"But until this year, she kept her views on race to herself and that was all to the good. "

Oh, good the unvarnished Geraldine Ferraro on Race...what did she say? Where did she make her "views" on race known?

You know perfectly well that this claim is bogus.

I've run out of patience with pundits from both sides of this Obama-Clinton divide who keep making sweeping statements that are simply not supported by the public record.

Posted at March 21, 2008 2:38 PM in response to Krauthammer, Tucker Carlson, Rev Wright & Other Racial Paranoids

The problem with Rev Wright's theology is not how he expresses the rage all enslaved people feel, nor is it his prophetic condemnations of an immorally motivated nation (His name is Jeremiah, after all) it is his perpetuation of a racist theology, one which, like the "white devils" of the Nation of Islam, marks out "whites" as the source of all the world's ills.

A spiritual leader moves us forward by ensuring a time out for empathy in all our lives.

Each human grows spiritually, not by nursing the grievances peculiar to their state (and blacks are far from the only people who have been abused, enslaved, degraded, or exterminated.) but by recognizing the universality of pain and suffering as a tangible and urgent experience.

The Rev. is a demagogue and some of his comments really are beyond the pale, his "Hillary ain't never been called a nigger" may be factual, but is gratuitous and cheap.

After all, that same comment might just as easily be said of Obama's mother. "Obama's mama ain't never been called a nigger", might also be factually true, but I think Obama supporters will more easily see how vicious it's intent is when directed at someone other than Hillary Clinton. (In fact, I think they will go insane and I will be burned in effigy at Daily Kos, but that alone will, of course, prove my point.)

I am not sure how a man who grew up with a white family, a family he claims to have loved and whom he counts as a force for good in his life, could have tolerated the Rev Wright's cartoonish theology

Rev Wright, in many respects, has served as a surrogate father to Sen. Obama. Did that mean he had to throw his mother and her family out the window?

Of course, an psychoanalyst could have a field day with the implications here (Obama's own unresolved anger at his father leaving and blaming his mother and grand parents for that), there is, of course, another possibility: that he joined this church with the specific intent of buffing up on his "blackness" and building his credibility within the district he would go on to represent in the state senate.

So, no, I'm not actually suggesting that Obama is driven by some subterranean anger at his white mother (ie Hillary) but I am suggesting that he didn't "hear" the substance of Rev Wright's sermons because, like many social interlopers, he was simply trying to build his own cachet by being in the parish. Just like most politicians. And, Senator Obama is nothing if not a politican.

What I resent here, aside from the Obamabots dangerous insistance that politics should be transcendent, is the intimidation that also dangerously insists that any and all criticism or doubt about Sen. Obama, his judgement, his experience, his policies or his ability to win a general election be dismissed as racism in the most over wrought and self-aggrandizing manner possible.

I resent that David Axelrod would create a success story built almost entirely on building repulsion at Hillary Clinton's hitherto unobserved racism.

Perhaps the Rev Wright can give Axelrod a short talk about the meaning of the Biblical phrase, "He who sows the wind, reaps the whirlwind"

For myself, I grow to wonder if Obama-ism has evolved to the point where it fits Karl Kraus's famous dictum: "Obama-ism is the disease which it claims to cure."

Posted at March 16, 2008 3:29 AM in response to Obama's judgment: Wright or Wrong

The last - and most important - item appears to be unknown: Who leaked Spitzer's name to the press, when, and why (well, we know why, but what is the "official" justification)?

Posted at March 12, 2008 1:34 PM in response to Today's Must Read

This is idiotic. Those of you who found this story at the Church of Barack Obama (DailyKos) will notice, if you read the comments, that quite a few people are distancing themselves from both the story and DailyKos itself. It is this sort of thing that is destroying the last few shreds of credibility that Markos has left. Let's hope that doesn't happen here.

I've been more or less undecided between the canidates, but every word I read by Obama supporters drives me closer to supporting Senator Clinton. This bullshit story may be the last straw. Senator Obama may be relatively clean, but his supporters are right up there with Karl Rove. Good job, guys, you're destroying your own candidate. If the candidate is ANYTHING like his acolytes, he deserves to disappear from public life altogether - permanently.

Posted at March 4, 2008 4:49 PM in response to Clinton Camp darkens Obama's skin in Ad