Krauthammer on the speech

On one hand, we need to look suspiciously at any attack by neocons on Obama, because neocons only care about electing McCain, because McCain will keep us in Iraq forever. On the other hand, Charles Krauthammer devastatingly exposes the core falsity of Obama’s speech. He makes clearer than before the vileness of what Obama did when he made his grandmother’s private fear of a black panhandler who had accosted her the moral equivalent of Rev. Wright’s obscene stoking of hatred against America and whites. I continue to be astonished. I thought Obama was a decent man, even if a leftist. Now I think he’s one of the worst people I’ve ever seen.

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Adelda Gereth writes:

I’m glad those adjectives (vile, obscene) are so strong. They should be. I, too, continue to be astonished by Obama’s broadcasting his grandmother’s private fear of a black man in order to pander to the prejudices and stereotypes held—and cherished—by black and white liberals.

I, too, thought Obama was a decent man, even if a leftist in slick packaging, offering only the vague and empty promise of “change”. Now I find him utterly despicable and completely irredeemable, outside of divine intervention.

Though it’s hard to discern degrees of darkness in his moral morass, I think one of the worst things is how he distorted and magnified the incident of a black panhandler harassing his white grandmother into a larger picture of her being a “typical white person” afraid of a black man, just to suit his political needs.

His own reaction of feeling a metaphorical “fist to the stomach” on discovering that “… [black] men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their [his white grandparents] rawest fear” shows that this possibility carries more weight with him than does the reality.

Yes, strange black men might have been his brothers in a parallel universe—but they weren’t in this universe. And in that parallel universe, his grandmother, a typical white person, might have refused to raise a biracial grandchild, particularly when he had two living parents to do so. But she didn’t refuse. Even better, in that other universe, his white grandmother might never have been asked to raise him because his black father would have worked alongside the boy’s mother to provide for the son he was raising in his home. But his father, being a typical…oh, never mind.

Obama is so blinded by racism that whatever gratitude he feels toward the white grandmother who overcame her racial prejudices to raise him with love is obviously outweighed by his upset at discovering that she was fearful of being accosted by black strangers; otherwise, why mention the incident at all? Yet we white people are supposed to transcend race and vote for a man who chose as his spiritual advisor a preacher mired in anti-white racism. And why not? Racism is excusable, even permissable, as long as it’s the Wright kind.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 21, 2008 11:15 AM | Send