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Before sending Lewis and Clark west, Thomas Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis to Philadelphia to see Dr. Benjamin Rush. The eminent doctor prepared a series of scientific questions for the expedition to answer. Among them, writes Stephen Ambrose: "What Affinity between their [the Indians'] religious Ceremonies & those of the Jews?" Jefferson and Lewis, like many of their day and ours, were fascinated by the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and thought they might be out there on the Great Plains. They weren't. They aren't anywhere. Their disappearance into the mist of history since their exile from Israel in 722 B.C....

WASHINGTON — By the time Hillary Clinton figured out how to beat Barack Obama, it was too late. When she began the race in 2007 thinking she was in for a coronation, she claimed the center in order to position herself for the real fight, the general election. She simply assumed the party activists and loony left would fall in behind her. However, as Obama began to rise, powered by the party's Net-roots activists, she scurried left, particularly with her progressively more explicit renunciation of the Iraq war. It was a fool's errand. She would never be able to erase...

<p>"I can no more disown him (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown my white grandmother."</p> <p>WASHINGTON -- Guess it's time to disown Granny, if Obama's famous Philadelphia "race" speech is to be believed. Of course, the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union.</p>

"I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother." BARACK OBAMA, PHILADELPHIA, MARCH 18 Guess it's time to disown Granny, if Obama's famous Philadelphia "race" speech is to be believed. Of course, the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union. A New York Times columnist said it "should be required reading in classrooms across the country." College seniors and first-graders, suggested the excitable Chris Matthews. Apparently there's been a curriculum change. On Tuesday, the good senator begged to extend...

"I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother." - Barack Obama, March 18 Guess it's time to disown Granny. Obama's speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln. It "should be required reading in classrooms across the country" for first-graders and college seniors, suggested the excitable Chris Matthews. Moral equivalence between Grandma and Wright is now inoperative. Apparently, Wright's latest comments were so shockingly "divisive and destructive" that Obama cited three reasons he had to denounce the man. What were Obama's three citations?...

< href="http://moneyrunner.blogspot.com/2008/05/race-speech-revisited.html">After Obama’s "Race Speech" in Philadelphia, Liberal pundits outdid each other in comparing it to the great orations of all time. In it he found that regarding Reverend Wright: I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother Charles Krauthammer on May 2nd in the Washington Post: ... the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union. A New York Times columnist said it "should be required reading...

May 02, 2008, 0:00 a.m. We're Not in Philly AnymoreJeremiah Wright is now disowned, and Barack Obama is forever discredited. By Charles Krauthammer “I can no more disown him (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown my white grandmother.� — Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18Guess it’s time to disown Granny, if Obama’s famous Philadelphia “race� speech is to be believed. Of course, the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union. A New York Times columnist said it “should be required reading in classrooms across...

Guess it's time to disown Granny, if Obama's famous Philadelphia "race" speech is to be believed. Of course, the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union. A New York Times columnist said it "should be required reading in classrooms across the country." College seniors and first-graders, suggested the excitable Chris Matthews. Apparently there's been a curriculum change. On Tuesday, the good senator begged to extend and revise his previous remarks on race. Moral equivalence between Grandma and Wright is now, as the Nixon administration...

"I can no more disown him (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown my white grandmother." -- Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18 WASHINGTON -- Guess it's time to disown Granny, if Obama's famous Philadelphia "race" speech is to be believed. Of course, the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union. A New York Times columnist said it "should be required reading in classrooms across the country." College seniors and first-graders, suggested the excitable Chris Matthews. Apparently there's been a curriculum change. On Tuesday, the good...

Charles Krauthammer, who happens to have his M.D. from Harvard, is asked how he feels about Reverend Wright's declaration that black children learn differently from white children because they use different parts of their brains. As usual, the Hammer doesn't disappoint.

With that, Obama identified the new public enemy: the “distractions” foisted upon a pliable electorate by the malevolent forces of the status quo, i.e., those who might wish to see someone else become president next January. “It’s easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit for tat that consumes our politics” and “trivializes the profound issues” that face our country, he warned sternly. These must be resisted. Why? Because Obama understands that the real threat to his candidacy is less Hillary Clinton and John McCain than his own character and cultural attitudes. He came...

Real change has never been easy. ... The status quo in Washington will fight. They will fight harder than ever to divide us and distract us with ads and attacks from now until November. -- Barack Obama, Pennsylvania primary night speech WASHINGTON -- With that, Obama identified the new public enemy: the "distractions" foisted upon a pliable electorate by the malevolent forces of the status quo, i.e., those who might wish to see someone else become president next January. "It's easy to get caught up in the distractions and the silliness and the tit for tat that consumes our politics"...

<p>The era of nonproliferation is over. During the first half-century of the nuclear age, safety lay in restricting the weaponry to major powers and keeping it out of the hands of rogue states. This strategy was inevitably going to break down. The inevitable has arrived.</p>

On Tuesday, Iran announced it was installing 6,000 more centrifuges - they produce enriched uranium, the key ingredient of a nuclear weapon - in addition to the 3,000 already operating. The world yawned. It is time to admit the truth: The Bush administration's attempt to halt Iran's nuclear program has failed. Utterly. The latest round of UN Security Council sanctions, which took a year to achieve, is comically weak. It represents the end of the sanctions road. The President is going to hand over to his successor an Iran on the verge of going nuclear. This will deeply destabilize the...

Hillary Clinton met her Waterloo at Tuzla. She'd been regaling audiences with tales of a dangerous landing under sniper fire in the Bosnian city 12 years ago and then running for cover. None of this occurred. When CBS provided the tape, she was forced to admit to "a misstatement." Now, confabulation is a fairly common psychological phenomenon. We all have internalized childhood stories so oft repeated by elders that we come to falsely "remember" the actual experience. Adult memories are less susceptible to such unconscious inventions, but experiences embellished over time by repeated recounting can reach the point where we...

WASHINGTON -- Asked at a New Hampshire campaign stop about possibly staying in Iraq 50 years, John McCain interrupted -- "Make it a hundred" -- then offered a precise analogy to what he envisioned: "We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea for 50 years or so." Lest anyone think he was talking about prolonged war-fighting rather than maintaining a presence in postwar Iraq, he explained: "That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed." And lest anyone persist in thinking he was talking about...

At the heart of the Clinton presidency lies an oddity. Bill Clinton has been plagued by questions of character and trustworthiness throughout his career. He earned the nickname Slick Willie long before he ran for the White House. The man who "didn't inhale" is a man the public does not trust. His slickness is such a given that in a column defending the President, Michael Kinsley quite casually, indeed parenthetically, concedes that Clinton all but lied about Gennifer Flowers. And yet this is a presidency that makes a public fetish of its virtuousness. The Clintons really do believe that they...

<p>McCain Wants 100 Years of War?</p> <p>Even in politics, it's seldom that you see such a dirty lie.</p> <p>Asked at a New Hampshire campaign stop about possibly staying in Iraq 50 years, John McCain interrupted — “Make it a hundred” — then offered a precise analogy to what he envisioned: “We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so.” Lest anyone think he was talking about prolonged war-fighting rather than maintaining a presence in postwar Iraq, he explained: “That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.”</p>

WASHINGTON -- Asked at a New Hampshire campaign stop about possibly staying in Iraq 50 years, John McCain interrupted -- "Make it a hundred" -- then offered a precise analogy to what he envisioned: "We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea for 50 years or so." Lest anyone think he was talking about prolonged war-fighting rather than maintaining a presence in postwar Iraq, he explained: "That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed." And lest anyone persist in thinking he was talking about...

Asked at a New Hampshire campaign stop about possibly staying in Iraq 50 years, John McCain interrupted -- "Make it a hundred" -- then offered a precise analogy to what he envisioned: "We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea for 50 years or so." Lest anyone think he was talking about prolonged war-fighting rather than maintaining a presence in postwar Iraq, he explained: "That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed." And lest anyone persist in thinking he was talking about war-fighting, he...

But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave...Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction. His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence and (b) white guilt. (a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother... "I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was...

WASHINGTON -- The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright. An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which "controversial" remarks? Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was...

The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright. An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which "controversial" remarks? Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible...

Much to my surprise Charles Krauthammer came up with the best, short description of Obama's speech regarding Reverend Jerimiah Wright. Krauthammer pointed out: (1)Obama equated the Wright hate speech with a private worry of his white grandmother or the valid observation by Geraldine Ferraro that without his race he would not be the Democrat presidential candidate he is; (2)Obama never expressed any apology of any kind to anyone; (3)And, Obama seems to have taken the attitude of "..Come to me and I will heal you..." If anyone can link to this very short Krauthammer effort, I would appreciated it.

Elections can be about policy, personality, or identity. The race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is surely not about policy. The differences between the two are microscopic. It did not start out that way. Last year, when Hillary was headed toward a coronation, she deliberately ran to the center. She took more moderate views on Iraq, for example, and voted to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. When she began taking heat for these positions from the other candidates and the Democratic party’s activist core, and as her early lead began to erode, she quickly tacked...

-- snip --It goes like this. Because Obama transcends race, it is therefore assumed that he will transcend everything else -- divisions of region, class, party, generation and ideology. The premise here is true -- Obama does transcend race; he has not run as a candidate of minority grievance; his vision of America is unmistakably post-racial -- but the conclusion does not necessarily follow...

There is no denying the surge has worked in Iraq—unless you’re a Democrat.

-- snip -- Imagine the transformative effects in the region, and indeed in the entire Muslim world, of achieving a secure and stable Iraq, friendly to the United States and victorious over al-Qaeda. Are the Democrats so intent on denying George Bush retroactive vindication for a war they insist is his that they would deny their own country a now-achievable victory?

"No one can spend some 10 days visiting the battlefields in Iraq without seeing major progress in every area. ... If the U.S. provides sustained support to the Iraqi government — in security, governance and development — there is now a very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state."—Anthony Cordesman, "The Situation in Iraq: A Briefing From the Battlefield," Feb. 13, 2008This from a man who was a severe critic of the postwar occupation of Iraq and who, as author Peter Wehner points out, is no wide-eyed optimist. In fact, in May 2006, Cordesman wrote...

How Far Will Paperless Trail Carry Obama? By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER February 15, 2008 There's no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: Bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more than reprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay for gasoline. Or consider how Google found a way to sell dictionary nouns — boat, shoe, clock — by charging advertisers zillions to be listed whenever the word is searched. And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a...

brillant article by Krauthammer. There is no better, brighter political commentator. http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer021508.php3

One aspect of the current Presidential Campaign Season has continued to cause Figgins and I to regularly cock our heads and look at each other with facial expressions that obviously say, "What the heck does that mean?!" This aspect is the passion-evoking, yet vacant, rhetoric of Barack Obama. Actually, we touched on this subject in an earlier posting entitled The Better Angels of Our Nature?!?!?!?. Although that posting addressed Senator Ted Kennedy's old-style-politics approach to whip the crowd into a frenzy when he endorsed Obama (ironically, quoting the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln), the theme is the same ... words...

There's no way this sort of thing lasts: "There’s no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: bottle it and charge more than they pay for gasoline."

On Super Tuesday, Jonn McCain secured the Republican nomination. How did that happen? The reason is George W. Bush. He redefined conservatism with a "compassionate" variant that is a distinct departure from classic Reaganism. Bush muddled the ideological waters of conservatism. It was Bush who teamed with Kennedy to pass No Child Left Behind, a federal venture into education that would have been anathema to Reagan. It was Bush who signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. It was Bush who strongly supported the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill. It was Bush who on his own created a vast new entitlement program, the...

There was general amazement when (the now-muzzled) Bill Clinton did his red-faced, attack-dog, race-baiting performance in South Carolina. Friends, Democrats and media sycophants were variously perplexed, repulsed, enraged, mystified and shocked that this beloved ex-president would so jeopardize his legacy by stooping so low. What they don't understand is that for Clinton, there is no legacy. What he was doing on the low road from Iowa to South Carolina was fighting for a legacy — a legacy that he knows history has denied him and that he has one chance to redeem. Clinton is a narcissist but also smart and...

There was general amazement when (the now-muzzled) Bill Clinton did his red-faced, attack-dog, race-baiting performance in South Carolina. Friends, Democrats and longtime media sycophants were variously perplexed, repulsed, enraged, mystified and shocked that this beloved ex-president would so jeopardize his legacy by stooping so low.

Clawing for a Legacy Legacy? What legacy? There was general amazement when (the now-muzzled) Bill Clinton did his red-faced, attack-dog, race-baiting performance in South Carolina. Friends, Democrats and longtime media sycophants were variously perplexed, repulsed, enraged, mystified and shocked that this beloved ex-president would so jeopardize his legacy by stooping so low. What they don't understand is that for Clinton, there is no legacy. What he was doing on the low road from Iowa to South Carolina was fighting for a legacy -- a legacy that he knows history has denied him and that he has but one chance to...

Legacy? What legacy? There was general amazement when (the now-muzzled) Bill Clinton did his red-faced, attack-dog, race-baiting performance in South Carolina. Friends, Democrats and longtime media sycophants were variously perplexed, repulsed, enraged, mystified and shocked that this beloved ex-president would so jeopardize his legacy by stooping so low. What they don't understand is that for Clinton, there is no legacy. What he was doing on the low road from Iowa to South Carolina was fighting for a legacy — a legacy that he knows history has denied him and that he has but one chance to redeem. Clinton is a...

WASHINGTON — So she said. And then a fight broke out. That remarkable eruption of racial sensitivities and racial charges lacked coherence, however, because the public argument was about history rather than what was truly offensive — the implied analogy to today. The principal objection was that Clinton appeared to be disrespecting Martin Luther King Jr., relegating him to mere enabler for Lyndon Johnson. But it is certainly true that Johnson was the great emancipator, second only to Abraham Lincoln in that respect. This was a function of the times. King was fighting for black enfranchisement. Until that could be...

-- snip -- But telling Obama to wait his turn is a tricky proposition. It sounds patronizing and condescending, awakening the kinds of racial grievances white liberals have spent half a century fanning -- only to find themselves now singed in the blowback, much to their public chagrin. Who says there's no justice in this world?

On Fox News Special Report, Charles Krauthammer said Fred Thompson is "dead." Krauthammer, of course, was referring to Thompson being the GOP candidate for POTUS.

...This is John Edwrads on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa. "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheel chair and walk again." In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good, false hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.

"My mother always said, democracy is the best revenge." -- Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, son of the late Benazir Bhutto WASHINGTON -- Of all the understandings of the democratic idea, none could be more wrong than this one. Democracy at its very core is an antidote to the kind of dynastic revenge young Bhutto was suggesting. For the Bhuttos, elections are a means for the family to regain power. Benazir was always avenging the death of her father, the former prime minister hanged two years after a coup. Bilawal is now pledged to do the same for his mother's martyrdom. The...

Just four months after 9/11, George Bush identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the "axis of evil" and declared that defanging these rogue regimes was America's most urgent national security task. Bush will be judged on whether he succeeded. Six years later and with time running out on this administration, the Bush legacy is clear: one for three. Contrary to current public opinion, Bush will have succeeded on Iraq, failed on Iran and fought North Korea to a draw. Iran. Bush has thrown in the towel on Iran's nuclear program because the intelligence bureaucracy, in a spectacularly successful coup,...

Time magazine has terminated its relationships with its two conservative columnists, Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol. The New York Observer has the details: The exact reasons for the departures of Mr. Krauthammer and Mr. Kristol, both high-profile backers of the Iraq war, are not entirely clear. “I was very happy to work with them,” said Mr. Krauthammer on the phone from his Washington office. “And I have a lot of things that occupy me.” Asked if he would have preferred to stay with the magazine, Mr. Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize winner who writes a regular column for The Washington Post,...

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: And, for sure, there will be another cycle in the campaign coverage, which will be her comeback. It is inevitable, and if it doesn't happen, we're going to make it happen because the press will want a story.But I think there's a fundamental problem that she has that explains her fall, and that is we saw on the front page of "The New York Times" today. Her staff is talking about the big theme has to be change, change, change, and she is a change agent. She used the word a dozen times in all of...

Now I know how a Supreme Court justice feels when he writes a separate opinion “concurring in part and dissenting in part.” I have tremendous respect of Charles Krauthammer. His commentaries are typically fresh. His views are usually grounded in reality rather than the politically correct, smooth, wave washed bromides so common among the columnists both Left and Right. And Krauthammer has written a very good column An Overdose of Public Piety. ... But there are assertions about religion that are simply a-historical and deserve to be debated rather than dismissed.

WASHINGTON - Mitt Romney declares, “Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.” Barack Obama opens his speech at his South Carolina Oprah rally with “Giving all praise and honor to God. Look at the day that the Lord has made.” Mike Huckabee explains his surge in the polls thus: “It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people.” This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it’s only going to get worse. I’d thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican...

The words are Krauthammer’s, expressing a consensus shared by everyone from my pal Barnett to America’s Mayor. The incredible, unanswerable question of the hour: What kind of slackjawed moron would take the two most important issues of the election off the table at the start of the last pre-primary debate? If anything, she should have kept those two and jettisoned everything else. After today’s withering reviews, the moderators are bound to be working out the kinks for tomorrow’s turn with the Democrats. Kucinich is disqualified so the field will be leaner and meaner than the GOP’s bloated Keyes-plus format. The...

Keep Up the Pressure By Charles Krauthammer For Democrats, good news in Iraq is bad news. For me, good news is good news, whether from Iraq or now from Iran. Facts are facts. And if the conclusions of the most recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) about Iran's nuclear program are true, they are moderately encouraging. Moderately only, because the NIE itself expressed only "moderate confidence" in its most sensational conclusion--that Iran had not restarted its previously suspended covert nuclear-weaponization program. First, the good news. To go nuclear, you need three things: a) the raw material, b) the ability to turn...