Yesterday was a big news day with two unrelated events occurring that will each have an impact on this fall’s elections. While on the surface the two may seem unrelated both spell trouble for Democrats.

President Bush, speaking at The Knesset in Israel, used the opportunity to launch an unmerited attack against Senator Barack Obama. At least, that’s what Senator Obama, aided and abetted by the left-leaning media, would like voters to believe. Here’s the paragraph that got Democrats’ collective undies in a bunch from the transcript of the speech: Read the rest of this entry

Obama could no sooner disown the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than he could disown the black community.  Well, at least up until the past few days.  He still hasn’t disowned him per se, but he certainly has tried to distance himself from his 20-year pastor.

But the discussion has been that what one heard from Wright’s pulpit was part and parcel of church in that selfsame black community.  But the LA Times has been asking black clergymen in LA and finds that, no, Wright’s rants aren’t necessarily mainstream.

In a series of nationally televised appearances over the last few days, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. has defended his controversial remarks as "prophetic theology," and said criticism of him amounted to an attack on the black church.
But most black church leaders and members reached Tuesday disagreed.

"This didn’t have anything to do with the black church — it was basically an attack on the individual message he proclaimed, which hurt some individuals," said the Rev. K.W. Tulloss of Weller Street Missionary Baptist Church in Boyle Heights. "My own members were offended by Rev. Wright’s words. His views have cast a wedge between people, and that’s the exact opposite of the unity Jesus represented."

[…]

Bishop John Bryant of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, who has known Wright for 30 years, said he would have used less provocative language.

"How one speaks is as important as the right to do so," Bryant said. "If it is done in an inflammatory way, the substance of the message gets lost in the rhetorical style."

Kerman Maddox, a member of First AME church in Los Angeles, said that he had listened to hundreds of sermons in black churches nationwide as part of his political and community work, and that Wright’s messages did "not represent mainstream black thought on Sunday morning."

He said he had never heard pastors curse America or proclaim, as Wright had, that the U.S. government caused AIDS among blacks. He said the common pulpit themes had long been unity, personal responsibility, loving your neighbor and improving your neighborhoods.

But the biggest concern Tuesday among local black religious leaders — and across a wide swath of black Los Angeles — was not about Wright’s words per se but about their impact on Obama’s historic campaign.

It’s been a while since all this came out; why didn’t anyone in the media think to ask these questions earlier? 

But the main question to me is this; what does this say about Obama himself?  He’s not running on experience — he’ll lose to McCain if he is — so one of main things to consider is his judgement.  If he’s shocked to find out that his own pastor is so far out of the mainstream after spending 20 years with him, that does not reflect well on that judgement.

John Fund has a good round-up of the recent Supreme Court 6-3 ruling upholding Indiana’s voter fraud laws.  There was one thing, however, that the justices were unanimous on.

In ruling on the constitutionality of Indiana’s voter ID law – the toughest in the nation – the Supreme Court had to deal with the claim that such laws demanded the strictest of scrutiny by courts, because they could disenfranchise voters. All nine Justices rejected that argument.

Even Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the three dissenters who would have overturned the Indiana law, wrote approvingly of the less severe ID laws of Georgia and Florida. The result is that state voter ID laws are now highly likely to pass constitutional muster.

As much as the Left has tossed that word around (and at times incorrectly), this is indeed a crushing blow to budding Mayor Daley’s of the world.

But read the whole thing.  The case was from Indiana, and there’s a very close Obama connection.  You’d expect him to want to avoid voter fraud, right?

Right?

[tags]John Fund,Supreme Court,Indiana,vote fraud[/tags]

Uh oh, don’t these Democrats realize that you simply can’t talk about this sort of thing in polite company?

Wading back into the Democratic presidential race, billionaire businessman Bob Johnson said Monday that Sen. Barack Obama would not be his party’s leading candidate if he were white.

Yes, apparently Mr. Johnson does recall Geraldine Ferraro’s remarks, and in fact agrees with them.

Johnson’s comments to the Observer echoed those of former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. She stepped down as an adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton last month after saying Obama wouldn’t be where he is if he were white.

"What I believe Geraldine Ferraro meant is that if you take a freshman senator from Illinois called `Jerry Smith’ and he says I’m going to run for president, would he start off with 90 percent of the black vote?" Johnson said. "And the answer is, probably not… ."

"Geraldine Ferraro said it right. The problem is, Geraldine Ferraro is white. This campaign has such a hair-trigger on anything racial … it is almost impossible for anybody to say anything."

Well, I wouldn’t say Ferraro’s skin color was a "problem" in the general sense, because that shouldn’t have mattered.  Equally, Bob Johnson’s skin color shouldn’t matter either, but if you click here and pull up the web page for the article, you’ll notice that he is black.  Not only can he say that Obama’s color is a factor in his popularity, he can also say that it was a "problem" for Ferraro to say this because of her color.

Whether or not you agree with Johnson’s assessments, I highly doubt he’s going to come under fire nearly as much as Ferraro for what amounts to a restating and expanding of her comments.  Obama himself may take a shot back, but the uproar, or lack thereof, over this will be telling.

And again I have to come back to the question; who it is that really has a problem with this?  It’s Democrats, the ones who insist they have more common cause with Dr. King.  It’s not just that talking about racial issues (which they, like Obama, insist they want to have a conversation on) can be taboo, but it’s a different sized taboo (or none at all) depending on the race of the speaker.  Your opinion is simply not tolerated unless you are of a particular race. 

Isn’t that, y’know, the very definition of racism?  Isn’t this allegedly what political correctness — AKA liberal sensitivity — was supposed to remove?  And yet liberals find themselves yet again in a bed, nay coffin of their own making.  Identity politics is ripping the party apart, and now oversensitivity to racial issues is continuing the breakdown. 

The facade that is the Democratic party has some gaping fissures. 

A gift from God.

³ Sons are a heritage from the LORD,
children a reward from him.

⁴ Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are sons born in one’s youth.

⁵ Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.

Well, unless they’re not planned or wanted. Then they’re a punishment, right Senator?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNbaig-D5pk[/youtube]

[tags]children,Barack Obama,Psalms,abortion,sex education[/tags]

Our contributor Tom said recently, "These are tough times to be a Democrat."  A commenter, noting that line, replied, "It still appears that McCain can’t even beat Clinton – with her huge negative ratings – much less Obama."

If you put your stock in opinion polls, McCain’s looking better all the time.

The poll showed Arizona Sen. McCain, who has clinched the Republican presidential nomination, is benefiting from the lengthy campaign battle between Obama and Clinton, who are now battling to win Pennsylvania on April 22.

McCain leads 46 percent to 40 percent in a hypothetical matchup against Obama in the November presidential election, according to the poll.

That is a sharp turnaround from the Reuters/Zogby poll from last month, which showed in a head-to-head matchup that Obama would beat McCain 47 percent to 40 percent.

Now, as I’ve said, I’m not a big fan of opinion polls.  They tend to judge emotion moreso that anything else, as I think this one does.  Nonetheless, I think Tom’s point stands, especially when you consider, as he did, the primary season debacle.

So now Democrats find themselves in a thoroughly uncomfortable position. Their nominee will ultimately be selected by the party’s elite, unelected delegates rather than by the millions of voters who turned out in during the primary season. Depending on which way they go, they run the risk of alienating a huge portion of their base. They could potentially disenfranchise millions of voters (particularly if they cannot resolve the Michigan/Florida problem). It’s rather ironic that the same party that since 2000 has routine accused Republicans of disenfranchising voters may do the same to their own base. How they solve these issues in selecting their nominee could mean the difference between a huge victory in November and utter self-destruction.

It ain’t over ’til it’s over, right Yogi?

[tags]politics,Democrats,John McCain,Hillary Clinton,Barack Obama,presidential primary,disenfranchisement[/tags]

Senator Barack Obama gave a speech in Philadelphia yesterday on race issues.  The speech was precipitated by connections being drawn between Obama and his black liberation theology pastor of 20 years, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Many people have been turning to the Internet to view statements by his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who suggested in one sermon that the United States brought the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on itself and in another said blacks should damn America for continuing to mistreat them.

Obama rejected Wright’s divisive statements but still embraced the man who brought him to Christianity, officiated at his wedding, baptized his two daughters and inspired the title of his book "The Audacity of Hope."

Not disown, perhaps, but much of that association has been scrubbed from Obama’s website and elsewhere on the Internet.  And that’s begging the question; are Rev. Wright’s view extreme for black liberation theology?  See here for Mark Olsen’s look into this.  If they are extreme, what does it say about the candidate who supports that church by his attendance and, likely, his money?  If they aren’t extreme, what does it say about the theology, in addition to the candidate?  [UPDATE: James Taranto reports that they may be more mainstream than some would like to think.]

So then, are a candidate’s pastor’s views fair game for consideration on the campaign trail?  Before you answer, consider how the occasional words of Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell have been used to paint evangelical Christians with a broad brush, both in the media and in the blogs.  But Falwell wasn’t, and Robertson isn’t, the pastor of the vast majority of those people for whom the Left likes to suggest they speak for.  Obama, on the other hand, attends by personal choice.  If the Left wants to make Robertson the spokesman for millions who may have not heard him speak, doesn’t that standard then apply to someone with a 20-year, close association with a presidential candidate? 

Or is there one standard for the Religious Right, and another for the Religious Wright?

Please vote in the poll on the right; do you think it’s fair game?

[tags]Barack Obama,Rev. Jeremiah Wright,race issues,Jerry Falwell,Pat Robertson,Religious Right,Christianity[/tags]

These are tough times to be a Democrat. After months of battling through primaries and caucuses, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are practically deadlocked in the race for their party’s presidential nomination. Even though several states are still slated to hold their primaries they aren’t going to ultimately decide who the nominee will be. That decision will be made by 796 “superdelegates” who are party officials who will ultimately select the nominee. Never before has the Democratic party had to rely on these unelected delegates to decide a nomination. This was the year the Democrats were supposed to win back the White House. Now, it looks like the party may implode before they can select a nominee.

To make matters worse, Senator John McCain has already wrapped up the Republican nomination which means he can focus on the general election and raise a boatload of campaign cash.

The question now facing Democrats in how to bring their nomination process to a peaceful end. Unfortunately for them, no one has a good solution.

Read the rest of this entry

When Maureen Dowd finally sees the problems brought on by identity politics, and calls it like it is, you can just see the chickens coming home to roost.  However, in the entire article, there’s something missing.  We’ll get to that, but first…

Dowd lays it on the line as to the choice that Democrats have to make.

With Obama saying the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts.

People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?

As it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It’s all about the past. Will America’s racial past be expunged or America’s sexist past be expunged?

My question to this is; in spite of all the common cause the Democrats have made with Martin Luther King, whatever happened to "the content of their character"?  Or their policies, given that this is the highest office in the land?  Instead, Democrats are fixated on race and gender.

Oh, and age, too.

But Hillary — carried on the padded shoulders of the older women in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island who loved her “I Will Survive” rallying cry that “I am a little older and I have earned every wrinkle on my face” — has been saved to fight another day.

And so we wind up with the very thing Democrats accuse Republicans of doing; voting (or not voting) for someone based on their gender or race or age or some other external characteristic rather than their positions.  This leaves Democrats in the unenviable position,and one of their own making, of seeming racist or sexist even if their true motives have nothing to do with either.

Welcome to our world, folks, where Republicans get accused by the Democrats, the media and the blogs of being racists and bigots regardless of how we explain our positions and our votes.  Stinks, doesn’t it?  So here’s what I see as missing from the article; can we possibly hope that this will be the end of identity politics?

I’m not so sure.  Dowd’s article, while noting the disaster awaiting Democrats…

Just as Michelle Obama urged blacks to support her husband, many shoulder-pad feminists are growing more fierce in charging that women who let Obama leapfrog over Hillary are traitors.

Julie Acevedo, a precinct captain for Obama in Austin, noticed that things were getting uglier on Friday, during the early voting, when she “saw some very angry women just stomping by us to go vote for Hillary. They cut us off when we tried to talk about Barack.

…doesn’t really seem to renounce it.  The sooner Democrats get rid of it, the sooner Spelman students will be able to make an informed decision as to whom to vote for.

[tags]Maureen Down,New York Times,Democrats,identity politics[/tags]

I downloaded Mr Obama’s little Plan the other day. He says he’s in full support of strengthening laws which support and strengthen unions. Is he insane? Alternatively … stupid, pandering,  or evil?

He’s suggesting this in a global market were the local Ford unions just recently went onstrike for more, …  well, whatever. They (and Obama) are apparently not noticing that they’re now in direct competion globally with companies like Tata, who probably pay their employees $2.50 per day (and that’s likely a 10-12 hour 6 day-per-week workweek). Tata is now launching a 2,500 dollar automobile. Now it probably doesn’t have the bells and whistles that even a low end Ford does. But … I’ll bet it is a lot nicer than whatever Ford thinks it can make a profit at selling for $2500. It takes a lot of mechanization, get up and go, yankee ingenuity to make up over an order or so of magnitude difference in manpower. Furthermore remember that unions do the opposite of inspiring any of those three. Jobs are leaving Ohio, not because unions are too strong but because American salary demands aren’t competitive on the global market.

Now that Ralph Nader has entered the presidential race, things get a little more interesting.  My personal feeling is that McCain would lose to Obama but could win against Clinton, with all her negatives.  Nader typically draws votes more from the Democratic candidate (just ask Al Gore), so with Obama looking more and more like the presumptive candidate, I like this development. 

One of the things that Nader’s candidacy always puts forth is that he is the candidat of real change, and that there’s not much difference between the two major parties.  Which, in my mind, means that those who vote for Nader on that basis really just don’t generally pay attention to what’s going on.  That most of Nader’s votes come from Democrats says, to me, more about Democrats than about Nader.

[tags]Ralph Nader,Al Gore,Democrats,politics[/tags]

Ed Morrissey notes an exchange between Chris Matthews and Texas State Senator Kirk Watson that is rather telling in regards to Obama’s accomplishment thus far.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: “You are a big Barack supporter, right, Senator?”

State Sen. Watson: “I am. Yes, I am.”

Matthews: “Well, name some of his legislative accomplishments. No, Senator, I want you to name some of Barack Obama’s legislative accomplishments tonight if you can.”

State Sen. Watson: “Well, you know, what I will talk about is more about what he is offering the American people right now.”

Matthews: “No. No. What has he accomplished, sir? You say you support him. Sir, you have to give me his accomplishments. You’ve supported him for president. You are on national television. Name his legislative accomplishments, Barack Obama, sir.”

State Sen. Watson: “Well, I’m not going to be able to name you specific items of legislative accomplishments.”

Matthews: “Can you name any? Can you name anything he’s accomplished as a Congressman?”

State Sen. Watson: “No, I’m not going to be able to do that tonight.”

Matthews: “Well, that is a problem isn’t it?”

(Video is here.)

Indeed, that is the problem. A speech with “something something something change! something something something hope!” may get ’em swooning, but it’s also the perfect way to fly in under the radar and foist on the American people policies they had no idea were coming.

And it actually says more about Obama’s supporters, since they’re more than willing to vote based on platitudes and “free” government goodies than on actual, y’know, policies. Getting more people involved in politics is one thing, and a good thing, but getting them voting without a clue of why they’re voting is not a good thing at all for the democratic process.

[tags]Barak Obama,Democrats,Kirk Watson,Ed Morrissey,democracy[/tags]

You expect this sort of talk from the Bush administration.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year’s mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group’s security structure suffered “total collapse”.

But this is not the script from the latest press briefing in DC.

These are the words not of al-Qaeda’s enemies but of one of its own leaders in Anbar province — once the group’s stronghold. They were set down last summer in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda base near Samarra in November.

The US military released extracts from that letter yesterday along with a second seized in another November raid that is almost as startling.

That second document is a bitter 16-page testament written last October by a local al-Qaeda leader near Balad, north of Baghdad. “I am Abu-Tariq, emir of the al-Layin and al-Mashahdah sector,” the author begins. He goes on to describe how his force of 600 shrank to fewer than 20.

“We were mistreated, cheated and betrayed by some of our brothers,” he says. “Those people were nothing but hypocrites, liars and traitors and were waiting for the right moment to switch sides with whoever pays them most.”

Given that, this pronouncement seems at odds with reality.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said twice Sunday that Iraq “is a failure,” adding that President Bush’s troop surge has “not produced the desired effect.”

“The purpose of the surge was to create a secure time for the government of Iraq to make the political change to bring reconciliation to Iraq,” Pelosi said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “They have not done that.”

The speaker hastened to add: “The troops have succeeded, God bless them.”

If al Qaeda is having to regroup and has lost all this ground, then the Iraqi government does have “a secure time”, at least far more secure than it has been. If that’s her definition of success, I’d say the Surge has been quite successful.

That the Iraqis have had a tough time coming together and resolving differences is simply human nature in action. As I mentioned earlier, culture and tribalism can work against a shared national identity, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. It will take time, but we are giving them that time, successfully.

[tags]Iraq,al Qaeda,Afghanistan,Nancy Pelosi,terrorism[/tags]

Inside and outside of the Christian community at large views the prosperity gospel as errant, and proponents of the same such as Mr Osteen are seen as heretical. Now, I’m something of a Christian purist, if you don’t adhere to the Nicene Creed … you aren’t, by definition, Christian. Mr Romney as a Mormon, or Jehovah Witnesses for example, are not thereby, technically speaking Christian. Barack Obama holds to a church which professes what is called Black Liberation Theology. Now, I had formerly looked askance at that having associated Liberation Theology with the South American Catholic Liberation movement which intimately connected the gospel and Marxism, which I felt was probably “just wrong.” It was then remarked that the adjective “Black” has definite meaning and as such there is little or no connection with Marxism. However, I just looked into via a little googling what Black Liberation theology entails … and well first of all it’s not Christian, and secondly it’s not properly theology at all to my way of thinking. Mr Obama is not a Christian, he’s something worse. He’s a heretic claiming to be Christian but in fact is not.

Now I’m planning on going a little more details in future posts, but in precis it seems to me the theological content of Black Liberation (BL) theology might be summarized thusly. In my view, BL and the properity gospel are two sides of the same coin. Prosperity gospel is for the rich (white?) American folk hoping to get richer (simply put, Jesus = Good news (gospel) and what other than good news can one have than getting rich?). The other side of the coin, for those feeling or being oppressed is BL. For example:

The first question Bruce L. Fields asks in Introducing Black Theology is “What is black theology?” It is theology from the perspective of an oppressed people. It seeks to interpret the gospel of Jesus Christ against the backdrop of historical and contemporary racism. The message of black theology is that the African American struggle for liberation is consistent with the gospel—every theological statement must be consistent with, and perpetuate, the goals of liberation.

I find the statement “every theological statement must be consistent with, and perpetuate, the goals of liberation” to be, in a word, from the small “o” orthodox Christian perspective rankest heresy. An honest atheist is not dangerous in the way that man claiming to be your brother who in fact is not … is.

Now American’s Black included are notoriously ignorant of history. Historically speaking, one can argue that the majority of the starkly oppressed Christian churches have been the Eastern Orthodox. Now, I’ll admit some prejudice here, but I think it can be argued with that prejudice in mind that the proper Christian response to oppression can be found in the Early church and the Eastern church in lands conquered by Islam and the Orthodox church behind the Iron Curtain and under atheist communist persecution. If the American Black can claim oppression what by contrast does the Coptic Christian claim is his situation in Egypt, or the Antiochan Orthodox within Syria? In parts of the (former) Soviet bloc, it was a capital crime to baptize. I’m not saying the Black American today isn’t oppressed. But there needs to be another word to describe these other instances of oppression. A few people killed here and their is murder. Holocaust or Holodomor are not “murder” because the quantitative difference yeilds something which begs for a new word to describe and signify that difference.

In this series I’m going to examine Black Liberation Theology in more detail and contrast it, where possible, with a Christian viewpoint as well as, if appropriate, to contrast the how theological responses to the same stimuli played out in the East with the Black liberation ideas, and thus underlying and understanding what is meant by Mr Obama as Heretic.

Yeah, right, this is the first thing I think about when I hear the word "freedom".

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday she might be willing to garnish the wages of workers who refuse to buy health insurance to achieve coverage for all Americans.

The New York senator has criticized presidential rival Barack Obama for pushing a health plan that would not require universal coverage. Clinton has not always specified the enforcement measures she would embrace, but when pressed on ABC’s "This Week," she said: "I think there are a number of mechanisms" that are possible, including "going after people’s wages, automatic enrollment."

I’m sorry, but that does not give me a warm fuzzy about what other freedoms Hillary might take away from us for "our own good".