Charles Krauthammer explains, slowly and carefully so that even liberals can understand, what Obama actually said, and what he didn’t say.

But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

Read the whole thing.

Is Obama Wright?

A 2:38 video on the subject of Barack Obama’s patriotism.

The Onion reports that a black man began harrassing strangers in downtown Chicago and has subsequently spread his operations to other cities.

According to witnesses, a loud black man approached a crowd of some 4,000 strangers in downtown Chicago Tuesday and made repeated demands for change.

“The time for change is now,” said the black guy, yelling at everyone within earshot for 20 straight minutes, practically begging America for change. “The need for change is stronger and more urgent than ever before. And only you—the people standing here today, and indeed all the people of this great nation—only you can deliver this change.”

The black guy is oddly comfortable demanding change from people he’s never even met.

It is estimated that, to date, the black man has asked every single person in the United States for change.

“I’ve already seen this guy four times today,” Chicago-area ad salesman Blake Gordon said. “Every time, it’s the same exact spiel. ‘I need change.’ ‘I want change.’ Why’s he so eager for all this change? What’s he going to do with it, anyway?”

After his initial requests for change, the black man rambled nonstop on a variety of unrelated topics, calling for affordable health care, demanding that the government immediately begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, and proposing a $75 billion economic stimulus plan to create new jobs.

“What a wacko,” Schaumburg, IL resident Patrick Morledge said. “And, of course, after telling us all about how he had the ability to magically fix everything, he went right back to asking for change. Typical.”

“If he’s really looking for change, he’s got the wrong guy,” Morledge added.

Read the whole story.

The Boston Herald’s Michael Graham listened to the speech and does not think it succeeded in persuading voters that there is not something more than a little peculiar about his choice of churches and that there is not a problem with his relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

As a former speechwriter myself, I was looking forward to Obama’s remarks yesterday because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how anyone could talk themselves out of Obama’s predicament. How does Obama – the Kumbaya Candidate – explain his 20 years at the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s black power church? How does a uniter spend every Sunday in the pews where anti-white, anti-Semitic and anti-American conspiracies and kookery are preached on a regular basis?

It’s like discovering that John McCain is a closet pacifist, or that Hillary Clinton is Rush Limbaugh’s Client No. 9.

Yesterday I got my answer. Blame everyone.

I knew we were in trouble when Obama compared the hapless but harmless Geraldine Ferraro with the Rev. Wright on the “racial insensitivity” scale. And invoking the memory of the O.J. Simpson trial in a speech on racial unity left some of us wondering if the Tawana Brawley references were cut at the last minute.

Obama did say that some of Wright’s comments were “wrong” and “divisive.” He also admitted that he had in fact been in church for some comments that “could be considered controversial – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagree.”

Uh, no.

As a graduate of Oral Roberts University who grew up attending church five times a week – including tent revivals, healing services and the handling of less-than-friendly reptiles – I can honestly say that I never attended a service where the minister preached race hatred, anti-Israel paranoia or used the phrase “ridin’ dirty” in a theological context.

And other than Obama, I don’t know anyone else who did, either.

Disagreeing with your pastor about transubstantiation is one thing. Debating whether government scientists are secretly trying to infect you with AIDS – that disagreement is a bit more profound.

At least it is for me.

Not Obama, who went out of his way to embrace the irrational Rev. Wright, saying, “I could no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”

That says quite a bit about Obama’s opinion about the black community. Then again, Obama had very little positive to say about anyone in his “I have an excuse” speech.

America is still a nation suffused with racism, Obama insisted. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition (Racists!). Politicians exploited fears of crime (Double racists!). Talk show hosts and conservative commentators unmasking bogus claims of racism (Super double extra racists!).

To paraphrase the Disney movie “The Incredibles,” “If everybody’s racist, then nobody is.”

So determined was Obama to declare us all guilty by racial association, he even compared Wright to his own grandmother, “who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.”

C’mon, Barack, do you have to pick on your own grandmother?

Shelby Steele offers the most intelligent analysis of the psychology of Barack Obama’s magical appeal, explaining why his lack of specificity and precision is essential to his role, and why the myth is currently dissolving.

Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer’s race against him. And whites love this bargain — and feel affection for the bargainer — because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama’s extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.

His actual policy positions are little more than Democratic Party boilerplate and hardly a tick different from Hillary’s positions. He espouses no galvanizing political idea. He is unable to say what he means by “change” or “hope” or “the future.” And he has failed to say how he would actually be a “unifier.” By the evidence of his slight political record (130 “present” votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much.

Race helps Mr. Obama in another way — it lifts his political campaign to the level of allegory, making it the stuff of a far higher drama than budget deficits and education reform. His dark skin, with its powerful evocations of America’s tortured racial past, frames the political contest as a morality play. Will his victory mean America’s redemption from its racist past? Will his defeat show an America morally unevolved? Is his campaign a story of black overcoming, an echo of the civil rights movement? Or is it a passing-of-the-torch story, of one generation displacing another?

Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans — black and white — Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America’s very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama’s candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton’s or Jesse Jackson’s. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama’s run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were “challengers,” not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don’t know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . .” And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama’s Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a “blank screen.”

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama’s political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage (“God damn America”).

How does one “transcend” race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has 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 judgment 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 could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn’t thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to “be black” despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn’t this hatred more rhetorical than real?

But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one’s blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America’s television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.

I’m not crazy about McCain personally, but I recognize that all John McCain has to do is run this ad:

4:31 video

While the Republican Party also runs portions of this video (just to put things in perspective):

3:51 video

and it’s over for Obama.

Jules Crittenden thanks the democrats for a lesson in political correctness.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the Democratic Party, its two remaining presidential candidates and their campaigns for the important lessons in sensitivity and political correctness they have offered in recent weeks.

Political correctness is not simply the denial and dispute of facts or subject matter, but more practically the denial of the right to speak them, due to their objectionable or politically inconvenient nature. It’s generally wielded as a weapon against opponents. But it is more fascinating to watch it swung as a cudgel against allies. And in a campaign in which the strongest points … hope, change, experience … have tended to be a little vague or tenuous at best, the most memorable moments turn out to be about what must not be said, when we’ve seen that cudgel come down.

Of course they have platforms. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have attempted to outbid each other with your money. There are subsidies for universal healthcare, giveaways to newborns, that kind of thing. It theoretically gets paid for by taking from the rich, but stopping the war. Though that of course depends on what your definition of rich is, and whether the war can stopped…

Read the whole thing.

Bill Siegel explains what Obama’s choice of churches and his close twenty-year association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright proves about Obama’s real ideology and agenda.

Barack Obama’s response to the outrageous views and statements of his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah A.Wright Jr., was that he should not be tagged with “guilt by association.” In addition, his surrogates and supporters quickly joined to recite the full gamut of distracting, misdirecting, and irrelevant defenses — that the pastor doesn’t really mean what he says but uses material to stir up his congregation, whites do not understand the context of the statements, he is permitted these views because of the oppression blacks have endured, if Obama was seeking any other job these statements be irrelevant so ignore them here, only a few of the Reverend’s statements are possibly objectionable, if Obama was white this would be a non-issue, this is not the first time a candidate has been burned by an endorsement, Bush and Reagan visited Bob Jones University, John Hagee has endorsed McCain, Wright is off the campaign now so case closed and so on.

First, the “guilt by association” approach admits guilt. It merely argues over who is guilty. Therefore, any in depth analysis of the virtues or truth of Reverend Wright’s charges is clearly a waste of time. Little could be clearer on its face than the racism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism spewed by the pastor. The only issue is whether Obama shares in any of this guilt.

The defense rides on the notion that “association” is an insufficient connector between the pastor and the candidate. In law, this defense is often sensible. We typically require significant evidence of connection between parties to pass guilt from one party to another but what constitutes significance depends upon the case. In many other cases, however, the defense does not work. Being members of the same organization can often do the trick. Under the recent Sarbanes-Oxley laws, a CEO can be charged with the offenses committed by a junior officer if he should have been aware. In conspiracy cases, one member of a conspiracy can be guilty of the offenses of another merely by agreeing to be in the conspiracy even if the former was completely unaware of the specific acts of the second and would not have intended those acts himself. …

Obama followers have been failing to accept what is right in front of their eyes. Obama had stated in a February debate “The implication is that the people who have been voting for me or involved in my campaign are somehow delusional” as a joke to convey that of course that is impossible. And the public bought the joke. Similarly, when Obama or his surrogates assert that this is merely “guilt by association,” the public seems to buy it as well. The hypnotic instruction seems to be that as long as Obama can stand up and offer a counter statement that takes the focus off of him, we can still believe in him.

Nonetheless, Obama’s connections with the reverend are considerably close and meaningful. He calls Wright his “uncle” and a “sounding board.” He chose the pastor as his “spiritual advisor” who helped him “find Christ” and included him, until now, in his campaign. He has been a member of the church for roughly twenty years. He had the pastor oversee various personal occasions including his own marriage and children’s baptisms.

He has involved Wright in his political life. The title “Audacity of Hope” came from Wright. He only made any attempt to appear to disconnect from Wright following his decision to run for President.

Conversely, Wright has involved Obama as well. Wright referred to Obama in one of his diatribes of which we have been made aware: “Barack knows what it means to be a black man controlled by rich white people.” It seems the reverend knows Obama quite well. Is he telling us Obama is like the other cheering congregants who clearly accept and identify with the picture Wright paints of blacks?

And, as reported recently on MSNBC’s “Hardball”, Obama and Wright had one or more conversations in which they agreed that Obama might have to distance himself from Wright in a national campaign. Which — directly and clearly — calls into question Obama’s sincerity in supposedly distancing himself from Wright. If he planned to distance himself from Wright during the campaign it is logical to infer that Obama plans to embrace Wright again after it.

It is difficult to trust Obama’s responses. He has tried to frame the issue as concerning these specific “statements” of Wright’s, as if these are rare utterances that occurred outside of Obama’s presence. He says he hadn’t heard these statements and repudiates them and that now that he has heard them he does reject them. He has even tried to suggest that what he has heard from Wright over twenty years is simple talk about helping the poor and Jesus and so forth, subliminally suggesting to his consuming audience that the typical Wright speech is similar to any decent sermon that could be heard across the nation. It is simply disingenuous to assert that a man filled with these points of view accompanied by the rage that flows out of him in these appearances gives no hint in any of the services Obama attends or in their frequent “uncle-nephew”, “spiritual advising”, or “sounding board” interactions.

What is even more incredible is the notion that any person of reasonable judgment could walk into that church over twenty years and not know exactly what is being communicated, the radical far left bias of the pastor, and the rage-filled leanings of the entire congregation. The joy and excitement seen throughout the congregation does not come forth only after brute sublimation. This reverend knows exactly what to say to elicit that response and it is and has been exactly his job to do so. It is far more likely that these hate America views are central to what holds the entire church together rather than simple incidental slips of a pastor’s private views which were inadvertently leaked. If the Obamas are so completely in the dark as to this pastor’s sentiments, they have no judgment whatsoever. The more likely reality is that they know exactly what is happening and that is why they have been supporters for years.

Wright’s statements also give a fuller picture to Michelle Obama’s comment that she had never before been proud of America. Having Wright as one’s teacher of what America is would destroy anyone’s pride in their country. The problem, then, is that we run the risk of electing a couple whose understanding of America should probably bar them from even taking a White House tour.

To oversimplify Shelby Steele’s extremely valuable theory in A Bound Man, Obama is in the untenable position of having to keep the real Obama hidden from the public. In short, it is part of the negotiation arrangement Obama has chosen with whites — that of what Steele calls a “bargainer” — in which whites turn over power to Obama so long as he does not in any manner use his blackness as a means to make whites act as if they feel guilty. Yet in a presidential campaign, it is virtually impossible to stay hidden.

Obama has done a great job to date in hiding behind his mesmerizing speeches, his charm, his affable humor, and gentle persona, just to mention a few of his gifts and tactics. He loves to claim he is a bringing in a new politics and is “transcending” the old. It sounds wonderful to his deluded audience yet what he transcends is merely his being tagged with exactly who he is. “Transcendence” is most often used by him as an escape, an excuse to wiggle away from some charge. Yet, as he approaches nomination, much is starting to leak out. It is precisely for this reason that Obama’s associations are all the more relevant and need to be amplified. They are precisely the best window into what is behind his curtain.

with the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass, who finds himself unable to take a leap of faith.

Barack Obama looked me straight in the eye. I heard him speak. Yet unlike some other pundits, I felt no thrill going up my leg.

I did feel a twinge of Rezko, though, and figured Obama could feel it, too, like when the bottom of your foot cramps up inside your shoe and you can’t dance.

That’s “hardball” the Chicago way, as Barack visited the Tribune on Friday to discuss his old friend, fundraiser and real estate fairy, indicted political fixer Tony Rezko. Rezko himself was quite busy, in federal custody, preparing for this week’s testimony in his corruption trial. …

Obama asks us to believe he can swim in the sewers of Illinois politics without catching a cold. He tells us that Rezko helped him scope out his dream house, yet Obama never thought he’d get a call from Tony saying his back was itchy.

“No,” Obama said. “Because I had known him for a long time, and so I would have assumed I would have seen a pattern [of Rezko asking for favors] over the course of 15 years.”

I’m too old to believe in fairy tales.

At issue is the purchase of the Obama dream house on the South Side in 2005. The Rezkos bought the lot next door from the same owners on the same day, even as Tony was leprous with federal subpoenas. The Obamas paid $300,000 less than the asking price. The Rezkos paid the full list for the lot. Everybody was happy until Tony got indicted.

Was it a favor, with a bigger payout intended for later?

“No,” Obama said again, reiterating that I was wrong for writing that he needed Rezko’s help to buy his home.

Obama said he asked Rezko about the federal investigations, if Rezko had any problems, and Tony said no, and Barack believed it.

What will he say when Vladimir Putin of Russia asks President Obama to believe him? President Bush has already looked into Putin’s eyes, thought he saw a soul in there, and was greatly mistaken.

(* punchline to a proposed “Why does a Republican cross the street” joke. The famous Ernest Hemingway version of the “Why Does the Chicken” joke, you see, ends with: “To die… alone… in the rain.”)

Peggy Noonan thinks the two parties these days are like two very different houses:

It’s a tale of two houses. One is dilapidated, old. Everyone in the neighborhood is used to it, and they turn away when they pass. A series of people lived in it and failed to take care of it. It’s run down, needs paint. The roof sags, squirrels run through the eaves. A haunted house! No, more boring. Just a house someone . . . let go.

But over here, a new house on a new plot. It’s rising from the mud before your eyes. It has interesting lines, a promising façade, and when people walk by they stop and look. So much bustle! Builders running in and out, the contractors fighting with each other—”You wouldn’t even have this job if it weren’t for the minority set-aside!” And everyone hates the architect, who put a port-o-potty on the lawn.

But: You can’t take your eyes off it. “Something being born, and not something dying.” Maybe it will improve the neighborhood. Maybe the owners will be nice.

Personally, I think the cops will soon be arriving in large numbers to suppress the donnybrook going on in that nice new house, and to take a significant portion of the tenants away in paddy wagons.

We Republicans?

The base is tired. Republicans feel their own kind of unease at Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton. Talk about wanting to stand athwart history yelling stop. They’re not in a mood to give money. Remember the phrase “broken glass Republicans?” The number of Republicans so offended, so wounded, actually, as citizens, by the Clinton years, that they’d crawl across broken glass to elect George Bush? They existed in 2004, too. Now a lot of them wouldn’t crawl across a plush weave carpet to vote for a Republican.

Not if he’s John McCain, we wouldn’t.

But Peggy has one crumb of good news about McCain. He likes Hemingway. A lot.

Who has he read besides Hemingway? (And he’s read him—he loves him to an almost scary degree.)

Maybe he’s not all bad, after all.

Pro-Clinton Kos Kid Alegre declared herself on strike from Daily Kos, frustrated at management’s refusal to enforce standards of civility or factuality with respect to postings attacking Hillary.

Gateway Pundit offers a screen capture of a portion of the flung feces representing the typical negative response the Kos community.

Kos himself was unsympathetic. He told ABC’s Jake Tapper:

First, these people should read up on the definition of ‘strike.’ What they’re doing is a ‘boycott.’ But whatever they call it, I think it’s great. It’s a big Internet, so I hope they find what they’re looking for.”

The conflict between Obama and Clinton supporters has already become bitter and ugly, and there is every reason to expect that things will only grow worse through the convention.

Things look black for Republicans, but Jonah Goldberg explains in a good rap how Hillary will “win by skullduggery and intimidation” and “Obama’s supporters will be vexed.”

This means that at precisely the moment she needs to move right toward the center, she will need to move left to shore up an angry base. In other words, the Democratic Party would nominate the most polarizing candidate possible (roughly half the country already says it will never vote for her), who will have to become even more polarizing in order to appease aggrieved Obama voters.

Meanwhile, she would be facing a GOP candidate with a sterling record of winning the support of moderates, independents and even Democrats. Both McCain and Clinton would probably enter the race with, say, 47 percent of the vote already in their pockets. So, who would be better positioned to win a majority of the undecided middle-of-the-roaders? Hillary Clinton, the scandal-plagued Assassin of Hope, or John McCain, Mr. Bipartisan War Hero?

I think he’s perfectly right. I’m not eager to see McCain win, but the way things are playing out, John McCain looks to have an extremely good chance. Pity.