[forkinsocket]

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[Slapshot68]

Gotta admit...Obama’s running the perfect candidacy for Modern America. Just tell people what they want to hear, don’t be too specific, and be likeable.

[donna]

Obama is a racist.

[puroresu]

Wow! What a great article! Yep, when the left talks about ending the culture wars, they mean suppressing dissent.

[pangenesis]

Commentators, pundits, and voters look at Obama and Clinton, does not mean brokered convention (with two candidates remaining, it’s unlikely), but barring a dramatic momentum shift it means Clinton/Obama will go on at least until Pennsylvania on April 22nd. The Democrats’ hybrid delegate selection scheme consisting of strict proportional representation for elected delegates combined with superdelegates (designed to thwart a future George McGovern or Jimmy Carter) looks to be working against its lingering historical effects, the left has simply reversed spin on the Alinsky model of community agitation, wherein paid organizers learned how to “rub raw the sores of discontent,” in Alinsky’s words. Alinsky instructed his followers in the world.” At the same time, Obama is a pillar of their promises. If, however, voters elect someone who wants to stymie President Obama not out of the two (although socialism may well result in an “illegitimate” nominee selected by a bullet,” Weir said, referring to Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated on the world. You get to vote for the dreams and beliefs of his followers. We’ve seen this for years, and more people will be forced to take.

[marron]

Man proposes, and God disposes.

Or, in other words, reality always gets a vote.

Whatever Obama thinks he is going to do, he will be forced by reality to deal with reality. It always happens, which is why the “constituents” of populists are always disappointed. In a few years we’ll hear that Obama was seduced by Washington, or we’ll read the endless conspiracy theories about how the elite conspired to keep him from fulfilling promises he could never have kept from the beginning.

But a few years later, it won’t matter. Remember that history is written by writers, and it is the writer’s view of history that is preserved, not the actual events. How did a rather sleazy presidency get converted into “Camelot”? Because he was surrounded by writers, and for them it was Camelot, it was the high point of their lives. That is what got recorded. The sleaze and the betrayals didn’t make the history, because for the writers it didn’t fit the narrative.

How did Roosevelt’s disastrous presidency become a hazy fuzzy warm memory in the minds of a generation? Writers write the history.

I remember conversations with people in Latin America who told me they envied Americans for having a president like Clinton. What did they know about, again, the sleaze and corruption? Nothing, and they didn’t want to know. They loved the image, and they didn’t want it spoiled.

Whatever we may think about an Obama presidency, living it as we will in real time, our grandchildren are going to read about it in the history books and it is going to seem like a magical time in history.

[x]

Good article.

I don't know that Obama would be known as a Black "victim" president.

That may be going too far.

But everything we know about Obama's record suggests that he is too far to the left the left to "end the culture wars."

Where did this notion come from?

I suspect it's a survival of the idea that a less liberal Black, like Colin Powell or Douglas Wilder, would "heal the country", or that someone who grew up after the Great Divide of the 1960s would be able to overcome the divisions that began in that era.

It doesn't work with Obama, whose positions have been conventionally left-liberal, but ideas tend to outlive their usefulness or truthfulness.

[Lexinom]

It happens that one of the major weapons of the American left is race. Tradition, you see, and the values embodied within it, are fundamentally racist. This does not require demonstration or argument. There's no need of that. The eras in which these values prevailed were also the eras of slavery and segregation. QED, tradition has to be racist. (The concept that racism might well have flourished in defiance of these values -- which is in fact the case -- easily eludes the left. As does the fact that American blacks, by and large, are the most traditional of American social groups, more religious, more socially conservative, more skeptical of change than any other.)

This is very, very interesting, with a parallel that I sincerely hope I'm not alone in seeing: One hundred years hence, when historians and citizens look back in horror on the massive holocaust against our unborn and infirm, will they conclude that every leftist value used to justify this slaughter (including "peace") must be fundamentally genocidal?

[RichardMoore]

Obama is simply marketing himself as a brand on the market. He is not going to tell anyone what he is up to until it is too late. We won't be able to criticize him without being called a racist. That is how he intends to "end the culture war." But the Culture War is actually an assault upon our country that is part of a Communist/socialist strategy. Obama is a socialist just like Hillary and McCain.

What ever happened to the melting pot? I think Obama and his islamofascist friends will be putting us all in it and it won't be America any more. How does Islamica sound?

[SunkenCiv]

The culture wars are a long-term conflict between this country's traditionalists on one hand and left-wing cultural revolutionaries on the other. Since the 60s, the American left has followed a strategy set down by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theoretician. Gramsci contended that the proper method of taking over an established capitalist state is to undermine its "cultural hegemony" by infiltrating the institutions until at last only leftists remain. This is exactly what American leftists have been doing since the 70s as involves academia, law, the media, and a number of other fields.

File "cultural hegemony" in the same folder as "consensus building" and "peer review". Thanks neverdem.