VFR readers comment on Obama
Below is a miscellany of further readers’ observations on the amazing Obama business (with an occasional side issue) that have been sent since March 20. Apologies again for not posting them sooner.
Tim W. writes:
You may have already seen this, but Obama was the first Senator to call for Don Imus to be fired. He also said he would never again appear on Imus’ show. So an admittedly ugly joke about blacks, which Imus apologized for, is cause for a boycott and a firing. But twenty years of anti-white hate rhetoric prompts Obama to stick around and to donate thousands of dollars to the man spewing the hate.
Paul Nachman writes:
Gorbachev isn’t an atheist.
Joseph Farah states the case against McCain clearly:
LA replies:
He sure seemed like an atheist, through and through. If he wasn’t, what took him so long to let us know? He’s been out of power, and the Soviet Union has been out of existence, and I think even the Communist Party has been out of existence, for 17 years. So there was nothing stopping him.
Paul Nachman writes:
I’ve wondered all along what was the basis for statements by you and others that Obama is bright. I think someone can have good potential, but if he never actually thinks hard about anything, I wouldn’t call him “bright.” Mere verbal facility wouldn’t count by my standards.
What do I mean by “think hard”? Example: In 1987, I needed to design a laser from scratch. There was a pertinent equation in a published paper, but the equation didn’t “speak” to me. So I literally sat at my desk for a few days at work, alternately staring at the wall, sketching “physical” pictures on scratch paper, and toying with pieces of equations. In the end, I derived an equation that was essentially the same as that published equation, which had previously seemed opaque to me.
So is there evidence that Obama has ever done such thinking? That’s not meant as a truculent challenge. You and/or others may have provided plentiful examples, but I don’t think I’ve come across such examples in anything I’ve read.
I do have one other bit of input. Somewhere in the last few days, I read that Obama had voted “Present” 160 times in Illinois Senate proceedings. One would think that has to be a record by at least a factor of ten. I don’t know if I saw this in a mainstream source or merely in an assertion somewhere on the internet. It’s certainly out there many places in the latter form. Here’s an example from Feb. 12.
This guy has stood for nothing (other than blaming Hillary for voting for the Iraq War) in the last 10 years. No experience running anything, inspirational speeches that have no substance. Won’t answer any specific questions on issues (example: Obama says “Americans need to come together”—okay, HOW do we do that. Obama says “America needs to end dependency on foreign oil”—ok, HOW do we do that, HOW do we PAY for it, WHAT do we do in the meantime while solar panels and other silly things get developed/installed and gas is hurting American families at $3/gallon)? He has these well-written speeches, but he has no concrete positions on anything or has any ideas on how to deal with any specific issues.
Obama talks a good game, but he has NO idea how to actually handle any of America’s problems. He has no idea how to pull out of Iraq, he has no idea how to deal with the slowing economy (other than raise taxes and provide handouts to illegal aliens and lazy people on welfare), he has no idea how to deal with Iran (other than have them over for coffee and cookies at the White House). This guy is all talk, no ideas, no action.
Not only that, Obama has co-sponsored and/or passed ZERO bills since joining the U.S. Senate, voted over 160 times in the Illinois State Senate “Present” other than taking an actual position on an issue. He has been a do-nothing Senator, a partisan that voted with his party line 99.8 percent of the time, is NOT an united, he has never reached over to the GOP to pass a bill, yet he speaks of “bringing the two parties together.” LOL
I hate Hillary, but at least she knows how to fix some of these issues, she has specific ideas on specific issues, while most of her ideas may be stupid, she actually states what she plans to do, not just stand there and give speeches on how America needs to come together, blah, blah. Talk is cheap, it’s time Obama answer some questions and explain how he plans to fix all the things that America does wrong.
Paul T. writes:
Dr. Manning is a clever and entertaining speaker, but in the YouTube segment below, he advises his flock never to vote for a Negro who hasn’t been in jail, because that’s where white people put Negroes who can really lead. Whites, he says, want Obama in the White House to show how liberal they are, to provide an example of a “good Negro” to the rest of the black community, and to send a message that with the election of a black President, nothing else is owed to America’s blacks despite 500 years (!) of slavery.
Adela Gereth writes:
I read the speech, read the responses, op-eds, etc.
What it boils down to is that, with every opportunity (given by whites in a white-majority country) truly to transcend race, instead Junior is an confirmed and unrepentant racist. But that’s OK because he’s black. Also, he had a white grandmother but she was a racist so he owes her no loyalty, even though she raised and supported him after his black father abandoned him. And Junior really is black even though his mother was white because it’s blacks who are authentic, which makes even their racism OK. Except it’s not really racism; it’s righteous anger because whites haven’t done enough for them yet. And don’t expect blacks to get over that righteous anger soon (or give up the right to express it in truly hateful, vile ways) because there’s no chance that whites ever will do enough to make up to blacks for the myriad ways in which they’ve harmed them, stolen their wealth, heritage and opportunities.
So even though a man born of a black father and a white mother has marginalized his white heritage almost out of existence and identifies himself in terms of marriage, religion, politics, culture and color as “black,” he and he alone can bring change, healing and racial unity to a white-majority America because … well, because it’s time “one of us” was President. And if you don’t elect him, you’re racist. You are anyway, but you’re an even worse one if you don’t.
I think it’s all clear to me now.
Simon Newman writes from England:
“Barack Obama, Sr. was an out-of-control mess, yet managed to attract lots of women and wives. (What does that say about Darwin by the way?)”
Per current Darwinian theory: The women’s genes “recognise” that he is likely to have lots of children, and any male children they have by him will inherit his genes and are likely to have lots of children too, so the women’s genes benefit by such children. The women, as individuals, lose out, but the genes get to reproduce themselves, which is all they “care” about (gene lines that don’t seek to reproduce themselves don’t reproduce themselves, and die out). Leaving aside the teleology, the point is that evolution operates at the level of genes, not individuals, and the interests of the two don’t necessarily coincide. For instance in a society of cousin marriage being a suicide bomber is bad for the individual but good for their genes, because the individual has lots of cousins with the same gene lines, who benefit from having the “hero” in the family.
David B. writes:
In a movie about Barack Hussein Obama’s life, I know just the actor for the role of his grandfather. That would be none other than Sam Waterston. He could use his Jack McCoy characterization of the whiny self-righteous liberal. Or, Waterston might not have to act at all to play this part. Here is a previous thread on Waterston:
Mark K. writes:
I keep hearing this term “the legacy of slavery.” This thing is supposedly responsible for keeping blacks down. Now I’ve never heard it investigated and researched as a genetic phenomenon. If slavery had a genetic impact (to use the Darwinian paradigm that our environment caused a mutation in blacks to carry the slavery code), then I would understand slavery’s lingering effects. This “legacy of slavery” condition must be something like Dawkins’ “meme” (a mental gene).
Mark K. writes:
Interesting article exploring the two book odyssey of Obama. Obama already had crafted a racial identity before meeting Wright! he chose Wright for a reason—it resonated with his own persona. Sowell asks the question, why did Obama choose this church when others were available to him? Here’s the answer.
What is interesting is that he chooses an absent father’s image to put on!!!! He even states that this is a “package” of attributes.
The following statements by Obama from “Dreams from My Father” give us a glimpse as to why he chose the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as his pastor, mentor and friend.
“I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.”
“It was my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d package all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, Dubois and Mandela.”
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students, the foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”
“There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out, many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs.”
In the second book, Obama writes about Wright’s sermon “The Audacity of Hope,” which Obama borrowed and used as the title for his second book.
Obama quotes Wright as describing the world “where white folks” greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere … That’s the world! On which hope sits.”
Obama continued:
“Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policymakers in the White House and in the State House. As the sermon unfolded, though, the stories of strife became more prosaic, the pain more immediate.”
******
Lawrence, remember how Wright said that the chickens have come home to roost given Hiroshima. Obama stated that he couldn’t recall hearing Wright make statements like this. But look at this passage in his own book—he remembers Wright talking about Hiroshima!
Mark K. writes:
This man Obama is not a fool—he has been trying on different identities to see which propels him forward:
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students, the foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”
Structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. These are post-modernist groups that see identity and self as cultural artifacts. That selves are created in and through performance. No wonder that Obama’s speech was a carefully crafted dialectical exercise in trying to combine opposites to achieve some sort of transcultural, transracial stage. A lookup on Google of Marxism and structuralism yields a ton of info on post-modern art and discourse. This is not a black man in the order of a MLK or Jessie Jackson. he is much more hip and he is banking on making it through the dialectic of opposites.
James W. writes:
It is a very tricky business choosing the least lethal virus to be infected with. I have arrived at Hillary also, but perhaps not for the same reasons. I consider her to be shrill and artless, possessed of a tin ear, and thoroughly hated by many people who have actually worked with her. That may be the best we can hope for.
Still and all, elections are not decided by sophisticated calculations. Perhaps our sway, if there is any, will be in a thorough understanding of a small but significant number of conservatives that McCain will finish them off with some permanence, while Hillary or Obama will reform the conservative base and expel the McCains. If the election becomes close, that would provide the difference.
But there is no telling: I have had the experience of a man at my workplace who’s very DNA is liberal telling me he is seriously considering McCain because of this man’s problems with the Democrats, and my profound revulsion of McCain.
Michael N. writes:
Here’s another one—Obama to nation: “I forgive you.” It turns out that WE’RE the ones who have something to apologize for—not the guy whose mentor is a racist kook.
Mark K. writes:
I think I’ve arrived, for my own personal satisfaction, on a final image of Obama. This man is a magnificent fraud being perpetrated on mainstream America. I’m not using the word “fraud” in a bad or immoral sense. Here’s how I mean “fraud”:
Obama selectively chose a series of selves over the years. Marxist, Afro-American, African, post-modern\structuralist, etc. He even adopted a missing father’s past rather than a present grandmother’s. He wasn’t obliged to do any of this, living as he was in Hawaii. There were no sociological pressures on him in Hawaii the way a young black faces in Chicago. But he chose to go this route. He could have moved to LA and joined an evangelical black church such as T.D. Jakes. But he chose to live and work in Chicago and align himself with Wright.
He thought that he could in a post-modern sense juggle these personalities “understandably.” This is the dialectics (a Marxist term, or rather Hegelian) of his persona. he bet that that mainstream America could be pulled into this process if he “explained” all these dynamics. He knew about Wright’s sermons but he hadn’t “heard” them. In other words he was there and he wasn’t. He knew but he didn’t hear. Wright’s harsh words and strident language have to be “contextually” and “mythically” understood. They are part of the historical dialectic of American history. A dialectic is a thesis\antithesis (no matter how negative) that resolves itself in a synthesis. he was that synthesis.
Now his support is sinking fast. Why? Because mainstream America, which was willing to give him a fair chance, doesn’t do personality juggling to the extent that it can “understand” the words “God damn America” as just part of a natural historical process. Some words are absolute. His rhetorical juggling act isn’t working. His choice of identities is coming back to bite him.
This really has the making of a good theatrical drama.
Adela Gereth writes:
He’s at it again, according to this article.
He either wants to sabotage his own campaign OR he is such a totally clueless leftwinger that he has NO concept of how deeply he has offended so many by “throwing his Grandma under the bus.”
The left is still basking in the transcendent glow of his uplifting speech and falling over one another in their scramble to come up with new ways of comparing it to those of Lincoln, FDR and JFK.
Meanwhile, those of us who occupy the real world are simply aghast at his mean-spirited, contemptible references to his “white grandmother,” the white woman who overcame her reservations at her daughter having married a black man to raise and support the child of that union, after both his parents had decamped.
People seem more upset about his lack of family loyalty than about anything else. (Of course, to be fair, he’s really only 50 percent disloyal so far, as he has not yet “dissed” the black side of his family. Nor am I holding my breath waiting for that.)
I’m still trying to process the meanness of spirit that would allow someone to say—repeatedly—such things about a grandmother who did incomparably more for him than his own father, who nevertheless rates a mention in the title of Junior’s autobiography.
There just aren’t words for the depth of contempt I feel for this man (and his grievance-mongering black wife).
Karen writes from England:
Thought this might interest you. Obama has made covert overtures to Hamas and supports their use of terrorism to advance their political goals. He is sinister, the right description. Have a lovely Easter,
N. writes:
Oh, this gets better and better. Via Jonah Goldberg in the Corner, this Powerline entry just speaks for itself:
Unlike you and a lot of others, I have never found Obama to be charming. Maybe it is because I remember other “charming” individuals: Vernon Howell was said to be quite charming, as was Jim Jones.
The etymology of “charm” is interesting, because of the original meaning: a spell, traditionally delivered via song or verse …
Adela G. writes:
Here’s the audio link to Obama’s remarks today about his white grandmother.
He doesn’t even get that both blacks and whites fear being accosted by blacks. His white grandmother’s reaction to that experience is not solely that of a “typical white person” but of both black and white people generally. Or was he so busy not listening to the Rev. Wright’s sermons that he also hasn’t heard of Jesse Jackson?
Reverse the colors of the speaker and his subject and his political career would have ended today.
P.S. I lived in a mixed-race neighborhood in Columbia, MO in the early 90’s. (Yes, the Columbia MO of Scott Thomas Beauchamp fame.)
It was hilarious to see how black Africans, though apt themselves to turn any party into a fight, avoided African-Americans, whom they considered way too violent. They socialized freely and generously with white Americans, though.
Mark K. writes:
I find it quite disturbing that in liberal America, the black man has become the “authentic” American; whites are inauthentic. Somehow due to the victimhood and the suffering of the black race, the black man is now the embodiment of all hopes for the ultimate humanization of America and Americans. America and Americans are “incomplete” as long as the black man is not The sine qua non American Persona. The Renaissance phrase that “man is the measure of all things” becomes in America “the black man is the measure of all things.” The white self is incomplete as long as the black self is not “at home.” It is not that the black has to be equal with the white, the black has to be beyond all alienation since alienation of the black self is created through white society. White society has to be “redeemed” through an act of atonement offered by whites sacrificially towards blacks. This runs as an undercurrent throughout Obama’s speech.
Mark K. writes:
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, thanks for a blog that discusses the issue of race (past, present and future) in rational terms without descending into racist emotionalism. That is quite a feat for VFR to look at the issue of race, culture and civilization with open eyes. In the past I didn’t think that a rational framework could be had for such a discussion but here it is. The posts discussing Obama’s address are the best I’ve seen at any forum or blog.
Stephen F. writes:
In the interests of promoting a “dialogue” on race, may I refer you to the following.
AFTER five town council members were murdered by a crazy, resentful black whose own brother justified the killing, a black man who also sees the causes of the killing in white racism is running for mayor in the same town!
Since a century ago, the lynching situation has been reversed! Now black leaders are publicly allowed to “understand” racial murders of whites while not “approving” of them.
Another example of whites being resentful and uptight?
By the way, I love the image of you blogging with a jacket and tie on. Even a virtual jacket and tie are classier than the “pajamas,” let alone “underwear,” of the mainstream conservative bloggers.
Harry the Horse writes:
Regarding James M2’s comment:
” … but what if his drama-queen writing style is actually a nearly authentic representation of his mental fantasy-life? What if the young Barack, searching for direction and meaning in his life, latched on to a philosophy of black victimhood and grievance not because he truly believed in it, but because it gave him an identity? An exciting identity. And what if, in creating and perpetuating that identity, he became extremely proficient at acting, to the extent that his whole life became an act, until he forgot who he really was and could no longer keep his stories straight?”
Then this would make him the consummate liberal, wouldn’t it? It makes his behavior all so unsurprising and thoroughly predictable (for us strategists in the VFR family). After all, to the initiate, liberalism appears wild, surly, and capricious. To us hardened Traditionalists, liberal behavior is as calculable as arithmetic.
Steven H. writes:
Peggy Noonan might surprised at the outcome of any new “meditation” on race in this country. Many white Americans may become open to the idea that we no longer “owe” black Americans anything and want recognition for all the sacrifices that whites have made in their behalf.
“We don’t know if voters will welcome a meditation on race. My sense: The speech will be labeled by history as the speech that saved a candidacy or the speech that helped do it in. I hope the former.”
LA replies:
This is Noonan at her worst. 9/10ths of this overlong article consists of a thoughtless, uncritical, emotional rehash of Obama’s points. If she had no thoughts of her own, why write the column? It’s as though her mission in life is to persuade people that women are not competent politically because they’re just into having “caring” feeings.
Ken Hechtman writes:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/010199.html
Paul Nachman writes:
Not only that, Obama has co-sponsored and/or passed ZERO bills since joining the U.S. Senate, voted over 160 times in the Illinois State Senate “Present” other than taking an actual position on an issue. He has been a do-nothing Senator, a partisan that voted with his party line 99.8 percent of the time, is NOT an united, he has never reached over to the GOP to pass a bill, yet he speaks of “bringing the two parties together.” LOL
This is one of Hillary’s talking points and it’s not true in any particular. You really have to be careful about repeating Hillary’s talking points. If Hillary says the sun rose in the east this morning, I’d go to the window and check before repeating it.
Obama has sponsored zero bills worth covering in the popular press. The ones he does sponsor are all very dull, technocratic and non-controversial. There’s not a news hook in the bunch.
The list below was compiled by Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings in Oct 2006, less than two years after Obama was elected. The commentary (edited for length) is his.
Nonproliferation: The way to a wonk’s heart: campaign on securing Russian loose nukes.—In any case, in addition to working on nuclear non-proliferation, Obama and Lugar co-sponsored legislation expanding the Nunn-Lugar framework (which basically allows the U.S. to fund the destruction or securing of nuclear weapons in other countries) to deal with conventional arms.
Avian flu: Obama was one of the first Senators to speak out on avian flu, back in the spring of 2005, when it was a quintessentially wonky issue, not the subject of breathless news reports. There’s a list of Democratic efforts on avian flu here; Obama shows up early and often. He has sponsored legislation, including what I think is the first bill dedicated to pandemic flu preparedness
Regulating Genetic Testing: The [lack of quality control] is serious, and bad. Suppose you are mistakenly informed that you are a carrier for some horrible disease: you might decide never to have kids. Suppose you have a fetus tested and you are told that it has, say, Downs’ syndrome: you might abort. To do these things as the result of a lab error would be horrible.
Not nearly as horrible as the results of some false negatives, though. Imagine this: you know that you and your spouse are at risk for carrying this disease. You both get tested; neither is a carrier. You give birth to an apparently healthy child. But after a few months, the child you love stops developing normally, and it turns out that both your test and your spouses were misinterpreted, or screwed up, or whatever, and as a result your child is going to die a horrible death by the age of four. Oops!
You can probably guess who has introduced legislation that addresses this problem. The people who wrote the initial report (note: I know them; they’re very good) think it’s good. So do I.
Reducing medical malpractice suits the right way: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton teamed up to introduce legislation aimed at helping hospitals to develop programs for disclosure of medical errors. (They describe it in this NEJM article.) Again, I think it’s good policy: this really is what the evidence suggests is the best way to reduce malpractice claims, and it does it without curtailing the rights of people who have already been injured through no fault of their own. Moreover, when people feel free to discuss their errors, they are much more likely to figure out ways to avoid repeating them. (The legislation provides support for this.) And that’s the best way of all to deal with malpractice claims: by addressing the causes of medical malpractice itself.
Those are some of the wonkier things he’s done. (There are others: introducing legislation to make it illegal for tax preparers to sell personal information, for instance, and legislation on chemical plant security and lead paint.) He has done other things that are more high-profile, including:
- His “health care for hybrids” bill
- An Energy Security Bill
- Various bills on relief for Hurricane Katrina, including aid for kids and a ban on no-bid contracts by FEMA
- A public database of all federal spending - and contracts
- Trying to raise CAFE standards
ยท Veterans” health care
- Making certain kinds of voter intimidation illegal
- A lobbying reform bill (with Tom Coburn), which would do all sorts of good things, notably including one of my perennial favorites, requiring that bills be made available to members of Congress at least 72 hours before they have to vote on them.
- And a proposal to revamp ethics oversight, replacing the present ethics Committee with a bipartisan commission of retired judges and members of Congress, and allowing any citizen to report ethics violations. This would have fixed one of the huge problems with the present system, namely: that the members have to police themselves
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 24, 2008 02:10 AM | Send