… in case you’re interested. [Is this turning into a basketball blog?-ed I'm taking McCain over Obama in six.]

At the very moment Democrats are still wrestling with delegate selection in Michigan and Florida, Barack Obama has finally done what he should have done years ago – resign from the Trinity Church. How many years ago? Well, Oprah did eight, but I think she was late. Black Liberation Theology is reactionary and racist. Anyone who wants to see progress between the races should stay as far away from it as possible. It was fake at the beginning and it is fake now. That Obama ever had anything to do with it is repellent. He was not of the generation of Stokeley Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. He should have known better. Now he is riding the whirlwind.

UPDATE: From his presser, Obama calls the statements of current Trinity pastor Moss “innocuous.” I guess that depends on what your definition of innocuous is.

I was (semi) stunned to read that Michael Pfleger was to be the subject of a suddenly “dormant” documentary by Barack Obama’s top aide David Axelrod. From the Sun-Times: Pfleger is the subject of a documentary being made by Chicago-based David Axelrod, Obama’s top strategist. On Friday, Axelrod told me in an e-mail that the film project has “been dormant for much of the last two years due to other commitments.”

For anyone still interested, this is a classic case of why this kind of liberalism has become reactionary. Pfleger proclaims to the adoring crowd that blacks have the right to be angry forever about slavery. They should not forgive. Think how racist and condescending that statement is toward African Americans if you examine it. It is like saying that Jews should never forgive the current generation of Germans for the Holocaust. How cruel and self-defeating would that be? Yet Pfleger and, by extension the monumentally naive Axelrod, wish to continue racism “by any means necessary” (subconsciously or consciously for their own profit). Pfleger even resurrects the hoary “white skin privilege” from my days on the left. What self-defeating junk. And this is the cesspool from which Barack Obama has sprung. No wonder he doesn’t know what to say other than platitudes.

Don’t miss The Rebellion Within about dissension within Al Qaeda ranks by Lawrence Wright. Not everything in The New Yorker is liberal pap.

UPDATE: This report on women in Al Qaeda is also worth reading, although, of course, considerably less sophisticated than Wright’s essay.

When I was working with some dubious characters in Hollywood and would complain to my attorney, he would remind me of the cliché “You lie down with dogs, you get fleas.” He had a point. I tried to mend my ways – not always successfully. Hey, it was Hollywood, Washington for pretty people (to reverse another cliché).

Obama seems to have rolled around with more than his share of fleas, the latest being an execrable creep named Rev. Michael Pfleger, now getting his fifteen minutes. I had never heard of the reverend before, not being steeped in Chicago politics. Obama’s cronies Wright, Ayers and now Pfleger hide behind the moniker “progressive,” a bizarre use of the English language that currently appears to give people the right to be racist, sexist and everything else they claim to be opposing. But Pfleger seems to be if anything one degree crazier (and I mean this clinically) than his predecessors in the Obama roll of shame. What’s astonishing in all this is the weak response of Pfleger’s own Catholic church who appear to have let the racist reverend off with a mere slap on the wrist — Cardinal says priest was out of line. But, hey, this is the same Catholic church that took decades to react to pederasty.

For those of you who missed it, here is the “man who needs no introduction.”

Full disclosure: All things being equal, I usually vote for friends when they are on a ballot. And Paul Mirengoff of Powerline is my friend.

But that’s not the reason I am voting for him in the current Dartmouth Board of Trustees election. Paul is smart, conscientious, fair-minded, thoughtful — everything a college or university could want in such a position. He would easily get my vote just from reading him on Powerline, even though occasionally his views are more conservative than mine (to use the conventional terminology).

Now to the second part of my headline: Normally the election of university board of trustees is about as interesting a contest as dog catcher. But the Dartmouth Trustees in the last few years have become a focal point of the struggle for freedom of thought on our campuses where a form of rigid liberalism (it’s hard even to call it liberal, perhaps “reified post-modernism” would be more accurate, although pretentious) holds sway to a degree that verges on the Soviet (although in a gentrified form). Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki broke through this unilateralism of thought by winning positions on the Board through a citizen’s campaign. Now the Empire is Striking Back. Robinson wrote today of the struggles Mirengoff is having. Let’s get Paul’s back.

UPDATE: Paul is running for the Association of Alumni, not Board of Trustees. My bad. (Perhaps I’ve been a bit over-extended. In any case, the big battle over the composition of the Trustees continues and is significant.)

… one.

Sick.

People make crazy mistakes when they sense they are in trouble. It’s pretty obvious in the post Jeremiah Wright world that Obama is in trouble with the Jews. He could even be in bigger trouble than we know, from internal polling…. So like a white man appealing to blacks in the old days, he trots out the hoary “Some of my best friends are.. [gay, black, Jewish, Puerto Rican, fill in the blanks]…” argument. Only in this case he went for the brass ring by hitting the Holocaust button into the bargain. But unfortunately, like a desperate man, he missed, hitting his finger up to his knuckle by telling us it was his uncle [sic] who helped liberate Auschwitz when anyone who knows anything about the Holocaust knows the camp was liberated by the Soviets. It’s basic World War II history. His embarrassed campaign then had to back track to explain their harried candidate had meant his great uncle had liberated (sort of) Buchenwald.

Okay. This stuff happens. But Obama still has his Jewish problem. So here’s a simple solution. Why not get to the crux of the matter and apologize to the Jewish community the way any Jew who had spent twenty years in the synagogue of an anti-black rabbi would have to apologize to the African American community if that Jew were running for office? Obama made a big mistake, probably for his own gain. The truth is the only thing that will set him… and the rest of us… free.

Sounds like an exaggeration, doesn’t it? But I’m not so sure. He and his cronies have already made mince-meat of the so-called Clinton machine, and we know Bill is no slouch in this regard.

No, Obama gets the nod for several reasons, not the least of which is he has been able to hide so brilliantly under the mantle of “new politics” when his style is as old as Boss Tweed and as monolithic as the Mayors Daley from his hometown of Chicago. But he’s done Tweed and the Daleys one better because he’s got the nitwits in the national press eating out the palm of his hand as well. Those bozos bought into the Politics of Hope crapola from the get-go. Obama can go around accusing McCain of hobnobbing with lobbyists, being a warmonger, you name it, and they lap it up. Meanwhile they wouldn’t dare print anything nasty about Barack, even when it bites them in the foot. Can you imagine what chance McCain would have if he had spent twenty years in a racist minister’s church and then titled his book after a sermon from the minister? McCain would have had to retire to Fiji, but Obama is running for President, decimating his opposition. Has there ever been a more brilliant, machine-like political move than that? And now there’s the implication that Obama’s campaign manager might have been…ohmygosh… a lobbyist in good old Chi-town? How much mileage is that going to get in the MSM? Think it’s going to make it to the front page of the NYT along with story about McCain’s putative girl friend? I wouldn’t hold my breath, but I might my nose.

[Maybe we should start calling Obama "The Machine."-ed. No. Absolutely not. A desecration. That moniker is reserved for the one and only Sasha Vujacic... unless he loses tomorrow.]