Election 2008

The latest poll has Clinton 9 points ahead.

Obama Campaign Gives Up On Finding 'Mr. Wright'
by Ann Coulter


Whew! I'm certainly glad to hear the "snippets" from Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons "in context."

In the famous B. Hussein Obama speech that sent a tingle down Chris Matthews' leg, Obama dismissed the clips of Rev. Wright being played on TV as mere "snippets." He claimed the media were highlighting Wright's "most offensive words," complaining that they had been played endlessly, as if repetition were the problem with the statement: "GOD DAMN AMERICA!"

It's absolutely unheard of to repeat passages from famous speeches. In fact, I have a dream that we will not do that. Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask that the media stop replaying "snippets." All we have to fear is repetition itself, because we are the people we've been waiting for to tear down that wall of endless repetition.Continued

So, like I said: Whew. At last Rev. Wright's "snippets" have been put in a healing context. In two speeches and one uxorious interview with PBS' Bill Moyers over the past few days, Rev. Wright had plenty of time to lay out the lush analytical context of his remarks.

In his speech to the National Press Club on Monday, for example, Wright described America as a country of "segregation, Jim Crow, lynching and the separate-but-equal fantasy." Then he ran outside to feed more quarters into the meter where his time machine was parked.

Wright described this as a country that supported the "racist regime of South Africa" and "the Contras, who were killing the peasants and the Miskito Indians in those two countries" -- as opposed to the Sandinistas, who were equal-opportunity murderers with a more diverse group of victims.

He said this is a country that "cuts food stamps and spends billions fighting in an unjust war in Iraq," neglecting to add that before you can cut the food stamp program, you must have a country that has a food stamp program.

He said we are a country that sent "over 4,000 American boys and girls of every race to die over a lie." And Wright said it is a country "where I can worship God on Sunday morning wearing a black clergy robe and kill others on Sunday evening wearing a white Klan robe." (Unless, like me, you do all your Klan-related murdering on "casual Fridays.")

And, to listen to Wright, those were the "U.S. of KKK A.'s" good points! (Is it just me, or does Rev. Wright sound kind of bitter these days? I sure hope he doesn't have a gun.)

He clarified his Sept. 16, 2001, sermon, in which he said that on 9/11 "America's chickens are coming home to roost" by saying: "You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you." I'm glad to get the full context on that because I had thought he was talking about chicken farming.

Actually, that's pretty much the way I took it even when presented as a "snippet."

Rev. Wright also put into context his church giving an award to fellow Obama supporter Louis Farrakhan by saying: "He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century. That's what I think about him. ... I am not going to put down Louis Farrakhan."

Why did Rev. Wright's supporters think it would be helpful to hear longer versions of the "snippets"?

Curiously, Rev. Wright complained that "everybody wants to paint me as if I'm anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago" -- especially those damn East Coast, money-grubbing Jews, he carelessly added. This from a man whose entire oeuvre is based on reveling in what happened in this country 250 years ago.

Rev. Wright clarified his statement, "GOD DAMN AMERICA!" by explaining: "God doesn't bless everything. God condemns something -- and d-e-m-n, 'demn,' is where we get the word 'damn.' God damns some practices."

Well, that changes the meaning entirely.

One begins to suspect that the Clintons, flush with those megamillions they got from selling their previous tenancy at the White House, have put the reverend on staff. I believe this used to be called "walking around money."

Obama said the Rev. Wright he heard defending himself on Monday was not the Rev. Wright he met 20 years ago. This is the political equivalent of the "It's not you, it's me" speech. He might just as well have said, "I love Rev. Wright. I'm just not in love with him anymore. Hey, can I have my CDs back?"

If it takes Obama 20 years to notice that his pastor is a traitorous, racist nut-job, it will probably take him his full term of office to realize that the U.S. has been invaded and subdued by al-Qaida. Let's just hope President Obama pays closer attention during national security briefings than he did during 20 years of the Rev. Wright's church services.

The only good news for the Obama campaign this week is that Obama admitted that his relationship with Rev. Wright is "a legitimate political issue," which at least makes him smarter than John McCain, who just last week denounced the North Carolina Republicans for an ad mentioning Obama's raving lunatic pastor.


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Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN EVENTS and author of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Slander," ""How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)," "Godless," and most recently, "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans."

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http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=26302

Mister Beautiful
By Paul Greenberg
Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Ever notice how Barack Obama handles a question from a real person, as opposed to one of us annoying media types? Even a question that challenges his position? It's a thing of beauty.

Watch him at one of his forums. He listens patiently, nods his head sympathetically, and seems to share his questioner's point of view. He identifies.

He then begins his answer by restating the question, often enough in more persuasive form than the original. He doesn't so much entertain a question as improve it.

Only after he has established a bond between himself and his critic does he present his own, different point of view, carrying the questioner and the rest of the audience with him every respectful step of the way. Soon it's his critic who is nodding sympathetically, understandingly. Barack Obama has made another friend and supporter.

This is the approach he adopted to address the God-damn-America rhetoric of his old pastor - and rise above it. By the time he was finished, he'd actually turned a political embarrassment to his advantage in what soon became known as The Speech, an instant classic of American rhetoric.

If Barack Obama ever tires of his day job, he'd make a good editorial writer, for he has grasped the essence of the assignment: Appeal to the community's own standards, and at the same time raise them. It's called raising the level of public discourse, and it should be the end of every exercise in rhetoric. It's quite a trick, but Sen. Obama has mastered it when dealing with the issues.

It's when the talented Mr. Obama takes to analyzing people the same way he does issues, like some social scientist weighing us in the balance, that he gets into trouble. Real trouble. As he did when he analyzed the benighted inhabitants of deepest, darkest Pennsylvania during a private fund-raiser - in mod San Francisco, of all unfortunate places. That's when he committed the following masterpiece of two-bit psychology:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and . . . the jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing's replaced them. It's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

It was a revealing comment - not about people in small-town Pennsylvania and their counterparts all across America, but about Barack Obama. It revealed him as another smooth talker as glib as he is condescending. Note the way he just threw religion in there as one more harbor for America's disgruntled along with guns, opposition to free trade, anti-immigrant feelingsŠ.

Barack Obama's was an off-the-cuff analysis of those of us not as sharp and well adjusted and successful as he is. That is, the pitiful rest of us. It's the kind of attitude that has made the very word "liberal" odious in American politics, so much so that many liberals have stopped describing themselves as such, and started calling themselves progressives.

If there was a point in this campaign when the Obama magic cracked, that was it. Suddenly we saw an empty young man unscarred by age or experience or any great failure in life. This campaign's Golden Youth seemed blissfully unschooled by the best of teachers - a great failure.

The trouble with the senator's revealing comment in San Francisco was that it reduced rhetoric in its best sense - an appeal to common memory and shared values - to something else: cold, clever analysis. He'd severed the bond of community he'd been so good at establishing. He let the circle be broken.

Whatever he was saying in public, here Barack Obama was in private referring to us as Them, talking about how They feel, and what values They were clinging to for comfort. We had become just specimens under his microscope. And his oh-so-deep analysis of us? Poor creatures, we're just taking out our frustrations when we embrace, say, our faith. Maybe that sort of thing goes over in San Francisco; it doesn't in America.

There had been signs earlier in this campaign of the distance between Barack Obama and We the People he seeks to represent. As when he was campaigning in Iowa as if it were Zabar's. ("Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula? I mean, they're charging a lot of money for this stuff.") Goodness, is there a single Whole Foods anywhere between Dubuque and Sioux City?

He sounded out of his territory, like a Cub fan slumming in Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox. When the Sox are having a good year, tourists from the city's fashionable northern suburbs may brave the South Side to see how the game is really played. One year, when fortune's favored motored down from ivy-covered Wrigley Field in their Jaguars and insufferable little Lacoste polo shirts, they were greeted by a huge banner unfurled from the cheap seats: YUPPIE SCUM GO HOME.

The moral of the story: If a Democratic presidential candidate hopes to mobilize the core of the old Roosevelt Coalition, aka Reagan Democrats, he better not get caught exchanging class cliches with his rich buds in San Francisco. Overheard in that upscale setting, Mister Beautiful didn't sound so beautiful any more.

Back in the Iowa primary, which now seems years ago, Barack Obama's arugula comment could be seen as just a slip, an understandable gaffe on the part of a stranger in a strange land. But now one begins to wonder if it wasn't part of a pattern, and if America itself isn't a strange land to this elegant young stranger. Surely not. Surely he knows this country better than that. Or will pretend to.

Link

INDIANAPOLIS -- Sen. Barack Obama defended his opposition to a temporary break from the federal gas tax Sunday and put part of the blame for the nation's dependence on imported oil on the domestic auto industry.

Repeating criticisms of the Detroit carmakers he has made throughout the campaign, Obama faulted them for failing to build more fuel-efficient cars during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"Detroit ended up making investments in SUVs and large trucks because that's where they perceived a competitive advantage and that's where they felt they could make the most profit," the Illinois senator told host Tim Russert. "I think it was a mistake for them not to plan earlier, and now we're seeing a huge growth in fuel-efficient cars that is benefiting the Japanese automakers and Detroit is getting pounded some more."

During a dueling appearance on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Clinton disputed Obama's suggestions that she and Republican candidate John McCain were the same because they both support a gas tax holiday.

"Sen. McCain has said, 'Take off the gas tax, don't pay for it, throw us further into deficit and debt.' That is not what I've proposed," Clinton told ABC, adding that she wants the oil companies to pay the gas tax instead of consumers this summer.

More than 200 economists, including four Nobel prize winners, signed a letter rejecting proposals by presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain to offer a summertime gas-tax holiday.

Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, former Congressional Budget Office Director Alice Rivlin and 2007 Nobel winner Roger Myerson are among those who signed the letter calling proposals to temporarily lift the tax a bad idea. Another is Richard Schmalensee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was member of President George H.W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers.

The moratorium would mostly benefit oil companies while increasing the federal budget deficit and reducing funding for the government highway maintenance trust fund, the economists said.

``Suspending the federal tax on gasoline this summer is a bad idea, and we oppose it,'' the letter says. Economist Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution is among those circulating the letter. Aaron said that while he supports Obama, the list includes Republicans and Clinton supporters.

Dirtman wrote:[...]
I hate to say it, but I now think she'll be the next prez And Obama knows that now is not his time, and he also knows what he has to do if he ever wants the presidency. Watch for Clinton to get the nomination, and for her and Obama to kiss and make up, and for him to accept the running mate position. That will give him 8 years to establish his credibilty again in the public eye and for Wright to fade into the background, or die.

Bad times ahead.