Victor Davis Hanson NAILS IT

First of all, h/t to a great American, documentary filmmaker and blogger
Pat Dollard for this swashbuckling photo of VDH, one of the great brain trusts at Stanford's Hoover Institution. Here's Hanson's take on the speech Obama should have given:

Had Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., just said the following words last week in his speech on race in America, his problems with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, would probably now be over:

"You have all heard the racist and anti-American outbursts of my pastor Rev. Wright. They are all inexcusable. His speeches have forced me to re-examine my long association with Trinity United Church of Christ. And so it is with regret that I must now leave that church.

"I had heard similar extremist language of Rev. Wright in the past, and now apologize that I did not earlier end my attendance and contributions. Had I long ago expressed my strong objections to Rev. Wright's views, such opposition might have suggested to him a more moderate path.

"But any good that now might come by remaining steadfast to Rev. Wright in consideration of our long past friendship is outweighed by the damage that would accrue from the sanction of his extremism that my continued attendance at his church might convey.

"I have loyalty aplenty, but it is to the truth, my country and universal tolerance, not to any one friend, however long and close our association.

"Allegations that America helped to cause -- and thus deserved -- 9/11 and that the U.S. government engineered the AIDS epidemic, as well as the pastor's slurs against 'white people' and Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice, are not reflective of the views of mainstream black America and they have no place in any house of Christian worship.

"It would be easy to claim that Rev. Wright's biases are no different from those voiced on occasion by our own family members, our pastors or political leaders in the public eye and therefore not so injurious to America. That defense of false equivalence, that 'others do it all the time,' is a common one offered by those who offend the public sensibility.

"It would also be easy to excuse my pastor's outbursts by citing the long tragic history of the African-American experience. After all, every extremist outburst always has a particular and perhaps mitigating context.

"And finally it would be easy to suggest that the special landscape of the black church allows a sort of venting and role-playing unlike other common venues in America. It has often been a refuge from white oppression and a place to make sense of the tragic history of race relations that plague us still. That and the good that Rev. Wright has done could also be an extenuating circumstance.

"But neither Pastor Wright nor I -- a candidate for the presidency of the United States -- can afford to find refuge in any of these relativist explanations. To do so would not merely exempt the statements of Rev. Wright from proper censure, but also would have the effect of offering endorsement to them. Here is why we must not and will not do that:

"First, today's America has evolved into a multiracial society unlike anytime in our long history. Each of America's groups has unique grievances, based on their own past ordeals.

"So now more than ever in American history, there is need to establish a universal, absolute standard of public discourse in which no individual or group claims extenuating circumstances to demonize other Americans. Otherwise, the bar will have been lowered -- and Rev. Wright will be followed by merchants of hate of every sort, each citing his allowance as a pass for his own hate speech.

"Second, we are in our fifth decade since the landmark civil-rights legislation of the 1960s. And while the African-American community has made enormous strides, it still has not achieved parity with either the white majority or some other minorities. The reasons are complex, but they cannot be simply reduced to white racism or the purported pathologies of the United States as Rev. Wright supposed. We African-Americans must be as vigilant in demanding an equality of opportunity for all Americans as in ensuring that crime, illegitimacy, drug use and the failure to finish high school are no higher in the African-American community than in others.

"Third, Americans were appalled, as was I, at my minister cursing the United States. But we must always appreciate the unique nature of America, an experiment that unites a multiplicity of religions, races and ethnicities, and endures only to the degree we all adhere to a common set of values. We must never think that because the United States has sometimes not been perfect, it is not good.

"The hard work of creating and improving the United States required centuries; the easier task of tearing apart America can be done in a generation. But neither you nor I can or will allow that to happen. Thank you, and God bless the United States."

I would like to register a second request to John McCain, who's speaking at Stanford's Hoover Institution today. In addition to asking Thomas Sowell for economic advice, can you please add Victor Davis Hanson to your list of foreign and domestic policy advisors? Thank you.

League of Superhero Democracies!

USA Today: McCain proposes "League of Democracies" to bypass U.N.--maybe Russia & China too

Sen. John McCain says that if he's elected president, he wants to create a worldwide "League of Democracies" to "revive democratic solidarity" and bypass gridlock at the United Nations.

The new League of Democracies would form the core of an international order of peace based on freedom. It could act where the U.N. fails to act," such as in Darfur, McCain says in advance excerpts of a speech he's making Tuesday to the Hoover Institution.

According to the excerpts, provided by his campaign, McCain envisions the new organization taking on AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and "the crisis in our environment." He says it could also put pressure on tyrants in Burma or Zimbabwe "with or without Moscow's and Beijing's approval."

Sounds like Russia and China might not be invited to join. Asked about that, McCain spokesman Danny Diaz declined to elaborate.

McCain says he would call a summit of world democracies in his first year to explore the practical steps needed to realize his vision.

Yes, go card! Green light! I like it. Best of all, he's giving the speech at the Hoover Institution, home of Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Victor Davis Hanson, et al. This is his second time around at Stanford, he gave the first iteration of this speech in 2007. Not everyone liked it then, including Foreign Policy Watch.

I sincerely hope that McCain will ask Thomas Sowell to mentor and advise him about economics. He could start by reading Sowell's book Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy. My copy's arriving today.

My Favorite Comment on The Obama Policy

This was just too good not to repeat from Ackerman's comment section:

Finally someone who tells it like it is.

Democracy doesn't "fill bellies", at least not quickly. Democracy is rather inefficient at getting things done, and it certainly isn't fast or easy.

You want quick results and rapid changes? You need a tyranny. Until you have a fascist warlord running things, you're going to have a lot of needless "discussion".

So we have to stop spreading democracy, and start spreading tyrannical Dictatorships ASAP so we can get the world on our side...

I can't imagine why nobody was willing to go the extra step and spell it out, but this article comes the closest I've seen to admitting that Democracy is a failure, and what we really need is some good old-fashioned fascism to get things working.

And I do agree, Obama will be the man to help get this done world-wide. Stop trying to "spread Democracy" and start spreading Dictatorships and fascism. Elect Obama '08.

Posted by: Gekk Mar 25, 2008 1:44:11 PM

The only thing I would add to Gekk's comment would be "Elect Obama the next President of the US of KKKA". Heh. You GO, Gekk. Icelanders rule.

The Obama Doctrine vs. The Audacity of Rhetoric

Spencer Ackerman posts an interesting read in The American Prospect today titled The Obama Doctrine. It's a little ditty about how Obama's surrounded himself with brain trust types who are helping him to create a brand new kind of foreign policy called "dignity promotion". Ackerman tells us:

When considering any presidential hopeful's foreign-policy promises, it's important to remember that what candidates say is, at best, an imperfect guide to their actions in office. What proves to be a more reliable indicator of presidential behavior is a candidate's roster of advisers. (If the press had paid better attention, the country would have seen through Bush's pitch about a humble foreign policy and realized that many of his advisers, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, were conspiracy-minded warmongers.)

I, for one, certainly agree with the idea that the press should pay better attention. I actually like the idea of dignity promotion as a cornerstone of foreign policy. In fact, I was under the impression that promoting dignity was our chief goal in liberating Iraq to create the Middle East's first model of democracy. As a Libertarian, my idea of promoting dignity has to do with fostering self-reliance, personal responsibility and a free market. But that's just me. I believe that my view of dignity promotion is shared much more by John McCain than by Barack Obama, who strikes me as a very articulate old-school Marxist.

We can listen to the Wright apologists who say that we shouldn't judge Obama by his pastor, but I tend to agree more with Thomas Sowell's article The Audacity of Rhetoric on that topic. In other words, Yes We Can judge Obama by the company he keeps. The voters' judgment of Obama's carefully cultivated relationships with counterculture radicals, along with his inconsistencies on NAFTA, the timetable for pulling troops out of Iraq, and his decision to wage a very negative and race-focused campaign in spite of commitments to the contrary will probably carry far more weight than their ability to access and comprehend his foreign policy philosophy.

The fact that Obama has been attractive to great thinkers is admirable. We definitely need an infusion of great thought in our government as long as it isn't simply a rehash of old 60's revolutionary thought expressed in new 21st Century language.

Post-Speech Analysis

I recorded Barack Obama’s speech on race the morning of March 18th to watch it in its entirety that night. Like most people, I agree that the speech was excellent from an academic standpoint. It was well crafted and well articulated, although his delivery lacked any eye contact whatsoever with the camera, which was not helpful.

I thought he did well to separate his values and opinions from White's. I was, however, concerned by his statements on Friday, March 14th, that he'd never heard of White's opinions either in the pews or privately, yet last night he plainly said that he was aware of White being a "fierce critic" of American policies. I think that it would have been better not to deny having heard them earlier. Recasting his statements on the subjects of Wright, Rezko and NAFTA from one position to another are causing me to have serious concerns about his credibility.

As for White being considered simply a "fierce critic", here's the problem. White, who’s earned several doctorial theology degrees and is considered one of the foremost authorities on Black Liberation Theology and Social Gospel in the entire country, clearly stated that HIV was created by the American Government in order to commit genocide against people of color. This rhetoric no doubt stems from deep and certainly well-justified Afro-American shock and awe over the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service (which also included a complicit black physician and a black nurse on its core staff). It does absolutely nothing but further more controversy, fear and disinformation. It's well documented that the HIV virus originated with primates in Africa in the 1930's then spread to Haiti around 1966 (http://www.avert.org/aids-timeline.htm). It's one thing to be a fierce critic, which I'm all for, versus spreading more fear, panic and outrage over false information of a highly controversial nature to a community which has already been completely saturated with outrage over being preyed upon by a government health department. It would have been far more positive for Obama to have actually confronted White and the black community to have a real and open discussion about these outrageous assertions which do nothing but inflame the community and distance it further from trusting and coming together with the larger community overall.

It’s very revealing that Wright’s sermons made references to “Clarence Colon” and “Condamnesia Rice”. I find this abusive stereotyping of extraordinarily successful conservative black Americans to actually be the most offensive of all Wright’s statements. Clearly the message is that an authentically black American can only become a studious, sober, law-abiding, highly successful citizen by subscribing to a radical militant Marxist belief system – otherwise they’ve simply sold out to rich, white, greedy, corporate, capitalist America.

Along those lines, I find it intriguing that Oprah Winfrey used to attend Trinity, and was also roundly criticized by Wright when she distanced herself from the church during his tenure. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 2007, Wright mentioned Oprah as an example of African Americans who forget their roots in the church after finding success. “A lot of us do not even like the word faith anymore,” he wrote [in the column]. “We prefer the more chic-sounding word, spirituality! We are caught up in an Oprah-generated mentality and a 12-step vocabulary that prevents us from using the very words and the very bridge that ‘brought us over!’

Most voters probably doubt that Obama actually subscribes to the same ideology as Wright, but Obama himself pointed out how uncomfortable most whites would be when there was light shed on the nature of many black churches as vehicles for radical politics. Black Liberation Theology is a militant brand of revolutionary Marxism adopted in the 1960's. Here is what James Cone wrote about this brand of Christianity: "Black hatred is the black man's strong aversion to white society. No black man living in white America can escape it... While it is true that blacks do hate whites, black hatred is not racism. " Thus Black Liberation Theology changes Christ, the God of peace and love, into a God of their own construction, a God of hate and revenge, who is hell bent on political and social change at any cost and who supports that hate and "revenge" to suit their needs. This same type of liberation theology has been used for decades in Latin America to pervert Catholics and goad them into rising into Marxist rebellions in class warfare. (H/T to jeffhead.com)

As for Obama’s comments about his white grandmother, my white grandmother was an equal opportunity racist, religionist, sexist, etc - she had the most diverse biases I’ve ever encountered against everyone on the planet including the Germans, Asians, Irish, French, Jews, Catholics, you-name-it. She tried to accept my parentage on my mother’s side because I was, after all, her granddaughter, yet the message was still there that my bloodline was partially impure. I adored her when I was a child, but her remarks completely mortified me when I was a teenager. Nevertheless, I would never have conflated her private comments with someone who speaks divisively in public to an audience of at least 8000 locally and possibly hundreds of thousands nationally.

It is interesting, however, to note the following quotes from Obama’s book “Dreams of My Father”. While I freely admit these quotes have been taken out of context, they do seem to be threads in a tapestry of a very challenged childhood lived as a half-white child in a mostly white family:

• "I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13"
• "I found a solace in ... a sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race"
• "The other race (white) would always remain just that: menacing, alien and apart"
• "It was into my father's image , the black man, the son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself"
• "That hate hadn't gone away, blaming white people"

Obama's close relationships with other militant radicals such as William Ayers of the Weather Underground and more recently with Paul Reyes of the Colombian FARC terror group via proxy staff members tends to make some people a bit uncomfortable as to his judgment in associates, if not his potentially radical politics. In spite of Obama’s speaking skills, to know him may not necessarily be to love him after this week. Several Republican and Independent colleagues of mine were simply in love with his message during the California Primary, and now say they no longer trust him enough to vote for him in the General. It’s become a real challenge for some of us to feel that he really does believe in the kind of hope and change he's been talking about. He’s looking more and more like just another politician making expedient choices and playing fast and loose with the truth in order to get our votes. John McCain will take the high road in terms of confronting Barack Obama on anything other than his policies, but I would imagine that this week is only the tip of the iceberg of what the 527's will do to him in the General if/when he becomes the nominee.

In conclusion, it appears that racial issues arose during his childhood that inspired Obama’s quest to distance himself from white culture to become authentically black. This was undoubtedly a void that Jeremiah White filled to great effect in Obama’s life. Had Barack Obama directly confronted White's disinformation and ruthlessly divisive rhetoric head-on and debated him within the black community, that might have given him the credibility of an independent thinker and a real post-racial uniter. It would have proven without a doubt that Obama has courage to represent real change and is willing to fight for it on the streets of Chicago first, followed by the streets of Washington, D.C. Compared to the notably tough South Side of Chicago, Washington's mean streets may turn out to be a lot tougher.

Response to Obama's Bold Gamble on Race

Well, I've been away for awhile but now I'm back with a lagomorphic vengeance. I can no longer sit idly by any longer and watch this absolute travesty of a primary season swagger on by with all of its arrogant detritus without injecting my opinion. I've been patiently waiting for Barack Obama to actually do or say anything that would redeem him regarding this unconscionable relationship with the Most Wrong Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and I've been watching CNN, NBC, CBS, FOX and ABC to see what they have to offer in the way of analysis of this topic. Aside from ABC and FOX News, who have both actually chosen to man up and wrestle with this issue, the rest of the network news media are completely in the tank for Obama and apparently expect us to fall in line as well.

The title refers to today's article in Time Magazine by James Carney. Please note that Time is "in partnership with CNN", who we like to affectionately refer to as "the Communist News Network". I attempted to respond to Mr. Carney's fawning valentine in a letter to the editor, but was frustrated in my attempt by technical difficulties in launching the email applet provided by Time's webmaster. So here it is for your viewing pleasure:

James, your article strikes me as a breathless, adoring sigh of relief that somehow your obvious candidate of choice was able to get through the problem that threatens to undermine his campaign with such an unconventional and "breathtaking" speech. That would be the speech in which he sold out his white grandmother and refused to distance himself unequivocally from the hate-filled and divisive excoriations of an angry black "child of the 60's".

As a child of the 60's myself, I will be so relieved to see my entire generation finally fade away into the sunset of history having accomplished so little while making so much noise about it. Compared to my parents, members of the Greatest Generation and our children, members of another truly great generation of patriots and givers, children of the 60's appear to be a small, mean and selfish lot - much like the ones Michelle Obama referenced in one of her speeches last month. After all, it's always about US. The universe revolves around US. OUR feelings and history must be understood and put into context - and Barack Obama is just the man to excuse us and indulge us for demanding it.

I'm very familiar with Liberation Theology and its Marxist roots, along with Social Gospel and its Socialist roots. In 1985, a leader of the conservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America, Bishop Hoys, denounced liberation theologians, saying: "When I see a church with a machine gun, I cannot see the crucified Christ in that church. We can never use hate as a system of change. The core of being a church is love."

The core of being Barack Obama is not to confront Jeremiah White and similar leaders of his community about this fact. There is nothing spiritual about doing good works in the name of hate. Just look at Hamas, the "community activists" on the Palestinian streets who brought medical care and food and the suicide bomber culture to their wards. Just look at Bin Laden, who built good roads and hospitals and broadcasts a culture of death on the Internet to young disaffected Muslims worldwide. Words do count, as do good deeds - but when do we draw the line and hold people accountable when good deeds are done in the name of hate instead of love? This becomes a shell game which seduces the players into grasping the elusive goal of winning while in fact robbing them of real progress, real hope, and real gains.

And you, my dear writer, have now condoned and encouraged it one step further. Shame on you and Barack Obama because you should both know so much better.