Democratic what?

The Republicans, no doubt, get what they deserve, given the out-of-control federal spending the last few years, the corruption and sex scandals in the Congress, and the inability to articulate a conservative message.

That said, the current Democratic Party is nothing like what I remember my parents and grandparents belonged to. The latest Farm Bill is welfare for the wealthy. The restrictions on energy exploration and production are boutique—and hurt the working classes, who can’t wait for hydrogen cars and solar houses while they drive the 10-year-old Chevy truck to work at $4 a gallon.

Democratic populism is an oxymoron these days, something like multimillionaire John Edwards in blue jeans on his way to his mansion, or John Kerry in duck-hunting garb, or Michelle Obama and those oppressive Ivy League loans that have to be paid back and no doubt cut into the meager $20,000 annual donations to the pulpit of Rev. Wright.

What I miss most about the old Democratic Party was its “can-do” energy. Here one thinks of Pat Brown building California highways and universities, or a Harry Truman setting up the ambitious policy of containment, or the soaring rhetoric and tax cuts of JFK. After that it was mostly ‘how do we divide up the pie’ rather than ‘how we create a bigger pie.’ And for ‘damn it, we are all going to get along, and stand together or hang together’ we got ‘you and you and you can all have your hyphenated-names, set-asides, and tribal spaces.”

Populism

The last two weeks in speaking in various places I have had dinner with a few of what I would call “elite” Democrats. I was struck how in conversation one hears about Johnny going to Stanford, Jane to the Peace Corps after Princeton, the private clubs, the parties where the local grandee and the regional magnifico were present—all chit-chat sandwiched in between a sort of radical socialist hymn to Barack Obama. The point? That the people in question lived lives that were not merely not harmonious with their abstract world views of a radical egalitarianism by result, but downright antithetical to them—without a hint of the contradictions.

When a privileged wealthy liberal elite goes on about unfairness in between name-dropping and snobbery it achieves the same effect as the evangelical moralist talking about loose women or going to the bar for his fifth cocktail.

Quiet in Iraq

There are two keys to stabilizing Iraq—getting a Shiite-dominated government to turn on Shiite militias backed by Iran, and doing so in such a fashion to lure the Sunnis back into the government that will ensure regional support and a continuance of the Anbar Awakening and coalition against al-Qaeda.

Both seem to be happening in major campaigns in Basra, Mosul and Sadr City. And yet in the midst of these operations, American fatalities at the half-way point in May (it could change next hour) are, by the standard of past months, low. Something is going on in Iraq, and the U.S. military and its Iraqi allies are on the verge of achieving a radical reconfiguration of the theater—to the silence of the media.

I talked for about an hour with Dave Petraeus last October in Baghdad. One thing struck me: at the time in Washington it was fashionable for almost everyone (especially Senate Democrats) to damn the Maliki government for its incompetence and biases. But while acknowledging problems (that caused him problems), Petraeus was almost alone optimistic in his support for the elected government, the take-over process of the Iraqi Security Forces, and the eventual ability of the government to deal with the Shiite militias. “They’ll make it” is what I remember him saying.

Given the campaign hype, we haven’t heard much about Petraeus lately, but already he has achieved an amazing turn-about, not just in the military sense, but in the cultural and political sphere of giving confidence to the Iraqis, prompting them to take over their own security, and in a manner that assures them of our support even as we plan to slowly disengage.

If he pulls this off, I think his place is assured among the very great generals in our history. In his appreciation of the role of public opinion, politics and perceptions of war, he resembles Sherman; Marshall in his efforts to reform the military and promote a new sort of officer; and Ridgway in his ability by personal leadership to turn around an entire front. I think he is a rare talent, and as often happens in American history, we were given a great gift by his command—and none too soon.

Such things can happen very quickly in American history. In late 1861 Sherman was in self-imposed exile, melancholy and without a command, by December 1864 he was a legend. Grant by late April 1862 was all but finished, by July 1863 a genius. And so on…

Ten new regulations for the 2008 election

Barack Obama is a gifted politician who has led an exemplary life. His run for Presidency for many offers redemption that America has finally moved beyond race. But that laudable proposition is beginning to foster surreal rules of campaigning from both the media and Obama himself that do no one any good.

1. The 2008 campaign must stick to concrete issues and detailed policies. That said, Barack Obama can continue to speak only in vague terms of “hope and change.”

2. Rev. Wright’s racist tirades must be contextualized and only understood in their proper historic milieu of white racism—that is, unless he suddenly turns on Barack Obama, in which case one is now free to deride him as “mean-spirited,” “malicious” and on a “vendetta.”

3. Rev. Wright is like “an old uncle” and his church “not particularly controversial.” Those who insist otherwise are using “snippets” and “loops” out of context for cheap political advantage. But should the Rev. repeat his serial lunacies at the National Press Club on national television, and insult the sympathetic liberal DC press corps, then he is suddenly expendable and inexplicably not the same pastor that Barack Obama knew for 20 years—and so now to be freely derided as a “spoiler”.

4. It is assumed that Barack Obama’s exotic middle name Hussein can provide authentic multicultural fides and hope of projecting a new, more globally sympathetic American image abroad, but to voice ‘Hussein’ aloud is assumed to be nefarious.

5. It is legitimate to appeal to, and thus win en masse 90% of African-Americans of all classes over a rival liberal candidate, but it is absolutely illegitimate and a sign of a racialist strategy should someone else win two-thirds of that total of the white working-class vote—and, worse, acknowledge it as such.

6. John McCain can be written off as “losing his bearings” and wanting U.S. troops in Iraq for “100 years.” But to repeat the fact that a Hamas advisor has praised Obama, or that one of his own foreign policy advisors has met with officials of that terrorist organization, is “divisive,” “a distraction,” and the “old politics as usual.” McCain’s fuzzy references to Shiite/Sunni terrorist cooperation are signs of his senility. Obama’s repeated confusion over how many states there are in the Union (48? or is it 58?) is proof of exhaustion and lack of sleep.

7. Racial generalizations of any type in connection with the candidacy of Barack Obama are out of order. Barack Obama is free to characterize his grandmother as a “typical white person” and to lump the middle-class voters of Pennsylvania together as nativists, racists, and superstitious in their reliance on religion and guns. Only endemic white racism—never anger over Obama’s overt racialist stereotyping of the white middle class and his Reverend’s slurs—can explain that group’s rejection of him at the primary polls.

8. Substantial campaign contributions and the money nexus in politics are pernicious, proof of the “old politics” with a long history of distorting campaigns. The record fund-raising and enormous war-chest of Barack Obama are instead proof of a healthy American democracy and preclude any need for public campaign financing.

9. If a zealous pastor endorses John McCain, then his past illiberal talk about Catholicism demands a formal rebuke. If Barack Obama’s spiritual advisor of some twenty years addresses a meeting of a branch of the NAACP and announces that blacks and whites have genetically different brain chemistries and learning abilities, then one simply keeps quiet about it.

10. For conservatives to have suggested that the media was biased in favor of the Clintons in the 1990s was McCarthyesque. For Clintonites to suggest that it is now even more biased toward Obama is even more McCarthyesque.

This is the new political landscape that we are in, and those who object to it should expect to face hysterical outrage—in the manner of anyone who suggests that a messiah should at least try to practice what he preaches. And the problem is that those he will face as President—whether an Iranian religious nut, a Hamas terrorist, a Chinese communist, a Castro, Chavez, or North Korean extortionist—will follow no such Obama rules.

Basra wasn’t Tet because Tet wasn’t “Tet”

Just a month ago, pundits (cf. Frank Rich’s mid-April New York Times article) were writing off the violence in Basra—especially rocket and mortar attacks on the Green Zone—as Tet, 1968. But of course it wasn’t. And not just because Americans, in a spike of violence, lost 52 in April—not the some 1500 during Tet (depending on how one defines the length of the campaign).

That said, Tet was an impressive American victory, not a defeat—in Saigon, Hue, and Khe Sanh—in which the North Vietnamese broke the armistice, attacked with thousands of troops and lost nearly 50,000, surrendering control of the South Vietnamese countryside for over a year. The North Vietnamese after the war admitted the extent of the disaster they suffered—and the propaganda victory they achieved.

The chief problem in Iraq has been the fragility of the Anbar awakening, and concern that the tribal chiefs will revert in anger at the fact that the Iranian-back militias have either taken control of, or are immune from, the Maliki Shiite-dominated government. For Iraq to survive, the Sunnis to participate, and Iran to lose influence, there had to be some sort of Shiite government cleaning up of Basra and turning on Sadr and his thugs. That has happened, and while we might not have liked the timing, its resolution is necessary for Iraq to stabilize.

Basra, then, was hardly a Tet, but then Tet wasn’t a “Tet” either.

The War about the War

With the publication of Gen. Sanchez’s memoirs we are now fighting the book war over the real war, remembering that Gen. Franks, Doug Feith (by far the best documented), Paul Bremmer, and a host of others have already weighed in. Of course, “not me, him” is the theme, but there is nothing new here either. From 1865 to 1890 Union and Confederate generals refought Shiloh (cf. poor Gen. Lew Wallace), Gettysburg (poor Longstreet), and almost every campaign of the war. The same was true of WWII, as the memoirs of Eisenhower, Bradley (two versions no less!), Montgomery, and the notes and letters of Patton, were all mutually contradictory—as Falaise, the halt at the Rhine, Arnhem, and the Bulge were all blamed on someone else. And the position and status of postbellum writers always matter. (Nothing is sadder than Gen. Wallace’s entreaties to ex-President Grant to give him the benefit of the doubt about the mix-up at Shiloh). The Eisenhower Presidency and the longevity of Bradley meant that the mainstream narrative of a reckless, uncouth Patton was pretty much standard—not the truer account of a sophisticated, widely-read, sober and judicious thinker, who was right on his views of Falaise, Arnhem, and the Bulge.

What happened in Iraq won’t be known for years—and the judgment will hinge on whether we insure the continuance of the democratic government there, or abandon it and the country sinks into chaos.

Metamophoses

Think of all the weird changes we have witnessed the last few months:

The liberal media suddenly flipped and now apparently hate the Clintons far more than the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ ever did. In fact, they seem to be trumping all the arguments of duplicity and disingenuousness made between 1997-2000. One wonders whether, if they now acknowledge that they were wrong about Clinton then, some day in the future they will likely turn on Obama?

Race: the Clintons went from the “first black” co-Presidency to openly talking about catering to the “white” vote; likewise, the first “transracial” candidate went from “bring us together” to “typical white person” and white working classes clinging to guns and religion—and garnering 95% of the African-American vote. No one can think that defining oneself in racial terms first is not a dangerous and reprehensible trend, and can never be liberal, no matter how many liberals subscribe to it. The proverbial chickens came home to roost this election, and it is eerie to see liberal Democrats on both sides of the issues split along racial lines, implictly encouraged to do so by two “liberal” candidates.

John McCain went from the darling bipartisan moderate of the press to being portrayed as a foaming right-wing nut, supposedly too old and too tempermental.

Hillary went from the hard-left, elitist half of the Clinton team to a blue-collar, pant-suited, beer-drinking everywoman—and after she loses back to what?

Bill Clinton lost any gravitas he had so carefully sought to reclaim after the pardons, Monica, the asleep-at-the-wheel reactions to terrorism, etc., going from the star of the jet-setters at Davos to speaking to tiny unconvinced audiences in North Carolina.

Meanwhile gas hits $4 a gallon and there is no chance of a grand compromise in which conservatives further increase mileage standards and solar/wind subsidies in exchange for the far more important concession from liberals to drill in ANWR, our coasts, build refineries, as well as clean-burning coal and nuclear power plants.

A Final Note: Flying, Take #5

After doing more flying this week, I realize that 99% of the problems are caused by 1% of the passengers. And yet, given the squeeze of seats, lack of storage space, and long lines, just one or two persons can do a lot of damage.

While boarding, on yesterday’s flight, a 30-something woman, with a 4-5 year old in tow (along with two enormous carry-ons) in Zone 5, suddenly cut in (“My daughter must go to the bathroom, right now!”). Most murmured that she should go off down the hallway before boarding, but nevertheless she and her bags cut in and went onto the gangway.

Then once on board, she blocked the aisle for 2-3 minutes with her cell-phoning. Then she went against the aisle boarding traffic to get to the first class on-plane bathroom, again delaying boarding for some 150 people. Then once in the air, she gets up and pulls out an oversize carry-on to find her book (rummaging through the bag on the aisle floor). Then she asks the stewardess for various snack boxes and pulls out a $50 bill.

I won’t go on, but you get the picture that planes and their use are fragile, and a single miscreant can put them all out of kilter, ruin the mood of dozens, and delay even more appointments.

I never understood why the supposedly lax government has all sort of rules you dare not break at the security check-in; while the supposedly tough private sector enforces none of its own.

The New Hillary

Why does she continue? Because she grasps that Obama is just one more landmine away from imploding (e.g. , if Oprah left, why did Obama stay?). And given the sinister nature of Wright, he might just well release a revealing email, or a DVD clip of a nodding Obama in the first pew or some such thing that would require a 4th “correction” that would make his 3rd version of Wright “inoperative.” Or there is always Michelle’s self-absorption that is reaching a critical mass: one or two more “raise-the-bar” speeches will do the public in—and don’t forget Ayers and the rest. So, yes, Hillary was right months ago in warning about this. And Obama’s legions who threaten those with “racism” for pointing all this out proves only counterproductive.

Hillary appears to have morphed into a different person over the last six months. (Note I said “appears”). The sheer exhaustion of the campaign trail has left her voice worn, scratchy, tired, and Midwestern—and oddly far more appealing that her former know-it-all, mommy knows best, nasal sermonizing.

She Feels Our Pain?

For years cruel critics ridiculed her pantsuit, endomorphism, and her attempts to seem elegant when she was not. But now, weathered and tired, she seems more at home in the bowling alley, and her outfits convey a sense of practicality, wear-and-tear, and sensibility. The old Hillary’s eyes flashed and mouth tightened whenever challenged; new Hillary throws back her head and laughs on Bill O’Reilly.

When she was running 20 points ahead of Obama, and 10 beyond Giuliani, she was distant, arrogant, and aloof—and hard Left. Now in desperation, she is the earthy beer-drinker, and (far too late) appealing to the working classes. While she still gratuitously trashes George Bush, she seems to become more animated over Barack Obama, and welcomes the unflinching fight with his religious disciples who hate her with great passion.

Had she campaigned at this level of intensity last fall and edged to the center, she would have won the nomination. But, then, to be fair to her, had she run under any election rules known to Americans, she would have already won the delegate count by her big-state victories.

Has she metamorphosized permanently? I doubt it, but her present moth stage is at least most interesting than her past caterpillar incarnation. A final point: her “first woman President” is much less bumper-sticker than Obama’s “First Black President.” Believe it or not Hillary has almost made her gender incidental to her candidacy.

Fuelishness

Listening to all the candidates debate whether to lift the gas tax or not; to finish filling, or to draw from, the strategic petroleum reserve; and to tax or not tax more the oil companies’ mega-profits conveys a sense of the surreal. None of these measures will give us more fuel or cut consumption; some will no doubt worsen the situation. Is our generation so bankrupt that it merely fights over slices of the shrinking pie, rather than chooses to bake new ones? Can’t the last honest man in America simply say: “Either produce more energy, or voluntarily cut back on our lifestyles to something akin to 1970?”

In the liberal mindset, one forbids Alberta oil, stops Anwar, doesn’t dare drill off our coasts, insists on using high-priced natural gas that is scarce over plentiful coal for our power-generating plants, outlaws more refineries, accepts that nuclear power is bad and clean hydroelectric dams are worse—and then when naturally short of everything cries about the “two oil men” in the White House for not subsidizing solar and wind to magically cure all our ills.

Taxes…

I was reading some of Obama’s tax proposals. They seem designed to extinguish the notion of high-bracket, duel income elites. Say, someone is a veteran high-school principal (e.g., $110,000) and married to a lawyer, who, while not as well-paid as Michelle Obama, nevertheless is making $150,000. That $260,000 duel income will probably see a 4-5% increase in income taxes when Obama raises the federal rates, or about $10-13,000 more. Then when the payroll tax cap is lifted, say $160,000 more income is subject to another $15,000 in Social Security taxes, inasmuch as the lawyer’s income derives from a self-employed practice, and so gets the double dose of SS deductions. That takes about another $22,000. Now in toto we are up to $37,000 more per year to the Fed.

Don’t Expect a Thanks

Worse still, that hit does not go to reducing the deficit, as was true under the Clintoni when federal spending was not that much over the rate of inflation, but rather to fund entirely new federal programs that go well beyond the Bush wasteful spending.

Even worse, those taxes don’t arise in an environment of conciliation, but rather in an atmosphere of accusation and slander about the rich shirking their responsibilities—as if the net income left to this hypothetical couple is anything like the net yearly wealth of the multimillionaire Obamas ($4 million last year) or the Clintons (who knows—$10, $20 million a year now?).

Our European Future

So the “wealthy” couple, depending on what state and municipality they are living in, may well be paying now $100-130,000 in aggregate total taxes, take on another $37,000, and end up paying over $150,000—only to accept that the country is still broke and they are still dubbed “elites,” who nevertheless pay mortgages, tuition, food, fuel, car, etc. out of their remaining net income of less than half what they earned.

And with existing tax cuts and exemptions for the middling brackets to be expanded, we are reaching the new frontier in which the aim is that what you make won’t matter. I predict very soon that we are all going to end up with about $50,000 in family net income, either earning that amount tax-free, or making five-times that and having it expropriated.

The Obama Cult

I would say that about 90% of my current mail concerns things I have written about Obama—50% of it readers furious that anyone would dare question their messiah. I can accept that he is charismatic, means well, and has led a largely exemplary life, but cannot tolerate the charge that questioning Obama’s honesty and judgment in the Wright and related matters is somehow “racist.”

Let us remember: we were once promised that two liberal Democratic candidates would run a clean campaign in which the racially transcendent Obama would not, well, inject race. Almost a year later here are the sad facts—and they have nothing to do with the ‘right wing freak show.’ Note well:

1. Blacks are now voting 90% along racial lines against a white liberal wife of our first “black” President.

2. The liberal African-American transcendent candidate attributed racist views to his own grandmother who, he said, is “a typical white person,” and on a morally equivalent plane with the racist Rev. Wright.

3. Obama has smeared the white working class as xenophobic and nativist, racist in their distrust of the ‘other’, and hopelessly clueless in their clinging to guns and religion.

4. Then there is Rev. Wright: praised in Obama’s memoirs and in set speeches, and by his donations and 20-year church attendance, the Right Rev. nevertheless is on record slandering America, Jews, Italians, whites, et al.

5. In response, Obama at first defends him (“not particularly controversial”) , then as more hatred comes out, suddenly desires to give a transcendent speech on race (odd timing) in which he contextualizes Wright’s racism, and suggests right-wingers are smearing him by replaying these “snippets.”

Then Wright himself corrects Obama in a press conference, by assuring the liberal DC press corps that his hatreds are not taken out of context, but reflective of his odious views (race determines brain chemistry, Farrakhan is an historic figure, our government is giving blacks AIDs, etc.)—completely undermining both Obama (now in Wright’s view a mere “politician”) and the scores of African-American intellectuals, ministers, and professors who on the air for two months excused Wright by defining down Martin Luther King, quoting black liberation theology, citing Wright’s great works, and suggesting we are racists to demand explanations.

Enough said. Ethics and integrity call for pointing all this out. The real amorality belongs to all those who excused the racialism, gushed over Obama ‘context’ speech, and simply accept that a President of the United States need not meet the same standard of racial tolerance that others must adhere to.

Try all of the above with McCain or Clinton and see how long they would last.

Sunset of the West

We hear that Guantamo is a Stalag or Gulag; but the real disaster is the rising number of early released killers—so unlike the fate of our enemies caught out of uniform in WWII—who have gone on to kill the innocent, such as the former Gitmo murderer who blew himself and seven Iraqis in Mosul recently. The essence of modern liberalism: agitate to eliminate the theoretical and distant wrong to find alleviation of guilt, then absence of any contrition when in the here and now the innocent are killed for that magnanimity. The ultra liberal always feels good at someone else’s expense.

The Blame Game

Now Gen. Sanchez has a book out blaming Rumsfeld etc. for the botched occupation. I just reviewed Douglas Feith’s book for the next issue of Commentary. I tried to read the Tenet, Franks, and Bremmer memoirs (but could not finish them), as well as the “I accuse” volumes of Ricks and the Cobra II authors. No one wishes to defend the occupation, all wish to say it was someone else’s fault. For the final verdict–wait decades.

If one were to find out who did not close the gap at Falaise in August 1944, you can find all sorts of “not me” accounts in the memoirs of Eisenhower, Bradley, Montgomery, and various letters of Patton–and the most likely culprit on the American side—Bradley— is the least blamed. So I doubt we will know the full story for decades, and the decision will be predicated on the ultimate fate of Iraq.

One of the most disturbing facts of this war is how various officials in mediis rebus give a party line–and then,when out of office, suddenly offer the opposite take, claim they were coerced or framed, and that now they are finally speaking the truth.

I will read Gen. Sanchez’s volume, but at some point I would have wished he had taken some responsibility for the fate of the troops under his command and the pulse of the war. No one was stopping him in 2004 from implementing Petraeus-like tactics over most of Iraq. In the past I have been charitable to him, in the sense that he didn’t lose the war, and attrited the enemy despite the dismal news from the front.

I wish I could say all this blame-gaming is new and representative of our ‘me’ generation, but in fact it is no different from the rehashing of the Civil War and WWII for the next thirty years following those conflicts. Sherman’s memoirs caused a near riot; poor Lew Wallace begged Grant to write kindly of him. Eisenhower was hurt by Montgomery’s story; and Bradley published two memoirs, and got meaner in the process. Nihil novum sub sole.

Peace at Home Was the Natural Order of Things After 9/11?

We grandstand about “lost liberties” and a “new fascism” due to the elements of the Patriot Act and wiretaps of terrorists, although few Americans can point to any liberty lost since 9/11—only that Americans have not been slaughtered by Islamic terrorists as promised. Note that there is indeed a loss of freedom since 9/11 in the Western world; just ask a European novelist, film-maker, opera-producer, or cartoonist.

May Day

If illegal aliens wished to gain public support for their plight, then once again it was a terrible mistake to choose the international communist day of liberation (”Workers of the World Unite!”). When watching some clips of the mostly failed May Day immigration parades in California, I noticed the de rigueur Che posters. That is especially incoherent: immigrants come to a capitalist, democratic society in illegal fashion, and then glorify a communist cutthroat, who, had he had his way, would have ruined North America in the way he and his friends tried in Latin America.

How can one’s feet be so at odds with one’s head. Here is the message of the protestor with the Che placard: the feet say “I’m running as fast as I can from a failed Mexico to get to El Norte,” and the head responds, “I want to arrive in a place with revolutionary social fervor just like Mexico.”

Couric, Stephanopoulos, et al.

Very strange to see the Latino outrage at Katie Couric for simply suggesting in her film piece that anchor babies allow illegal aliens to enter into the entitlement bonanza—reminiscent of the left’s furor at Stephanopoulos. I guess no one ever thought that by creating identity politics and hypersensitive victimization that such things would not be, Frankenstein like, turned on their creators.

Obama’s Folly and Left/Right Brain Racism

The true crime of Obama is the silence about Wright’s grotesque “left brain/right brain” lecture in front of the NAACP. He sort of, kinda disowned Wright due to his National Press Club rants, but was silent about his racist, pseudo-scientific exegesis about genetic differences in learning—and the irony of delivering it in front of the premier civil rights organization.

Again, Obama et al. are systematically destroying race relations. Had any other African-American ran who made it a point to make race irrelevant, it would have advanced conciliation. But what Obama accomplished is the following: to demonstrate that the outrage over the Bell Curve, Imus, Michael Richards, etc. was merely politics, not based on principle or substance, since Wright, to either approval or silence, has trumped them all; to demonstrate by his “clingers” comments, “typical white person” cast-off sneer, Michelle no-pride speech, etc. that there must be two standards of acceptable speech, and that “victims” cannot be “victimizers” no matter what they say.

The Backlash

The result?

I don’t think I’ve heard or read more white cynicism in my entire lifetime. And it is a sort of “I’m tired” attitude, in which, after what Obama has said and done, the white middling class no longer cares all that much about minority angst, since it senses that minority leadership is hypocritical and shows a hatred of whites as voiced by Wright and euphemized by Obama. We owe all that to our first trans-racial candidate.

And because Obama either could not or would not tell the truth, the so-called typical white voter now believes not that he was inexperienced or clumsy, but in fact silently shares the Wright world view that peeps out in Michelle’s speeches, Barack’s off-the-record remarks, and was fully voiced long ago by Michelle’s Princeton thesis.

Note Well:

BO (Before Obama) my use of “white voter”, which is used routinely by the media these days, would have been considered too racialist for polite usage; but AO (After Obama) it is perfectly acceptable (again, cf. “typical white person”).

A Hope?

I think, nevertheless, that most black churches would reject Wright and privately most African-Americans are getting tired of Wright, and concerned that Obama is blowing what was a golden opportunity to run as a post-racial candidate, whose record and performance would make race irrelevant, not essential to his identity.

Superdelegate Fright

I think this is the current Democratic insider position:

Obama is a disaster. Yet, we’re stuck with him, and if we were to dump him at the convention (in the manner that for decades conventions used to do just that with primary leaders), African-Americans would sit out or worse, and leftists and students would try another 1968. In that calculus, they will probably nominate their McGovern and be willing to lose the fall election.

Final Note on Wright

I posted this today on the NRO corner:

Wright Postmortem

Why the Obama Pass?

I think we have sort of reached an impasse on Rev. Wright. Most Americans, I think, accept the following realties. Obama, by what he wrote in his memoirs, by what he said when he spoke in his early campaign speeches, by his frequent praise of Wright, and by his 20-year presence in front of, and subsidies to, Wright knew exactly the racist and anti-American nature of his odious pastor.

But many also seem to accept that they have invested too much in Obama and have come too far to accept anything that might end his candidacy. (Hence their hysteria over the Wright “smear”.)

In other words, privately they acknowledge:

—that their candidate made a devil’s bargain with a racist to create an authentic black persona in order to jump start a political career in Chicago;

—that their candidate was so inured to de rigueur anti-American speech from his church days, black-liberationist friends, assorted reverends, and former radicals like Ayers, that he never really thought things that Wright said were all that big a deal — hence his deer-in-the-headlights approach to the initial scandal and serial hedging. After all, in Obama’s adopted world, his church really isn’t “particularly controversial;”

—that their Obama messiah is hardly a new politician, but instead a very gifted and charismatic actor, who, in skillful fashion, can talk about utopian politics but then backstep, hedge, and get away with more than anyone since Bill Clinton in his prime in 1992 (one of the reasons that those two dislike each other so is that they are so much alike) — and that is not such a bad thing after all.

So while Obama is hurt in the primaries, and perhaps mortally so in the general election (the white working classes have a long memory), he will probably get the nomination, because his base will overlook all the above: they despise George Bush, will do anything to prevent another Republican in the White House, are tired of the Clintons, and feel Obama offers them symbolic capital, making them liked abroad and free of guilt at home.

Bottom line: unless Obama was caught on tape nodding as Wright screamed his obscenities at the United States, or an angry and spiteful Wright produces some letter, e-mail, etc. that reveals a kindred soul in Obama, or Michelle gives another speech “from the heart” about how hard she has struggled and how in return she has had no pride in this country, or there is another off-the-cuff, but recorded sneer at the white working class (50/50 chance on all four counts), I think he will weather the current storm and get the nomination. Obama evokes pure emotion and raw politics now, and logic, honesty, and accountability have little to do with his nomination bid.

05/02 05:13 PM

Let Me Get This Straight

A Rev. Wright gives a speech to the NAACP, an organization that has often fought a gallant battle against racists. But inter alia he insists that we are genetically different, and that our DNA is distinct by race, and to such a degree it explains cognitive differences and learning aptitudes.

Then he assures the audience that blacks have right-brains and whites left-brains (Asians something in between apparently). This genetic difference elucidates, Wright assures the audience, why blacks rap and sing and are so spiritual, and why whites are sooooo analytical and tediously rational.

Then, after spewing this pseudo-sophisticated race claptrap, Wright is given an ovation by the very organization that would have rightly crucified any white nut that had stooped to offer such a condescending racist diatribe. And you and I, in turn, are utter racists to question Wright, much less to suggest he and what he says have a bearing on the election.

All the while, Wright was gushed over by witless CNN commentators, who were apparently relieved (or disappointed?) that he didn’t go off on AIDs viruses and special Israeli bombs that target blacks and Arabs.

Then in his encore the next morning, Wright insults the liberal Washington press corps (always a dumb thing to do) for reporting his serial nonsense ‘out of context’. They sort of take his tongue-lashing even as larger excerpts from his rants prove that the longer one listens to him, the nuttier he becomes.

How odd that he claims his prior slurs were snippets, then at the Press Club expounds on them to assure the nation that they were not.

And our next would-be President has called all this “not particularly controversial?”

The wild enthusiasm that greeted Wright’s racist speech at the NAACP, and the packed sympathetic audience at the National Press Club that similarly applauded when he confirmed that his past offensive “loops” were in fact perfectly representative of what he feels, raise a disturbing thought: For 20 years various studies programs have insisted that victims cannot be victimizers, and the result seems to be that a great many African-American elites, who have met with success and live lives that millions of Americans could only envy, have become deaf to what is classically racist hate speech.

When Wright apparently referenced his hateful partial white ancestry (or at least I think that was what he was doing this morning), or genetic racial differences in brain chemistry, or caricatured Italians, or lumped together all whites as “rich white folks” and received ovations for that bombast from his audiences, the message was unmistakably clear and will have terrible ramifications for the nation at large.

Without sounding overly dramatic, I think Wright’s performance yesterday and today have cost Barack Obama the election. He cannot give yet another incomplete sermon on race (”Racial Relations Take 2?”), and will soon discover that his Hispanic, Asian, and white supporters suspect that he is either a racial chauvanist or tone deaf to those who are—and then will silently flee his candidacy, sort of like quietly getting up and leaving the theater half-way through a bad movie.

So Try a Thought Experiment …

If you wish to learn how morally confused the Obama campaign has become, how embarrassing Obama’s associates are, and how much harm his waffling has done to race relations, try this:

Example 1: John McCain’s pastor of twenty years and spiritual advisor addresses a large white convention and declares that whites have different brains than blacks, and then begins to mimic the supposedly different ways blacks speak.

Example 2. Hillary Clinton visits a white Midwestern donor base, and is caught on tape lamenting to her constituents that she can’t reach inner-city Chicago blacks because they are bitter and cling to their church and guns, don’t like those who don’t look like them, and scapegoat immigrants.

Example 3. While explaining his embarrassing pastor’s remarks, John McCain sighs that critics don’t understand white churches, don’t understand all the good that his church does, have taken remarks (“greedy black folks”) out of context, and is now being slurred by political hacks and opportunists.

Example 4. In explaining her comments, Hillary evokes her aged grandmother’s biases, who to be fair also said that “white people” scared her too. Meanwhile, Mark Penn pontificates that the black vote usually goes to liberal candidates anyway and so is not that important to the Clinton campaign. Then to rationalize what she has said, Hillary offers that a black friend of hers—in the manner of a “typical black person”—also has stereotyped white people.

Example 5: Meanwhile Cindy McCain says on two occasions that she never really had pride in America—since it was a “mean” country—until her husband staged his political comeback.

The ghosts of Howard Cossell and Jimmy the Greek, Don Imus, and Michael Richards apparently have now all been absolved by Barack Obama. Thanks to the bar he has lowered in reacting to racism, no one will ever be disowned for their racist remarks, but always contextualized and excused. Watch what follows as a consequence of what Obama has wrought.

Moral compasses

As I age, I have adopted a certain compass: the more I hear a Bill Ayers slam the United States, or a Rev. Wright slander America, the more I am convinced that what they hate was pretty good. And just as I find them odious, so too I find attractive the lost world that they now find odious. That said, I don’t think either Ayers or Wright are serious people. Ayers grew up a wealthy kid from the suburbs, went to prep school, and was the son of a multimillionaire CEO. He could have turned his angst at capitalism against his own family, or rejected his inheritance, rather than bored the rest of us with puerile rants, and occasionally criminal behavior. We used to call someone like that a simple “punk.”

Rev. Wright, grew up solidly middle class, went to white schools, was the son of a high school administrator and minister, won subsidies and scholarships from universities and foundations, and then in Machiavellian fashion, honed a message of anger and resentment from borrowed black liberation theology that turned a tiny church into a mega-money machine—which finally won him a multimillion-dollar 10,000 sq. ft mansion in a gated white estate. He is about as authentic a representation of the black underclass as is Barack Obama ($4 million in income last year, similar mansion, etc.), or as true a victim of the other America as is multimillionaire trial lawyer and chronic litigator John Edwards.

Wright’s genius was to figure out how to turn Christianity and a religion of personal responsibility and brotherly love into a Sunday morning gripe session that offered psychological venting for angry African-Americans who could blame “them” for their own personal angst.

Ayers’s brilliance was to act contrite, turn himself in ahead of the posse, bite his lip and beat a terrorism rap on a technicality—and then to turn around and brag, exaggerate, and magnify his terrorist thuggish credentials in the hothouse of academia where he rose as a sort of suburban pet bad boy from the old days. Had we not suffered September 11, we would still be hearing about his terrorist exploits glorifying attacks on policemen and others of the working class he championed from the faculty lounge.

Thoughts on the so-called food crisis

To the extent that there is a food crisis, it has been brought about by (1) panic speculation predicated on the fact that a quarter of the nation’s corn supply is now devoted to ethanol production; (2) a falling dollar that has meant foreign demand for U.S. foodstuffs; (3) millions of new middle-class consumers in India and China now have dollars to buy grains, beef, fish, and vegetables on the world market, and wish to eat as we do; (4) depressed food prices for a half-century that has led to idle acreage or land diverted from foot production.

When I began farming in 1980 the price of raisins was $1200 a ton, labor was $6 an hour, and diesel fuel was about $1 a gallon. Today raisins are about $1200 a ton, labor runs over $10, diesel fuel $4 a gallon, and most chemicals are 5-6 six-times their cost in 1980. There are no more small or medium-sized family farmers in my vicinity, in which they once predominated as late as the early 1970s. Most acreage is rented out to corporations, or, like mine, to a few farmers who have cobbled together large acreages by renting from former small farmers.

Only lately have cotton, grains, fruits and vegetables seen any spike in prices. In 1980 we received about $10 per 23 lb box for fresh grapes, and when we quit producing them in the late 1990s the price was about $7. I sold Santa Rosa plums in the early 1980s for $5-6 per 28 lb. box and when my brother retired in 2004, he was getting $5-6. I note there were no farm subsidies for growers of fresh fruits and vegetables, and I believe that there should not be any for any other commodities as well.

In some sense, the current prices are long overdue and might allow enough profit to remedy years of neglected investment in machinery, infrastructure—and farmer compensation. I know farmers complain, but they have much to complain about. That said, grain-based ethanols are insane: they are not energy efficient; drive up prices for food; and are not nearly as ecologically sound as a comparable barrel pumped from Anwar or off the California coast.

The good news is that there is no country in the world that has more competent farmers, better farmland, and more agricultural knowledge and research than has the United States, which can readjust its policies rather quickly without long-term damage. So far we have only seen one side of the oil/energy equation: the enormous infusion of wealth into the nonproductive but oil-rich Middle East. But these countries have shot themselves in both feet: oil’s high prices are spurring a mad race to conserve energy and find replacements; and the oil-panic has set off similar stampedes in minerals, food, and finished consumer products—none of which the Middle East has in any great abundance, but dearly prizes.

Final Note on the Movies

I apologize to readers for glaring omissions: Tommy Lee Jones is a rare talent, and surely a throwback to a better age. John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a work of genius, and one of my favorites.

I think most of us agree that something has been lost. The movies are a keyhole by which we look back through at an entire world that has been thrown away—and by which we are the worst for it. I think that yearning explains why a Robert Duvall or Tommy Lee Jones resonates with so many of us (cf. the reaction to Lonesome Dove). We simply want more of them to be around in our daily lives.

Paradoxes everywhere

What strange paradoxes: the more the Democrats tried to show their egalitarian fides, they more they crafted an undemocratic nominating process; the more Obama talked of transcending race, the more he appealed to racial solidarity; the more Bill Clinton stumped and shook hands, the more he threw away his legacy; and the more Hillary and Barack slurred McCain as a right-wing nut, the more they repaired his relations with the his conservative base. And all this is only half-way through…

Obama and race

Lately a number of Obama’s African-American supporters have taken the airways to make the argument that his astounding percentages of 90% and above among African-American voters are not racialist because the community would not vote in such numbers for a Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice.

But that is a dangerous comparison that raises only more questions. So it’s politics, not race? Why then not a mere 60/40 margin over the ultra-liberal Hillary, wife of our first “black” President? The answer? Obama represents a certain racial chauvinism that neither a white liberal nor black conservative can convey. In other words, in the world of identity politics, he seems to reflect an authentic representation of grievance, and a perpetuation of the entire industry of racial reparations.

Most think the corpus of Rev. Wright’s sayings, comments like “typical white person”, and snotty condescension about white Middle American yokels were terrible gaffes. True, but such wedge politicking apparently ensures him the astounding margins in the African-American community that really are unprecedented—when not long ago there were concerns among his strategists that he might not capture the black vote in such numbers. That problem of authenticy was put to rest by his choice not to disown Rev. Wright.

Speaking of whom, the snippets from his interview with a fawning Bill Moyers were about as disingenuous as they come. He claimed they were out of context and his critics divisive, but never disowned what he said. He claimed he was a pastor outside of politics, but his attraction apparently hinges on his political views about everything from the AIDs conspiracy to apartheid. And on and on. The problem with Rev. Wright is, well, he loves the attention, makes a profit on it, and won’t shut up. And as long as he is not disowned by Obama, the more Obama has to explain why he continues to worship in that church, whether Wright is or is not really retired, and what exactly did Obama know and when did he know it. A fair reading of the Obama memoirs suggests he knew exactly what Wright was saying and heard a great deal of it.

It doesn’t help his cause that when CNN and Fox bring in analysts from the universities (e.g., African-American studies professors), they not only excuse Obama, but Wright too!—usually by the tactic of redefining a Martin Luther King not as a healer, but a proto-firebrand like Wright. That sounds catchy and may ooh and aah the white elite base, but in the general election the defense of Wright and what he stands for will prove catastrophic. To fathom the soul of the Obama campaign juxtapose Obama’s Pennsylvania comments alongside the recent Axelrod’s dismissal of the need to reach out to the white working class:

“The white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections, going back even to the Clinton years. This is not new that Democratic candidates don’t rely solely on those votes.”

Now we wait to hear the “context” for “don’t rely”.

More on the Movies

I learned a great deal from the comments on the movie posting. I still maintain, as do many readers, that elements of physical ordeal and elemental challenges have vanished from the American middle-class lifestyle, and with their departure, the sort of actor who clawed his way up, and was familiar with the underbelly of the United States is disappearing as well.

Again, I sense the tell-tale difference is in the voices. Today’s male sounds metrosexual, ambiguous, nasal, sing-songy—feminized. Today’s Westerns are embarrassing, as Hollywood searches in vain for a southerner, or anyone who does sound like a Valley Boy from San Fernando. Sam Elliot made an entirely successful career out of having an authentic Western voice, or at least something that resonates experience outside the suburb.

In general, I don’t think we will ever see again the wide range of rich resonant and idiosyncratic voices of a Burt Lancaster, Frederic March, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, or Robert Mitchum, much less a Ben Johnson, L.Q. Jones, or Richard Boone (one of my favorite actors). The ability of today’s wild young actors to drink, snort, party, go on rampages, work as a bartender, drop out of high-school, provoke—part of the Sean Penn profile— is not comparable to the masculine world of the 1930s and 1940s, where there was a brutal honesty and hard decency utterly lacking today. That said, there is something in the eye and voice of a Robert Duvall, Christopher Walken, Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, and a few others, which readers immediately noted, that reminds us at times of the old breed.

My interest in movies was inculcated by my father, who grew up outside of Kingsburg, California on a small farm in the Depression to Swedish parents, was a central fire control gunner on a B-29 for 40 missions over Japan, lost many of his teeth playing football for Amos Alonzo Stagg at the University of Pacific, and was never quite tame or predictable, despite his ability to both farm and become a successful junior college administrator—and remain gentle and gentlemanly at all times.

He took us to the movies quite often, roused us when a movie came on one of our three scratchy channels on a small black-and-white television in the kitchen, and shared with us his notion of the tragic hero, who either self-implodes as he eliminates the problem along with himself, or deals with an awful fate with a sort of resigned nobility. These are some of the great scenes I remember best—and I watched them all with my father from the 1950s to his death in 1998.

The Wild Bunch: The scene when Ernest Borgnine, Bill Holden, Ben Johnson, and Warren Oates decide to give it all up, put on their guns, smile, and head off to take out the federales and meet their fate.

Shane: Brandon De Wilde yells “Shane” and runs after the gunslinger, who rides off into the sunset, leaving the viewer unsure whether his limp arm is a minor or fatal wound. The entire movie is one of unresolved tensions and a certain dignity shown in not giving into the temptations.

High Noon. A worried Gary Cooper accepts that his town has abandonded him, as he walks down main street, sweating and watching the clock as Tex Ritter sings ‘Do not forsake me…” Never understood Howard Hawks simplistic critique of this brilliant movie.

Breaker Morant: Breaker and Handcock sit waiting for their bullets in their head, and Morant yells, “Shoot straight, you bastards! Don’t make a mess of it!”

Das Boot: The submarine somehow blasts to the surface of the Mediterranean, the crew opens the hatch, and races to the Atlantic, as the crew signs, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

The Magnificent Seven. Steve McQueen and Yul Brenner climb on the caisson to drive it up to boot hill—to the cut-in of the famous soundtrack.

Pat Garret and Bill the Kid: Katy Jurado watches Slim Pickens hold his guts in, sitting on the riverbank as he dies to “Knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door.” Great cinematography. My paternal grandfather, a disabled WWI veteran and cowboy of sorts who spoke in a thick accent, once sold a horse to Slim Pickens in Traver, California (Frank Hanson broke them for a living), and claimed he was the most decent person he had encountered.

Twelve O’clock High: Dean Jagger snaps out of his long flashback of the awful B-17 missions, and rides off on his bike from the weed-filled airfield at Archbury.

The Vikings: the Viking music cuts in as the Norsemen send their fire arrows into the funeral ship taking Kirk Douglas’s body out to sea.

Hombre: Richard Boone shouts out to Paul Newman who has come down the hill on a suicide rescue mission, Mister, you have got a lot of hard bark on you coming’ down here like this.”

The Searchers: the loner John Wayne walks his walk out the door to shadows and music—and a solitary existence after his work is done.

Zulu: the survivors of Rorke’s Drift look up and suddenly see thousands of Zulus chanting on the hilltops—saluting their bravery and their survival.

What’s Wrong With Hollywood?

It is more interested in political correctness than profits, as the Iraq War movie bombs attest. Talent is no longer gravitating to Hollywood, but staying put in Europe and Asia. Alternate media, from the Internet to video games to cable television, mean that fewer go to the movies anymore (I went once in the last 12 months). The old bread-and-butter genres—like the Western or the war movie—are either moribund or merely landscapes for political revisionism.

One difference is the steady decline in the quality of male actors. We simply do not have a James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Bill Holden, or John Wayne any more, much less brilliant against-the grain actors like a Robert Duvall, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, or a Yul Brenner, nor character actors like a Slim Pickens or a Ben Johnson.

Today’s he-man actors don’t even sound the same as the old breed. Compare the speech patterns and intonation of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Spencer Tracey, Henry Fonda or Bill Holden to those of a Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, or Tom Hanks—and there seems to be a new, but separate species of male. The appeal of a Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, or Daniel Day-Lewis is that they sound like, well, the old breed rather than sensitive metrosexuals.

Some of you will sigh: Victor, Victor, actors only reflect the society that produces them. We don’t have a Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart because we aren’t Fondas and Stewarts any more.

Perhaps, but what I also don’t understand is that we know that excellent war films—Breaker Morant, Saving Private Ryan, and Das Boot—win over critics and audiences. Why then do we keep seeing snoozers like Redacted, Lions for Lambs, or Stop Loss? Is there that little talent left?

Obama’s Problems—Let Me Count the Ways

I continue to get barrages of furious mail from Obamiacs, full of self-righteousness, and outrage that anyone might dare criticize the next Messiah. So some additional thoughts:

By any standard measure, Democrats should win the November election by a landslide. The dollar is collapsing. Fuel is sky-high. The deficit is too large, the economy stagnant. The war goes on; real estate prices have nosedived. Food is climbing each month. Many of these problems are due to the entry of China and India into the world economy, as hundreds of millions of new consumers are demanding the consumer lifestyle that Americans take for granted, and resources are now bid upon by the entire globe. Nonetheless, the American political tradition mandates that a President gets the credit he doesn’t deserve for good times, and the blame for the bad he didn’t completely earn.

So instead of McCain running even or better against Obama or Clinton, he should be polling 10-15 points behind. Why, then, is McCain doing so well? Much of the answer is the Obama-Clinton cat-fighting; but Obama has also shown an inability to come clean the first time after an embarrassing disclosure or gaffe. By now the public expects instead that more of his serial half-truths will follow ad nauseam.

Rev. Wright. Because Obama never distanced himself from the Rev., the latter will come back to haunt him again and again. Just these last two weeks, examine three ways in which his ghost did so.

Wright himself gave a speech caricaturing the Founding Fathers, and using the old Jefferson-as-pedophile trope, while the cable news channels showed his 10,000 sq. ft. gated estate (a dividend of the hated “black middleclassness”?); second, Obama’s Pennsylvania comments immediately called for (Wright) analogies that Obama is so famous for: if white Middle America “clings” to its religion in fear and in bitterness, what then were the Obamas doing for 20-years at the Wright ministry?; there has been a number of racial “slips”, from Rev. Lee in Los Angeles and his anti-Semitic outbursts to Congressman Geoff Davis’s “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button.” But in these cases and those to come, Obama has lost the moral high ground of commentary, and instead has in advance offered the cover of contextualization for any future perpetrator. Now anyone can say, “But, I did a lot of good things; and you’re just using snippets; and you’re just playing this over and over again for political purposes; and we all say things like this from time to time; and you don’t understand the milieu in which the insensitivity was uttered.”

Michelle Obama. After the “no pride” and “mean” America speeches and interviews, someone should have given her a written script, lest she trumps Mrs. Kerry’s wacky performance in 2004. But she’s back at it again with her “raise the bar” and “had to pay back those college loans” shrillness. Yet once again, new events always overtake a problem not solved. So this week the 2007 Obama tax returns revealed over $4 million in income. In that context, the same old whine about Ivy-League student loans, summer camp costs, piano lessons, et al. are becoming even more tiring. The Obama campaign’s challenge: can Michelle give a single uplifting speech in which she sounds the theme of America as a land of opportunity—or at least the notion that she is hopeful and confident, given that she received an Ivy-League education, bought a $1.6 million house, and makes over a third of a million dollars in salary? If not, by September she will become a Saturday-Night-Live caricature of the proverbial whiner, and by November a would-be, post-modern First Lady who travels the world explaining to others what’s wrong with the United States.

Jimmy Carter. At first, Obama said Carter’s Hamas’ gambit was none of his business. Then he said Carter should not meet with a group that advocates the destruction of Israel. So why then does Obama wish to meet with Ahmadinejad, whose position is identical to that of the Hamas leadership? In short, he should simply assume that whatever Carter is for, he is against.

Cut out the analogies. They are usually false and such similes only reveal a disturbing pattern of mendacity. Sen. Coburn is not similar to Bill Ayers: the former is a US Senator who offered the idea of a hypothetical death penalty for the abortionist should abortion ever become a capital crime; the latter was an unrepentant terrorist in deed.Obama’s grandmother is not analogous to Rev. Wright: what she says in private is not the same as what Wright declaims in public; suggesting that black males might frighten solitary women has a basis in the fact that black young males have higher than average incarceration rates; there is no basis in fact for Wright’s claims that the US government created the AIDs virus or that Israel and South Africa created a special racial bomb. Wright is not like a typically eccentric “uncle”, since we pick our pastors, not our relatives. Anytime Obama tries to talk in the abstract or evoke similes to excuse a lapse (the “everyone does it” defense), he only makes things worse.

Cut out the use of “they”, as in the yokel “they” who cling to guns, or Michelle’s “they” who raise the bar on her. Who is this “they”? A President leads “us”, not “them”. When the Obamas are in charge, will they be “they”?

But no matter. We are in the realm of prophets and holy men, and we must trust in Lord Hope and God Change that are immune from answering bothersome facts. Trust what I really think, rather than what I say and do, is the new Obama creed.

Here we go again with Wright Redux.

By now no one is surprised by what is said by a Rev. Wright (”KKK of A”, Israel is a “dirty word”, etc.) or a Rev. Meeks (”white people” as “slave-masters”), or that they have figured prominently among Obama supporters.

Now the latest is apparently Rev. Eric Lee (”What other kind of Rabbis are there, but Jews?” “The Jews have made money on us in the music business and we are the entertainers, and they are economically enslaving us.’”), one of the designated co-sponsors of a Feb., 2008 “Obama—Get Out and Vote Rally” in Los Angeles, who on April 4th went on a public unhinged anti-Semitic rant about Daphna Ziman, the recipient of the Tom Bradley award.

The point is not to what degree Rev. Lee is directly involved in the Obama campaign (the usual official distancing will follow), but rather three other considerations:

First, once Obama failed to condemn Wright and offered contextualization, the flood gates of extremism were thrown wide open. Now any hate-monger, it seems, can go on a public racist rant, with the expectation that there will be no credible and absolute public condemnation. You see, our potential next President has already weighed in on Rev. Wright’s hate speech by citing his past good works, the commonality of such talk among all our religious figures, the special nature of the black church, and the unfair snippets that are replayed–all of which, of course, will offer the same “context” of mitigation for the Eric Lee hatred. We can imagine the accolades to come in the next few days concerning Lee’s public benefactions.

Second, when one collates what Wright, Meeks, Lee, and Sharpton have said, and then compares those “snippets” and “loops” with the cheery characterization of the unique protocols of the black church by Obama, then one realizes that the public is supposed to accept that African-American pastors are exempt from the sort of no-go speech zones that everyone else rightly accepts. It seems that we are rapidly reaching a sort of scary situation in which the black pastor will say whatever he wishes, no matter how anti-Semitic and racist, and then almost dare anyone to challenge that hatred, knowing that his congregation will support him, African-American intellectuals will contextualize him on television, and politicians like Obama (cf. Hillary’s past hugs of Sharpton) will defend him.

Three, these incidents will only continue until someone of stature in the civil rights community issues a zero-tolerance speech of the sort Obama should have given but failed at. In isolation, each subsequent outburst is explicable; in the aggregate they paint a picture of a deep-seeded racism and hatred that have been encouraged by the absence of any censure—the appeasement that we know so well from the Obama/Wright controversy.

Three weeks ago I wrote, in a number of postings, that we would see more of such Wright-like hatred in response to the widely-praised Obama race speech, which was, in fact, one of the great regressions in civil rights history. I don’t think that anything I have written has received more angry emails in response; but the Lee case, I think, shows that I was correct—and we can expect more still to come in the next six months. I also stand by my second prognosis—that in Obama we are witnessing the slow formation of a McGovern candidacy, a disaster to come that won’t be fully appreciated by now starry-eyed Democrats until September or October when, as in 1972, it will be too late.

Where Art Thou Democrats?

With the release of the Clintons’ combined $109 million post-presidential aggregate income (cf. Hillary’s call for the creation of a poverty czar), we are a long way from clips of Harry Truman strolling around Independence, Missouri in his retirement. John Edwards’ 30,000 sq ft. castle (apparently part of one of his “Two Americas”) is a far cry from the hole in Adlai Stevenson’s shoe. And John Kerry’s various mansions are not quite like Hubert Humphrey’s tract house in the DC suburbs. But then the Rev. Wright’s gated estate and the Obama income aren’t quite like Martin Luther King’s either.

The point? In the general enrichment of the United States over the last quarter-century of globalization, it is hard to ascertain one’s politics by one’s financial circumstances. Being a Democratic leader now does not suggest any greater intimacy with poverty than a Republican’s, or any greater reluctance to indulge in the rarified good life. If anything, the Democratic party (cf. the Obama nexus) is increasingly an alliance of those who want federal entitlements, combined with the elite who are willing to hand them out—precisely because their own financial circumstances mean that tax increases hardly affect their standard of living.

Indeed, whereas indulgences in gambling, sex, or drugs may have embarrassed conservative Republicans, the hypocrisy for Democrats lies in the combination of high living and condemnation of the present economic system. Al Gore leaves a bigger carbon foot-print than most of those he condemns. Rev. Wright disdains the middle class—perhaps because he lives as if he were in the upper-class. The Clintons talk ad nauseam about “fairness,” but weren’t about to stop at $50 million when $100 million could buy so much more.

The Academic Morass

One can collate all the various reasons that have embarrassed the current university—the politically correct curriculum, the relaxation of standards, the political imbalance, the intolerance for diversity of thought, etc. But the one charge that proves the most lethal is this same hypocrisy, or the notion that well-paid tenured professors, with life-time assurances of employment of being on the job only 30 weeks a year, and usually accountable for only 6-12 hours of teaching a week on campus, harangue cash-strapped, working students with sizable loans, about the unfairness of society.

I have never quite encountered an intrinsically less fair institution than the university, at least in liberal terms of egalitarianism and respect for the underclass. A full professor may damn Wal-Mart, but Wal-Mart would never get away with the two-tier system that the university in built upon: the PhD part-timer has no job security, sometimes no benefits, no privileges, and earns usually about 25% of the compensation that is paid to the full professor to teach the identical class.

When one factors in the use of graduate assistants not merely to TA courses, but to teach them in their entirety, then you can appreciate the level of exploitation that the university is built on. And add to the notion that tuition has climbed higher than the annual rate of inflation, and the picture is complete of an institution that is entirely immune from public scrutiny.

I have a modest prediction—just as the bloggers, talk-radio, and cable news began to make irrelevant the grandees at the New York Times and the likes of Dan Rather at CBS, so too online colleges, web-based data archives, and junior colleges are starting to question the notion that one pays $40-50 thousand a year for university training—and often gets biased professors, part-timers and TAs, and a curriculum imbued with popular culture and politically-driven therapeutic courses. Learning and the university are not any longer synonymous, and the divide is ever widening.

The Morality of Environmentalism

The idea that we were going to devote 25% of America’s prime corn acreage to ethanol (while supplying millions of dollars of subsidies to large farms) was always absurd. And now we see the wages in increased prices for meat, rice, soy, corn, and wheat, as food for fuel means less food for eating. At some point someone is going to say that an oil well in a tiny patch in Anwar is a far more humane proposition than taking out hundreds of acres of food land to produce the same amount of energy, or sending millions over to terrorist-sponsoring nations for comparable oil production, or allowing Russia or Nigeria to desecrate planet earth through far less careful protocols of extraction to produce the same amount of petroleum.

Who’s What?

Close your eyes and imagine. You hear one party demand tariffs and an end to free trade. Its supporters talk in terms of racial values and racial separateness, as it leaders calculate the white versus black vote state-by-state. It denounces the idea of protecting a democracy abroad from thugs and terrorists. And it has out-raised its counterpart over 3-1 in cash donations for political campaigning. Its nominating process is Byzantine and ultimately determined by the undemocratic votes of unelected Superdelegates accountable to no one. And this is all deemed “liberal.”

Airline absurdities #3

In two past postings I listed the sort of craziness that follows when you cram dozens of people on transcontinental flights, from cell-phoning in the aisle to smashing two gigantic carry-ons into tiny overhead compartments.

I noticed three others today flying back from New York.

1. The seats are so small and Americans are so large that it is almost impossible to walk down an aisle without hitting a knee or ankle. The stewards have a strange solution: they simply slam their mega-food carts full speed ahead and hardly worry how many bruises they inflict on the way, the theory being that once your foot is run over by a stainless steel cart you won’t put it out there again.

2. Boarding is a joke. A huge crowd assembles in a circle. The various zones are announced, and then everyone feeds his own self-declared line into the fray, from all sides–the duration one has been there waiting mattering little. The poor ticket gatherer sometimes rejects a Zone-4er trying to get into Zone 1, sometimes not. The theory is that the crowd swarms to ensure claim to the rare on-board carry-on space above the seats?

3. I don’t understand the protocol of “lounge” position of the seats. I try never to use it, since the person ahead of me almost destroys my computer or knees when he goes into full “relax” position and leans back, and I wouldn’t wish to do that to those to my rear. I thought, to paraphrase Aristotle about land alienability, that while it is legal, “it is not done” out of deference and manners? True or not?

4. I think airline pilots should be hired by politicians. With a simple mike and ad hoc, they can so spin and reconstruct terrible delays due to mechanical slips, weather, incompetence, or simply traffic that one hardly objects. Usually a calm, slightly southern male voice comes on, notes a sense of frustration at the incompetence of others that has made us all late, and then in JFK-fashion assures us of a terrible, but necessary “10 minute delay” or “15 minute hitch”—and then one hour later we still are not mad when the voice returns to comfort us that “we are now on our way” (10 more minutes follow). These are pros and natural press secretaries—at least far better than a Scott McClellan.