow-driven growth leading to prosperity by the 1980s, combined with the Chinese-American community in the US reaching critical mass around the same time, created an army of ethnic Chinese with the knowledge and skills to rapidly expand business ties with the PRC.

Trashing The Race Card


One of the funniest things in the world, according to the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Orombi, "is to see the expression on the faces of so-called African-Americans when they finally figure out that we consider them to be White."

The dirty secret of American racial politics is that Commonwealth blacks, and most of them really are BLACK, intensely dislike African-Americans. It was the same in Canada for all the years I lived there. It doesn't matter if it's Grace, the Trinidadian nurse; John, my Igbo (Nigerian) classmate in geology; "Auntie" the Jamaican coffee grower; or Henry, the Ugandan Archbishop.

That is the "Trash" frame of mind, and skin color doesn't matter. Bill Clinton has been described by some as "America's first black President" simply because Black Trash observed White Trash and found a kindred spirit.

Until they stop, we'll get nowhere on the "race" issue, because it isn't really about race. There are attitudes of success and attitudes of failure.
This is a RTWT.

The Looming Memory Hole

Never mind what Lawrence Wright says in "The Looming Tower" about al-Zawahiri's support for Iran. How about the 9/11 commission report? (p.61):

Turabi sought to persuade Shiites and Sunnis to put aside their divisions and join against the common enemy. In late 1991 or 1992, discussions in Sudan between al Qaeda and Iranian operatives led to an informal agreement to cooperate
in providing support—even if only training—for actions carried out primarily
against Israel and the United States. Not long afterward, senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives. In the fall of 1993,another such delegation went to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon for further training in explosives as well as in intelligence and security. Bin Ladin reportedly showed particular interest in learning how to use truck bombs such as the one that had killed 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983.The relation-ship between al Qaeda and Iran demonstrated that Sunni-Shia divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations.
As will be described in chapter 7,al Qaeda contacts with Iran continued in ensuing years.52


Looks like when O is president, he will be the "fireman" for the 9/11 Report. O'Brother...

And if he doesn't succeed in burning all the copies, what will be the sneering argument? Something along the lines of "of course murderers and rapists get better, what kind of a racist are you?".

Welcome to insulated credulity on stilts...

Therefore Hamas Does Not Exist

clipped from online.wsj.com

The other day blogger Tom Blumer reported that Obama's "spiritual mentor," Jeremiah Wright, had reprinted in his church bulletin an op-ed piece by Hamas's Mousa Abu Marzook under the headline "A Fresh View of the Palestinian Struggle."

Uh-oh, more trouble for Obama? Don't worry. Hamas is a Sunni fundamentalist group. It receives support from Iran. But Iran is Shiite. Therefore Hamas does not exist. Take that, John McCain.

LOL

It Couldn't Happen To A Nicer Bunch Of Murderous Morons

March 21,
2008:  The recent national elections were
largely ignored by most Iranians. The Islamic conservative dictatorship did not
allow most reformist candidates to even run. The clerics know that they only
have the support of about a third of the population, and have no realistic long
range plan to maintain their power. What the clerics are doing is trying to
apply more pressure, largely via the lifestyle police, to stamp out "un-Islamic"
dress and behavior.
The Islamic
conservatives have a problem in that their own children, and often some of
their own number, who are partaking in this forbidden foreign culture. It is
common for Islamic conservative politicians and officials being forced to rescue
their wayward kids from the lifestyle police. This attempt to change the
attitudes of young Iranians is not working, but the Islamic conservatives have
no Plan B.

Let Me Make Sure I've Got This Straight...

I have been a critic of NAFTA from the very beginning.

-- Hillary Clinton, February 26, 2008

Anyone remember Barack Obama's NAFTAGATE? Hillary's Texas and Ohio victories were made possible in no small part because she hammered away at Barack Obama for being secretly in favor of NAFTA, or at least, not as opposed to it as he claimed he was in public.

Well, it turns out that Hillary has now been caught in a bold-faced lie. It's all in the White House documents released this week:

Now that we know from the 11,000 pages of Clinton White House documents released this week that former First Lady was an ardent advocate for NAFTA; now that we know she held at least five meetings to strategize about how to win congressional approval of the deal; now that we know she was in the thick of the manuevering to block the efforts of labor, farm, environmental and human rights groups to get a better agreement.
... W is the stand out liar? Huh?

Transcendence Postponed

Then answer this, senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

The Accessory

Robert Fulford noted the delightful coincidence of Hayden’s Nation essay appearing at the same time as a Village Voice column by the acclaimed playwright David Mamet, entitled “Why I Am No Longer A ‘Brain Dead Liberal.’”
More “big news” was made shortly thereafter by another playwright. Writing in the Sunday Times of London, Tom Stoppard issued a remarkably similar declaration.

The way it looks now, Tom Hayden will resist joining Stoppard and Mamet to his dying day. And when all is said and done, he can never undo the enormous damage he helped perpetrate upon millions of Indo-Chinese people. Longing for a Vietnam that now mirrrors everything he wished to destroy, the anti-war activist now faces his destiny: going down in history as, at best, a pathetic footnote or a cryptic joke, and at worst, an accessory to mass murder and oppression ultimately repudiated even by the oppressors.

Meet The New Pastor ... Same As The Old Pastor...

Rev. Wright's successor is Otis Moss, who now leads the Trinity United Church of Christ. Rev. Moss is, of course, well aware of the controversy surrounding his predecessor. So he should have been well prepared for his interview on National Public Radio yesterday. Still, he was unwilling to distance himself from Wright's most irrational and noxious claims, including the ridiculous assertion that the United States government created the AIDS virus in a laboratory to kill African Americans. Instead of denouncing such ridiculous claims, he tap-danced around Rev. Wright's "narrative." Here is the relevant portion of the interview:


Barack Obama says that he wants to bring Americans together and get beyond the divisions of the past. So why does he continue to associate himself with those who seem to think it's a trick question if you ask them whether the federal government created the AIDS virus?

You Know, ALL of Palestine...

Aaron Klein reports that Barack Obama's Chicago church reprinted the Los Angeles Times column by Hamas leader Mousa abu Marzook. The column spouts the usual Hamas propaganda defending terrorism as legitimate resistance. The column was published on the "pastor's page" of the Trinity Church bulletin on July 22, 2007 and posted online here by
Bizzyblog yesterday. Perhaps most revealing is the church bulletin's own subhead over the column: "An official of the movement describes its goals for all of Palestine." You know, "all of Palestine," including Israel, whose right to exist Hamas denies and which it seeks to "liberate" for Islam.

That Old Time Media Myopia


Here is where the confusion comes in. The EIJ, as anyone who has studied al Qaeda knows, is as much "al Qaeda" as Osama bin Laden himself ever was. A number of accounts have pointed out that the EIJ merged with al Qaeda in 1998 (or not fully until 2001, depending on who you talk to). The implication being that the EIJ wasn't really "al Qaeda" until that time. This is nonsense for a lot of reasons.



The EIJ and its leader, Ayman al Zawahiri, who is al Qaeda's #2, have worked closely with bin Laden since the mid-1980's. There is ample evidence of this close working relationship from then on. Montasser al-Zayyat, an Islamist attorney in Egypt who represented Zawahiri's terrorist colleagues in court, has explained this in his book The Road to al-Qaeda. Zayyat writes: "Zawahiri managed to introduce drastic changes to Osama bin Laden's philiosophy after they first met in Afghanistan in the middle of 1986, mainly because of the friendship that developed between them.

Bad-Ass Stereotyping -- Whoops!

clipped from isteve.blogspot.com

Obama then proceeds to make stereotypical assumptions about young black males:

"I start picturing myself through the eyes of these boys, a figure of random authority, and know the calculations they might now be making, that if one of them can't take me out, the four of them certainly can."

The chapter ends:

"The engine starts, and the car screeches away. I turn back toward my apartment knowing that I've been both stupid and lucky, knowing that I am afraid after all."

Shocking, isn't it?

Most of the effort that goes into my Obama posts consists of my editing out the excess verbiage with which Obama padded his endless autobiography. To make this incident comprehensible, for example, I left out hundreds of intervening words of vintage Obama posturing about what a bad-ass he had been when he was the same age

Clueless

Whence Obama's problems? It is not that he believes in the venom of Rev. Wright, or that when he says something stupid like a "typical white person" he means to imply a stereotyped distasteful race. He doesn't.

The problem is instead the environment that he heretofore has navigated in — prep school, the Ivy League, the regional identity politics of Chicago, or Illinois liberalism — is hardly representative of his own country.
the Obamas suffer from that same blinkered existence and narrow associations that make the extreme seem accustomed and normal.

When he praises Rev. Wright he sounds like he is from Mars — but hasn't a clue that he does. And so like a deer in the headlights Obama keeps waiting for a black precinct captain or a Columbia professor to come to the rescue and explain — ever more clueless that even if they did, it wouldn't matter a bit.

And The Ticking Intellectual Bomb

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God's nature.

Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?


In other words, Paleologos was arguing that if the Koran commanded men to spread God by the sword then the Koran perforce did not come from God, or Allah if you prefer.

Benedict's little talk in Regensberg contained a ticking intellectual bomb.
I've linked to the Pope's Regensberg lecture before, and it still ticks loudly for those for those not deafened by their closely held explosions of nihilism...

The Computer Bomb

What makes the Mohammed Cartoon attack on radical Islam so potent that Bin Laden himself must oppose it, is two things. First, anyone can make fun of radical Islam. Second, the Cartoons are aimed at the weakest point of the Jihad: it's sources of authority. It is paradoxically true of all organized nihilisms that they rely upon their unquestioned authority to negate. For example, whereas Bolshevism could regard humans as expendable, dogma was sacrosanct. The real message of organized nihilism is that "everything is permitted" except to make fun of nihilism itself. Every act is lawful in radical Islam: to bomb markets, kill children, lie, cheat and steal. Everything: except to publish the Mohammed Cartoons.

I argued that the Islamic reaction to Geert Wilders converted every paintbrush, chisel and computer into a bomb. Islam has to suppress every affront to Mohammed lest Mohammed be shown to be impotent against affront.

RTWT. This is one of Wretchard's best posts in a while. Excellent references to Spengler and the Pope.

And of course, the Libs PC is the Islamist's best defense against our best -- and possibly totally NON-violent -- strategy to win... [UPDATE: And of course, Libs are constantly ridiculing conservatives as religious simpleton rubes while making excuses for the real simpleton rubes: the Islamists they like. This is why they are so upset at the ridicule building up against Obama -- their tactics are being employed against them.]

I haven't read all the comments but it looks like you should read them also.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Not Just Some Doofus -- And A Very Real Bus To Throw Grandma Under!

clipped from isteve.blogspot.com

Well, no, according to Obama's 1995 book, it is not at all true that she "once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street." Instead, she once confessed her fear of one aggressive black beggar who didn't pass by her but instead confronted her, demanded money, and then gave her -- an intelligent, level-headed woman who had worked her way up to a mid-level corporate management position -- good reason to believe he would have violently mugged her if her bus hadn't pulled up.

If this was some doofus politician like Bush or Biden who retold the story in a misleading fashion, you might view it as just their usual struggle with using the English language to get across what they really kind of, sort of mean. But Obama is so superb with words that it's perfectly reasonable to hold him accountable for choosing to slander his own living grandmother for his political advantage.

RTWT.

Obama Orbits The Black Theology Memory Hole

Cone, not incidentally, originated the movement known as black liberation theology. He said to The Washington Post:

"The Christian faith has been interpreted largely by those who enslaved black people, and by the people who segregated them."

No mention of the Civil War involving the sacrifices of tens of thousands of lives; no abolition or civil rights movements. No Abraham Lincoln.
In the closed world of Cone, Wright and Moss, Jefferson Davis and Bull Connor are alive and well. Black victimhood is the doing of white society, not the doing of angry black leaders and leftists, who see advantage and profit in keeping too many people in black communities captive.

Barack Obama knows all this, as a seventeen year congregant at Wright's church, and as a liberal community activist prior to his election to the Illinois Senate. That he feigns innocence,
is not the line one expects from a post-racial politician.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

You Can Pick Your...

Well, you can’t pick your grandma, but you can pick your pastor. And Obama picked the wrong one if he aspires to be the president of all America — an America that includes citizens of all colors who cringe at self-serving racial rationalizations masquerading as moral salvation.
Michelle nails it. And luckily, it's just blacks who are special. There are no Hispanics, Indians, Asians, etc in this country apparently.

Hmm. Why is that? Maybe because they are Americans?

And this reminds me of a gratuitous but impossible to forget joke that my departed dear friend Pete loved to tell:

You can pick your nose, and you can pick your friends, but you can't wipe your friends on the couch.

There, I've said it. I can see Pete trying to suppress a belly laugh right now. And I'm sure someone will find a way to tar me for being a racist for saying it too at the rate this is going...

Thank God My Granddaddy...

clipped from minx.cc

Recently David Horowitz created a stir by attempting to place ads in college newspapers denouncing the idea of reparations for slavery — that is, the disbursement of cash payments to blacks today as a way of repairing the injustice of historical slavery. This bizarre idea of reparations reminds me of a story related to the heavyweight fight in the mid-1970s between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Held in the African nation of Zaire, this famous fight was billed — quite insensitively by contemporary standards — as the "Rumble in the Jungle." In any case, after the fight was over and the victorious Ali returned to America, he was asked by a reporter what he thought of Africa. He replied, "Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat."

Can I Have Jesse Jackson Back?

clipped from minx.cc
Ok, let me see if I understood this speech correctly:


1. I was in church when Wright said some bad things.


2. I didn't like the bad things he said.


3. I never, ever spoke up about how I felt about the bad things.


4. I continued to go to the church even after he said the bad things.


5. All of which is irrelevant because my grandmother used some racil epithets.


Did I get it right?

Welcome To The "War"

As I wrote above, the plausibility of “democratic” central planning on a gargantuan scale emerged, in the West, from the circumstances of a World War. After that war, the idea of the “mixed economy” replaced it, as a kind of compromise. Free enterprise became our engine of wealth, while state bureaucracies expanded alongside, their parasitical “sustainable growth” depending upon ever higher levels of taxation. The “new Western man” is half-free, with approximately half our earnings retained, and half surrendered to the Moloch, which tells us how to live with ever-growing self-confidence.

But to get beyond this half-measure, the central planners need a war. The “climate change” and “global warming” scares are intended to provide this war, and justify Moloch in seizing the rest of our earnings, property, and freedom.

The Bus Again -- But Really Ugly This Time

"The Throw Your Grandmother Under the Bus Speech"   [Rich Lowry]

That's what a friend of mine calls it. She only raised him—to get compared to a raving anti-American pastor in his hour of political need.

By the way, my friend—who has shrewd political instincts—thinks the speech means Obama gets the Democratic nomination, but will have a big problem in the general election.

McCain: Truly The Heir To W's Incompetence Facing The EneMedia?

But McCain was right the first time. He shouldn’t have taken his statement back. And it’s the bloggers who are ignorant--not John McCain.

• The 9-11 Commission found extensive evidence of collaboration between Iran and al Qaeda. For example, the Commission concluded (p. 61): "The relationship between al Qaeda and Iran demonstrated that Sunni-Shia divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations."

• The mainstream media, including the Washington Post itself, has reported on Iran’s ties to al Qaeda. But now a blog hosted by the Washington Post dismisses the idea that the two could collaborate.

John McCain was right the first time. He shouldn’t have taken his comment back. But this whole imbroglio shows just how much ignorance there is concerning our terrorist enemies.

Not promising. This is like taking it as an article of faith that Democrats would not join with Republicans in defending the United States if it were attacked.

Wait a minute...

What Was The Problem With Those Sermons Again?

In the end, Obama delivered a well-crafted speech. Has he ever made a truly bad one? But his address at the National Constitution Center did not put to rest the concerns of those Americans who wonder just what he thought as he sat in Wright’s church listening to the pastor’s “controversial” statements; after all, Obama knew of Wright’s positions and had planned, until a very cold day and fear of controversy forced a change, to have Wright deliver the invocation at his presidential announcement last year. Beyond that, the reactions of some Obama partisans in the audience here in Philadelphia today did not put to rest concerns that Rev. Wright’s comments are not the subject of universal disapproval but are in fact positions with which many of Obama’s supporters agree.
The sad truth is that most of the things we have been watching Wright say are simply indistinguishable from nutbar leftists like Ward Churchill.

So Obama can't specifically disown them without suffering a beating from the leftist nutbar base. So he didn't.