why obama wont get elected ,yes blacks do read seee

[wizthom]

ANN COULTER
Jonathan Livingston Obama
I’ve caught Obama fever! Obamamania, Obamarama,
Obama, Obama, Obama. (I just pray to God this is
clean, renewable electricity I’m feeling.)
Only white guilt could explain the insanely hyperbolic
descriptions of Obama’s “eloquence.” His
speeches are a run-on string of embarrassing, sophomoric
Hallmark bromides.
In announcing his candidacy, Obama confirmed
that he believes in “the basic decency of the American
people.” And let the chips fall where they may!
Obama forthrightly decried “a smallness of our
politics” — deftly slipping a sword into the sides of
the smallness-in-politics advocates. (To his credit, he
somehow avoided saying, “My fellow Americans,
size does matter.”)
He took a strong stand against the anti-hope
crowd, saying: “There are those who don’t believe in
talking about hope.” Take that, Hillary!
Most weirdly, he said: “I recognize there is a certain
presumptuousness in this — a certain audacity
— to this announcement.”
What is so audacious about announcing that you’re
running for president? Any idiot can run for president.
Dennis Kucinich is running for president. Until he was
imprisoned, Lyndon LaRouche used to run for president
constantly. John Kerry ran for president. Today,
all you have to do is suggest a date by which U.S.
forces in Iraq should surrender, and you’re officially a
Democratic candidate for president.
Obama made his announcement surrounded by
hundreds of adoring Democratic voters. And those
were just the reporters. There were about 400 more
reporters at Obama’s announcement than Mitt Romney’s,
who, by the way, is more likely to be sworn in as
our next president than B. Hussein Obama.
Obama has locked up the Hollywood money.
Even Miss America has endorsed Obama. (John
“Two Americas” Edwards is still hoping for the other
Miss America to endorse him.)
But Obama tells us he’s brave for announcing that
he’s running for president. And if life gives you
lemons, make lemonade!
I don’t want to say that Obama didn’t say anything
in his announcement, but afterward, even Jesse
Jackson was asking, “What did he say?” There was
one refreshing aspect to Obama’s announcement: It
was nice to see a man call a press conference to
announce something other than he was the father of
Anna Nicole Smith’s baby.
B. Hussein Obama’s announcement also included
this gem: “I know that I haven’t spent a lot of time
learning the ways of Washington. But I’ve been there
long enough to know that the ways of Washington
must change.” As long as Obama insists on using
Hallmark card greetings in his speeches, he could at
least get Jesse Jackson to help him with the rhyming.
If Obama’s biggest asset is his inexperience, then
if by the slightest chance he were elected and were to
run for a second term, he will have to claim he didn’t
learn anything the first four years.
There was also this inspirational nugget: “Each
and every time, a new generation has risen up and
done what’s needed to be done. Today we are called
once more, and it is time for our generation to
answer that call.” Is this guy running for president or
trying to get people to switch to a new long-distance
provider?
He said that “we learned to disagree without
being disagreeable.” (There goes Howard Dean’s
endorsement.) This was an improvement on the first
draft, which read, “It’s nice to be important, but it’s
more important to be nice.”
This guy’s like the ANWR of trite political aphorisms.
There’s no telling exactly how many he’s sitting
on, but it could be in the billions.
Obama’s famed eloquence reminds me of a book
of platitudes I read about once called “Life Lessons.”
The book contained such inspiring thoughts as:
“When was the last time you really looked at the
sea? Or smelled the morning? Touched a baby’s hair?
Really tasted and enjoyed food? Walked barefoot in
the grass? Looked in the blue sky?” (When was the
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last time you fantasized about dismembering the
authors of a book of platitudes?)
I can’t wait for Obama’s inaugural address when
he reveals that he loves long walks in the rain, sunsets,
and fresh-baked cookies shaped like puppies.
The guy I feel sorry for is Harold Ford. The former
representative from Tennessee is also black, a
Democrat, about the same age as Obama, and is
every bit as attractive. The difference is, when he
talks, you don’t fantasize about plunging knitting
needles into your ears to stop the gusher of meaningless
platitudes.
Ford ran as a Democrat in Republican Tennessee
and almost won — and the press didn’t knock out his
opponent for him by unsealing sealed divorce
records, as it did for B. Hussein Obama. Yet no one
ever talks about Ford as the second coming of Cary
Grant and Albert Einstein.
Maybe liberals aren’t secret racists expunging vast
stores of white guilt by hyperventilating over B. Hussein
Obama. Maybe they’re just running out of greeting
card inscriptions.
Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN
EVENTS and author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors,
Slander, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), and most
recently, Godless.
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BILL O’REILLY
The Perils of Obama
Sen. Barack Obama seems to be a nice guy. I won’t
say he’s “articulate,” because some African Americans
hear that word and take offense. In fact, I won’t
give the senator any compliments other than the nice
guy description, just to be on the safe side.
Is there any question that we are living in an age
of hypersensitivity? Some of that, of course, is justified.
When Sen. Joe Biden described Obama as
“clean,” it was a verbal disaster, adjectival Armageddon.
“Clean”? As opposed to what?
Some whites thought the reaction to Biden’s
remark was overblown, but consider this: If someone
described me, an Irish-American, as a “sober
thinker,” surely most Irish folks would raise a collective
eyebrow.
But when President Bush said Sen. Obama was
articulate, I’ll confess to thinking he was giving the
guy a genuine compliment. I mean who knew some
African-Americans would find the “a” word offensive?
Many of us are still confused.
According to some columnists, if you label a black
person “articulate,” you are implying that other
blacks are not. You are expressing surprise that an
African-American can actually speak English well.
And that’s condescending, is it not?
Well, I guess it could be. But Mr. Bush’s tone wasn’t
condescending at all. So I chalk this one up to
mild paranoia and/or a victimization play.
Many of us know people of all races who are professional
victims. They see slights everywhere. The
world is against them, and if you live in the world, so
are you. These people are tough to deal with. Anything
you say to them can and will be used against
you.
Few want to deal with this victim mentality, and
that’s the danger in this articulate controversy. I
know some white people who don’t know what to
say to black Americans so they completely disengage.
They don’t want to offend, and they don’t really
understand the “rules,” so they play it cautiously.
This is not a good thing for America. All responsible
citizens should be trying to break down racial
and religious barriers and work together. But, believe
me, there is fear in the marketplace—fear along racial
lines.
None of this, of course, is Barack Obama’s fault,
but he may suffer because of it. On Jan. 17, a Rasmussen
poll had him tied among Democrats with
Hillary Clinton in the presidential sweepstakes. Two
weeks later, Obama was behind Hillary by 14 points
in the same poll.
It is speculation, but all this word controversy
stuff can’t be helping Sen. Obama. For any candidate
to be elected to high office, there has to be a certain
comfort level with the folks. I don’t know about you,
but the articulation thing wasn’t comfortable for me.
The solution here is for honorable people to give
other people the benefit of the doubt. Sen. Biden
made a mistake, but it was not born from malice.
President Bush simply did nothing wrong. We have
enough problems in this country without creating
phantom annoyances. And that’s about as articulate
as I can be.
Mr. O’Reilly is host of the Fox News show “The O’Reilly
Factor” and author of Who’s Looking Out for You?
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MAC JOHNSON
Barack Obama: The Human Rorschach Blot
Barack Obama is like a small, shiny object. The easily
fascinated can stare deeply into his blank sheen
and see… their own reflections. He can be anything to
anyone because he is nothing in particular. Yet listening
to the leftstream media, one would have to conclude
that the man is a multifaceted miracle.
He’s a moderate. He’s a third way. He’s demographic
fusion cuisine. He’s a floor wax. He’s a desert
topping. He’s everything you’d hoped for and whatever
you need. That’s the beauty of being unknown.
He’s like that girl way over there at the other end
of the bar — perfect, unknown, perfectly unknown,
and improved mightily by distance and pent-up
desire. Mentally, you’re in love and three weeks into
the relationship before you even make it halfway
over to meet her.
Then you notice her eyes and think, “Man, which
one do I look at when I speak, because they don’t
point in the same direction. And what’s with the
Adam’s apple?” But at that point it’s too late to turn
around, because one of those eyes has seen you
already. I think that’s the way a lot of folks are going
to feel about their Obamaphilia after a few months
of campaigning have removed the gauze filter from
his carefully blurred image.
If any of the fawning were asked to name his
greatest accomplishment, could they name an accomplishment?
Other than being elected to the Senate just
two and a half years ago, and being simultaneously
black and yet likeable to white folks, I mean.
For emphasis, let’s examine a list of Obama’s
major accomplishments (so far):
1. Simultaneously black and yet likeable to white
folks
2. Made the initials “B.O.” cool again
3. Good oral hygiene
That’s it. He’s the Wayne Brady of politics —
everything white folks had been hoping for in at least
one black person, the big payoff for all that tolerance
and diversity babble. That may not be the politically
correct thing to say, but it is an honest assessment of
exactly what pent-up desire is fueling Obamamania
among his white, liberal fan base.
Obama’s resume and record (even just a record of
firm opinions on important issues) are so thin that I
really believed that early media talk of his running
for President was an affectionate nicety — like a
manager saying of a favored intern, “You’ll be running
this corporation before the summer’s over!”
Yet here we are, just a year after such talk began,
and the intern has announced that he’s putting his
resume in for the position. Well, I’ll alert human
resources.
Allegedly, his appeal rests with his “inspiring”
story. Lord knows he’s told his story enough: in two
books, uncounted speeches and interviews and occasionally
in explanations of why the story in the books
seems to differ from the facts. (Obama was telling the
“literary” truth, rather than getting bogged down in
the literal truth.) Come to think of it, I should add a
fourth bullet point to my list of Obama’s major
accomplishments (so far):
4. Telling his own story
The man’s Jesus and John the Baptist all rolled
into one — the Messiah that foretells his own coming.
But what, really, is so inspiring about his story?
He is alleged to have overcome the odds — to have
succeeded in the face of oppression. But to see
“black” as a synonym for “oppressed” is just a
stereotype (oh, and the rationale behind affirmative
action laws). And we all know that stereotypes are
wrong. I keep waiting for some real tale of the adversity
he’s faced and I have yet to hear it.
As far as I can tell, this is his inspiring story of success
despite oppression:
He overcame the oppression of being born to a
well-off middle class white woman and a Harvard
Ph.D. father, then he overcame the oppression of
attending private schools his entire life. His story
took a dark turn toward further oppression when he
was admitted to Columbia University and then —
gasp — Harvard Law School — where he was
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practically lynched into the position of President of
the Law Review by an overwhelming majority. Nay,
an oppressive majority. From there, his life has just
been a Hell of accolade and accomplishment.
The Boston Globe this week cited as an example
of his oppression that children at his private school
sometimes made fun of his unusual name. Please
excuse me if I don’t rush off to a sit-in on his behalf.
As a child named “Mac””entering elementary school
right about the time of McDonald’s famous “Big
Mac Attack” campaign and “Big Mac” jingle (“two
all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles
and onions on a sesame seed bun” as I seem to
recall), and who soon learned that Mac rhymes with
“Quack!” and “Whack!” I would now like to
announce my candidacy for the presidency of the
United States based on my inspiring story. I still can’t
hear a quip about “special sauce” without thinking
of the oppression of my fathers... or at least the Clinton
administration. Get in line, crybaby.
The only real adversity I can find in his life is that
his mother couldn’t seem to stay married to the same
man for much time and his father couldn’t seem to
marry just one woman at a time. And, again, if having
a screwed up family is a primary political asset,
we’ll need to form a really long line. The only thing
weirder than the average family would be a normal
family.
Yet the CNN.com poll question for Saturday was
“Does Barack Obama’s life story inspire you?” (Surprisingly,
most respondents said “No.” So I am not alone in
my underwhelming enthusiasm for the media darling.)
If stories like Barack’s are inspiring, then the field is
plainly crowded with inspirational tales:
Mitt Romney: An eloquent son of a former governor
of Michigan. Like Barack, he overcame his privileged
background to become a successful politician.
Although, if it’s triumph over real adversity and prejudice
that you want, consider that young Romney
spent 30 months as a Mormon missionary in France!
Now this is a man that has known struggle against
the odds.
Joe Biden: Born to a used car salesman, he somehow
found a talent for politics. He later overcame a
devastating battle with congenital dihydrotestosterone-
induced alopecia. Despite its ravages, Biden
has bravely kept “plugging away” at politics ever
since, chairing numerous televised hairings. Uh, I
mean “hearings.”
Tom Tancredo: Actually did come from a humble
background, went to a humble school, became a public
school teacher, married a public school teacher
and yet went on to engineer a national political
career. People don’t like that story though, so let’s
focus on the fact that he was involved in public education
and still became an unabashed conservative.
Talk about overcoming oppression.
John Edwards: The son of a textile worker and a
postal employee, grew up working class in rural
North Carolina. He overcame this humble background
to become a primping effete metrosexual millionaire
trial lawyer. Perhaps picking leaders based on
humble beginnings is not a foolproof system.
Dennis Kucinich: The son of an Ohio truck driver
and a stay-at-home mom, Kucinich went on to overcome
his obvious mental illness and the malnutrition
of a vegetarian diet to become the member of Congress
voted “most detached from world reality.”
Again, perhaps choosing leaders based on humble
beginnings is not a foolproof system.
I could go on and on (and often do), but you get
the idea. Barack Obama called his political aspirations
“The Audacity of Hope,” but really they’re
nothing so much as the audacity of hype.
Obama is just a human Rorschach Blot — a figure
so devoid of definition and meaning that what his
devotees see in him is more an insight into them than
into him.
Mr. Johnson, a writer and medical researcher in Cambridge,
MA., is a regular contributor to HUMAN EVENTS. His column
generally appears on Tuesdays. Archives and additional material
can be found at www.macjohnson.com.
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9
Who The Liberals Really Are
When the Democrats tell you who they are, what
they think, and what they intend to do, believe
them. When they claim (with Oscar-worthy straight
faces) they “support the troops,” their history —
both past and recent betrays that vacuous claim.
Last week, Senator Barack Obama made his third
big mistake, the result of a series of on-the-fly policy
pronouncements. Mistake Number One was his
statement that he’d move more aggressively into Pakistan
if, as president, he had “actionable intelligence”
about al Qaeda operating there. The statement itself
was quite hawkish, so the mistake wasn’t on the policy,
it was political: he ticked off his liberal base,
which does not want escalated military action in Pakistan,
or frankly, anywhere else. Mistake Number
Two came when he tried to fix Mistake Number
One: he said he’d take nuclear weapons “off the
table.” This brought him back into the liberal lovenest,
but just about everyone else thought it was
“naïve and irresponsible.”
Then came the Third Big Mistake. He was asked
about U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, and he said this:
“We’ve got to get the job done there. And that
requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not
just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is
causing enormous problems there.”
Throwing American troops down the stairs. It
may have been the first time Obama has done it, but
it’s not the first time his party has.
Another liberal Junior Senator repeatedly made
wild accusations about the conduct of the American
military in a different war:
“. . . they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off
heads, taped wires from portable telephones to
human genitals and turned up the power, cut off
limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians,
razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis
Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food
stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of
South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of
war, and the normal and very particular ravaging
which is done by the applied bombing power of this
country.”
The year was 1971, the war was Vietnam, and the
man was an aspiring politician (and president) named
John Kerry.
The routine was the same: Accusing U.S. troops of
widespread barbaric acts. Equating them with the
savage beasts they were fighting. Essentially saying
that they are no better than the enemies trying to kill
them — and us.
Where else have you heard a similar tune recently?
In the pages of The New Republic, a left-leaning publication,
that ran columns from Iraq, written by an
anonymous soldier, called “Baghdad Diarist.” In these
columns, the soldier accused his fellow troops of
“mocking and sexually harassing a woman whose face
had been marred by an I.E.D.” and “one soldier of
wearing part of an Iraqi boy’s skull under his helmet,”
among other things.
The Weekly Standard raised some serious questions
about those “reports,” forcing The New
Republic to identify the writer as Pvt. Scott Thomas
Beauchamp. The military then did its own thorough
investigation and found that the allegations made by
Beauchamp were “false.” Beauchamp himself signed
statements recanting the stories as “exaggerations
and falsehoods.”
It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to see an ugly pattern
here. Liberals with a predilection for slanderously
and maliciously skewering American troops in
order to further their own agendas.
This is who the liberals are. This is what they
believe. These are the “values” they would bring if
they win the presidency and hence, the role of commander-
in-chief.
At least Senator Hillary Clinton was smart enough
to “decline to comment” on Obama’s remark about
our troops in Afghanistan. But remember: she and
Bill slashed military budgets when they were president
the first time around. During his draft evasion
days, he was on record as saying he “loathed” the
MONICA CROWLEY
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military. He was accused of using the military during
times of personal political crisis, and only from politically
safe heights of 30,000 feet.
John Kerry, 1971. Bill and Hillary Clinton, 1992-
2000. Harry “the war is lost” Reid, 2007. The New
Republic, a few months ago. Barack Obama, last
week. They are all cut from the same cloth, singing
the same refrain. And despite their self-serving and
empty rhetoric to the contrary, it isn’t about “supporting
the troops.”
Monica Crowley, Ph.D., is a nationally syndicated radio
host and television commentator. She has also written for
The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles
Times, The Baltimore Sun and The New York Post.
www.monicamemo.com.
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Playing by Obama’s Rules
To observe Democrats, savaging one of their heroines,
is to understand why the party is unready
to rule.
Consider: At the 1984 Democratic convention in
San Francisco, an unknown member of Congress was
vaulted into history by being chosen the first woman
ever to run on a national party ticket.
Geraldine Ferraro became a household name. And
though the Mondale-Ferraro ticket went down to a
49-state defeat, “Gerry” became an icon to Democratic
women.
This week, however, after being subjected for 48
hours to accusations of divisiveness by Barack
Obama, and racism by his agents and auxiliaries in
the media, Ferraro resigned from Clinton’s campaign.
What had she said to send the Obamaites into paroxysms
of rage?
She stated an obvious truth: Had Barack not been
a black male, he probably would not be the frontrunner
for the nomination.
Here are the words that sent her to the scaffold.
“If Obama was a white man he would not be in
this position. And if he was a woman (of any color)
he would not be in this position. He happens to be
very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught
up with the concept.”
Note that Ferraro did not say race was the only
reason Barack was succeeding. She simply said that
being an African-American has been as indispensable
to his success as her being a woman was to her success
in 1984. Had my name been “Gerald” rather
than Geraldine, I would not have been on the ‘84
ticket, Ferraro conceded.
In calling her comments racist, Barack’s retinue is
asserting that his race has nothing to do with his success,
even implying that it is racist to suggest it. This
is preposterous. What Geraldine Ferraro said is palpably
true, and everyone knows it.
Was the fact that Barack is black irrelevant to the
party’s decision to give a state senator the keynote
address at the 2004 convention? Did Barack’s being
African-American have nothing to do with his running
up 91 percent of the black vote in Mississippi on
Tuesday?
Did Barack’s being black have nothing to do with
the decision of civil rights legend John Lewis to dump
Hillary and endorse him, though Lewis talks of how
his constituents do not want to lose this first great
opportunity to have an African-American president?
Can political analysts explain why Barack will
sweep Philly in the Pennsylvania primary, though
Hillary has the backing of the African-American
mayor and Gov. Ed Rendell, without referring to
Barack’s ethnic appeal to black voters?
What else explains why the mainstream media are
going so ga-ga over Obama they are being satirized
on “Saturday Night Live”?
Barack Obama has a chance of being the first
black president. And holding out that special hope
has been crucial to his candidacy. To deny this is selfdelusion
— or deceit. Nor is this unusual. John F.
Kennedy would not have gotten 78 percent of the
Catholic vote had he not been Catholic. Hillary
would not have rolled up those margins among white
women in New Hampshire had she not been a sister
in trouble. Mitt Romney would not have swept Utah
and flamed out in Dixie were he not a Mormon.
Mike Huckabee would not have marched triumphantly
through the Bible Belt were he not a Baptist
preacher and evangelical Christian. All politics is
tribal.
The first campaign this writer ever covered was
the New York mayoral race of 1961. Republicans
stitched together the legendary ticket of Lefkowitz,
Fino and Gilhooley, to touch three ethnic bases. Folks
laughed. No one would have professed moral outrage
had anyone suggested they were appealing to, or
even pandering to, the Jewish, Italian and Irish voters
of New York. People were more honest then.
Obama’s agents suggest that Ferraro deliberately
injected race into the campaign. But this, too, is
ridiculous. Her quote came in an interview with the
PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
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Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif., not “Meet the
Press.”
The attack on Ferraro comes out of a conscious
strategy of the Obama campaign — to seek immunity
from attack by smearing any and all attackers as having
racist motives. When Bill Clinton dismissed
Obama’s claim to have been consistently antiwar as
a “fairy tale,” and twinned Obama’s victory in South
Carolina with Jesse Jackson’s, his statements were
described as tinged with racism.
Early this week, Harvard Professor Orlando Patterson’s
sensitive nostrils sniffed out racism in
Hillary’s Red Phone ad, as there were no blacks in it.
Patterson said it reminded him of D.W. Griffith’s pro-
KKK “Birth of a Nation,” a 1915 film.
What Barack’s allies seem to be demanding is
immunity, a special exemption from political attack,
because he is African-American. And those who go
after him are to be brought up on charges of racism,
as has Bill Clinton, Ed Rendell and now Geraldine
Ferraro.
Hillary, hoping to appease Barack’s constituency,
is ceding the point. Will the Republican Party and the
right do the same? Play by Obama rules, and you lose
to Obama.
Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and
author of The Death of the West, The Great Betrayal, A
Republic, Not an Empire and Where the Right Went Wrong.
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Obama the Inexperienced
While the Rev. Jeremiah Wright continues to play
out in sound bites on cable TV and talk radio, it
isn’t Wright who might be president. It is Barack Obama
who wants that job. Rev. Wright is consistent in his
preaching that America bore some responsibility for the
9/11 attacks and in his conspiratorial lunacy about “how
the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a
means of genocide against people of color,” but Obama
has been inconsistent in what he has said about issues that
will have a far greater impact than the outrage produced
by his former pastor.
I am all for a post-racial, nonpolarized society, but
Obama has yet to detail how that would work and
on which issues he is willing to move toward the center
from positions any reasonable observer would
have to describe as far-left, even radical.
On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace tried to get
Obama to say where he might find common ground
with Republicans when he asked him: “Can you
name a hot-button issue where you would be willing
to buck the Democratic Party line and say, ‘You
know what? Republicans have a better idea here.’”
Obama offered regulation and charter schools, not
exactly hot-button issues. Moving away from his
vote against banning partial-birth abortion, as other
Democrats have done, would have been a good hotbutton
issue on which he might have compromised,
but abortion is the unholy grail of the left and no
Democrat can get the presidential nomination unless
he (or she) buys the entire abortion package.
Obama has the right attitude, as in, “My goal is to
get us out of this polarizing debate where we’re
always trying to score cheap political points and
actually get things done.” That’s admirable, so let’s
examine a few of the things Obama says he would
like to do.
On the war, Obama said on Fox, “I will listen to
Gen. (David) Petraeus, given the experience that he’s
accumulated over the last several years. It would be
stupid of me to ignore what he has to say.”
Admirable. But in testimony last September before
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of which
Obama is a member, Gen. Petraeus said, “I believe
Iraq’s problems will require a long-term effort.” The
day after Petraeus’ testimony, Obama called for the
U.S. to “Immediately begin to remove our combat
troops from Iraq.” Which is it, immediate, or heeding
Gen. Petraeus and his long-term approach for
bringing stability to Iraq?
On Fox, Obama said he would raise capital gains
taxes to no more than 20 percent. But on March 27,
Obama told CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo he would
raise capital gains taxes to 28 percent. Obama said
his goal is to “create additional revenue.” But as The
Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial recently,
lower capital gains taxes have, in fact, historically
produced more tax revenue while higher capital gains
taxes bring in less, as people are less willing to sell
stocks because it will cost them more in taxes.
What about payroll taxes? On Fox, Obama said
he’s for raising them on Americans earning more than
$102,000 annually. But just two weeks ago, Obama
said he wouldn’t raise taxes on anyone making less
than $200,000. When asked by ABC’s George
Stephanopoulos during the Philadelphia debate with
Hillary Clinton if he would pledge not to raise taxes
on the middle class, Obama responded, “I not only
have pledged not to raise their taxes, I’ve been the
first candidate in this race to specifically say I would
cut their taxes.” Again, which is it?
Obama’s view of government is classic liberal
paternalism: “... what (the American people) are
looking for is somebody who can solve their problems
… who will tell them the truth about how we’re
going to bring down gas prices, how we’re going to
bring back jobs,” he told Wallace.
No president can solve my problems, or bring
down gas prices (those are set by market forces) or
create jobs, other than more government jobs. In all
of Obama’s impressive rhetorical skills, there is nothing
about the role of the individual, only the role of
big government. His uncertainty and inconsistency
CAL THOMAS
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14
on issues ranging from war to taxes reveal his inexperience
and youthful stumbling, two qualities that
make him unprepared to be president.
And now we return to our regularly scheduled
program of the rantings of Rev. Wright.
Mr. Thomas is America’s most widely syndicated op-ed columnist.
He is a commentator/analyst for the Fox News Channel
and appears weekly as a panelist on “Fox News Watch,” and
an author of 10 books, including Blinded by Might: Why the
Religious Right Can’t Save America (HarperCollins/ Zondervan).
His latest is, The Wit and Wisdom of Cal Thomas. Contact
him at [e-mail].
■ ■ ■
15
Is Obama Ready for America?
Some pundits ask whether America is ready for
Obama. The much more important question is
whether Obama is ready for America and even more
important is whether black people can afford
Obama. Let’s look at it in the context of a historical
tidbit.
In 1947, Jackie Robinson, signing a contract with
the Brooklyn Dodgers, broke the color barrier in
major league baseball. He encountered open racist
taunts and slurs from fans, opposing team players
and even some players on his own team. Despite that,
his first year batting average was .297. He led the
National League in stolen bases and won the firstever
Rookie of the Year Award. Without question,
Jackie Robinson was an exceptional player. There’s
no sense of justice that should require that a player
be as good as Jackie Robinson in order to be a rookie
in the major leagues but the hard fact of the matter,
as a first black player, he had to be.
In 1947, black people could not afford a stubble
bum baseball player. By contrast, today black people
can afford stubble bum black baseball players. The
simple reason is that as a result of the excellence of
Jackie Robinson, as well those who immediately followed
him such as Satchel Paige, Don Newcombe,
Larry Doby and Roy Campanella, there’s no one in
his right mind, who might watch the incompetence
of a particular black player, who can say, “Those
blacks can’t play baseball.” Whether we like it or not,
whether for good reason or bad reason, people make
stereotypes and stereotypes can have effects.
For the nation and for black people, the first black
president should be the caliber of a Jackie Robinson
and Barack Obama is not. Barack Obama has
charisma and charm but in terms of character, values
and understanding, he is no Jackie Robinson. By
now, many Americans have heard the racist and anti-
American tirades of Obama’s minister and spiritual
counselor. There’s no way that Obama could have
been a 20-year member of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s
church and not been aware of his statements.
Wright’s racist and anti-American ideas are by no
means unique. They are the ideas of many leftist professors
and taught to our young people. The basic
difference between Sen. Obama, Wright and leftist
professors is simply a matter of style and language.
His Philadelphia speech demonstrated his clever style
where he merely changed the subject. The controversy
was not about race. It was about his longtime
association with such a hatemonger and whether he
shared the Reverend’s vision.
Obama’s success is truly a remarkable commentary
on the goodness of Americans and how far
we’ve come in resolving matters of race. I’m 72 years
old. For almost all of my life, a black having a real
chance at becoming the president of the United States
was at best a pipe dream. Obama has convincingly
won primaries in states with insignificant black populations.
As such, it further confirms what I’ve often
said: The civil rights struggle in America is over and
it’s won. At one time black Americans did not have
the constitutional guarantees enjoyed by white Americans;
now we do. The fact that the civil rights struggle
is over and won does not mean that there are not
major problems confronting many members of the
black community but they are not civil rights problems
and have little or nothing to do with racial discrimination.
While not every single vestige of racial discrimination
has disappeared, Obama and the Rev. Wright are
absolutely wrong in suggesting that racial discrimination
is anywhere near the major problem confronting
a large segment of the black community. The major
problems are: family breakdown, illegitimacy, fraudulent
education and a high rate of criminality. To confront
these problems, that are not the fault of the
larger society, requires political courage and that’s an
attribute that Obama and most other politicians lack.
WALTER E. WILLIAMS
Dr. Williams is a nationally syndicated columnist, former
chairman of the economics department at George Mason University,
and author of More Liberty Means Less Government.
■ ■ ■
16
The Other Obama
Here we go again. After being subjected to eight
years of the collegial presidency of Bill and
Hillary, when we were told that when we got Bill we
got Hillary as a bonus, it looks as if we are facing
another twofer: Barack and Michelle.
Effete liberal Democrats are all but canonizing
Barack Obama, who they see as one of their own —
cool, detached, impressively intellectual — all in all
what Pat Buchanan described as something fresh out of
the faculty lounge, where lofty thoughts abound and
contempt for the great unwashed is hardly concealed.
That may be an apt description, implying that the
Barack Obama who scorned ordinary folks in small
towns who, he sneered, cling to such lower-class
crutches as religion and guns, is above the distractions
of the madding crowd.
It does not, however, fit the other half of the new
twofer, Michelle Obama, who far from being above
it all is down there in the trenches acting like the
flame-throwing liberal activist she is. To know her is
to know what her husband really believes.
As I have told my listeners of my radio show, if
you want to understand how Barack Obama uncomplainingly
sat through all those fire-breathing sermons
without so much as stirring uncomfortably you
need to understand the way husbands and wives
practice their religion these days.
The men in the pews for the most part are passive,
while the wives tend to be passionate. In most cases husbands
are there because their wives have dragged them
there. Chances are that while the women sit in rapt attention
to the words of their pastor, the husbands are snoozing,
blissfully unaware of what the reverend is preaching.
From what we’ve heard from Mrs. Obama she was
paying close attention to the Reverend Mr. Wright, eating
up his fiery words and probably enthusiastically
nodding agreement as he blamed whitey for inventing
AIDS to kill blacks as Barack dozed beside her, wondering
when the Reverend Wright was going to shut up.
Barack is now wide awake, and for the next seven
months he’s going to continue to be faced with explaining
why he remained silent while his pastor ranted in
the pulpit. And insisting that during his presence in the
pews the Reverend Wright never once acted like Reverend
Wright just won’t wash. Poor Barack, how can
he admit that he didn’t hear any of that rabble-rousing
rhetoric because he slept through all 20 years of it?
If you want to find the culprit here, turn to
Michelle. I’m willing to bet she heard every word of
the Reverend Wright’s inflammatory sermons, swallowed
them whole, and seethed in anger over White
America’s wretched mistreatment of her fellow black
Americans as described by her pastor.
Nowadays she’s playing the role of dutiful wife
and doting mother, but every once in a while her
anger surfaces as it did most famously when she told
a group in Milwaukee, “For the first time in my
adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels
like hope is making a comeback.”
Just what is hope in Michelle Obama’s lexicon?
Why it’s nobody other than the man she shared a
pew with for 20 years, her husband, who she brags
“is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter
who will deign [i.e. “lower himself”] to enter this
messy thing called politics.”
“We have lost the understanding that in a democracy,
we have a mutual obligation to one another —
that we cannot measure the greatness of our society
by the strongest and richest of us, but we have to
measure our greatness by the least of these,” she says.
“That we have to compromise and sacrifice for
one another in order to get things done. That is why
I am here, because Barack Obama is the only person
in this who understands that. That before we can
work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our
souls are broken in this nation.”
Barack Obama, our sole hope — the cobbler
who’ll mend our poor broken souls. With, of course,
the help of his wife Michelle.
BY MICHAEL REAGAN
Mr. Reagan is a syndicated radio talk-show host, author of
Twice Adopted (Broadman & Holman Publishers) and The
City on a Hill, and the son of former President Ronald Reagan.
■ ■ ■
17
BY ROBERT NOVAK
Obama: Flawed or Fantastic?
Buyer’s remorse was beginning to afflict supporters
of Barack Obama before a recent primary
election returns showed he had delivered a knockout
punch against Hillary Clinton. The young orator
who had seemed so fantastic beginning with his 2007
Jefferson-Jackson dinner speech in Iowa disappointed
even his own advisers over the past two weeks, and
old party hands mourned that they were stuck with
a flawed candidate.
The whipping Obama gave Clinton in North Carolina
and his near miss in Indiana transformed that
impression. The candidate who delivered the victory
speech in Raleigh, N.C., was the Obama of Des
Moines, bearing no resemblance to the gloomy,
uneasy candidate who had seemed unable to effectively
deal with bumps in the campaign road. Returning
to his eloquent call for unity, the victorious
Obama in advance dismissed Republican criticism of
his ideology or his past as the same old partisan bickering
that the people hate.
John McCain as the Republican candidate does
not like that kind of campaigning, either. But a gentlemanly
contest between the old war hero from out
of the past and the new advocate of reform from the
future probably would guarantee Democratic
takeover of the White House. The Republican Party,
suffering from public disrepute, faces major Democratic
gains in each house of Congress — leaving the
defeat of Obama as the sole GOP hope for 2008.
Republicans were cheered and Democrats distressed
by an inexperienced Obama’s ineptitude in
handled adversity the past month. The new Republican
consensus considered Obama the weaker of the
two Democratic candidates. Indeed, Hillary Clinton
had finally shaken off pretensions of entitlement and
consigned Bill Clinton to rural America, raising speculation
that she would decisively carry Indiana and
threaten Obama in North Carolina. Clinton’s failure
Tuesday was a product of demographics rather than
Obama’s campaign skill. Consistently winning over
90 percent of the African-American vote, Obama is
unbeatable in a primary where the black electorate is
as large as North Carolina’s (half the registered Democratic
vote there). Indiana differed from seemingly
similar Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Clinton scored
big wins, because it borders Obama’s state of Illinois,
with many voters in the Chicago media market.
As the clear winner and the presumptive nominee,
Obama in Raleigh Tuesday unveiled his general election
strategy. Dismissing McCain’s “ideas” as “nothing
more than the failed policies of the past,” Obama
denounced what he called the Republican campaign
plan: “Yes, we know what’s coming. ... We’ve already
seen it, the same names and labels they always pin on
everyone who doesn’t agree with all their ideas.”
Thus, Obama seems to be ruling out not only discussion
of his 20-year association with the Rev. Jeremiah
Wright but also any identification of the
Democratic presidential candidate as “liberal” or as
an advocate of higher taxes, higher domestic spending,
abortion rights and gun control. These issues
appear to be included in what Obama at Raleigh
called “attempts to play on our fears and exploit our
differences.”
The test of Obama’s strategy may be his friendship
with and support from William Ayers, an unrepentant
member of the Weatherman terrorist underground
of the 1960s. Instead of totally disavowing
Ayers as he belatedly did his former pastor Wright,
Obama potentially deepened his problem by referring
to Ayers as just a college professor — “a guy who
lives in my neighborhood.” He then compared their
relationship with his friendship with conservative
Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, as he had compared
Wright’s racism with his white grandmother’s.
Democrats abhor bringing up what Obama calls
Ayers’ “detestable acts 40 years ago,” but it will be
brought into the public arena even if it is not
McCain’s style of politics. A photo of Ayers stomping
on the American flag in 2001 has been all over
the Internet this week. That was the year Obama
accepted a $200 political contribution from Ayers
■ ■ ■
18
and the year in which the former Weatherman said:
“I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do
enough.”
While McCain will demand no response from
Obama, others will. How the prospective nominee
handles this in the future will help define whether he
is seen as flawed or fantastic in the long campaign
ahead.
Mr. Novak is a syndicated columnist and editor of the Evans-
Novak Political Report, a political newsletter he founded in
1967 with Rowland Evans.
■ ■ ■
19
ANN COULTER
Dreams From My Father, Lame Excuses
From My Grandfather
Since a Chinese graduate student at Columbia University,
Minghui Yu, was killed recently when
black youths violently set upon him, sending him
running into traffic to escape, I think B. Hussein
Obama ought to start referring to the mind-set of the
“typical Asian person.”
As of Wednesday, police had no motive for the
attack, and witnesses said they heard no demand for
money or anything else. The Associated Press reports
that the assailant simply said to his friend, “Watch
what I do to this guy” before punching Yu.
Meanwhile, let’s revisit the story about Obama’s
grandmother being guilty of thinking like a “typical
white person.” As recounted in Obama’s autobiography,
the only evidence that his grandmother feared
black men comes from Obama’s good-for-nothing,
chronically unemployed white grandfather, who
accuses Grandma of racism as his third excuse not to
get dressed and drive her to work.
His grandmother wanted a ride to work at 6:30 in
the morning because, the day before, she had been
aggressively solicited by a homeless man at the bus
stop. On her account, the panhandler “was very
aggressive, Barry. Very aggressive. I gave him a dollar
and he kept asking. If the bus hadn’t come, I think
he might have hit me over the head.”
Even Obama’s shiftless grandfather didn’t play the
race card until pretty far into the argument over
whether he would drive Grandma to work. First, the
good-for-nothing grandfather told Obama that
Grandma was just trying to guilt him into driving her,
saying, “(S)he just wants me to feel bad.”
Next, he complained about his non-work routine
being disrupted, saying: “She’s been catching the bus
ever since she started at the bank. ... And now, just
because she gets pestered a little, she wants to change
everything!”
Only after Obama had offered to drive his grandmother
to work himself and it was becoming increasingly
clear what a selfish lout the grandfather was,
did Grandpa produce his trump card. The reason he
wouldn’t get his lazy butt dressed and drive Grandma
to work was... she was a racist!
As Obama recounts it, on Grandpa’s third try at
an excuse, he told Obama: “You know why she’s so
scared this time? I’ll tell you why. Before you came
in, she told me the fella was black. That’s the real reason
she’s bothered. And I just don’t think that’s
right.” So I guess I’ll be heading back to the sack
now!
That makes sense. It certainly never bothers me
when crazy white people harass and threaten me.
This is Obama’s own account of what happened,
which — as anyone can see — consisted of his slacker
grandfather making a series of excuses to avoid having
to drive the sole bread-earner in the family to
work.
But Obama says, “The words were like a fist in
my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure.”
(It was as if he had been punched by an
aggressive panhandler at a bus stop!) And not
because his grandfather’s sorry excuse reminded him
that he came from a long line of callow, worthless
men, both black and white.
No, Obama swallowed his grandfather’s pathetic
excuse hook, line and sinker, leading Obama to a
reverie about his grandparents: “I knew that men
who might easily have been my brothers could still
inspire their rawest fears.” That’s true — assuming
his brothers and sisters were menacing people at bus
stops.
How deranged would you have to be to cite this
incident as evidence that your grandmother thought
like a “typical white person” — as opposed to your
grandfather being worthless and lazy? For those
keeping score, Obama is aghast at his grandmother’s
alleged racism, but had no problem with Jeremiah
Wright’s manifest racism.
If Obama is sent reeling by the mere words of an
elderly white woman, how is he going to negotiate
with a guy like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? What if
Ahmadinejad calls him “booger-face”? Will he run
■ ■ ■
20
crying from the table?
Your grandmother wasn’t a racist, Barack. Your
grandpa was just a loser. Can we wrap up our
national conversation about race now? I think we’d
like to move onto questions about your stupid plan
to hold talks with Iran.
Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN
EVENTS and author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Slander,
How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), Godless, and
most recently, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be
Republicans.
■ ■ ■
21
GARY BAUER
Obama’s Controversial Views on Israel
For those of us with access to the Internet, it’s been
difficult to miss the circulating e-mails claiming
that Barack Obama attended a Madrassa (an Islamic
school) as a child in Indonesia. Or perhaps the one
informing us that Obama’s middle name is Hussein.
Then there’s the Internet allegation that Obama is
really a “secret Muslim.”
Innuendo about Barack Obama’s faith and
upbringing often dominate discussions regarding
how the likely Democratic presidential nominee
might conduct his foreign policy. That’s a shame,
because it distracts us from more legitimate and far
deeper concerns over Obama’s relationship not with
Islam but with Israel, the principal rhetorical and military
target of that religion’s most extreme adherents.
Of course, as with Obama’s remarks on many
issues, it’s easy to cherry-pick a few of his statements
about Israel that make it seem as if a President
Obama would be a loyal friend of the beleaguered
state. Such as when he says, “peace through security
is the only way for Israel” and “when I am president,
the United States will stand shoulder to shoulder with
Israel.”
What’s not to like, right? Well, a more thorough
examination of Obama’s statements, his background
and previous associations and, most importantly, his
would-be foreign policy team reveals a far different
reality — one that has caused many supporters of
Israel, including me, to worry about what an Obama
presidency might do to the long-term support for the
Jewish State.
First off, Obama demonstrates a deep misunderstanding
of the Middle East when he calls for the
immediate removal of American forces from Iraq,
which would expose Iraq to worse ethnic bloodshed
and embolden the enemies of Israel and the United
States. Senator Obama also voted against legislation
to place the Iranian Revolutionary Guard on the list
of terrorist organizations and criticizes Hillary Clinton
for voting in favor of the legislation, which
passed with the support of over three-quarters of the
Senate. He has also pledged to meet without preconditions
with Iran’s Holocaust-denying leader,
Ahmadinejad.
Just as disturbing are Obama’s statements about
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which include:
“Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people”
and the clueless remark that “the Israeli government
must make difficult concessions for the peace
process to restart.”
These troubling statements caused my friend and
former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Danny Ayalon
to ask in a recent op-ed, “Who are you, Barack
Obama?” Ayalon wrote that after meeting with
Obama on two occasions, he was “left with the
impression that [Obama] was not entirely forthright
with his thinking [about Israel].”
Ayalon’s skepticism no doubt stems from the fact
that Obama’s more recent pro-Israel statements do
not square with his past sympathy for Palestinian
radicals. Anti-Israel activist Ali Abunimah claims to
know Obama well and to have met him at several
pro-Palestinian events in Chicago when Obama was
an Illinois state senator. In an article, Abunimah
lamented that “Obama used to be very comfortable
speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian
rights and opposing the Israeli occupation.”
“Obama’s about-face is not surprising,” Abunimah
insisted, “He is merely doing what he think is necessary
to get elected and he will continue doing it as
long as it keeps him in power.”
Then there’s Obama’s church, Trinity United
Church of Christ, whose anti-Semitism is now well
known. Among many anti-Semitic documents that
the church has published on its website is a letter that
alleges Israeli “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” of
Palestinians and claims that Israelis “worked on an
ethnic bomb that kills blacks and Arabs.” Trinity’s
former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who Obama
has described as a “spiritual mentor,” gave anti-Semite
Louis Farrakhan an award for being a leader who
“truly epitomized greatness.”
■ ■ ■
22
Wright even traveled to meet with Libyan terrorist
leader Muammar al-Gaddafi and has compared
conditions in Israel to the apartheid of South Africa.
Of course, you won’t hear much from Wright these
days. As Wright told PBS last year, he understands
that Obama must keep his distance because “he can’t
afford the Jewish support to wane or start questioning
his allegiance to Israel.”
But nothing should concern Israel supporters as
much as Obama’s foreign policy team, which consists
of the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a remnant of the
administration of President Jimmy Carter, who, like
Rev. Wright, calls Israel an apartheid state. Brzezinski,
Carter’s national security advisor, has long held
anti-Israel views and supports open dialogue with the
terrorist group Hamas. Other top foreign policy advisors
with avowed hostility toward Israel include
Susan Rice and Robert Malley.
Most recently, it was revealed that Obama military
advisor and national campaign co-chairman Merrill
“Tony” McPeak has a long history of criticizing
Israel and in 2003 alleged that American Middle East
policy is being controlled by Jews at the expense of
American interests in the Middle East. During the
interviewer with the Oregonian, McPeak was asked
why there was a lack of action in the Israeli-Palestinian
peace process. He responded, “New York City.
Miami. We have a large vote — vote, here in favor
of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it.”
What’s most worrying about Obama’s foreign policy
team is that given the candidate’s extreme lack of
foreign policy experience (he once declared that the
four years he spent living in Indonesia as a child give
him credibility on the world stage), one would expect
Obama to lean heavily on it for advice. That’s something
that should concern anyone who understands
the value of supporting America’s only reliable ally
from a region in which we are engaged in two wars.
Mr. Bauer, a 2000 candidate for president, is chairman of
Campaign for Working Families and president of American
Values.
■ ■ ■
23
ANN COULTER
Obama’s Dimestore ‘Mein Kampf’
If characters from “The Hills” were to emote about
race, I imagine it would sound like B. Hussein
Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams From My Father.”
Has anybody read this book? Inasmuch as the
book reveals Obama to be a flabbergasting lunatic, I
gather the answer is no. Obama is about to be our
next president: You might want to take a peek. If
only people had read “Mein Kampf” ...
Nearly every page — save the ones dedicated to
cataloguing the mundane details of his life — is bristling
with anger at some imputed racist incident. The
last time I heard this much race-baiting invective I
was ... in my usual front-row pew, as I am every Sunday
morning, at Trinity United Church of Christ in
Chicago.
Obama tells a story about taking two white
friends from the high school basketball team to a
“black party.” Despite their deep-seated, unconscious
hatred of blacks, the friends readily accepted. At the
party, they managed not to scream the N-word, but
instead “made some small talk, took a couple of the
girls out on the dance floor.”
But with his racial hair-trigger, Obama sensed the
whites were not comfortable because “they kept smiling
a lot.” And then, in an incident reminiscent of the
darkest days of the Jim Crow South ... they asked to
leave after spending only about an hour at the party!
It was practically an etiquette lynching!
In the car on the way home, one of the friends
empathizes with Obama, saying: “You know, man,
that really taught me something. I mean, I can see
how it must be tough for you and Ray sometimes, at
school parties ... being the only black guys and all.”
And thus Obama felt the cruel lash of racism! He
actually writes that his response to his friend’s perfectly
lovely remark was: “A part of me wanted to
punch him right there.”
Listen, I don’t want anybody telling Obama about
Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” line.
Wanting to punch his white friend in the stomach
was the introductory anecdote to a full-page psychotic
rant about living by “the white man’s rules.”
(One rule he missed was: “Never punch out your
empathetic white friend after dragging him to a
crappy all-black party.”)
Obama’s gaseous disquisition on the “white man’s
rules” leads to this charming crescendo: “Should you
refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they
would have a name for that, too, a name that could
cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent.
Nigger.”
For those of you in the “When is Obama gonna
play the ‘N-word’ card?” pool, the winner is ... Page
85! Congratulations!
When his mother expresses concern about
Obama’s high school friend being busted for drugs,
Obama says he patted his mother’s hand and told her
not to worry.
This, too, prompted Obama to share with his
readers a life lesson on how to handle white people:
“It was usually an effective tactic, another one of
those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so
long as you were courteous and smiled and made no
sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they
were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a
well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem
angry all the time.”
First of all, I note that this technique seems to be
the basis of Obama’s entire presidential campaign.
But moreover — he was talking about his own
mother! As Obama says: “Any distinction between
good and bad whites held negligible meaning.” Say,
do you think a white person who said that about
blacks would be a leading presidential candidate?
The man is stark bonkersville.
He says the reason black people keep to themselves
is that it’s “easier than spending all your time
mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white
folks were thinking about you.”
Here’s a little inside scoop about white people:
We’re not thinking about you. Especially WASPs. We
think everybody is inferior, and we are perfectly
■ ■ ■
24
charming about it.
In college, Obama explains to a girl why he was
reading Joseph Conrad’s 1902 classic, “Heart of
Darkness”: “I read the book to help me understand
just what it is that makes white people so afraid.
Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. I
helps me understand how people learn to hate.”
By contrast, Malcolm X’s autobiography “spoke”
to Obama. One line in particular “stayed with me,”
he says. “He spoke of a wish he’d once had, the wish
that the white blood that ran through him, there by
an act of violence, might somehow be expunged.”
Forget Rev. Jeremiah Wright — Wright is Booker
T. Washington compared to this guy.
Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN
EVENTS and author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Slander,
How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), Godless, and
most recently, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be
Republicans.
■ ■ ■
25
Over the Top Barack
DAVID LIMBAUGH
Based on Barack Obama’s hysterical, paranoid
reaction to President Bush’s remarks to the Israeli
Knesset condemning the practice of appeasing terrorists,
one might infer Obama was lying in wait for just
such an opportunity to capture some national security
street cred.
After all, Democrats begin any presidential race
with a national security credibility deficit, and this
one should be no different, notwithstanding the
unpopularity of the Iraq war. Democrats like to think
they gained congressional seats in 2006 because of
the war, but a better read is that Republicans did
themselves in through reckless spending, scandals
and other abandonment of conservative principles.
Despite his puffed-up posturing, Obama probably
recognizes this, as well. Otherwise, why would he
have lashed out so nastily at both Mr. Bush (and Sen.
McCain) for assuring our closest Middle Eastern ally
that we would stand by it?
Obama was so sure Bush’s remarks were aimed at
him that he shed his nice-guy facade and gave the
nation a little glimpse of his inner anger. For those
who insist Obama is all sweet and light, I challenge
you to listen to his tantrums in response to the president’s
non-attack.
Obama shouted: “I’m a strong believer in bipartisan
foreign policy, but that cause is not served with
dishonest, divisive attacks of the sort that we’ve seen
out of George Bush and John McCain over the last
couple days. They aren’t telling you the truth.”
Let me ask you: Where does Barack Obama get
off proclaiming himself the high arbiter of civility and
bipartisanship while he is engaged in a sputtering
tirade of abject incivility and partisanship? Obama
apparently expects us to assess his civility not on the
basis of his conduct, but solely on the strength of his
distorted self-description.
Like so many other liberals, Obama exempts himself
from behavioral accountability through identification
with liberal policies, which confer upon him
the irrebuttable presumption that he is kind and compassionate.
But those not subject to the self-deluding
spell of liberalism or Obamaphilia will not be fooled
by such hypocrisy. They will judge Obama’s claim to
civility not on his self-elevating but empty words, but
on his self-damning, nasty ones.
Obama’s joining with other Democrats to bear
false witness against President Bush is a perfect example
of the type of incivility for which he disingenuously
excoriates President Bush.
Obama also decried the president’s remarks as
“exactly the kind of appalling attack that’s divided
our country and alienated us from the rest of the
world.”
No, Sen. Obama, what have divided this country
and alienated us from the rest of the world are the
nonstop Democratic assaults against President Bush
— assaults that you not only did not condemn as
uncivil, dishonest and divisive but also have
embraced and echoed.
What has placed America in a falsely negative
light to the world is the Democratic chorus of lies
that President Bush misled us into war in Iraq; that
he is responsible for the killing of hundreds of thousands
of Iraqi civilians; that the United States is torturing
and otherwise violating the “rights” of our
enemy prisoners at Guantanamo Bay; that this very
detention center is comparable to a Soviet Gulag or
Nazi prison camp; that the Bush government is spying
on its own citizens; that America, because of its
corporate greed, refuses to lead the world against
apocalyptic global warming; and that the heartland
of America is inhabited by jingoistic, imperialistic,
intolerant, homophobic, xenophobic, racist and reality-
challenged Bible-thumpers.
President Bush is not guilty of leveling a partisan
attack against Barack Obama in Israel. But if he were
to change course after seven long years on the receiving
end and start returning cheap shots at Democrats,
say, at the rate of 10 per day for the remainder of his
term, he still would be behind Democrats in this
department by a sizeable multiple. Truly, it amazes
■ ■ ■
26
me how civil, composed and un-reciprocal President
Bush has been in the face of this incessant barrage of
partisan vitriol.
Shame on Barack Obama for falsely accusing the
president of behavior he and his party have perfected
through meticulous practice. Shame on him for pretending
that he offers bipartisanship when his actual
record is one of extreme liberalism and is strikingly
bereft of aisle crossing or compromise. Shame on him
for defining bipartisanship and civility, in effect, as
acquiescing to his dictates.
Obama likens his own foreign policy approach to
that of Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, but reality
places him closer to George McGovern or Michael
Dukakis. But there is a method to his madness. He
has assumed the offense against his Republican rivals
to divert our attention from his demonstrable lack of
toughness in the war on terror.
Mr. Limbaugh is a nationally syndicated columnist and
author of Bankrupt: The Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy
of Today’s Democratic Party, Absolute Power and Persecution.
■ ■ ■
27
BRENT BOZELL
Barack Potatoe Obama?
Imagine that John McCain named a young running
mate to campaign with him, and this national
rookie suggested America had 58 states, repeatedly
used the wrong names for the cities he was visiting,
and honored a Memorial Day crowd by acknowledging
the “fallen heroes” who were present, somehow
alive and standing in the audience. How long would
it take for the national media to see another Dan
Quayle caricature? Let’s raise the stakes. What if it
was the GOP presidential candidate making these
thoroughly ridiculous comments? This scenario is
very real, except it isn’t McCain. It’s the other fellow.
ABC reporter Jake Tapper follows politicians
around for a living. On his blog, he suggested Barack
Obama has a problem: “The man has been a oneman
gaffe machine.”
In Sunrise, Fla., Obama said, “How’s it going,
Sunshine?” He did the same thing in Sioux Falls,
S.D., calling it “Sioux City.” Some of his geographic
struggles seem calculated. When asked why Hillary
Clinton trounced him in Kentucky, Obama claimed
“I’m not very well known in that part of the country
... Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming
from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not surprising
that she would have an advantage in some of
those states in the middle.” But Obama’s home state
of Illinois is more than “near” Kentucky — it borders
Kentucky.
In Oregon, there was a doozy. Obama said of his
long campaign, “I’ve been in 57 states, I think, one
left to go.” No one in the press made much of this.
As former ABC political reporter Marc Ambinder,
now with the Atlantic Monthly magazine, admitted:
“But if John McCain did this — if he mistakenly said
he’d visited 57 states — the media would be all up in
his grill, accusing him of a senior moment.” If you
doubt him, remember how most media outlets noted,
then underlined McCain’s error about al-Qaeda
being trained and funded by Iran.
In New Mexico, Obama suggested he was like a
young Haley Joel Osment in “The Sixth Sense,” with
the ability to see dead people: “On this Memorial
Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen
heroes — and I see many of them in the audience
here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly
strong.” Fallen heroes in the audience? Is this Barack
Potatoe Obama? This is precisely the kind of misstatement
that Dan Quayle-bashers would run ad
infinitum.
But there have also been gaffes on more serious
matters. ABC found that campaigning in Rush Limbaugh’s
hometown of Cape Girardeau, Mo., Obama
argued that our military’s Arabic translators in Iraq
are needed in Afghanistan: “We only have a certain
number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then it’s
harder for us to use them in Afghanistan,” he
claimed. But Afghans don’t speak Arabic; they speak
several other languages. That’s a lot like McCain’s
gaffe — except for the degree of media attention,
which in the Democrat’s case was virtually nonexistent.
McCain also would have enjoyed more media
focus on Obama’s completely muddled analysis of
South America last week. He told the Orlando Sentinel
on Thursday that he would meet with Chavez
to discuss “the fermentation of anti-American sentiment
in Latin America, his support of FARC in
Colombia and other issues he would want to talk
about.” But on Friday in Miami, he insisted any
country supporting the Marxist guerrillas of FARC
should suffer “regional isolation.” This left Obama
advisers scrambling to suggest that these two opposing
statements can somehow be put together, that he
can meet Chavez and isolate him at the same time.
Sometimes, Obama invents Bosnia-sniper-style
whoppers about his personal history. In Selma, Ala.,
Obama claimed that the spirit of hope derived from
the civil rights protests in Selma in 1965 inspired his
birth — when he was born in 1961. He also has inaccurately
claimed that the Kennedys funded his
Kenyan father’s trip to America in 1959.
While he was making boo-boos in New Mexico
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28
on Memorial Day, Obama also (according to CBS
reporter/blogger Maria Gavrilovic) talked about
post-traumatic stress disorder by claiming he had an
uncle “who was part of the American brigade that
helped to liberate Auschwitz,” and then came home
and spent six months in an attic. Gavrilovic didn’t
note that the prisoners at Auschwitz were liberated
by the Red Army. Obama earlier made the claim on
his campaign site that his grandfather knew American
troops who liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka
(also liberated by the Red Army).
Everyone should grant these candidates a little
room for error in the long slog of presidential campaigning.
But what about some balance? The same
national media that turned Dan Quayle’s name into
an instant joke are now working over time to present
Obama as Captain Competent.
Mr. Bozell is president of the Media Research Center.
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29
How Would Iran Read Obama?
ROBERT SPENCER
Reeling from President Bush’s criticism of the
proposition that we should negotiate with terrorists,
“as if some ingenious argument will persuade
them they have been wrong all along,” Barack
Obama was at first indignant, declaring: “George
Bush knows that I have never supported engagement
with terrorists.” But apparently he doesn’t consider
Iran, for all the genocidal bellicosity of its President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a terrorist state: on Monday
he reaffirmed that he would indeed sit down with the
leaders of Iran (as well as with those of Cuba and
Venezuela), and that no one should be disturbed by
this, since these countries “don’t pose a serious threat
to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us.”
And speaking specifically about Iran, the presumptive
Democratic nominee continued: “If Iran ever tried
to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn’t stand a
chance. And we should use that position of strength
that we have to be bold enough to go ahead and listen.
That doesn’t mean we agree with them on everything.
We might not compromise on any issues, but at least,
we should find out other areas of potential common
interest, and we can reduce some of the tensions that
has caused us so many problems around the world.”
Yes, he really said that “we should find out other
areas of potential common interest.” He didn’t
explain what these might be, but here John McCain’s
comment was particularly apposite. “It shows naivete
and inexperience and lack of judgment,” observed the
GOP standard-bearer, “to say that he wants to sit
down across the table from an individual who leads a
country that says that Israel is a ‘stinking corpse,’ that
is dedicated to the extinction of the state of Israel. My
question is, what does he want to talk about?”
That’s not all. Obama is apparently not aware that
Ahmadinejad has made it clear that he is in no mood
to sit down with Americans unless the Americans
know their place. “The American administration,”
he said in 2006, “is still dreaming of returning the
Iranian people 30 years backwards. As long as America
has this dream, these [relations] will not happen.”
What should America do instead? “They should
wake up from this dream and see the facts. They
should change their behavior and mend their ways.
They should take a fair position. We have told them
what they have to do, and if they do it, there will be
no problem as far as we are concerned.”
“We have told them what they have to do, and if
they do it, there will be no problem as far as we are
concerned”! As if that weren’t clear enough, he
warned America and its allies that “if you want to
have good relations with the Iranian people in the
future, you should acknowledge the right and the
might of the Iranian people, and you should bow and
surrender to the might of the Iranian people. If you
do not accept this, the Iranian people will force you
to bow and surrender.”
Would Iran’s Thug-In-Chief regard Obama’s invitation
to sit down and chat as a sign that he was willing to
“bow and surrender”? There is no reason to think he
would regard it in any other way. Islamic law stipulates
that Islamic forces may only ask for a truce with the
enemy under two conditions: if they have a reasonable
expectation that the enemy may convert to Islam, or —
more commonly — if the Muslims are weak and need to
buy some time to recover their strength to fight again
more effectively. With this understanding, the Iranian
mullahs might be forgiven for assuming that if Obama is
coming to them hat-in-hand, he must be weak. Given
Ahmadinejad’s oft-repeated declarations that Israel will
soon cease to exist (it was only last week that he said that
it was “on its way to annihilation”), weakness might not
be the wisest thing to project to them at this point.
Unless, of course, the bright new President Obama
is prepared to deal with a nuclear mushroom cloud
over Tel Aviv. That will certainly give him and
Ahmadinejad plenty to talk about.
Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of The
Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The
Truth About Muhammad and Religion of Peace? (all from
Regnery — a HUMAN EVENTS sister company).
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