Free Republic

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,...

Nancy Pelosi chanted "Veto and Drill", "Veto and Drill" in caricaturing the threatened presidential veto of windfall oil company taxes and desire to drill in ANWR and elsewhere. But all that might sound, in fact, good to most Americans. With the world's largest reserves of coal, after creating the nuclear power industry ex nihilo, and with billions of oil still under our soil and waters, it makes no sense to produce less energy while blaming and taxing those who produce what we have, rather than drilling, digging, and saving, as we find ways to transition to the alternate energies. The...

We are in one of the longest presidential campaigns in modern memory -- and haven't even started focusing on the general election. It's been enough to drive most of us mad, but if there's one person in particular suffering the most, it may be President Bush. It's been noted here before that we have not had an election since 1952 in which an incumbent president or vice president was not running in at least partial defense of an existing administration's record. That means Bush is not just a lame duck but an easy target for all three current candidates --...

Wednesday, May 07, 2008 What's Wrong with Republicans? [Victor Davis Hanson] On this great debate, I tend to agree with Mark Levin and others that conservatives should reach out with conservative principles better framed and presented, rather than change the message for the perceived advantage of the hour. What the Republicans need is not an abandonment of conservative principles, but a smarter, more articulate defense of even more conservativism, not less. E.g., Gas Prices? More nuclear power, hydro-, refineries, clean coal, drilling off coasts and in ANWR. And why? As a necessary bridge to next-generation cleaner and non-petroleum energy so...

When Ms. Murguia of the National Council of "The Race" announces that "when free speech transforms into hate speech, we've got to draw that line " we don't know whether to laugh or cry, since her own organization's very nomenclature "The National Council of La Raza" is hate speech to the core. No other ethnic organization these days would dare to refer to themselves as "The Race." Despite all the contortions of the group, Raza (as its Latin cognate suggests), reflects the meaning of "race" in Spanish, not "the people" — and that's precisely why we don't hear of something...

The gloomy election year refrain is that America is mired in Iraq, took its eye off Afghanistan, empowered Iran and is losing the war on terror. But how accurate is that pessimistic diagnosis? First, the good news. For all the talk of a recent Tet-like offensive in Basra, the Mahdi army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr suffered an ignominious setback when his gunmen were routed from their enclaves. This rout helped the constitutional — and Shiite-dominated — government of Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki renew its authority and has encouraged Sunnis to re-enter government. Two great threats to Iraqi...

The gloomy election-year refrain is that America is mired in Iraq, took its eye off Afghanistan, empowered Iran and is losing the war on terror. But how accurate is that pessimistic diagnosis? First, the good news. For all the talk of a recent Tet-like offensive in Basra, the Mahdi Army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr suffered an ignominious setback when his gunmen were routed from their enclaves. This rout helped the constitutional — and Shiite-dominated — government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki renew its authority, and has encouraged Sunnis to re-enter government. Two great threats to Iraqi autonomy...

The gloomy election-year refrain is that America is mired in Iraq, took its eye off Afghanistan, empowered Iran and is losing the war on terror. But how accurate is that pessimistic diagnosis? First, the good news. For all the talk of a recent Tet-like offensive in Basra, the Mahdi Army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr suffered an ignominious setback when his gunmen were routed from their enclaves. This rout helped the constitutional - and Shiite-dominated - government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki renew its authority, and has encouraged Sunnis to re-enter government. Two great threats to Iraqi autonomy...

Tuesday was Earth Day, and it reminded us how environmentalism has helped to preserve the natural habitat of the United States — reducing the manmade pollution of our soils, air, and water that is a byproduct of comfortable modern industrial life. But now we are in a new phase of global environmental challenges, as billions of people across an interconnected and resource-scarce world seek an affluent lifestyle once confined to Europe and the U.S. No longer are the old environmental questions of pollution versus conservation so simply framed. Instead, the choices facing us, at least for the next few decades,...

Is this not the most entertaining thing in the race so far?

Dana Milibank has a sober review of Wright’s morning rantings — and what they portend for the Obama campaign. For weeks now Wright has insulted the United States, whites, Jews, Israel, Italians, et al., but confined his media attacks to talk radio and cable news. But at the Press Club he showed disdain for the liberal corps, and that is a felony of a different sort. So expect outraged reporters to strike back. All this will be fatal to the Obama candidacy. Had he set an example of moral outrage at his pastor, Wright would be gone and Obama would...

One of the strangest things about the NAACP Wright pseudo-scientific speech on learning, and its enthusiastic CNN coverage and analysis, was the abject racialism of Wright. It was sort of an inverse Bell-Curve presentation, based on assumed DNA differences. His convoluted explanation of African-American right-brain 'oral' culture as more creative, musical, and spontaneous versus European left-brain traditional analysis could never have been given by someone white to that audience without justifiably earning booing and catcalls. Three comments: this was just the sort of racist 'genetic' difference that most Americans learned to shun, now apparently quite acceptable again, and part of...

"A savage, rather unsophisticated set of mores"... One way of gnashing one's teeth over the sudden scrutiny of the Obama candidacy, and its loss in Pennsylvania, is, well, to go back and blame American history for creating such illiberals. Now it's not just those "white folks" or the "white working class," but, you see, all those hick Southerners, wild Westerners, crazy Catholics and evangelicals, blood-drenched frontier warriors, sanctimonious Wilsonians—almost anyone other than the ancestors of those annoited it seems who now favor Barack Obama. Cf. the recent essay by Michael Hirsh, which if it is serious and not a joke,...

Inside the Obama mind. “They”? Who in the hell is “they”? — Lyle Gorch in The Wild Bunch Recently Barack Obama got into trouble by explaining to an affluent San Francisco audience why the cash-strapped, mostly white, working classes in Pennsylvania and the Midwest do not logically vote for his brand of economic populism, but instead cling to issues that sophisticates can see are extraneous to their economic plight.

Hillary won just enough to show that it is ludicrous to oust a 10-point winner at this late junction, but not quite the blow-out that might cause a stampede to her in the next few states. The Democrats are tottering at the edge of the abyss. They are about to nominate someone who cannot win, despite vastly out-spending his opponent, any of the key large states — CA, NJ, NY, OH, PENN, TX, etc. — that will determine the fall election. And yet not to nominate him will cause the sort of implosion they saw in 1968 or the sort...

It is only four months into 2008, but the presidential campaign — already too long and nasty — is still a long way from over. And the casualties are mounting. First, George W. Bush’s popularity remains dismal — even though some of the complaints about his first term have gone by the wayside. The French and German governments are now staunchly pro-American. Violence in Iraq is still way down from a year ago. America has been free from a terrorist attack since 9/11. No matter. Nothing has seemed to help the president. His approval rating stays at, or sinks below,...

The Real Obama? The problem with the Obama Marin County speech, inter alia, is that it invites comparison to himself—as all condescension does, being the nursemaid to hypocrisy. So if religion is a crutch for the embittered of Middle America, what is the creepy Rev. Wright for Obama? So the frustrated protectionists of Middle America are “anti-trade”, what then does that mean for the Harvard-educated NAFTA-trashing Obama? If Middle America can distinguish illegal from legal immigration, why can’t Obama in remarks to sophisticated Marin county elites? If jobs “have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them” why...

These days, Democrats are not sounding very liberal. Classic liberals, after all, would support free markets, internationalism, and the universal desire for constitutional government, while downplaying racial affinity. But the following examples highlight how far from these ideals today’s liberals are. Campaigning earlier this year in recession-prone Ohio, both Democratic candidates trashed the North American Free Trade Agreement. Sen. Barack Obama advocated renegotiation of the treaty. And Sen. Hillary Clinton assured voters she had always opposed NAFTA, an agreement that was concluded under her husband’s administration. But then a funny thing happened. A top economic adviser to Obama, Austan Goolsbee,...

For the Democratic party, 2008 was supposed to have been an ideal year. There’s an unpopular, lame-duck Republican president presiding over an iffy economy and an unpopular war. Plus, the Democrats won big in the 2006 elections, and there’s no Republican vice president in the race to draw on the power of incumbency. No wonder that for much of 2007, the polls suggested that the only mystery would be by how much Sen. Hillary Clinton would beat former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the general election. Indeed, for Democrats not to walk into the presidency in November 2008, the...

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Here is what Sen. Obama now says...

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...

I still believe that by August, Obama, the half-term rookie Senator, will have become the second George McGovern. Cf. his latest declaration to the Marin County faithful (coming on the heels of the crazy anti-Semitic rant of Rev. Eric Lee, a prominent LA Obama supporter): "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are...

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...

We know the critique of present American foreign policy under George W. Bush — unilateralist and preemptive — and to some extent we know Sen. Obama’s promised corrective — multilateral and reflective. So let’s take a serious look at what exactly is wrong with the former, and how things would substantially improve under the latter. Let’s start with India. Indians poll pro-American by wide margins — due no doubt to America’s unnecessary coddling of the world’s largest democracy. If Sen. Obama acts on his complaints about the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to India and institutes his anti-NAFTA preferences in U.S....

Americans have regularly changed their minds in the midst of their ongoing wars—and not just once, but often. War is a volatile enterprise. Tactics, strategies, and commanders must be sorted out amid death and destruction before the proper combination is found to defeat the enemy. In the meantime, the reasons for going to war, the manner in which the war is fought, and the objectives for which it is waged are constantly being weighed at home against the costs of conducting it. As a result, impatient democracies—and Americans are nothing if not impatient—are liable to suffer alternating fits of unrestrained...

Watching the parade of apologists for Rev. Wright’s hatred—“garlic noses”; “KKK of A;” “God Damn America;” “Condamnesia;” the U.S. deserved 9/11; America is no different from al-Qaeda; we caused the AIDs virus; Israel is a “dirty word” and sought an Arab and black ethnic bomb, etc—is, well, depressing. Instead of offering distance from Wright, far too many African-American professors and pastors interviewed on the cable stations the last few nights instead praised his brilliance and inspiration. At best, there was a feeble ‘you just don’t get it’ about the venting and wink-and-nod culture of the black church. But the net...

Watching the parade of apologists for Rev. Wright’s hatred—“garlic noses”; “KKK of A;” “God Damn America;” “Condamnesia;” the U.S. deserved 9/11; America is no different from al-Qaeda; we caused the AIDs virus; Israel is a “dirty word” and sought an Arab and black ethnic bomb, etc—is, well, depressing. Instead of offering distance from Wright, far too many African-American professors and pastors interviewed on the cable stations the last few nights instead praised his brilliance and inspiration. At best, there was a feeble ‘you just don’t get it’ about the venting and wink-and-nod culture of the black church. But the net...

Had Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., just said the following words last week in his speech on race in America, his problems with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, would probably now be over: "You have all heard the racist and anti-American outbursts of my pastor Rev. Wright. They are all inexcusable. His speeches have forced me to re-examine my long association with Trinity United Church of Christ. And so it is with regret that I must now leave that church. "I had heard similar extremist language of Rev. Wright in the past, and now apologize that I did not earlier...

Had Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., just said the following words last week in his speech on race in America, his problems with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, would probably now be over: “You have all heard the racist and anti-American outbursts of my pastor Rev. Wright. They are all inexcusable. His speeches have forced me to re-examine my long association with Trinity United Church of Christ. And so it is with regret that I must now leave that church. “I had heard similar extremist language of Rev. Wright in the past, and now apologize that I did not earlier...

Victor Davis Hanson's take is that Obama made a mistake because ... For some bizarre reason, Obama aimed his speech at winning praise from National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Harvard, and solidifying an already 90-percent solid African-American base — while apparently insulting the intelligence of everyone else. Indeed, the more op-eds and pundits praised the courage of Barack Obama, the more the polls showed that there was a growing distrust that the eloquent and inspirational candidate has used his great gifts, in the end, to excuse the inexcusable. Beyond Obama's natural constituency which includes most members of...

The United States is experiencing one of its periodic fits of isolationism. In the age before missiles and satellites, we often felt that two oceans protected us from warring states in Asia and Europe. In addition, for over a century our own frontier kept us busy enough. Both the Founding Fathers and waves of immigrants warned us against getting too involved with the aristocratic prejudices and age-old feuds of the Old World. After the Civil War, the federal government turned our army into a tiny constabulary. The nation industrialized, and didn’t much worry about the rising tensions between European colonial...

. . . Over the past four days, I asked seven or eight random (Asian, Mexican-American, and working-class white) Americans in southern California what they thought of Obama’s candidacy — and framed the question with, “Don’t you think that was a good speech?” The answers, without exception, were essentially: “Forget the speech. I would never vote for Obama after listening to Wright.” In some cases, the reaction was not mild disappointment, but unprintable outrage. . . . The sure thing of Democrats winning big in the House and Senate is now in danger of a scenario in which a would-be...

If he acts as if the Wright controversy is behind him, it's over for Obama. The latest polls reflecting Obama’s near-collapse should serve as a morality tale of John Edwards’s two Americas — the political obtuseness of the intellectual elite juxtaposed to the common sense of the working classes. For some bizarre reason, Obama aimed his speech at winning praise from National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Harvard, and solidifying an already 90-percent solid African-American base — while apparently insulting the intelligence of everyone else

The latest polls reflecting Obama’s near-collapse should serve as a morality tale of John Edwards’s two Americas — the political obtuseness of the intellectual elite juxtaposed to the common sense of the working classes. For some bizarre reason, Obama aimed his speech at winning praise from National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Harvard, and solidifying an already 90-percent solid African-American base — while apparently insulting the intelligence of everyone else.

March 20, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Hope and Change Amid DespairReports of America's demise are greatly exaggerated. By Victor Davis Hanson ‘I think the magic is over.� That’s what French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner recently said about the United States’ global reputation. It’s never been a great idea to rely on the assessments of French politicians, but the daily news coming out of the U.S. — in terms of our image overseas and beyond — does indeed seem bleak. Oil has climbed over $100 a barrel. Gas is nearing $4 a gallon. Gold is at $1,000 an ounce — a...

Barack Obama’s Tuesday sermon was a well-crafted, well-delivered, postmodern review of race that had little to do with the poor judgment revealed in Obama’s relationship with the hateful Rev. Wright, much less the damage that he does both to African Americans and to the country in general. Obama chose not to review what Wright, now deemed the “occasionally fierce critic.” said in detail, condemn it unequivocally, apologize, and then resign from such a Sunday venue of intolerance — the now accustomed American remedy to racism in the public realm that we saw in the Imus and other recent controversies. Instead,...

—The modified hang-out, and the modified modified hangout Despite the serial profession of a new politics, there is something Nixonian about Obama's recent disclaimers over his racist pastor's diatribes. At first he tried to blame the messenger: "Here is what happens when you just cherry-pick statements from a guy who had a 40-year career as a pastor.” The problem is not cherries, Senator, but an entire orchard. The most egregious slurs are not from two decades past, but post 9/11 and especially in 2006. And Obama should have learned from Nixon that when there is something there, it is best...

The Obama Implosion In a nutshell, Obama just doesn’t get it. The more he keeps hedging and huffing about the demagogic (“God damn America”) Wright, while simultaneously preaching about ethics, tolerance, and healing, and the more his own prior sermons are juxtaposed to Wright’s venom, so the more Obama appears an Elmer Gantry-like figure. He obviously either doesn’t fully grasp the degree to which his intimate relationship with a peddler of hatred offends Americans; or he feels that the Wright narratives are merely a wink-and-nod part of the local Chicago African-American landscape, and thus not that big a deal; or...

By now everyone sees what he wishes in Iraq — a disaster of many proportions, a necessary war that will still be won. Liberals who used to demand that we promote democracy abroad are fierce critics of Iraqi democracy; conservatives, who want an iron hand dealing with a hostile Middle East, support spending hundreds of billions of dollars in rebuilding Iraqi society. So it will be left to historians, as has been true in the case of the far-more-costly Korean and Vietnam wars, to adjudicate the final verdict. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq has entered yet another manifestation. The...

For forty years critics have attacked Western culture in general and its American brand in particular for an assortment of perceived sins. Minority groups have alleged America was singularly racist. Radical feminist have charged that it is sexist and male-dominated. Gays have complained about homophobia. Hard-core Leftists argued that the United States is exploitive and in thrall to a few elite capitalists. ...First, the charge was that our culture was inordinately dominated by white, heterosexual Christian men, who had systematically oppressed others to maintain their own privilege. Second, the solution was to enact affirmative action, change attitudes, pay fines, create...

Gaza erupted in celebration last week to the news that a Palestinian had murdered Jewish religious students in Jerusalem. And almost daily terrorists send rockets from Gaza into nearby Israeli cities, hoping to kill civilians and provoke Israeli counter-responses — and perhaps start another Middle East war. This is not the way some imagined Gaza two and half years after the Israelis withdrew both civilians and soldiers from the territory in September 2005. At the time, the Palestinian Authority controlled Gaza, but in early 2007, Hamas took over in a violent civil war, claiming legitimacy after once winning a popular...

Part of the problem with discussing race, Obama’s middle name, his wife’s astounding proclamations, and all the rest is perhaps remembering that there are two different constituencies, his base and the country, that require an Obama two-step. No doubt having a middle name like Hussein was ‘cool’ at Columbia and Harvard where it might solidify one’s ethnic or exotic fides. By the same token, a well-paid, Ivy-League-educated African-American woman like Michelle Obama, of course, had considerable success in lecturing upscale elite liberal audiences on their sloth, or cynicism, or why one should not heretofore have pride in the United States,...

Liberal Democrats from the North haven't had much success in recent presidential elections — not Hubert Humphrey, not George McGovern, not Walter Mondale, not Mike Dukakis and not John Kerry. Democratic Southerners — Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — have done quite a bit better. Continues... ============================================================= Obama harnesses power of Amnesia As proof that 'front-runner' Barack Hussein Obama will finally be getting the hard questions from the press, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz cited himself quoting a reporter from ABC News confronting Sen. Xerox recently with this staggering toughie: There's "an attempt by conservatives and Republicans to...

Liberal Democrats from the North haven’t had much success in recent presidential elections — not Hubert Humphrey, not George McGovern, not Walter Mondale, not Mike Dukakis, and not John Kerry. Democratic southerners — Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton — have done quite a bit better. Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois, knows this history. So why does he think he can be the first Northern liberal Democratic president since John F. Kennedy edged out Richard Nixon almost a half-century ago? First, there is no incumbent president or vice president running for the first time in over 50 years. Add...

Gen. David Petraeus — a sort of combination of Fabius Maximus ("unus homo . . .") and Matthew Ridgway — has changed the entire Iraq War, and thereby given us a breathing spell to reflect on our longer-term strategies of victory. Most of the conventional pessimism about Iraq is being proven wrong. For example, the recently translated captured diary of the dead al-Qaida terrorist — Abu Maysara, a senior adviser to Abu Ayyoub al-Masri — reveals a sort of hopelessness. The dead Maysara laments that al-Qaida has lost the hearts and minds of the people to the U.S. and its...

The forgotten American listens to Hillary and Barack and thinks all these promises are nice and well and good, but figures that they expect someone like herself to pay for all those programs for all those who chose to live life differently than she did—for whom in most cases there was as much or more chances than she had. She wants to pay taxes and help, but shrugs that those who receive think it’s never enough—resentment, not gratitude is their more appropriate response for government help. And she assumes that Hillary and Barak, given what they make, don’t much care...

The forgotten American listens to Hillary and Barack and thinks all these promises are nice and well and good, but figures that they expect someone like herself to pay for all those programs for all those who chose to live life differently than she did—for whom in most cases there was as much or more chances than she had. She wants to pay taxes and help, but shrugs that those who receive think it’s never enough—resentment, not gratitude is their more appropriate response for government help. And she assumes that Hillary and Barak, given what they make, don’t much care...

When President George Bush leaves office, will America once again be liked by most of the world? Not necessarily, since most current problems are either already getting better or not our fault. When the next president takes office in January 2009, he or she will be confronted by a world that either understandably appreciates America or for self-interested reasons will challenge it. On the positive side, the new president will see a Middle East without the Taliban in charge in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein ruling Iraq. A stabilizing constitutional Iraq should result in a steadily diminishing American presence there. In...

When President George Bush leaves office, will America once again be liked by most of the world? Not necessarily, since most current problems are either already getting better or not our fault. When the next president takes office in January 2009, he or she will be confronted by a world that either understandably appreciates America or for self-interested reasons will challenge it. On the positive side, the new president will see a Middle East without the Taliban in charge in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein ruling Iraq. A stabilizing constitutional Iraq should result in a steadily diminishing American presence there. In...

One wonders how the United States has come to the brink of nominating and probably electing someone with almost no experience as either an executive or national legislator, replete with ratings and rankings that suggest he will be about the most liberal Presidential candidate since George McGovern --snip--Instead, we are disliked by everyone, and for good reasons. The fact that Iranian mullahs, the House of Saud cousins, Hugo Chavez’s communists, European mullahs, and the Arab street don’t approve of America says more about us than it does them. The solution is to follow more the dictates of European Union and...