Poll: Preacher Calms Dem Fears of Obama's Faith by Scott Ott for ScrappleFace · 25 Comments(2008-03-19) —

The latest presidential poll shows that public exposure to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racially-charged, anti-American preaching has allayed Democrat voter fears about Sen. Barack Obama’s evangelical Christianity.Sen. Obama’s long-time pastor and mentor has called on God to ‘damn America’, and he blames rich, white people for everything from the crucifixion of Jesus to the epidemic of HIV in the black community.“Until mainstream Democrats heard Rev. Wright’s remarks,” said an unnamed pollster, “many were troubled by Sen. Obama’s profession of faith in Jesus Christ and his regular church attendance, which are generally-accepted indicators of mental weakness and deep-seated bigotry.”However, the source said, now that Democrat voters know that Sen. Obama’s pastor essentially preaches mainstream progressive talking points, they seem more willing to tolerate the Democrat candidate’s Christianity.As one survey respondent said, “At least he’s not some kind of religious nut, like George Bush, trying to force his god delusions and twisted morality down our throats.”

What Jesus and Obama's Pastor Have In Common

From your favorite theologian, reviewing Jacob Neusner's book on Jesus:

As such, Neusner’s friendly dialogue with Jesus amounts to what Matthew Scully, in a 1993 review of the book in National Review, called a “polite hedge.” Faced with a man who insists he is the equivalent of the Lord, one cannot disagree “with respect and reverence,” one cannot challenge the man’s claim while remaining “moved” by his greatness. “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher,” C.S. Lewis famously wrote. “He would either be a lunatic—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. . . . But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn on the messiah's mentor:

The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years. Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.

But you can't really blame the guy, if god is his disciple.

what if obama doesn't pivot?

mickey kaus

What Obama Should Have Said

LA Times Blowback:

In my considered judgment as a race and civil rights specialist, I would
say that Barack Obama's "momentous" speech on race settled on merely
"explaining" so-called racial differences between blacks and whites -- and in so
doing amplified deep-seated racial tensions and divisions. Instead of giving us
a polarizing treatise on the "black experience," Obama should have reiterated
the theme that has brought so many to his campaign: That race ain't what it used
to be in America.He should have presented us a pathway out of our racial boxes
and a road map for new thinking about race. He should have depicted his
minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as a symbol of the dysfunctional
angry men who are stuck in the past and who must yield to a new generation of
color-blind, hopeful Americans and to a new global economy in which we will look
on our neighbors' skin color no differently than how we look on their eye
color.In fact, I'd say that considering the nation's undivided attention to this
all-important speech, which gave him an unrivaled opportunity to lift us out of
racial and racist thinking, Obama blew it.

Media & Politics is back!

The Politico explaining why the media tried to cover up Wright's comments:

The minister’s controversial history has been written about countless times
throughout the campaign. Wright has ties to the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, the black
supremacist leader of the Nation of Islam — a fact that has been noted in more
than 100 news stories just in the past few months, according to the Nexis
database of news coverage. Opponents of Obama have constantly pushed reporters
to write about the minister, which these critics considered a ticking time bomb
for his campaign. On Feb. 20, after a fiery guest sermon by Wright in Little
Rock, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette ran an article that said: “On Tuesday,
Wright criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq and likened the insurgents to the
Israelites under Babylonian rule.” At 9:20 that morning, Obama opponents were
already trying to get Politico to link to the story. That’s why many news
outlets — including Politico — did not initially pile on with rehashes after
Ross’s story on “Good Morning America.”

One hundred stories which mentioned Obama's pastor in just the past few months! That's almost as much as the 4,351 stories about the woman who sat on the toilet for two years (in one week.) So I perfectly understand the media reaction: "G-d damn America? No news here."

Best Obama Speech Coverage Award (so far) goes to Mickey Kaus here

Andrew Sullivan on Obama:

As this campaign progresses, this man grows and grows. The same cannot be said for his two remaining opponents.

At this accelerated rate of growth, Obama will have like, four years of experience by the time he takes the white house!

Obama and the Bible

In light of Obama's posthumous conversion of Daniel to Christianity noted here, his "Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us" comment makes me wonder how often he really did attend church after all.

Must read Shelby Steele on Obama here.

"Bill Buckley Mekareved Me"

David Klinghoffer here. h/t to anonymous

One More Thing Obama and Jesus Have in Common

Jesus was a poor black guy in a county run by rich white people:

When Even GOP Believes in Hope

As I said, Obama was running well ahead of Clinton in head-to-head matchups a few weeks ago, and now they're tied. After several more weeks of Clinton reinforcing McCain's message against Obama, Clinton will probably be performing better than Obama against McCain. This is the point I made in my TRB column. She needs to convince the remaining uncommitted superdelegates to split for her by about a 2-to-1 margin. The only way she can get a split like that is if she can persuasively argue that Obama is unelectable. And the only way she can do that is to make him unelectable. Some people have treated this as an unfortunate byproduct of Clinton's decision to continue her campaign. It's actually a central element of the strategy. Penn is already saying he's unelectable. It's not true, but by the time the convention rolls around, it may well be.

--Jonathan Chait

Fwd: She was probably in the middle of a very long book...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: YK

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8VC22HO0&show_article=1&catnum=0

Sheriff: Woman Sat on Toilet for 2 Years

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) - Deputies say a woman in western Kansas became stuck on her boyfriend's toilet after sitting on it for two years.

Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said it appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman's skin had grown around the seat. She initially refused emergency medical services but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.

"We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital," Whipple said. "The hospital removed it."

Whipple said investigators planned to present their report Wednesday to the county attorney, who will determine whether any charges should be filed against the woman's 36-year-old boyfriend.

"She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body," Whipple said. "It is hard to imagine. ... I still have a hard time imagining it myself."

He told investigators he brought his girlfriend food and water, and asked her every day to come out of the bathroom.

"And her reply would be, `Maybe tomorrow,'" Whipple said. "According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom."

The boyfriend called police on Feb. 27 to report that "there was something wrong with his girlfriend," Whipple said, adding that he never explained why it took him two years to call.

Police found the clothed woman sitting on the toilet, her sweat pants down to her mid-thigh. She was "somewhat disoriented," and her legs looked like they had atrophied, Whipple said.

"She said that she didn't need any help, that she was OK and did not want to leave," he said.

She was taken to a hospital in Wichita, about 150 miles southeast of Ness City. Whipple said she has refused to cooperate with medical providers or law enforcement investigators.

Authorities said they did not know if she was mentally or physically disabled.

Police have declined to release the couple's names, but the house where authorities say the incident happened is listed in public records as the residence of Kory McFarren. No one answered his home phone number.

The case has been the buzz Ness City, said James Ellis, a neighbor.

"I don't think anybody can make any sense out of it," he said.

Ellis said he had known the woman since she was a child but that he had not seen her for at least six years.

He said she had a tough childhood after her mother died at a young age and apparently was usually kept inside the house as she grew up. At one time the woman worked for a long-term care facility, he said, but he did not know what kind of work she did there.

"It really doesn't surprise me," Ellis said of the bathroom incident. "What surprises me is somebody wasn't called in a bit earlier."

(Authorities might not know if she was mentally disabled, but I think I might hazard a guess.)

missed this parasha shiur by your favorite modern orthodox theologian, "The menorah and hating goyim":

In the end, however, the committee overseeing the choice of symbol declined this proposal, rejecting the biblical phrase, the shofar and lulav, and the tripod menorah, and settling ultimately on the menorah of the arch of Titus flanked by two olive branches signaling Israel’s peaceful intentions. While granting that the pairing of a menorah with two olive branches nods to Israel’s religious history by harking back to imagery from the book of the prophet Zechariah, Mishory writes that the emblem “clearly shows that in the struggle between the ‘secular camp,’ which wanted to emphasize the state’s socialist and democratic present and future, and the ‘religious camp,’ which wished to stress the grandeur of the past and its link to the God of Israel, the former won.”

Indeed, when the state’s seal was officially announced, Rabbi Herzog, an ardent Zionist, protested on both religious and archeological grounds:

It is not good what our government does today. Just when we have merited once again the light of Zion that is symbolized by the menorah, [the state] chose specifically the image of the menorah that is on the arch of Titus, which, it appears, was altered by foreigners. . . . And not only this, but an expert in the science of antiquities has testified to me that the menorahs that are formed on the graves in [Jewish] catacombs in Rome . . . are all with three legs, as are all those formed on the mosaics in the remains of ancient synagogues that are in the land of Israel.

“How right are the words of Rabbi Herzog,” exclaims Sperber, for whom Israel’s choice of emblem was a tragic error. In seeking to restore Jewish political honor, the Jewish state ended up insulting the Jewish faith; in seeking to emphasize Jewish political independence, it ended up selecting a symbol of Judaism’s spiritual servitude.

Excellent Bret Stephens column yesterday, if you have not read it, do so.

He must have mad a wrong turn

Spitzer should argue that he just got lost, accidentally turned onto Sleaze Drive, and then down Slimeball Lane. From there, he veered left onto Creepy Terrace, eventually landing up on Topoftrash Mt.
(And let this be a lesson for all who travel down Corny Ad Rd.)

Then and Now

Rolling Stone endorses McCain!

No generation of Young Voters has ever cared less about politics and politicians than yours. There's hard demographic and voter-pattern data backing this up … assuming you give a s*** about data. In fact, even if you're reading other stuff in RS, it's doubtful you're going to read much of this article — such is the enormous shuddering yawn that the Political Process evokes in us now, in this post-Watergate-post-Iran-Contra-post-Whitewater-post-Lewinsky era, an era when politicians' statements of principle or vision are understood as self-serving ad copy and judged not for their sincerity or ability to inspire but for their tactical shrewdness, their marketability.

and when Senator John McCain... says that his goal as president will be "to inspire young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest," it's hard not to hear it as just one more piece of the carefully scripted bull**** that presidential candidates hand us as they go about the self-interested business of trying to become the most powerful, important and talked-about human being on earth, which is of course their real "cause," to which they appear to be so deeply devoted that they can swallow and spew whole mountains of noble-sounding bull**** and convince even themselves that they mean it. Cynical as that may sound, polls show it's how most of us feel. And it's beyond not believing the bull****; mostly we don't even hear it, dismiss it at the same deep level where we also block out billboards and Muzak.

But there's something underneath politics in the way you have to hear McCain, something riveting and unSpinnable and true. It has to do with McCain's military background and Vietnam combat and the five-plus years he spent in a North Vietnamese prison, mostly in solitary, in a box, getting tortured and starved. And the unbelievable honor and balls he showed there. It's very easy to gloss over the POW thing, partly because we've all heard so much about it and partly because it's so off-the-charts dramatic, like something in a movie instead of a man's life. But it's worth considering for a minute, because it's what makes McCain's "causes greater than self-interest" line easier to hear.

You probably already know what happened. In October of '67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and flying his 23rd Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, which ejection broke both McCain's arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies right over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you'd be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb. His chute opened late and he landed hard in a little lake in a park right in the middle of downtown Hanoi. Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the lifevest's toggle with your teeth as a crowd of Vietnamese men swim out toward you (there's film of this, somebody had a home-movie camera, and the N.V. government released it, though it's grainy and McCain's face is hard to see). The crowd pulled him out and then just about killed him. U.S. bomber pilots were especially hated, for obvious reasons. McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90° to the side with the bone sticking out. Try to imagine this. He finally got tossed on a jeep and taken five blocks to the infamous Hoa Lo prison — a.k.a. the "Hanoi Hilton," of much movie fame — where they made him beg a week for a doctor and finally set a couple of the fractures without anesthetic and let two other fractures and the groin wound (imagine: groin wound) stay like they were. Then they threw him in a cell. Try for a moment to feel this. All the media profiles talk about how McCain still can't lift his arms over his head to comb his hair, which is true. But try to imagine it at the time, yourself in his place, because it's important. Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self-interest getting knifed in the balls and having fractures set without painkiller would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened. He was delirious with pain for weeks, and his weight dropped to 100 pounds, and the other POWs were sure he would die; and then after a few months like that after his bones mostly knitted and he could sort of stand up they brought him in to the prison commandant's office and offered to let him go. This is true. They said he could just leave. They had found out that McCain's father was one of the top-ranking naval officers in the U.S. Armed Forces (which is true — both his father and grandfather were admirals), and the North Vietnamese wanted the PR coup of mercifully releasing his son, the baby-killer. McCain, 100 pounds and barely able to stand, refused. The U.S. military's Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who'd been in Hoa Lo a long time, and McCain refused to violate the Code. The commandant, not pleased, right there in the office had guards break his ribs, rebreak his arm, knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. And so then he spent four more years in Hoa Lo like this, much of the time in solitary, in the dark, in a closet-sized box called a "punishment cell." Maybe you've heard all this before; it's been in umpteen different media profiles of McCain. But try to imagine that moment between getting offered early release and turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would have cried out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer. Can you hear it? If so, would you have refused to go? You simply can't know for sure. None of us can. It's hard even to imagine the pain and fear in that moment, much less know how you'd react.

But, see, we do know how this man reacted. That he chose to spend four more years there, in a dark box, alone, tapping code on the walls to the others, rather than violate a Code. Maybe he was nuts. But the point is that with McCain it feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he's capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest. So that when he says the line in speeches in early February you can feel like maybe it isn't just more candidate bull****, that with this guy it's maybe the truth. Or maybe both the truth and bull****: the guy does — did — want your vote, after all.

Well, that's pretty jaded. Now fast forward eight years:

The tides of history are rising higher and faster these days. Read them right and ride them, or be crushed. And then along comes Barack Obama, with the kinds of gifts that appear in politics but once every few generations. There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline. It's not just that he is eloquent — with that ability to speak both to you and to speak for you — it's that he has a quality of thinking and intellectual and emotional honesty that is extraordinary.

I first learned of Barack Obama from a man who was at the highest level of George W. Bush's political organization through two presidential campaigns. He described the first-term senator from Illinois as "a walking hope machine" and told me that he would not work for any Republican candidate in 2008 if Obama was nominated. He challenged me to read Obama's autobiography, Dreams From My Father.

The book was a revelation. Here was a man whose honesty about himself and understanding of the human condition are both deep and compassionate. Born to a white mother and an African father, he was raised in multiracial Hawaii and for several years in Indonesia. He drifted through some druggy teenage years — no apologies! — before emerging as a star at Harvard Law School. He chose to work as a community organizer in the projects of Chicago rather than join the wealthy insider world of corporate law. And as a young adult, he searched, in the distant villages of Kenya, for the father and family he never knew.

As I read all this, so elegantly written, my mind kept rolling over: Might it be possible? Is there some fate by which we could have this man as president of the United States?

Throughout the primaries, and during a visit he paid to our offices, we have come to know Barack Obama, his toughness and his grace. He would not be intimidated, and he declined to back down, when Senator Clinton called him "frankly, naive" for his willingness to meet leaders of hostile nations. When one of her top campaign officials tried to smear him for his earlier drug use, he did not equivocate or backtrack. On the matter of experience and capability, he has run an impressive, nearly flawless campaign — one that whupped America's most hard-boiled political infighters. Indeed, Obama was far more prepared to run a presidential campaign — from Day One — than Senator Clinton. And at no point did he go negative with personal attacks or character assassination; as much as they might have been justified, they didn't even seem tempting to him.

Obama has emerged by displaying precisely the kind of character and judgment we need in a president: renouncing the politics of fear, speaking frankly on the most pressing issues facing the country and sticking to his principles. He recognizes that running for president is an opportunity to inspire an entire nation.

I guess there's no possibility that he wants anyone to vote for him, though.

"I, by the way, served in Vietnam"

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McCain: No You Can't Kill Us

Best news on McCain comes from the Nation, here some excerpts:

But what you may not have heard is an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism," McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a "League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century.

"We created a number of institutions in the wake of World War II to deal with the situation," says Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top adviser on foreign policy. "And what Senator McCain wants to begin a dialogue about is, Do we need new structures and new institutions, both internally, in the US government, and externally, to recognize that the situation we face now is very, very different than the one we faced during the cold war?" Joining Scheunemann, a veteran neoconservative strategist and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, are a panoply of like-minded neocons who've gathered to advise McCain, including Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt and Maj. Ralph Peters. "There are some who've moved into his camp who scare me," Wilkerson says. "Scare me."

If McCain intends to be a shoot first, ask questions later President, consider a couple of the new institutions he's outlined, which seem designed to facilitate an unencumbered, interventionist foreign policy.

First is an unnamed "new agency patterned after the...Office of Strategic Services," the rambunctious, often out-of-control World War II-era covert-ops team. "A modern day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare; covert action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. "Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization" that would "fight terrorist subversion [and] take risks." It's clear that McCain wants to set up an agency to conduct paramilitary operations, covert action and psy-ops.

This idea is McCain's response to a longstanding critique of the CIA by neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, who have accused the agency of being "risk averse."


The UN, too, would be shunted aside to make room for McCain's new League of Democracies. Though the concept is couched in soothing rhetoric, the "league" would provide an alternate way of legitimizing foreign interventions by the United States when the UN Security Council won't authorize force. Five years ago, on the eve of the Iraq War, McCain said bluntly before the European Parliament that if Security Council members resisted the use of force, or if China opposed US action against North Korea, "the United States will do whatever it must to guarantee the security of the American people." Among the targets McCain cites for his plan to short-circuit the UN are Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe, Serbia, Ukraine and, of course, Iran--and he has already referred to "wackos" in Venezuela. According to Scheunemann, it's an idea that bubbled up from some of McCain's advisers, including Peters and Kagan, but it alarms analysts from the realist-Republican school of foreign policy. "They're talking about a body that essentially would circumvent the UN and would take authority to act in the name of the international community, sometimes using force," says a veteran GOP strategist who knows McCain well and who insisted on anonymity. "Well, it's very easy to predict that the Russians and Chinese would view this as a threat."

McCain seems almost gleeful about provoking Russia. At first blush, you'd think he'd be more nuanced, since many of the foreign policy gurus he says he talks to emanate from the old-school Nixon-Kissinger circle of détente-niks, including Henry Kissinger himself, Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft. Their collective attitude is that as long as Moscow doesn't threaten US interests, we can do business with it. But there is little evidence of their views in McCain's policy toward Putin's Russia. "I think it's fair to assume that he's most influenced by his neoconservative advisers," says the GOP strategist.

Not surprisingly, the center of McCain's foreign policy is the Middle East. "He's bought into the completely fallacious notion that we're in a global struggle of us-versus-them. He calls it the 'transcendental threat...of extreme Islam," says Daalder. "But it's a silly argument to think that this is either an ideological or a material struggle on a par with [the ones against] Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism." For McCain, the Iraq War, the conflict with Iran, the Arab-Israeli dispute, the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani crisis and the lack of democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all rolled up into one "transcendent" ball of wax.


He is the candidate of those Americans whose chief goal is an endless war against radical Islam and who'd like nothing more than for the Arizona senator to clamber figuratively into the cockpit once more. Like his former aide Marshall Wittman, currently a top aide to Senator Lieberman, McCain sees Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose interventionist President of the early twentieth century, as his role model. And that attracts neoconservatives.

"I'm an old-fashioned, Scoop Jackson--I guess you'd now say Joe Lieberman--Democrat, and he's a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, and they're pretty close in their views, so substantively there's a lot of overlap between us," says James Woolsey, a former CIA director who's endorsed McCain and has campaigned with him this year. "I think John's style is very TR-like. It's very much about speaking softly but carrying a big stick."

We too can hope.

Coincidence? I think not.

hat tip:
Slate Obama Messiah Watch