Barack Obama has received months of fawning press coverage, coverage that has tried valiantly to hide from an increasingly dumbed-down populace just how ultra-liberal are the Senator's positions on abortion, on a timid foreign policy, on homosexuality, on ethics, and many more important issues.
How long can that protective screen remain in place? Let's do a quick rundown on a few cracks in the dike.
1) Charles Krauthammer takes
a hard look in the
Washington Post at how Barack Obama is arrogantly, weirdly making a foolish mistake into a centerpiece of his foreign policy.
When the House of Representatives takes up arms against $4 gas by voting 324-84 to sue OPEC, you know that election-year discourse has entered the realm of the surreal. Another unmistakable sign is when a presidential candidate makes a gaffe, then, realizing it is too egregious to take back without suffering humiliation, decides to make it a centerpiece of his foreign policy.
Before the Democratic debate of July 23, Barack Obama had never expounded upon the wisdom of meeting, without precondition, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Hugo Chávez, Kim Jong Il or the Castro brothers. But in that debate, he was asked about doing exactly that. Unprepared, he said sure -- then got fancy, declaring the Bush administration's refusal to do so not just "ridiculous" but "a disgrace."
After that, there was no going back. So he doubled down. What started as a gaffe became policy. By now, it has become doctrine. Yet it remains today what it was on the day he blurted it out: an absurdity... 
2) Obama's extravagant support of homosexual marriages, if fairly reported, will be causing some
deep embarrassment for so-called "conservative" Democrats like Nebraska's Ben Nelson. Obama wants to "fully repeal" the Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1996, protecting states from having to recognize same-sex marriages contracted in other states.
Obama's website boldly describes the Senator's position, "Obama also believes we need to fully repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and enact legislation that would ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally recognized unions."
When Ben Nelson endorsed Barack Obama for President,
the Nebraska Senator claimed, "Those of us on both sides of the aisle who have made it our purpose to set aside partisanship to address some of the important issues of the day want a president that will join the effort, not foil it. Barack Obama, to me, represents the best hope for our own political reconciliation and a future where the cogs of government are working smoothly for progress instead of being gummed up by partisanship. Barack Obama will be the strongest candidate in the heartland, because he puts solutions and consensus first and he inspires great crossover appeal among Republicans and independents."
Ben, are you still giddy about Obama? With his hard line opposition to any and all right to life efforts, his dangerously naive ideas about economics and foreign policy, his lack of principled patriotism, and now his wholesale embrace of the homosexual agenda regarding repeal of DOMA, are you still going to try and act as if
this is the guy to bring Americans together? And do you really believe that you can still position yourself as a moderate when you've gone so far out on the limb for
the Senate's most liberal member?
3) In
a NRO column written by Sabrina Leigh Schaeffer and appearing on the
CBS News website, the problem of Obama's many anti-Israel friends and advisors is highlighted. This is another situation that will likely receive more and more publicity, giving Obama an increasingly ugly problem with Jewish voters.
Schaeffer writes, "But with the Democratic nomination all but secured, Jewish voters are likely to start thinking less about the senator’s speeches and more about the company he keeps. As the last two elections reveal, when it comes to the Jewish vote, actions speak louder than words.
While Reverend Wright’s anti-American and anti-Semitic ravings captured the attention of the public for weeks, it’s simply his theatrics that appear to make him the most repellant of Obama’s friends. The senator has tried to dismiss Wright as a 'crazy uncle,' but if you take a closer look at the crowd the senator runs with, it appears he has a whole lot of crazy relatives to disinvite from dinner."
She goes on to detail just some of the worst offenders including Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Catholic pastor at St. Sabina, also on the South Side of Chicago who Obama told the
Chicago Sun Times was one of his three spiritual mentors. (Yeah, Jeremiah Wright is in that trio too.)
"Pfleger’s name became more widely recognizable two years ago when Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich appointed a Farrakhan aide to serve on a hate-crimes commission. When the appointee, Sister Claudette, refused to denounce Farrakhan’s racist and anti-Semitic remarks, three Jewish members on the commission resigned - a situation that prompted Pfleger to respond, 'good riddance.'"
Other odious advisors? Retired Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill “Tony” McPeak, Obama's national co-chairman, who has made numerous anti-Semitic and anti-Israel comments. "While the general has a long blame-Israel-first record, the most repugnant remark came during a 2003 interview, when he blamed the Jewish-American community for the failure of the peace process between Israel and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Despite calls on Senator Obama to remove McPeak as a key adviser, the general continues to serve on the campaign."
There's more...disgustingly more.
Read the article here.
4) One more for this morning. And a particularly interesting one at that because this criticism of Barack Obama comes not from the right, not from the center, but from the far, far left. It's
a severely negative piece from leftist professor Adolph Reed Jr. in
The Progressive that concentrates on Obama's character and political maneuvering.
He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.
His political repertoire has always included the repugnant stratagem of using connection with black audiences in exactly the same way Bill Clinton did—i.e., getting props both for emoting with the black crowd and talking through them to affirm a victim-blaming “tough love” message that focuses on alleged behavioral pathologies in poor black communities. Because he’s able to claim racial insider standing, he actually goes beyond Clinton and rehearses the scurrilous and ridiculous sort of narrative Bill Cosby has made infamous...
The Obama campaign has even put out a misleading bio of Michelle Obama, representing her as having grown up in poverty on the South Side, when, in fact, her parents were city workers, and her father was a Daley machine precinct captain. This fabrication, along with those embroideries of the candidate’s own biography, may be standard fare, the typical log cabin narrative. However, in Obama’s case, the license taken not only underscores Obama’s more complex relationship to insider politics in Daley’s Chicago; it also underscores how much this campaign depends on selling an image rather than substance.
There is also something disturbingly ritualistic and superficial in the Obama camp’s young minions’ enthusiasm. Paul Krugman noted months ago that the Obamistas display a cultish quality in the sense that they treat others’ criticism or failure to support their icon as a character flaw or sin. The campaign even has a stock conversion narrative, which has been recycled in print by such normally clear-headed columnists as Barbara Ehrenreich and Katha Pollitt: the middle-aged white woman’s report of not having paid much attention to Obama early on, but having been won over by the enthusiasm and energy of their adolescent or twenty-something daughters. (A colleague recently reported having heard this narrative from a friend, citing the latter’s conversion at the hands of her eighteen year old. I observed that three short years ago the daughter was likely acting the same way about Britney Spears.)
Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz, a Clinton supporter, noted that the Obama campaign advisers have tried to have it both ways on the race question. On the one hand, they present their candidate as a figure who transcends racial divisions and “brings us together”; on the other hand, they exhort us that we should support his candidacy because of the opportunity to “make history” (presumably by nominating and maybe electing a black candidate). Increasingly, Obama supporters have been disposed to cry foul and charge racism at nearly any criticism of him, in steadily more extravagant rhetoric.
The campaign’s accusation that the Clinton team made Obama look darker in a photo or video clip than he actually is—and what exactly are we to make of that as an accusation?—and the hysterically indignant reaction to Geraldine Ferraro’s statement that much of Obama’s success stems from the fact that “the country is caught up in the concept” of a black candidacy are no different from the campaign’s touting its “historic” character...
Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people...
Getting Real About Islam: Colson Bucks the "Whitewashing Trend"
Chuck Colson has written a not-to-be-missed essay, "To Islam—and Back Again," published in the April/May edition of BreakPoint's WorldView Magazine and available on the net at this page of the BreakPoint web site. In the well-crafted, illuminating article, Colson reviews how the West has responded in a dangerous naiveté to Islam even after the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001. In so doing, educators, journalists, politicians and even Christian clergymen have grossly ignored the history of Islam and distorted the horrific violence it spreads around the world in our present day.
Chelsea Zimmerman does a close and insightful reading of Forbes Magazine's interview with Dr. Jamie Thomson, the scientist who produced the first human embryonic stem cells. She then points out for the rest of us some very significant admissions that Thomson makes about the unwarranted hype surrounding the scientific industry he helped create, the strict limits it is running into regarding the discovery of medical cures, and the primary purposes that have lay behind the jargon all along.
Jonathan Kayser alerted me to this weird (and pretty chilling) internet "game" for kids that informs you at just “what age you should die at so you don’t use more than your fair share of Earth’s resources!”
In a Vital Signs post last week ("Obama's Theater of the Absurd"), I linked readers to a NRO column by Sabrina Leigh Schaeffer which presented some alarming material about Barack Obama's many anti-Israel friends and advisors. Schaeffer mentioned one of the worst was a fellow Obama has described as one of his three spiritual mentors, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a renegade Catholic priest at South Side Chicago's St. Sabina Church. (He is shown here with Louis Farrakhan when the Nation of Islam leader spoke at Fr. Pfleger's church.)
Susan Sarandon...is still not a contented soul. She says if John McCain gets elected, she will move to Italy or Canada. She adds, "It's a critical time, but I have faith in the American people."
* Jimmy Carter's Granddaughter Has Her Own Vision of the World...And She Can Darn Well Keep It Too!
One wonders if Jimmy Carter, even as loopy as he is, remains a happy and proud grandpa when he surveys the weird-o-rama art show his granddaughter has produced. Shawn Macomber writing for NRO certainly isn't impressed with Sarah Chuldenko's talent nor with her vision of the world -- and after reading just what fruity froth she serves up as cultural significance -- neither will you.
Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius -- yes, that Kathleen, the self-styled Catholic whose rabid pro-abortion politics have, on the one hand, earned her the censure of her Archbishop and, on the other hand, earned her the consideration by Barack Obama as his running mate -- is at it again with more evidence (pictures even) of her cozy relationship with the notorious late-term abortionist George Tiller.
Jill Stanek has a report here on a bold new move by the Alliance Defense Fund to take back the freedom of speech for America's religious leaders. It involves what the ADF is calling a "pastor's revolt" this September against the unconstitutional 1954 law that has so effectively hindered pastors, priests, rabbis, and religious organizations from speaking freely about political candidates.
Why the Planned Parenthood center in Council Bluffs (right across the Missouri River from Omaha) and the one 60 miles away in Lincoln have not been performing surgical abortions for two months could quite possibly have something to do with the botched abortion case involving PP and their abortionist, Meryl Severson. However, the relatively low amount asked for in the case and the fact that Severson was earlier dropped from the lawsuit suggest other factors may be involved.
Regarding Barack Obama's personality-driven campaign (one too short on sound ideas), Karl Rove writes in today's Wall Street Journal about how Obama's increasing number of gaffes, distortions and flip-flops are giving Americans a whole new feeling for the guy.
Hey -- take a quick look at just a few of the people who profoundly affected the world...and who started out as adopted kids raised by a gracious, loving family:
Adoption? It is frequently the very best option, the most loving choice that young parents can make. It is a wonderful, hopeful investment not only for a child's life and a family's warmth and security...but for the flowering of an entire culture.
Wesley J. Smith has a compelling essay over at First Things dealing with California bill AB 2747 and the assisted-suicide movement which has promoted it. AB 2747 is a nefarious piece of work that would force doctors into active euthanasia.
Jack Nicklaus mourns the changes in the gentleman's game...and he's not talking about the money or technology either. No, chalk up one more arena in which the social graces are dying.
By no means will Al Gore climb in the ring with Czech President Vaclav Klaus to fight over global warming. For Gore needs a fawning press and adoring (but uneducated) liberals to continue his charade as the Green Lantern. Any genuine debate, one that would require him to give scientifically, economically, and politically sound arguments for his wild statements would be disastrous. Gore's superhero reputation just wouldn't stand under the grueling beating Klaus would give him.
"Mammograms saw only half of the breast cancers that were present. If we added ultrasound to mammography, we saw 78 percent of the cancers." That's from Dr. Wendie Berg of American Radiology Services at Johns Hopkins Green Spring in Lutherville, Maryland, who led a dramatic, large scale trial comparing rates of cancer detection using the two techniques. The results have just been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Barack Obama is fumbling, bumbling, stumbling away -- making more gaffes and goof-ups than Lucille Ball. But the mainstream media reporters who are covering (make that "covering up") Obama's campaign would rather dream of Dan Quayle's potato than tell you about the numerous errors and whopping untruths being committed regularly by their Democrat hero.
"Life’s Not Just Cheap in Modern Britain. It’s on Permanent Special Offer." -- Peter Hitchens On Parliament's Sad Mismanagement of the Abortion Bill
Peter Hitchens, the articulate, forthright, conservative British journalist and author (whose brother Christopher is also a widely-read reporter/author but who holds aggressively atheistic, socialistic views that are dramatically different than Peter's) has a not-to-be-missed column from the Sunday Mail (U.K.) dealing with the British Parliament's monstrous mishandling of the latest embryology bill.
Even the most despicable ideas can be made palatable when euphemisms are used to spin them. That's why abortion advocates call themselves "pro-choice" rather than "pro abortion." It's also why they talk about "terminating a pregnancy" rather than "killing a baby." Controlling the language not only controls the argument, it often determines the outcome of the argument.
Though the Koran does not teach that "apostasy" should receive punishment, the sad and frightening fact is that the rise of sharia law and other extremist teachings have resulted in several Muslim countries accepting (if not actually promoting) the most severe of punishments for those who renounce Islam. And yes, those punishments extend even to executions as certain Muslim leaders look less to the Koran itself and more to actions and pronouncements attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, his peers and later leaders.
Last weekend I posted (and not for the first time) a poem by Phyllis McGinley over on The Book Den. She entitled it "Death at Suppertime" and it has some remarkably appropriate applications for modern culture...especially remarkable given that the poem was written in 1949!
The article describes how Dion's great respect for St. Jerome, the brilliant scholar who translated the New Testament from Greek into Latin and then the Old Testament from Hebrew into Latin, led to an appreciation of the Phyllis McGinley poem about St. Jerome, "The Thunderer." Dion, a diligent student of Scripture, something unfortunately too rare among Catholics, had long appreciated Jerome's dicta, “Ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ.” But reading McGinley's poem intensified his interest in Jerome and he ended up writing a song using the same name.
“What are you so afraid of?”
Evangelical pastor Antoni Bokun understands the tragedy involved in Belarus losing its historic reputation as a haven for religious rights. And he sees it not only as a patriotic observer of history but also from the vantage point of being a victim of the Communist dictatorship's increasing persecution of religious believers.
"Purple Haze" at the Pentagon?
Barack Obama has received months of fawning press coverage, coverage that has tried valiantly to hide from an increasingly dumbed-down populace just how ultra-liberal are the Senator's positions on abortion, on a timid foreign policy, on homosexuality, on ethics, and many more important issues.
2) Obama's extravagant support of homosexual marriages, if fairly reported, will be causing some deep embarrassment for so-called "conservative" Democrats like Nebraska's Ben Nelson. Obama wants to "fully repeal" the Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1996, protecting states from having to recognize same-sex marriages contracted in other states.
Tony Blankley: "Conservatism Will Persist and More Often than Not Prevail"
...Conservatism will persist and more often than not prevail precisely because it realistically describes the human condition. It recognizes the fallen condition of man and thus rejects utopian principles of human perfection, or as conservatives like to say, we refuse to futilely try to immanentize the eschaton (bring heaven on earth). Thus, inter alia ,we understand that, with all its crassness and winners and losers, the power of self-interest drives free markets and free men to maximum and best-distributed human productivity and fulfillment.