A Bitter Pill

Said Obama: "It's not surprising, then, 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."

Because of the stakes, I think anything is fair to test the character of next president including Obama's misfired words. But I think there is a whisper-in-the-wind quality is this statement and also in the Reverand Wright statements that distort the susbtance of the comments. The implication from Clinton and McCain is that Obama doesn't like the folkways of Main Street America with their belief in guns and God.

As far as the Reverand Wright statements are concerned, there isn't very much that is different from what many evangelicals have said, although using milder language. A common thread in countless sermons is that the 9/11 attack occurred not so much because of who we are-- a multi-religious, multi-racial people who believe in the rule of law and principles of the constitution-- or what we did-- specific policies that have promoted Israeli or oil company interests for example-- but the collective sins of the American people. Thus, the moralizers say, God allowed the towers to fall because of what lesbians in San Francisco and abortionists in Dallas were doing. I think this makes no sense, but I have heard people of faith make that claim.

Finally, I think it is ironic that McCain and Clinton are using statements like that to suggest that Obama is arrogant and aloof. McCain comes from old money and Clinton comes from new money and the wealth of both McCain and Clinton exceeds Obama by many orders of magnitude. I thusly question the pretense that they are in touch with most Americans whereas Obama is not.

Is Obama the Messiah?

"...a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany...and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama." Barack Obama - Lebanon, New Hampshire - January 7, 2008

http://obamamessiah.blogspot.com/

You will never hear me saying that Obama is the hope of the world. That said, we need to reflect on our own hero worship of the false prophet George Bush. There are parents who trusted Bush so much that they allowed their president to lay down the life of their kids on foreign soil to no ultimate good. But Bush is a man for all seasons, a man of faith who knew all verses to "Amazing Grace" and a hale-fellow-well-met NASCAR Rotarian who cracked his jokes around the Saturday evening barbeque.

During World War II, Americans called the Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin Uncle Joe, because like Bush he was a regular Joe with twinkly eyes. But Bush like Stalin were frauds and what you saw then and see now is terribly false and utterly evil. Just as Stalin invoked God for political reasons, so to does Bush, although Bush's motivation also combines a 12-step effort to battle his forty year addiction to alcohol. What ever influence the Reverand Wright had on Obama, it pales in comparison to the influence that the atheist Rove had on Bush, and Americans will realize that a vote for McCain is a vote for a third term of Bush. And those who don't realize that are either blind or evil or both blind and evil.

Bush's serial lies on matters great and small culminating in the massive loss of treasure and life of our fellow countrymen will mean only one thing: President Obama nominating for a life-time appointment Hillary Clinton to the Supreme Court. And when that happens, the only people who will despise Bush more than the liberals and the Democrats will be the conservatives and the Republicans.

The Top Story

I don't find it strange that the rants of a retired man of the cloth is the top story on all the cable news shows. After all, we're enjoying five years of peace and prosperity, a robust stock market, a strong dollar, and a popular president. It reminds me of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As hundreds of people were drowning, Fox and other stations continued to prattle on about the mystery of the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. It's especially delicious to hear Karl Rove weigh in on another man's Christianity. Would it be rude to inquire how Rove's agnosticism shaped Bush's public policies or whether or not McCain is anything more than a country-club Episcopalian where, as the joke goes, where there are three or four gathered together, there is always a fifth?

Taking Obama to School

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120104819435508233.html?mod=opinion_main

This has been the core of the conservative critique of the Clintons for years. So it is illuminating to hear the same critique coming from Mr. Obama and his supporters now that his candidacy poses a threat to the return of the Clinton dynasty. Even Democrats are now admitting the Clintons don't tell the truth -- at least until Mrs. Clinton wins the nomination.

Obama For President

My choice on the Republican side is Mike Huckabee, but I'll talk about that on another day.

On the Democratic side, Barack Obama gets my nod. In making the choice generally, I want to choose someone who can be a president, not some who seems to be running to make a political point, such as Kucinich or Paul. I also want to vote for someone, not against someone. As much as I dislike Hillery, I don't want my vote to be for the person who is running against Hillery. Finally, I want to vote for someone who represents a genuine change, not just with the Republican administration but also with the way politics is conducted today.

David Brooks, in The New York Times, best articulates for me at least why Obama would make a good president. Obama would be a good president because of his moderation, his centeredness, his vision, his integrity, and in his yearning to reduce the politics of attack and division. In a previous post, I mentioned how how children can rise above their backgrounds and bad parenting. And I am especialy impressed that Obama has made the kind of chocies that has allowed him to rise to where he is today.

"Obama is an inner-directed man in a profession filled with insecure outer-directed ones. He was forged by the process of discovering his own identity from the scattered facts of his childhood, a process that is described in finely observed detail in “Dreams From My Father.” Once he completed that process, he has been astonishingly constant.

"Like most of the rival campaigns, I’ve been poring over press clippings from Obama’s past, looking for inconsistencies and flip-flops. There are virtually none. The unity speech he gives on the stump today is essentially the same speech that he gave at the Democratic convention in 2004, and it’s the same sort of speech he gave to Illinois legislators and Harvard Law students in the decades before that. He has a core, and was able to maintain his equipoise, for example, even as his campaign stagnated through the summer and fall.

"Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side.

"But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.

"Obama did not respond to his fatherlessness or his racial predicament with anger and rage, but as questions for investigation, conversation and synthesis. He approaches politics the same way. In her outstanding New Yorker profile, Larissa MacFarquhar notes that Obama does not perceive politics as a series of battles but as a series of systemic problems to be addressed. He pursues liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways.

"Obama also has powers of observation that may mitigate his own inexperience and the isolating pressures of the White House. In his famous essay, “Political Judgment,” Isaiah Berlin writes that wise leaders don’t think abstractly. They use powers of close observation to integrate the vast shifting amalgam of data that constitute their own particular situation — their own and no other.

"Obama demonstrated those powers in “Dreams From My Father” and still reveals glimpses of the ability to step outside his own ego and look at reality in uninhibited and honest ways. He still retains the capacity, also rare in presidents, of being able to sympathize with and grasp the motivations of his rivals. Even in his political memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” he astutely observes that candidates are driven less by the desire for victory than by the raw fear of loss and humiliation."

Let me finally end this post by trying once again to put to rest the silly lie that Obama is the educational product of an Islamic madrassa. Of all people, Christians should stand for the Idea of Truth. But it is they who perversely seem to be jumping on this dishonest bandwagon. Here is a column I did earlier this year on this so-called issue. But ignorance and expediency being what it is, I expect this lie to continue to have a long life.

www.mymallandnews.com/2007/04/why-i-dont-watch-katie-couric.html

Obama's Heaven on Earth

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/10/07/obama-gop-doesnt-own-faith-and-values/

"We're going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth."

- Barack Obama

"The attempt to produce Heaven on Earth often produces Hell. Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell."

- Karl Popper

Obama vs. Hillary

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070724/ap_on_el_pr/democrats_diplomacy

Barack Obama's offer to meet without precondition with leaders of renegade nations such as Cuba, North Korea and Iran touched off a war of words, with rival Hillary Rodham Clinton calling him naive and Obama linking her to President Bush's diplomacy.

Older politicians in both parties questioned the wisdom of such a course, while Obama's supporters characterized it as a repudiation of Bush policies of refusing to engage with certain adversaries.

Who's the scariest?

Osama
Obama
Chelsea's Momma

I consider Hillary's response to the question to be a minor intellectual victory but a major political defeat. Focus groups right after the debate seemed also to take the view the Obama nosed ahead of Hillary. It reminds of the Gerald Ford many years ago when he asserted that Poland wasn't under the domination of the USSR-- narrowly true but contrary to what Americans generally believed.

A concern I have with Hillary, apart from her tendency to trim the truth, is her effort as I see it to demonstrate that whatever a general can do, she can do better. I think it's that attitiude that can have her looking for a fight should she become president. I also see a tendency as well to carefully triangulate between the policies of the Bush administration and the Democratic base to prepare for the general election. In any case, as much as Hillary's response may have won plaudits from the Council of Foreign Relations and the editorial staff of the Chicago Tribune, it scarcely reflects the kind of new leadership this country needs to to reject and repair the legacy of the Bush years.

Are We Safer?

Clinton: "We are safer than we were."

Obama: "No, we are not safer."

To: Interested Parties
Fr: Obama Communications

Re: America is not safer since 9/11
Da: June 4, 2007

During the Democratic debate in New Hampshire last night, there was disagreement over whether or not America is safer since the 9/11 attacks on our nation. Senator Obama believes and asserted in the debate that America is less safe since 9/11 largely because the war in Iraq has fueled terrorism around the world. He opposed the war from the beginning and has a plan to end it, bringing all combat troops out of Iraq by March 31, 2008.Recent studies by the U.S. State Department and the Council on Global Terrorism confirm that the war in Iraq has accelerated the spread of terrorism and increased the threat of attacks.

In a September 2006 report State of the Struggle: Report on the Battle Against Global Terrorism, the Council on Global Terrorism issued a report with the number 1 finding -- "Five Year Assessment: As of Now, West is in a Worsening Position in Struggle Against Radical Islam." The report issued a D+ for "Combating Islamic Extremist Terrorism," saying, "there is every sign that radicalization in the Muslim world is spreading rather than shrinking."

Read More

In a speech in San Antonio in April 2006, Gen. Michael Hayden (currently the CIA director) said: "New jihadist networks and cells, sometimes united by little more than their anti-Western agendas, are increasingly likely to emerge… If this trend continues, threats to the U.S. at home and abroad will become more diverse and that could lead to increasing attacks worldwide."

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According to the State Department's "Country Reports on Terrorism" released on April 30, 2007 - there was a 29% increase in terrorism worldwide from 2005 to 2006(much of that gain took place in Iraq and Afghanistan). The new statistics record a rise in terrorist attacks on nonmilitary targets globally to 14,338 in 2006 from 11,153 in 2005, with an increase in deaths to 20,498 from 14,618.

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According to a January 2007 CSIS report (cited in May/June Foreign Affairs), al Qaeda has trained up to 60,000 jihadists in Afghanistan.

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