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Power Line warns us polar bears are the left’s new stalking horse.
That innocent-looking polar bear poses a huge threat to the American economy. It’s not his fault, of course. Liberals are always scheming to get control of the economy, and their latest dodge takes advantage of the myth that “global warming” threatens the bears’ habitat. The Left is now seeking to have the polar bear certified as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. Sounds harmless, you say? Hugh Hewitt–as far as I know, the only person so far to blow the whistle on the liberals’ scam–explains the legal consequences: …
Two of our favorites decided to revisit the “great” speech Obama gave six weeks ago. Mark Steyn is first.
Four score and seven years ago … No, wait, my mistake. Two score and seven or eight days ago, Barack Obama gave the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, or FDR’s First Inaugural, or JFK’s religion speech, or (if, like Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, you find those comparisons drearily obvious) Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860.
And, of course, the senator’s speech does share one quality with Cooper Union, Gettysburg, the FDR Inaugural, Henry V at Agincourt, Socrates’ Apology, etc.: It’s history. He said, apropos the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that “I could no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.” But last week Obama did disown him. So, great-speech-wise, it’s a bit like Churchill promising to fight them on the beaches and never surrender, and then surrendering a month and a half later, and on a beach he decided not to fight on.
It was never a great speech. It was a simulacrum of a great speech written to flatter gullible pundits into hailing it as the real deal. It should be “required reading in classrooms,” said Bob Herbert in the New York Times; it was “extraordinary” and “rhetorical magic,” said Joe Klein in Time – which gets closer to the truth: As with most “magic,” it was merely a trick of redirection.
Obama appeared to have made Jeremiah Wright vanish into thin air, but it turned out he was just under the heavily draped table waiting to pop up again. The speech was designed to take a very specific problem – the fact that Barack Obama, the Great Uniter, had sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years – and generalize it into some grand meditation on race in America. Sen. Obama looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes? …
… “Do you personally feel that the reverend betrayed your husband?” asked Meredith Vieira on “The Today Show.”
“You know what I think, Meredith?” replied Michelle Obama. “We’ve got to move forward. You know, this conversation doesn’t help my kids.”
Hang on. “My” kids? You’re supposed to say “It’s about the future of all our children,” not “It’s about the future of my children” – whose parents happen to have a base salary of half a million bucks a year. But even this bungled cliché nicely captures the campaign’s self-absorption: Talking about Obama’s pastor is a distraction from talking about Obama’s kids.
By the way, the best response to Michelle’s “this conversation doesn’t help my kids” would be: “But entrusting their religious upbringing to Jeremiah Wright does?” Ah, but, happily, Meredith Vieira isn’t that kind of interviewer. …
Then Charles Krauthammer.
… Obama’s Philadelphia oration was an exercise in contextualization. In one particularly egregious play on white guilt, Obama had the audacity to suggest that whites should be ashamed that they were ever surprised by Wright’s remarks: “The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning.”
That was then. On Tuesday, Obama declared that he himself was surprised at Wright’s outrages. But hadn’t Obama told us that surprise about Wright is a result of white ignorance of black churches brought on by America’s history of segregated services? How then to explain Obama’s own presumed ignorance? Surely he too was not sitting in those segregated white churches on those fateful Sundays when he conveniently missed all of Wright’s racist rants.
Obama’s turning surprise about Wright into something to be counted against whites– one of the more clever devices in that shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud in Philadelphia — now stands discredited by Obama’s own admission of surprise. But Obama’s liberal acolytes are not daunted. They were taken in by the first great statement on race: the Annunciation, the Chosen One comes to heal us in Philly. They now are taken in by the second: the Renunciation. …
… Obama’s newest attempt to save himself after Wright’s latest poisonous performance is now declared the new final word on the subject. Therefore, any future ads linking Obama and Wright are preemptively declared out of bounds, illegitimate, indeed “race-baiting” (a New York Times editorial, April 30).
On what grounds? This 20-year association with Wright calls into question everything about Obama: his truthfulness in his serially adjusted stories of what he knew and when he knew it; his judgment in choosing as his mentor, pastor and great friend a man he just now realizes is a purveyor of racial hatred; and the central premise of his campaign, that he is the bringer of a “new politics,” rising above the old Washington ways of expediency. It’s hard to think of an act more blatantly expedient than renouncing Wright when his show, once done from the press club instead of the pulpit, could no longer be “contextualized” as something whites could not understand and only Obama could explain in all its complexity.
Turns out the Wright show was not that complex after all. Everyone understands it now. Even Obama.
Then more of our favorites have Obama observations. First Victor Davis Hanson.
… 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.
Al Sharpton criticizing Barack Obama for urging non-violence in the Sean Bell verdict protest puts into dramatic relief the major racial conflict of our time – and it is inside the African-American community, not outside. Outdated racial profiteers like Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and now the formerly obscure Reverend Jeremiah Wright are clinging for dear life to their reactionary views that have impeded progress in their own community for years. …
Christopher Hitchens in his blog at the Daily Mirror.
If it had been held last Friday, it might well have gone the other way, or a different way. But something about the Obama magic seems somehow to have curdled, or congealed into what some analysts call “buyer’s remorse”. In a few short days, the world’s most charismatic candidate went straight from being able to do nothing wrong to being able to do very little right. ..
Norman Borlaug has in mind improved ways to feed Africa’s poor.
Rapidly increasing world food prices have already led to political upheaval in poor countries. The crisis threatens to tear apart fragile states and become a humanitarian calamity unless countries get their agricultural systems moving.
Now, with conference committee negotiations over the final shape of the Farm Bill at a critical stage, Congress needs to change the foreign food-aid program and help avert this calamity. The Bush administration has urged, rightly, that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) be allowed to buy food locally, particularly in Africa, instead of only American-grown food. …
Ilya Somin of Volokh reminds us of “Victims of Communism Day.”
Today is May Day, the primary holiday of communist parties and regimes. Last year, I put forward my proposal to transform May Day into Victims of Communism Day, in honor of the 100 million or more people murdered by communist regimes in the USSR, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere. …
Jim Taranto shows us a typical day slanting the news at AP, and Obama’s futile complaints to a Federal Election Commission that can’t act in part because he has put a hold on appointees.
On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, upheld Indiana’s requirement that voters present photo identification before casting ballots. Yesterday the Associated Press published a dispatch titled “Advocates: Voter ID Ruling May Disenfranchise US Voters.”
It ran 15 paragraphs, required two reporters (Deborah Hastings got the byline; David Lieb “contributed”), and was totally one-sided, offering not a single argument in favor of voter ID requirements. It’s possible that the AP did another dispatch titled “Advocates: Voter ID Ruling Helps Prevent Fraud,” or some such, but we couldn’t find it in a Factiva search. …
Business Week interviews Google’s CEO to learn about fostering innovation.
Tom Smith in Right Coast reviews Amazon’s Kindle electronic book.
I’m in love, and it’s with a gadget. Contrary to what some of you may think, I do not frequently fall in love with gadgets or gear. I am always looking for love there, true, but I rarely find it. I like iPods, sure, but they didn’t change my life. XM radio is a big improvement over FM, but it’s still hard to find anything you actually want to listen to. My seven station weight machine in the garage was a bust. My smartwatch hooked up to some useless Microsoft network was like an ill considered fling with a crazy chick, not that I’ve ever done that. And so on. But this little beauty is different.
For those of you who still dial into AOL, a Kindle is Amazon’s new e-book reader gizmo, a “wireless reading device.” With it you can download as many books as you could conceivably want to carry around with you from a library of 100,000 or so books in Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. …