Obama Fails the Test

Everyone agrees that Senator Barack Obama delivered a great speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

But not everyone agrees with the message.

Obama was forced to give this speech because of the recent flap over the racist, hateful sermons delivered by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor for over 20 years of the African nationalist church in Chicago to which Obama belonged.

Everyone understands that Wright is a symbol for America’s present shameful secret, the one you are not allowed to voice: that the most racist people in the United States are African Americans.

There’s a simple reason for this. Liberals give blacks a pass. If anyone in the United States other than a black voices a single racist word that person is shamed and blamed. But when blacks talk racist or act racist liberals give them a pass. Well, they say, how can you expect blacks to observe the standards of the rest of America—after centuries of slavery and oppression. Or there’s this one. You can’t be racist unless you have power, and blacks don’t have power.

Senator Obama, who now has the fervent support of black voters, had the opportunity, for one shining moment, to lead America’s blacks out of the wilderness of black racism and into the land of milk and honey. He could have said: “I utterly reject the hateful, racist philosophy of Minister Wright. That sort of rhetoric has no place in America. Period.” With that speech he could have begun the post-racist era in America. He would have gone down in the history books as a Jefferson or a Lincoln.

But he didn’t. Instead he ducked. He didn’t have the courage to be a leader.

Instead of leadership he gave us the usual liberal guilt trip and the usual bromides about racism and the understandable rage of blacks who lived through the 1950s and 1960s.

But the story of race in the United States is not shameful. It is incandescent.

At the dawn of the modern era, within 20 years of Lord Mansfield famously ruling in Somersett’s Case that slavery was unlawful in England, the founding fathers attempted to do the same in the United States. They tried to make slavery illegal in the new constitution. But they were blocked by the southern states. So they compromised, agreeing not to outlaw the slave trade—yet.

It was a weak moment, because for the next 80 years the South reacted with purple rage whenever the subject of slavery was brought up. For a potted history of the slavery issue start at the Northwest Ordinance and follow the events leading up the the Civil War. That was the epochal event, you recall, in which America tossed an entire generation of young men and a year of national income down the toilet. But the Civil War decided the slavery issue once and for all.

Only one US war was as costly as the Civil War. Our American grandparents spend 130 percent of national income in World War II fighting fascism and Japanese expansionism. We decided that question once and for all too.

Then right after World War II Americans rolled up their sleeves and began to work on the lingering race issue, the de jure oppression of blacks in the South and the de facto oppression in the North. This struggle culminated in the great Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. Liberals were the leaders in this great work. It was liberals’ finest hour.

It was a courageous thing for liberals to do, as President Johnson is said to have recognized, because it wiped out the Democratic Party’s power in the South.

Unfortunately, courageous as they were to walk away from white racism in the South, Democrats and liberals were not courageous enough to act against black racism in the North.

And so today we have the corrupt system of affirmative action, quotas, and “diversity” that has so poisoned the relations between the races, and has so cruelly prevented American blacks from taking their rightful place as equal and honored members of the American family. You can’t really take your place at the family table until you give up your rage and your victimhood, put on a smile, and start to discuss family business without always bringing up ancient feuds and humiliations.

In the United States today there is no worse accusation for a white than to be called a “racist.” But blacks get a pass on racist speech and actions. Instead, for blacks, most likely, there is no worse accusation than to be called an “Uncle Tom,” or to sneered at for “acting white.”

This double standard, this injustice, is a cancer eating away at the heart of America. America is waiting, longing for the leader who will lead us out of the tar pits of racist recrimination to the sunny upland meadows of post-racism. Many Americans hoped that Barack Obama might be that leader.

Now we know that he is not.

A National Conversation on Race

For as long as I can remember liberals have liked to suggest that we need a “national conversation” on something or other.

As often as not, that national conversation was about race.

Of course, liberals were not actually proposing a real national conversation about race. They were proposing something rather different and rather more sinister.

They were proposing to tell Americans what to think about race, what to feel about race, what to do about race, and if you didn’t agree with their prescriptions you had better shut up. Because if your voiced your disagreement you would be branded as a racist.

We know what this was all about. It was all about power, liberal power. The liberal ownership of the race issue allowed them to corral about 90 percent of the black vote, ever since the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. With that vote liberals could stop any reform of the welfare state and maintain their power, their perquisites, and their tenure.

In this liberal policy on race there were good cops and bad cops. Liberals were the good cops, telling us that their race-based quotas and set-asides were all for our own good. Then there were the bad cops, the black race hustlers like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and at the local level, men like Jeremiah Wright, pastor of a black nationalist church in Chicago..

The job of the good cops was to keep the white population cowed. The job of the bad cops was to keep blacks voting Democrat in a frenzy of race rage.

Then along came Barack Obama and promised Unity and Change. He was understood instinctively by white college-educated Democrats as offering a way out of the race ravine. In the words of Shelby Steele, Obama is a “bargainer,” offering “the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism.”

It’s lucky for Obama that he came along when he did. I’d say that American whites are getting close to the point where they are going to say “enough already” on race and refuse to be cowed by the race baiters.

But it turns out that Barack Obama is not exactly the race healer he pretends to be. How could he be when he has been attending a church of race hatred for most of his adult life. Barack Obama is asking us to believe that he is a race healer when he has belonged to a church, the biggest black church in Chicago, run by race baiter Jeremiah Wright.

[N]othing 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.

You know what, liberals? I think we are about to have a national conversation on race. And this will be the first one in living memory in which liberals don’t get to set the rules.

So there’s a chance that the conversation will be a real conversation. For the first time in living memory.

Another Day Another Dollar

Is there enough fear out there after the Fed moved in to stop the rot at mortgage meltdown victim Bear Stearns?

Sure, I’m scared. Who wouldn’t be?

But the job of the Fed is to act as the banker of last resort and stop the spiral of credit contraction. And that is what it did over the weekend when it gave away Bear stearns to JPMorgan Chase for a couple of cents on the dollar and a bunch of guarantees on Bear Stearns’ “dark matter.”

It was the failure of the Fed to do that in 1929-1933 that made the Great Depression a ten-year vale of misery.

Larry Kudlow is confident. But then he always is. He commends the Fed for doing the right thing. But then he takes a shot at the Democrats.

Senator Schumer is calling Bush "Herbert Hoover." But Hoover signed protectionist Smoot-Hawley, just as Hillary and Obama are today trying to break up NAFTA. Hoover signed a huge tax increase, just as Hill-Bama are preaching. The Dems are emulating Hoover. Bush is trying to stop it.

That’s a very important point. Herbert Hoover made the first mistakes that made the Great Depression “great.” He let the banks collapse, he jawboned business to keep prices and wages up, he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. He increased tax rates You could read it all up at Stuck on Stupid.

Democrats really have never learned the lessons of the Great Depression. They think that it was the genius of FDR that got us out, with the NRA, Social Security, the Wagner Labor Act, and TVA.

On the contrary. All those policies made the Depression worse.

If they try the same policies again then the American people will suffer greatly.

That is you and me.

Double Standard on Bigotry

One thing that conservatives and Republicans really know. When we step into the public square we have to be whiter than white. Anything we’ve said or written that doesn’t square with the liberal zeitgeist will be hauled out and used to prove that we are bigots, racists, and homophobes.

Barack Obama has, for twenty years, belonged to a church in Chicago. His minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., has opinions that, in a conservative or a Republican, would disqualify him from the public square. As Ronald Kessler reports:

In a sermon delivered at Howard University, Barack Obama’s longtime minister, friend and adviser blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs and creating a racist society that would never elect a black candidate president.


"Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."

It’s ok to say stuff like that if you are liberal and black. But a Republican saying that would be driven from the public square, and anyone connected with him would be convicted of guilt by association.

But in America, we have a Double Standard. Liberals and blacks get a pass when they say racist and bigoted things. Well, their hearts are in the right place.

Some day, when the American people just can’t take it any more, this double standard will crumble into dust and a new double standard will arise to wave cynically over the fruited plain.

But that day is not yet.

Bill Buckley Didn't Like Writing

What a grand life Bill Buckley had, doing what he loved, and being so good at it. That’s what young Anthony Dick said to Buckley while serving as research assistant on a book on Goldwater.

He quickly corrected me. He did not love writing. He found it difficult, tedious, and increasingly painful. Nor had he ever loved politics, which was awash in sordidness and banality. He would rather be reading, or sailing, or visiting friends, or enjoying any of the other luxuries his wealth could have afforded.

No. He worked out of a sense of duty, Buckley said, to repay for all the beauty he had received and to “resist the totalizing designs” of the folks who want to ratchet up the power of politics.

CA Homeschooling Decision an Opportunity

Conservatives and homeschooling parents are naturally worried and upset over the recent decision by a California state appeals court, in Re Rachel L, that parents lacked a presumptive right to educate their children in their own way. Parents needed to get a credentialed private tutor if they didn’t send their children to school.

But I am not discouraged. I take the view of the great Senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry. Bring. Them. On.

It’s encouraging, for a start, that both of the Smart Guys, liberal law school prof Erwin Chemerinsky and conservative law school Dean John Eastman, in their review of the case on the Hugh Hewitt Show, came out in favor of the right of parents to homeschool . Said Chemerinsky:

I think they’re going to reverse the California Court of Appeal here. I think based on the Supreme Court precedence we’re going to talk about, I think the California Supreme Court is going to say though the government has a compelling interest in making sure that children are well educated, there’s a way of achieving it that’s less restrictive of parents’ rights than completely outlawing home schooling.

Conservatives and school choice advocates must understand that the education blob isn’t going to go quietly. They have developed a government monopoly that gets paid to educate our children but that has no real accountability. Why would this protected elite give up a privilege like that for the hard work of actually having to produce results?

We need fights, public fights, that put the average homeschooling parent in the role of helpless victim being bullied by an uncaring government bureaucracy. And we need the American people to observe these fights and we need to teach them to side with the little guy. Or next time it could be them!

I sent my $100 contribution in to the folks fighting the good fight on this, thePacific Justice Institute, using their online contribution page. You can too.

Free Speech Means Free Speech

University of Notre Dame president Father John Jenkins has spproved performances of the lefty agitprop play The Vagaina Monologues at UND and conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt are upset. Hewitt doesn’t think that lefty agitprop has a place at Notre Dame. It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of other places where you can go to see the Vagina Monologues.

Father Jenkins justified his action on the following grounds:

"My decision on this matter,” Father Jenkins said, “arises from a conviction that it is an indispensable part of the mission of a Catholic university to provide a forum in which multiple viewpoints are debated in reasoned and respectful exchange—always in dialogue with faith and the Catholic tradition—even around highly controversial topics.

I agree. The Vagina Monologues is, no doubt, a foolish and a hateful piece of work. But we conservatives must never deny lefties the right to be heard. What we can and must insist upon is our right to be heard.

That is the great issue upon which conservatives should plant our flag. Too often we cringe before the bullying of the lefties and do not oppose their folly and their bile with sufficient vigor.

David Allen White, Shakespeare scholar issued the following challenge to Notre Dame on the the Hugh Hewitt Show.

I will issue a challenge to Notre Dame, okay? I do it publicly. I do it on the air. I have taught Shakespeare at the Naval Academy for 27 years... Will Notre Dame let me come and lecture on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, which presents a contradictory view to the Vagina Monologues? Public challenge ’“ academic freedom ’“ will they bring in a Shakespeare scholar to talk about one of Shakespeare’s plays, to give an opposing point of view?

Maybe Notre Dame will accept the challenge. But what about the 1,001 other colleges in America? Would they allow the voice of Shakespeare, Dead White Male, to compete with traditionally marginalized progressive voices of the Vagina Monologues? I don’t think so.