Most of our friends on the left and a few on the right are discouraged. It is not Hillary. Hillary is simply being Hillary. The fact that she recently added to her long list of constructs yet another fiction - that she was under fire when disembarking in Bosnia in 1996 when in fact she sauntered off the plane and stopped on the tarmac to listen to a little girl read her a poem - is old hat for most of her fans; as Carl Berstein noted recently, "She has always had a difficult relationship with the truth." No, it is in fact Obama whose cross-racial and cross-partisan supporters believed that he was a new-era politician, one not defined by the grievances and habits of an earlier generation, a post-racial leader who could bring us all together but who now appears, sub-surface, to be altogether someone else.
Among those who hoped this guy was genuine are intellectually honest black Americans like Shelby Steele who in a recent editorial in the WSJ worried about Obama’s revelation that he sat Sunday after Sunday for 20 years in a church whose pastor spewed venom at everything American. "Facts are stubborn things," John Adams reminds us. Obama, Steele says, "fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgement is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?" "What was Obama thinking?," Steel asks. And the answer: "Of course he wasn’t thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to ‘be black’ despite his biracial background," and a little race hatred was the compromise because from Rev Wright and others like him there is the mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one’s blackness, an apparent fit for Obama.
We also hear from Thomas Sowell, another black American and an economist at the Hoover Institute whose wisdom and courage have inspired many of us over the years. From Sowell: "Obama didn’t just happen to encounter Wright, who just happened to say some way out things; Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Obama began seeking out in college - members of the left, anti-American counter-culture. In college, ‘I chose my friends carefully,’ he said in his first book, Dreams From My Father. These friends included ‘Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets’ — in Obama’s own words — as well as the ‘more politically active black students.’ He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman Underground who endorsed him when he ran for state senator."
Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the Senate is the furthest left of any senator, and perfectly consistent with the far-left ideology and the grievance culture, just as his wife’s statement that she was never proud of her country is consistent with that ideology. Never did he try to educate himself on the views of people on the other end of the political spectrum, much less reach out to them. As Sowell notes, "He reached out from the left to the far left. That brings us together?"
To help explain away some of this Obama gave a speech the other day in Philadelphia. He made a statement on racial matters, answering a question that no one was asking. That speech warmed the hearts of the NYT’s staff and Harvard Review but insulted the intelligence of everyone else. If your topic is race, meaning blacks, then let’s discuss subjects ranging from disproportionate illegitimacy and drug usage to higher-that-average criminality to disturbing values espoused in rap music, and unaddressed anti-Semitism. (To most, racism is such a distant memory that racial victimologists like the Rev Wright are now left with concocting wild-eyed conspiracy theories to maintain their power. It is self-serving black "leaders" like Wright and Jackson and other race baiters who act as though the legacy of slavery gives black people like them the right to be permanently ill-mannered, and who through their racial identity politics have blocked advancement more than racism every could.) But key is that Obama dodged the question that everyone is asking - why did he spend 20 years listening to Wright and never say a word? There was no apology, no tough stance on Wright. If you seek to be president, you better damn well repudiate any clown who blames us for 9/11, who claims the US invented AIDS as a way to kill people.
The masquerade is that Obama’s sudden rise to leading Democratic contender has required him to project an entirely different image and persona. The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleon-like change and entranced both whites and blacks is a tribute to the man’s talent, yet a warning about his credibility. His run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. He flatters whites; as Steele explains, "he grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude."
And so now, from some of those who had hope for this man we actually hear accusations of dissembling. And why not? Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times, "I’ll be honest with you. I wasn’t in church when any of those sermons were issued....I had not heard him make what I consider to be objectionable remarks from the pulpit." Yet in the speech itself, Obama declared, "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church?" Yes." But for Obama to now claim that Wright’s obscene views come as a shock is a fabrication.. To deflect, Obama cowardly compares Wright’s invective to his own grandmother ("a typical white person") who he claims, "..once confessed her fear of black men who passed her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." My, my. His own grandmother, who cooked his food and tucked him in at night and paid for his private school - has expressed the same feeling about black men as Jesse Jackson. He had no excuses for his grandma though. She never felt discrimination, doesn’t get the same pass as his "old uncle" Rev Wright.
Obama, a phony?
Robert Craven
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
CHARACTER
"The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men." - Samuel Adams
It is a fruitful exercise to try to come to understand the depth of character that may reside within each of the three individuals looking to take the helm of this country. Most by now understand that Hillary Clinton had shed most any claim to honesty, candor, or, to the anchor of principle. We need only recall the NYTs own William Safire as he labeled the woman a "congenital liar" to realize one need go no further. John McCain on the contrary has a reputation, even among his would-be detractors as someone with integrity and true convictions. We need not agree with him on every issue but at least we know he is not willing to say something, or anything just to get elected. He has demonstrated that time and time again. It’s refreshing to be able to rely on a candidate’s word.
We arrive at Barack Obama. He is certainly a skilled orator but in addition he seems a sincere man, an individual who claims that he is truly concerned with the well being of his fellow Americans and - key - is blessed with a vision of a way to effect positive change for every one of them. Is this true? Or, is the left’s David Ignatius of the Washington Post more on the mark when he asserts that Obama’s record is that of, "...a stridently-liberal partisan, not a bipartisan consensus-maker who gets things done.."? Is the man authentic? Is he honest? Or, is he a phony? We’ll take a look.
We highlighted in an earlier post the worrying relationship between Obama and a his chief Chicago fund raiser, one Tony Rezko. Rezko has a long record yet Obama says he did not end his relationship with this fixer until recently, "because there was no evidence of wrongdoing".Obama went to Harvard law school, was elected the Review’s first black president in its 104 year history, completed his degree magna cum laude, yet did not have the wherewithal to realize his friend was a gangster? Whoa! That’s a bit of a stretch.
Less obvious to the masses but more worrying to us was Obama’s posturing while in Ohio, telling workers whose jobs are threatened by NAFTA that he will work to re-write that document to preserve their jobs yet sent his economic adviser Austan Goolsbee that week to Canada’s consulate in Chicago to assure them that "not really", he just saying that, so don’t worry. Obama was cornered, denied the visit, then backed down after a Canadian diplomat’s memo confirmed the mission.
We also highlighted in an earlier post the venomous and paranoid denunciations of America from Obama’s minister for over 20 years. The Obamas were not merely endorsed by, or attended the church of the good Rev Wright, but subsidized his hatred with donations, were married by him, and had their children baptized by this clown. Newsmax correspondent Jim Davis attended a service at the church during which Wright referred to "white arrogance" and "the United States of white America". Obama was at church that day. Davis claims that he sat in his pew nodding in agreement. The WSJ featured an opinion piece by Newmax chief Washington correspondent Ronald Kessler in the Mar/14 edition which disclosed that Wright had delivered a sermon blaming America for starting AIDS, training professional killers, importing drugs, and creating a racist society. Yet Obama has disassociated himself from all of this, saying he never heard any such thing or about any such thing all these years. As Newt Gingrich noted recently, "Does he honestly expect the nation to believe that for 20 years...he didn’t notice the anti-American rhetoric? I mean, does somebody seriously believe that in over 800 potential Sunday visits, it never once came up, no one ever mentioned it to him?" Or from life- long Democrat Vic Hansen, "Sen Obama has proclaimed a new politics of hope and change that were to transcend such venom and character assassination. Thus besides being politically dense, he suffers - unless he preempts and explains in detail his Byzantine relationship with the reverend - the additional charge of hypocrisy in courting such a merchant of hate." Well, it seems pretty obvious that Obama, since his early 20's has sat week after week willingly listening to the ravings of just another cookie-cutter race huckster. Or, are we missing something?
Finally, there is the seeming contradiction between his rhapsody of delivery and what appears to some to be a vacuity of content, or if nothing, certainly nothing new that has not been pablum from the left for years. Are we wrong? Is there something there that is authentic, genuine, new and different? Let’s take a look. Recall the so often-repeated line, "We are the ones we’ve been waiting for". What does that mean and where did that come from? Is this a sentence that as Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard put it, "...no one will admit to being confused by, like the tenor-sax solos of John Coltrane, lest your peers think you’re a loser or a moron."? Well, come to find out, the phrase was borrowed from the title of a book of essays by the left-wing-radical-feminist-lesbian novelist Alice Walker - We Are The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For. And then the more we looked at Ferguson’s research the more we found that Obama has been credited with using phrases that have been in circulation for years. "This is a defining moment in history," Obama repeats; that is what Elizabeth Dole said when her husband ran for president in 1996. Obama climbs to the climax of his stump speech. Head bowed, brow furrowed, eyes flashing, he announces that, "We will choose unity over division" (Jesse Jackson, 1992). "We will choose hope over fear" (Bill Clinton and John Kerry, 1994). "And we will choose the future over the past" (Al Gore, 1992). "In so doing we will overcome our moral deficit" (Bush 2000, Gore, 2000) "by bringing people beyond the divisions of race and class" (Clinton, 1992) because the "story of our country" (Perot, 1992) or the "genius of our country" (Bush, 2000) or the "wonder of our country" (Bush, 1988) is, as Obama says in 2008, "ordinary people doing extraordinary things" (Perot, Bush, Bush, Reagan).
Well, we’d like to believe the best about this guy; certainly the Democrats could use a break. At the moment unfortunately things do not look promising.
Robert Craven
It is a fruitful exercise to try to come to understand the depth of character that may reside within each of the three individuals looking to take the helm of this country. Most by now understand that Hillary Clinton had shed most any claim to honesty, candor, or, to the anchor of principle. We need only recall the NYTs own William Safire as he labeled the woman a "congenital liar" to realize one need go no further. John McCain on the contrary has a reputation, even among his would-be detractors as someone with integrity and true convictions. We need not agree with him on every issue but at least we know he is not willing to say something, or anything just to get elected. He has demonstrated that time and time again. It’s refreshing to be able to rely on a candidate’s word.
We arrive at Barack Obama. He is certainly a skilled orator but in addition he seems a sincere man, an individual who claims that he is truly concerned with the well being of his fellow Americans and - key - is blessed with a vision of a way to effect positive change for every one of them. Is this true? Or, is the left’s David Ignatius of the Washington Post more on the mark when he asserts that Obama’s record is that of, "...a stridently-liberal partisan, not a bipartisan consensus-maker who gets things done.."? Is the man authentic? Is he honest? Or, is he a phony? We’ll take a look.
We highlighted in an earlier post the worrying relationship between Obama and a his chief Chicago fund raiser, one Tony Rezko. Rezko has a long record yet Obama says he did not end his relationship with this fixer until recently, "because there was no evidence of wrongdoing".Obama went to Harvard law school, was elected the Review’s first black president in its 104 year history, completed his degree magna cum laude, yet did not have the wherewithal to realize his friend was a gangster? Whoa! That’s a bit of a stretch.
Less obvious to the masses but more worrying to us was Obama’s posturing while in Ohio, telling workers whose jobs are threatened by NAFTA that he will work to re-write that document to preserve their jobs yet sent his economic adviser Austan Goolsbee that week to Canada’s consulate in Chicago to assure them that "not really", he just saying that, so don’t worry. Obama was cornered, denied the visit, then backed down after a Canadian diplomat’s memo confirmed the mission.
We also highlighted in an earlier post the venomous and paranoid denunciations of America from Obama’s minister for over 20 years. The Obamas were not merely endorsed by, or attended the church of the good Rev Wright, but subsidized his hatred with donations, were married by him, and had their children baptized by this clown. Newsmax correspondent Jim Davis attended a service at the church during which Wright referred to "white arrogance" and "the United States of white America". Obama was at church that day. Davis claims that he sat in his pew nodding in agreement. The WSJ featured an opinion piece by Newmax chief Washington correspondent Ronald Kessler in the Mar/14 edition which disclosed that Wright had delivered a sermon blaming America for starting AIDS, training professional killers, importing drugs, and creating a racist society. Yet Obama has disassociated himself from all of this, saying he never heard any such thing or about any such thing all these years. As Newt Gingrich noted recently, "Does he honestly expect the nation to believe that for 20 years...he didn’t notice the anti-American rhetoric? I mean, does somebody seriously believe that in over 800 potential Sunday visits, it never once came up, no one ever mentioned it to him?" Or from life- long Democrat Vic Hansen, "Sen Obama has proclaimed a new politics of hope and change that were to transcend such venom and character assassination. Thus besides being politically dense, he suffers - unless he preempts and explains in detail his Byzantine relationship with the reverend - the additional charge of hypocrisy in courting such a merchant of hate." Well, it seems pretty obvious that Obama, since his early 20's has sat week after week willingly listening to the ravings of just another cookie-cutter race huckster. Or, are we missing something?
Finally, there is the seeming contradiction between his rhapsody of delivery and what appears to some to be a vacuity of content, or if nothing, certainly nothing new that has not been pablum from the left for years. Are we wrong? Is there something there that is authentic, genuine, new and different? Let’s take a look. Recall the so often-repeated line, "We are the ones we’ve been waiting for". What does that mean and where did that come from? Is this a sentence that as Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard put it, "...no one will admit to being confused by, like the tenor-sax solos of John Coltrane, lest your peers think you’re a loser or a moron."? Well, come to find out, the phrase was borrowed from the title of a book of essays by the left-wing-radical-feminist-lesbian novelist Alice Walker - We Are The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For. And then the more we looked at Ferguson’s research the more we found that Obama has been credited with using phrases that have been in circulation for years. "This is a defining moment in history," Obama repeats; that is what Elizabeth Dole said when her husband ran for president in 1996. Obama climbs to the climax of his stump speech. Head bowed, brow furrowed, eyes flashing, he announces that, "We will choose unity over division" (Jesse Jackson, 1992). "We will choose hope over fear" (Bill Clinton and John Kerry, 1994). "And we will choose the future over the past" (Al Gore, 1992). "In so doing we will overcome our moral deficit" (Bush 2000, Gore, 2000) "by bringing people beyond the divisions of race and class" (Clinton, 1992) because the "story of our country" (Perot, 1992) or the "genius of our country" (Bush, 2000) or the "wonder of our country" (Bush, 1988) is, as Obama says in 2008, "ordinary people doing extraordinary things" (Perot, Bush, Bush, Reagan).
Well, we’d like to believe the best about this guy; certainly the Democrats could use a break. At the moment unfortunately things do not look promising.
Robert Craven
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Responsibility
In previous posts, another blog site, we have for two years concentrated on matters of national security. We are certainly not "insiders" but we are far more in tune with key off shore developments than most. Past two years we have focused naturally on the crucible know as the Middle East. We have been pulled into the presidential election only because of the situational powers given to the commander-in-chief. It has been a stretch. Thus we have birthed this site to better analyze the presidential electoral process, maintaining the Robert Craven Report to monitor developments which directly relate to matters of US security.
At the moment we have three presidential contenders, one of whom has such a set on her that she offered the VP slot to a guy who has more pledged delegates than she (!); we have a convoluted Democrat primary process which, although most of the party unwashed don’t realize it, is anything but grass roots, and finally a Republican candidate who has offended many of his own party for his candor, most recently rebuking a fellow Republican who said that terrorists "would be dancing in the streets" if B.H. Obama is elected.
The key danger to the United States and the balance of the free world is illiteracy in the U S voting booth. This is not Denmark. If it were, a partisan vote or a vote cast just for the hell of it makes little difference to the free world. Here we have the biggest fish in the pond. Thus, American voters carry a further burden - one of responsibility not to just themselves and family, but to Western civilization.
Let’s take these three, one at a time. BH Obama’s message is "change," a word he used 33 times in a February primary victory speech (someone buy this guy a thesaurus). Maybe he’s right. A lot of our liberal friends in Marin County apparently hope a young president Obama would recast the United States as a hip, likable, multi cultural society, marking an end to the stereotype of the U.S. as a stodgy white-guy superpower. We need to find out. Is this a country that needs major change, and if so, is he our man? Well, we received from the Obama campaign eight pages of examples of his reaching across the aisle in the Senate. But these are small-bore items of almost no controversy — more help for war veterans, reducing loose nukes in the former Soviet Union, and the like. Bipartisan support for apple pie is hardly a profile in courage. While a state senator he regularly voted "present" 130 times rather than take a stand. But then again, we may be missing something.
Is the USofA in dire need of a fix? Despite all of its problems, America is not a deeply flawed place, at least we don’t think so. It is the greatest nation in the history of mankind we think. It allows Barack Obama to run for president; it allows his wife to attend Princeton University and Harvard Law School. Yet Obama’s constant emphasis on change carries the disturbing undertone that the country is a disaster requiring radical reform. This isn't a message of optimism -- it's a message of profound pessimism. But then we may be missing something. Apparently Obama wants us to believe that America is in trouble and that it can only be cured with a big lurch to the left. Take from the rich and give to the non-rich. Redistribute income and wealth. It's an age-old recipe for economic disaster. It completely ignores incentives for entrepreneurs, small family-owned businesses, and investors. You can't have capitalism without capital. But Obama would penalize capital, be it capital from corporations or investors. Won’t this only harm, and not advance, opportunities for middle-class workers? Haven’t we all been through this before? Obama wants a greater government role in healthcare, higher taxes, tighter regulation, more social welfare, an increased flow of low-skilled migrants with amnesty for those already here, a cut-and-run from Iraq: these are not measures likely to improve US competitiveness or enhance America’s standing in the world. Or are they?
This country deserves the pride of its citizens. A popular bumper sticker in Marin County reads - "Dissent is Patriotic". Naturally, but only if it is grounded; noise is not patriotic. Sure, some policies need change -- some policies always need change. But the soul of the country is intact. It doesn't need a soul-fixer. It needs a leader.
Robert Craven
At the moment we have three presidential contenders, one of whom has such a set on her that she offered the VP slot to a guy who has more pledged delegates than she (!); we have a convoluted Democrat primary process which, although most of the party unwashed don’t realize it, is anything but grass roots, and finally a Republican candidate who has offended many of his own party for his candor, most recently rebuking a fellow Republican who said that terrorists "would be dancing in the streets" if B.H. Obama is elected.
The key danger to the United States and the balance of the free world is illiteracy in the U S voting booth. This is not Denmark. If it were, a partisan vote or a vote cast just for the hell of it makes little difference to the free world. Here we have the biggest fish in the pond. Thus, American voters carry a further burden - one of responsibility not to just themselves and family, but to Western civilization.
Let’s take these three, one at a time. BH Obama’s message is "change," a word he used 33 times in a February primary victory speech (someone buy this guy a thesaurus). Maybe he’s right. A lot of our liberal friends in Marin County apparently hope a young president Obama would recast the United States as a hip, likable, multi cultural society, marking an end to the stereotype of the U.S. as a stodgy white-guy superpower. We need to find out. Is this a country that needs major change, and if so, is he our man? Well, we received from the Obama campaign eight pages of examples of his reaching across the aisle in the Senate. But these are small-bore items of almost no controversy — more help for war veterans, reducing loose nukes in the former Soviet Union, and the like. Bipartisan support for apple pie is hardly a profile in courage. While a state senator he regularly voted "present" 130 times rather than take a stand. But then again, we may be missing something.
Is the USofA in dire need of a fix? Despite all of its problems, America is not a deeply flawed place, at least we don’t think so. It is the greatest nation in the history of mankind we think. It allows Barack Obama to run for president; it allows his wife to attend Princeton University and Harvard Law School. Yet Obama’s constant emphasis on change carries the disturbing undertone that the country is a disaster requiring radical reform. This isn't a message of optimism -- it's a message of profound pessimism. But then we may be missing something. Apparently Obama wants us to believe that America is in trouble and that it can only be cured with a big lurch to the left. Take from the rich and give to the non-rich. Redistribute income and wealth. It's an age-old recipe for economic disaster. It completely ignores incentives for entrepreneurs, small family-owned businesses, and investors. You can't have capitalism without capital. But Obama would penalize capital, be it capital from corporations or investors. Won’t this only harm, and not advance, opportunities for middle-class workers? Haven’t we all been through this before? Obama wants a greater government role in healthcare, higher taxes, tighter regulation, more social welfare, an increased flow of low-skilled migrants with amnesty for those already here, a cut-and-run from Iraq: these are not measures likely to improve US competitiveness or enhance America’s standing in the world. Or are they?
This country deserves the pride of its citizens. A popular bumper sticker in Marin County reads - "Dissent is Patriotic". Naturally, but only if it is grounded; noise is not patriotic. Sure, some policies need change -- some policies always need change. But the soul of the country is intact. It doesn't need a soul-fixer. It needs a leader.
Robert Craven
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