Choosing Policies Based On Character, Or Color: Please Choose Wisely

It was the late 1980s, and I experienced something that will probably puzzle me for the rest of my life on this earth.

I had ordered “Blazer Cable” so that I could see the Portland Trailblazer home games.  And in order to help pay for it – and to make it more fun to watch – I got a few friends to go in on it with me.

One night, one of my friends brought one of his friends over on a night when the Blazers were playing the Chicago Bulls.  I thought the guy had some faulty wiring from about the moment I met him, but, what they hey.

In any event, to get to the point, at some point during the game my friend’s friend was sitting on the couch alone with me (everybody else was either in the kitchen or in the bathroom, as it was halftime).  They were interviewing Michael Jordan.  And he looked over at me and said, “Would you trade places with Michael Jordan?”

This was like the stupidest questions I had ever heard, and I’ve heard quite a few stupid questions.

“Of course I would,” I said.  I mean, duh.  Michael Jordan was strikingly handsome, he was filthy rich, he was incredibly successful, and he was one of the best athletes in the history of the human race.  And I wouldn’t want to trade places with him why, exactly?

Then came the only possible answer.

My friend’s friend starting giggling.  I can’t really call it laughing.

“What the hell is so funny?” I asked.

“You’d trade places with a black guy,” he said, still giggling.

Well, yeah.  I waited to hear the cross-eyed albino boy start playing a banjo.

At the time, I was too astonished to be angry at the guy.  It was like encountering someone who – in spite of massive evidence to the contrary – believed he was invisible to the human eye.

I’ve thought about that few second encounter a number of times since.  It still amazes me to this very day.  How can somebody possibly get that stupid?

In the years before that moment, and since then, I had known some black men who were total turds.  And I have known some black men whom I regarded as having superior character to my own.

Lumping people into racial groups and then judging people on the basis of the color of their skin is every bit as stupid as not wanting to change places with Michael Jordan simply “because he’s black.”  But I see it being done all the time these days.  By the left.

I was raised to regard character, intelligence, virtue, attitude and attractiveness of personality as the qualities that determined the value of a person.  It had never even occurred to me to think that the color of one’s skin made on more or less valuable.

I was also raised to want to continue to improve myself.  I was raised to want to become a better human being, to improve my station in, and my quality of, life.

I think that’s why I react so viscerally to the racial attitude inherent in modern liberalism.  To pit people against each other on the basis of color and bigotry, and to label white people as being evil and somehow complicit in some kind of white power structure is bad enough.  But it goes beyond that.

It’s self-taught, self-limiting perpetual victimhood.  It’s providing a class of people with a ready-made excuse for failure; it’s discouraging them from even really bothering to try, and rewarding them for not trying; it’s an evil exchange in which one accepts all kinds of control over their lives in exchange for destructive and cancerous welfare; it’s wallowing in an attitude of bitterness and even self-loathing that dooms one to a life of misery.  It is a guaranteed perpetuation of failure.

It is a completely alien worldview to me.  Every bit as much as that idiot who wouldn’t trade places with Michael Jordan “because he’s black.”

I made the earlier comment that I’ve met black men whom I regarded as being superior to me in the thing that I value most – character.  They were examples to me, and as a result of their friendship, I became a better person.  I’ve also known a number of white men whose superior character helped me advance in my own life.  The point is that you desire excellence, and you take it wherever you can find it.

I have a feeling that Pastor C.L. Bryant would be one of those men, were I fortunate enough to know him.

From ScottFactor.com:

Slavery, Courtesy Of Liberals Everywhere
July 27th, 2010

Comedian Eddie Murphy once joked that Lincoln forgot to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, and that people should go out and claim their slaves. I’m here to tell you that the Democratic Party took that request seriously and have claimed their slaves.
When 98 percent of African-Americans vote Democrat, that tells me that they are psychological and economic slaves to a Party that structures its fiscal policy to keep the black man down.

Welfare policy, government-forced affirmative action, reduced testing requirements for minorities…these are all things that don’t serve to elevate people to greatness, rather, they keep people down.

This video is a movie trailer about a man who proposes that these slaves to the liberals run away from the slave plantation that liberals have created. Its creator, Pastor C.L. Bryant, holds an honest discussion about black conservatives in America. Quote the man, “Run away from the slavery of tyranny toward the blessings of liberty!” Check it out:

David Horowitz rightly calls African-Americans “the human shields of the Democrat Party.”  It simply a fact of history that modern African-Americans have come hat-in-hand to the Party of Slavery, and the Party of the Ku Klux Klan.

That analogy illustrates a simple fact that was well-known only a couple years after the Civil War ended:

And the above isn’t a cartoon from some “right wing” loon, but from the venerable and quite left-leaning Harper’s Magazine.

Even the left-leaning historian Eric Foner observed that:

“In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired restoration of white supremacy. Its purposes were political, but political in the broadest sense, for it sought to affect power relations, both public and private, throughout Southern society. It aimed to reverse the interlocking changes sweeping over the South during Reconstruction: to destroy the Republican party’s infrastructure, undermine the Reconstruction state, reestablish control of the black labor force, and restore racial subordination in every aspect of Southern life” (Foner 1989, p. 425–426).

I wrote the following as part of a comment a few weeks ago to point how how shockingly far black Americans have gone from what should have been their core:

Let us never forget that Democrats were the party of slavery. And that Democrats were the creators of the Ku Klux Klan. It literally took a war in which Democrats had to be militarily crushed to keep them from enslaving people based on the color of their skin. And thank God for the Republican Party and a Republican president for freeing the slaves from Democrats. Let’s not forget that Woodrow Wilson – Democrat president and the father of the progressive movement – RE-segregated the military after Republicans had DE-segregated it. Let us not forget that Wilson cheered the racist propaganda film “Birth of a Nation.” Let us never forget that the national party convention that was so directly tied to the Ku Klux Klan that it was called the “Klanbake” was the 1924 DEMOCRAT convention. Let’s not forget that FDR’s New Deal directly attacked blacks and kept them from getting jobs.

Few know about the incredibly racist history of pro-Democrat labor unions (see also here), but it is both very real and very ugly.  And progressive Democrats were at the very core of it.

Few have bothered to learn the Democrat Party’s profound legacy of racism.  Or the Republican Party’s history of standing up to protect the rights, freedoms and dignities of black Americans.

As we move into the 1950s we find that a Democrat Governor, Orval Faubus, called out the National Guard in 1957 to prevent black children being integrated into white schools. And again, a Republican president had to rise to the occasion, with Dwight D. Eisenhower sending in US Army airborne troops to enforce racial equality that had once again been opposed by Democrats. And of course Alabama Democrat Governor George Wallace would fight for racist segregation all over again in 1963. It was Democrat John F. Kennedy who sent in the troops this time. But few are aware that that same John Kennedy had previously voted AGAINST the Civil Rights Act.

And let us not forget that both the famous Martin Luther King, Sr. and his even more famous son were both registered Republicans. It’s a shame that the pseudo civil rights leaders of today aren’t fit to carry Martin Luther King’s shoes, much less criticize his party affiliation.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglas BOTH fundamentally opposed the quotas and preferential treatment that liberals have employed to create the equivalent of the Democrat “house negro.” Jack Greenberg of the NAACP said in the 1950s that “The chief problem with quotas is that they introduce a potentially retrogressive concept into the cherished notion of individual equality.”  But it is readily obvious today that the NAACP has fallen far from it’s roots.

Let’s listen to Frederick Douglas, escaped slave and greatest of all champions of civil rights, has to say:

Frederick Douglass ridiculed the idea of racial quotas, as suggested by Martin Delany, as “absurd as a matter of practice,” noting that it implied blacks “should constitute one-eighth of the poets, statesmen, scholars, authors and philosophers.” Douglass emphasized that “natural equality is a very different thing from practical equality; and…though men may be potentially equal, circumstances may for a time cause the most striking inequalities.”77 On another occasion, in opposing “special efforts” for the black freedmen, Douglass argued that they “might ‘serve to keep up very prejudices, which it is so desirable to banish’ by promoting an image of blacks as privileged wards of the state.”

So now conservatives are suddenly racists for agreeing with Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Jr. and against liberals and the vile pseudo values that the greatest civil rights leaders in history condemned?

Richard Nixon, whom Democrats love to make the poster boy for “Republican racism,” was in fact the first president to introduce the racial quotas that Democrats have been trying to implement and expand ever since.  Which is to say that, if you want to argue that Nixon was a racist, Democrats have been baptizing themselves in Nixon’s racism ever since.  And if Nixon employed a racially immoral strategy to win whites, the Democrat Party has employed the flip-side of that same immoral strategy to win blacks.

Liberals are biblical – and never in a good way:

PSA 52:3 You love evil more than good, Falsehood more than speaking what is right.
MIC 3:2 “You who hate good and love evil, Who tear off their skin from them And their flesh from their bones

History proves again and again that DEMOCRATS are the racists, and conservatives have stood for genuine equality again and again.

There are men and women of basic virtue in every race, and even every creed.  The problem is that there are fewer and fewer of these, while the men and women of apathy, degeneration and self-centeredness abound.

Slavery is a terrible thing.  But it is even worse when one willingly applies the shackles to his or her own wrists and ankles and demands the right to a government-imposed easy way out, in pathetic contrast to the principle from an Aesop fable, “Better to starve free than be a fat slave.”

Watch the video.  One of the amazing and tragic facts that emerge is that, with liberal ideology and Democrat policies paving the way, blacks have instituted their own self-genocide, murdering more than one-third of their very own children.

Joe Lieberman, Independent, Urges Nation To Back McCain

Joe Lieberman – at great cost to himself – has thrown his support behind his fellow Senator and friend, John McCain.

Lieberman is the kind of Democrat who didn’t leave his party, but was rather abandoned by his party.  On many of the issues, Lieberman is well to the left of even so-called “moderate Republicans,” but believes that Democrats are terrible on national defense and national security.

Democrats are already sharpening their knives to stab Lieberman.  The words “traitor,” “punish,” and “stripping” are angrily being exchanged.  And Joe Lieberman – in some way like the John McCain who refused to break with the honor system of his fellow POWs even when it meant more captivity and more abuse – knows it.

Joe Lieberman didn’t betray the Democratic Party.  Rather, he called upon Democrats to honor the commitments they had made to support their President and their troops in time of war.  To punish him, they not only didn’t back him for re-election, but actually ran a candidate about him.  Lieberman lost in the primaries, but it was only liberals who rejected him; not his state.  Lieberman ran as an Independent and handily won re-election.

Lieberman – who agrees with Democrats “on 95% of the issues”, believes that John McCain has been right about Iraq.  For that departure:

“If the Democrats are in control in terms of leadership next year, a Democrat should chair that committee,” he said, in reference to the Homeland Security panel. “Clearly, he’s not a Democrat.”

So don’t you buck the Democratic leadership.  Don’t you dare.  They are vindictive, angry people, and they will exact their revenge.  They have held back their retribution only because they have needed Lieberman’s vote, but if they pick up the seats they believe they’ll get in the Senate, they are already vowing to come after Lieberman, drive him out of his committees, and destroy him.

Joe Lieberman has voted on his conscience.  Apparently, following one’s conscience is the unpardonable sin in the Democratic Party.

Here’s the speech that so enrages Democrats:

Highlights From Fred Thompson’s Great RNC Speech

I’ve always like Fred Thompson.  His combination of folksy wit, good old boy charm, and a brilliant mind make him a brilliant speaker.

Tonight, he took the podium at the Republican National Convention, and knocked Republicans dead – even as he knocked Democrats’ heads together like Moe with the stooges.

I’d like to present some highlights of the speech (entire transcript available HERE):

[Sarah Palin] and John McCain are not going to care how much the alligators get irritated when they get to Washington, they’re going to drain that swamp.

But tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the remarkable story of John McCain.

It’s a story about character.

John McCain’s character has been tested like no other presidential candidate in the history of this nation.
——

John McCain was preparing to take off from the USS Forrestal for his sixth mission over Vietnam, when a missile from another plane accidentally fired and hit his plane.

The flight deck burst into a fireball of jet fuel.

John’s flight suit caught fire.

He was hit by shrapnel.

It was a scene of horrible human devastation.

Men sacrificed their lives to save others that day. One kid, who John couldn’t identify because he was burned beyond recognition, called out to John to ask if a certain pilot was OK.

John replied that, yes, he was.

The young sailor said, “Thank God”… and then he died.

These are the kind of men John McCain served with.

Hillary Clinton: Good Speech, But Not Much Of An Obama Endorsement

Hillary Clinton gave a pretty good speech. She presented her case for her candidacy, citing all the reasons why she ran and all the aspirations she had for America. And she said that those same reasons were why she now supported Barack Obama. She did outwardly all the things the Obama people wanted her to do.

But she didn’t do any more than the minimum.

The McCain campaign jumped all over what Hillary Clinton didn’t say:

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds responded, “Senator Clinton ran her presidential campaign making clear that Barack Obama is not prepared to lead as commander in chief. Nowhere tonight did she alter that assessment. Nowhere tonight did she say that Barack Obama is ready to lead. Millions of Hillary Clinton supporters and millions of Americans remain concerned about whether Barack Obama is ready to be president.”

I  took notes on an interesting discussion  on Fox News.  There analysis was insightful about what Hillary didn’t do.

The interesting thing about this speech is that she could have given it about ANY Democratic nominee. It could have been given of John Edwards or Joe Biden or Bill Richardson. She didn’t say a word about him as a person. She didn’t talk about what she’d learned about his character over the last 18 months. She didn’t trace his biography and tell us what about his character or experiences would make him fit to be President. She never said she respected him. She never said she had confidence in him. She never said he was ready to be president. She never said she’d come to have confidence in him as Commander-in-chief. She never claimed he was experienced or ready to lead. And in the past she has said that he WASN’T ready to be president, ready to lead, ready to be Commander-in-chief.

In the end, Hillary Clinton supported Barack Obama for President because he is the Democratic nominee for President. She would have supported Daffy Duck if Daffy Duck were the Democratic nominee.

Interestingly, she said Michelle Obama would make a great first lady. She never said the same about Barack Obama making a great President.

It was a minimalist endorsement, and she didn’t go one iota beyond what she needed to.

Contrast Hillary’s speech endorsing Barack Obama with Barack Obama’s speech introducing Joe Biden.

Heck, the last quarter plus of her speech presented her historic role as the first major female candidate for President. “This is the culmination of the women’s movement of 1848.” That sort of thing. That was the rhetorical high point of the speech.

The speech didn’t in any way culminate with a presentation of Barack Obama’s vision for America. In the end, the speech was more about Hillary (and Hillary supporting the Democratic Party) than it was about Barack Obama as the candidate for President.

Barack Obama: All Hail the Complainer-in-Chief

The other day Barack Obama had this message. Too bad there were no violins playing in the background:

But one of the things that we have to change in this country is the idea that people can’t disagree without challenging each other’s character and patriotism. I have never suggested that Senator McCain picks his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition. I have not suggested it because I believe that he genuinely wants to serve America’s national interest. Now, it’s time for him to acknowledge that I want to do the same.

Let me be clear: I will let no one question my love of this country. I love America, so do you, and so does John McCain. When I look out at this audience, I see people of different political views. You are Democrats and Republicans and Independents. But you all served together, and fought together, and bled together under the same proud flag. You did not serve a Red America or a Blue America — you served the United States of America.

So let’s have a serious debate, and let’s debate our disagreements on the merits of policy — not personal attacks. And no matter how heated it gets or what kind of campaign he chooses to run, I will honor Senator McCain’s service, just like I honor the service of every veteran in this room, and every American who has worn the uniform of the United States.

Wah-ha-ha-whah-boo-hoo-hoo. Snif. Oh. I’m sorry. Are you through reading?

Obama claims he wants a “serious debate.” He just isn’t willing to go on any tough programs that would make him defend his policies. Or even actually HAVE a real debate with a John McCain who has already proven he would clean his clock.

Obama claims he has never questioned McCain’s character or patriotism. I’m not so sure of that: he’s questioned McCain’s commitment to veterans over veterans funding programs, his senior adviser said McCain “shot from the hip, very aggressive, belligerent statement. He may or may not have complicated the situation,” clearly suggesting that he was politically posturing at the expense of American foreign policy. His campaign literally called him a cheater (without any proof) due to McCain’s strong performance at the Saddlback debate. Rick Warren called that charge bogus. And all that’s just been in the past few days.

But let’s go back the last few months, with chief Obama surrogates repeatedly attacking John McCain’s war record and his POW experiences in what was nothing less than one cheap, vicious shot after another. Obama was whining about people questioning his patriotism even as his thugs tried to undermine a war hero’s record.

And Barack Obama’s bogus cheap shot at McCain, alleging that he would use racism in his campaign, was so far beneath contempt that he himself now deserves ANY attack.

So pardon me for my lack of tears.

Obama has been taking his complaints against his opponents to record heights. I’ve never seen anything like it. Again and again, I hear Obama deliver a “somebody’s always picking on me” whah-fest.

He started a “truth squad” which hysterically cries foul about one thing after another. It’s almost like this guy wants to start his own secret police to arrest his detractors or something.

I pointed out some time back that:

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and others have mocked the fact that Barack Obama says his ears are off limits, his race is off limits, his church is off limits, his pastor is off limits, his new pastor that replaced his former pastor is off limits, the visiting pastor who spoke at the invitation of the new pastor who replaced his former pastor is off limits, his “typical white person” grandmother is off limits, his great uncle is off limits, and now his wife is off limits.

The constant whining over allegations of unfairness had even liberal maven Maureen Dowd questioning whether Obama was much of a man.

I have long since become sick and tired of Obama’s constant whiny complaining. At some point, it will backfire on him as Americans realize this guy just isn’t tough enough to be our leader.

Obama’s Hypocritical Denunciation of Wright Is Too Little, Too Late

Barack Obama has decided it was time to pack up the campaign bus and move on. But before pulling out this time, Obama finally decided to throw his pastor under it.

“I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” Obama said in a last-minute press conference today. The candidate said that after watching Wright’s appearance from Monday, “What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for.”

I’d sure like to know whether Barack Obama was in his church – as so many Americans were – the Sunday following 9/11 when Wright offered one of his most inflammatory ravings of all. But this issue has exploded beyond such questions.

It’s frankly way past time Obama repudiated Jeremiah Wright. He should never have attended the extremely radicalized Trinity United Church in Chicago in the first place. He should have walked away in outrage twenty years ago.

Given full, repeated opportunites to show how he had been “taken out of context,” Jeremiah Wright instead demonstrated that he stood by every “sound bite” he had spoken exactly as it had been depicted. He does believe America is a terrorist nation who deserves terrorist attacks to be directed against it. He does believe that white America created AIDS as a genocide against people of color. He didn’t back away or in any way change the context of any of his radical statements.

By speaking out, Rev. Jeremiah Wright reveals that the “spin” that much of the media – and Barack Obama himself – had been putting on the story for the last couple months was a flat-out lie. These were not sound bites taken out of context. It was malicious to claim that Wright’s sermons had been deliberately taken out of context, because the charge was an attempt to assasinate the characters and reputations of men and women who are now revealed to have been right all the time.

You may despise Fox News’ Sean Hannity and love PBS’ Bill Moyers, but Hannity has been demonstrated to be the objective source, and Moyers the biased ideologue.

Conservatives keep saying that the elite media is biased to the left, and the elite media keeps proving that the allegation is completely true. You have only to go back and review every story that characterized Jeremiah Wright’s remarks as “soundbites” and “thirty second loops” spun “out of context” to see that the media was doing its own spinning out of a pro-liberal and pro-Obama agenda.

For the most part, there was simply no possible context that could have made most of these remarks palatable. America with three Ks, America as a terrorist state, America as a racist developer of genocidal death-viruses. Good luck with that, “What-the-Reverend-really-meant-to-say”-project.

But we still have another spin on this story. We still have the excuse that somehow Barack Obama never heard any of this stuff, and just didn’t know it was going on for all these years.

I can see it now:

Several thousand people settle into their pews as the worship team finishes leading the music.  Rev. Wright steps into the pulpit  to preach. The auditorium quiets down.

“Is he here?” The doormen charged with monitoring Barack Obama’s attendance shake their heads.

“Well, then, America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.! We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost!”

And then a security radio crackles in with a report that Barack Obama has driven in and is walking toward the auditorium.

“And Jesus said, love your enemies. Do good to them that hate you,” Wright sweetly and sublimely preaches as Obama files in and takes a pew.

The rest of the congregation smiles knowlingly. And the vast conspiracy, which has succeeded in keeping Barack Obama completely in the dark for twenty years, has succeeded yet again.

The problem with this scenario is that the facts simply say otherwise. Allow me to quote myself from 19 April:

First of all, it is a frankly incredible claim. Barack Obama spent 20 years in this church, and 20 years in an intimate personal mentoring friendship with Jeremiah Wright. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. has been well-known for being a fiery radical way out of the mainstream ever since he coming to the church in 1972. The fact that Wright married Barack and Michelle and baptized their children are only embarrasing details. And Barack Obama had no idea what his mentor for twenty years stood for? When the Reverend Wright delivered a particularly offensive, hateful and anti-American sermon, no one ever told Obama about it? The fact is, in his 1993 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Barack Obama himself reveals this argument for the lie it is. In a vivid description recalling his first meeting with Wright back in 1985, the pastor warned Barack Obama that getting involved with Trinity might turn off other black clergy because of the church’s radical reputation. And when Obama disinvited Jeremiah Wright to give the convocation speach at his announcement of his presidential campaign last year, he essentially told his pastor that he was too extreme for Barack to openly associate himself with him.  Obama knew.

When the video of Rev. Wright’s hateful, racist, anti-American rants first became public, the Obama campaign indignantly indicated that there was nothing worthy of bothering itself about. They had no problem with anything Wright had said. Later in the day, as the video of the ranting pastor spread, the campaign offered a lame dodge. A little after that, Obama himself offered that he’s never heard any of the remarks. Then he gave his speech saying, “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

And, of course, the left-leaning media swooned over the speech.

Well, I guess now he’s disowning the black church.  Sorry grandma. You gotta go.

Obama personally records the warning that Wright gave him about the church’s radicalism. The only thing that changed since that day in 1985 was that Barack Obama’s political ambitions have grown to the point where his twenty-year “association” (a word the liberal media loves to use to imply a bogus “guilt by association”) is no longer expedient for a man who had used the influence of Trinity United and its pastor to climb the ladder in Chicago politics. Obama had found the church offered him street credibility with common black folk as well as powerful local connections. And now he finds it politically expedient to bite the hand that fed him.

Obama chooses some interesting words to describe his reason for distancing himself from Wright. “What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for.”

Jeremiah Wright’s worldview has not changed. He is presenting the same worldview that he has been presenting for twenty years.

Let me quote myself again from 15 April, and note that I specifically refer to Jeremiah Wright’s worldview:

When revelations of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racist, anti-American remarks first began to surface, Democratic supporters of Barack Obama quickly claimed that these were just a few comments that were taken out of context. But when one considers black liberation theology, and when one listens to the words of numerous other black liberation theology theologians, this defense quickly becomes untenable.

When Jeremiah Wright talked about “white greed” in his now-famous “Audacity of Hope” message, he was perfectly expounding on black liberation thought. When he claimed that white America deliberately created the AIDS virus as a genocide against blacks, he was accurately exegeting black liberation ideology of class based warfare against the oppressed black class. Or, expressed negatively, when he said that anti-crack cocaine penalties were instituted by racist legislators for the purpose of incarcerating as many blacks as possible, how was that in any way contrary to his central theological beliefs? When Wright denounced Israel as a Zionist state that imposed “injustice and … racism” on Palestinians, how was this not in perfect accord with his theology? When Wright railed against “AmeriKKKa” in his sermons, just how was that contrary to black liberation thought? And when Wright lectured American society that it deserved 9/11, was this in any way out of bounds with either the teachings of black liberation theologians or the Marxism from which they derived their message?

Has Barack Obama, the Harvard Law School graduate, the former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and full-fledged elitist intellectual snob, somehow been totally unaware of black liberation theology? Was he totally unaware of the teachings of his church? Was he completely ignorant of the beliefs of the man who led him to his faith, who married him, who bapatized his children, and who taught him and mentored him for twenty years?

Get real.

Now the Obama campaign is pitching itself as the poor victim of this crazy Jeremiah Wright. And the media is just gobbling it up. But a New York Post story coming out today quotes a source that is problably closer to the mark; that the pastor felt betrayed by a man who had once embraced him as a friend, a mentor, and a spiritual guide. That the pastor feels betrayed that Obama is now distancing himself from views that he knew Wright had had for years and years.

Joe Scarborough is claiming that now that Obama has finally come out and denounced Wright that no one can bring this up any more, as though by sheer brute force of ultra-left-wing will can overcome every question and doubt that this relationship so justifiably raises. What is this guy putting in his coffee?

The media spins, and most of the media spins fast and furiously left. But the truth of the matter is that Barack Obama’s central campaign theme is, and has always been, a fraud. There’s nothing new about him, he isn’t the candidate of hope, and the change he will bring will only be for the worse.

Barack Obama’s close and long-term relationship with Jeremiah Wright calls his character, his honesty, his integrity, and his own beliefs into open question. Should we believe his current campaign spin, or should we believe his actions over the last twenty years?

Petraeus, Clinton, Obama, and All Democrats: Will The One With Credibility Please Stand Up?

As General David Petraeus returns to the US Senate to report on the war in Iraq, it is worth reminiscing on what occurred last time he appeared.

Yes, we had our front page ad “General Betray Us?” in that appeared in the New York Times with a sweetheart rate that violated the papers’ own standard of ethics.

But we also had that bastion of personal integrity – the junior Senator from New York – question the honesty and credibility of the general.

I cite a 12 Sep 2007 New York Sun story that appeared under the headline, “Clinton Spars With Petraeus on Credibility.” The first two paragraphs of that story by staff reporter Eli Lake read as follows:

“WASHINGTON — Senator Clinton squared off yesterday with her possible challenger for the White House in 2012, General David Petraeus, and came closer than any of her colleagues to calling the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq a liar.

Using blunter language than any other Democrat in the last two days, Mrs. Clinton told General Petraeus that his progress report on Iraq required “a willing suspension of disbelief.””

Well, let’s reflect on that a bit. Hindsight being what it is and all.

We now know that Senator Clinton is a documented liar on numerous fronts (her story of coming under sniper fire in Bosnia has been refuted by video of the event; her story of playing a role in the Ireland peace talks has been refuted by a Nobel Prize winning participant in addition to other participants; her story of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was refuted by that stain on the blue dress, etc. etc.).

I saw a biography of General David Petraeus on Fox News after he was named to command the multinational forces in Iraq, and was frankly awed by the man’s history of character and integrity. His entire life is a study in character and honor. He took control over a situation that had been presented as hopeless and turned it around in a manner that can only be described as stunning. By the time he appeared before the Senate last year, he had come through for this nation in a way that merited the gratitude of every American, and in particular every parent who sent a son or daughter to Iraq under his command. And as a reward this true American hero was attacked by demagogues who will never even begin to understand the character and integrity that David Petraeus has demonstrated throughout his life.

Mind you, Senator Clinton has hardly cornered the market on vicious attacks against American heroes:

Jay Rockefeller, the Senator from West Virginia, launched an incredibly hateful statement against Senator John McCain in an interview with the Charleston Gazette. He said McCain has become insensitive to many human issues. According to the paper, Rockefeller said “McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”

Rockefeller later apologized for his comment, but you can’t just take back a statement like that, can you? It was inexcusable, and frankly unforgivable. Rockefeller not only attacked JohnMcCain; he attacked every American serviceman who ever fired a weapon against an enemy during time of war.

This Senator Jay Rockefeller, by the way, is the same Jay Rockefeller who has positioned himself as a major Barack Obama supporter, and who recently urged that – for the good of the country – Senator Clinton should drop out of the Democratic primary and support Barack Obama. You can thus add him to the list of associates of Barack Obama who have said and/or done terrible things against America (e.g. Obama’s pastor for twenty years’ [Jeremiah Wright] racist charge that America created the AIDS virus to kill black people; his wife Michelle Obama’s statement that “America in 2008 is a mean place” which itself followed a similar statement that she had never been proud of America in her adult life; Barack Obama’s friend (as acknowledged by Obama’s own strategist David Axelrod) and former Weatherman Terrorist Professor William Ayers – who openly acknowledged bombing attacks after 9/11 – and claimed to have no regrets over them).

[As to William Ayers, it is frankly amazing that this man – who has openly acknowledged bombing the New York Police Headquarters as well as the Capital building and other locations and said on 9/11 that his only regret is that he didn’t bomb enough – is now an honored member of the liberal education establishment and a significant member of his community in Chicago, Illinois. You begin to see more clearly the absolutely toxic political environment that Barack Obama has emerged from].

Now, that last paragraph will be immediately dismissed by those who argue that you can’thold one’s associations against someone. So it doesn’t matter that Barack Obama sat in a pew for twenty years under the teachings of a documented America-hating racist. But it certainly goes to his judgment and his integrity. Michelle Obama has clearly been influenced by her pastor’s teachings, and Barack Obama has whitewashed several of Reverend Wright’s sermons and teachings – by removing the anti-white rantings but holding on to the substance – for mass consumption. Wright railed against “white greed” in his “Audacity of Hope” message. Obama rephrases it to say, “The greatest problem in America is greed.” Obama leaves it up to you to recognize that he’s talking about “white” greed.

And also mind you, Senator Clinton has hardly cornered the market on telling self-serving lies or padding her resume.

A Snopes.com article details some of Barack’s lies and provides their refutations. While Hillary Clinton’s lie can be seen exposed in vivid, hillarious color, Barack Obama is an even bigger documented liar than she when it comes to rewriting history to fabricate his own story. Barack Obama massively fabricated his association with President Kennedy: his father did NOT come to the United States with Kennedy money. And his mother were NOT inspired to marry and have a child by the Selma march as Barack Obama claimed: the first of the marches did not occur until at least five years after Barack was born!

Furthermore, Obama has lied about numerous aspects of his past in an attempt to bolster his credentials. He claimed on numerous occasions that he was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago: he was no such thing. He was a lecturer only. There is as gigantic a distinction between “professor” and “lecturer” as there is between “sniper fire”and “there had been reports of possible sniper fire in the area.”

Obama has also boasted of having passed legislation that in reality never even left committee. And fellow organizers have said that Sen. Obama took too much credit for his community organizing efforts.

An 8 April 2008 Time Magazine article by Mark Halperin details the above “misstatements” and many others. Basically, it chops Obama’s credibility down like a tree.

Another clear Obama lie has been his profound mischaricterization of John McCain as saying that McCain “wants the war to last for a hundred years.” Asked whether he would support U.S. troops staying in Iraq for fifty years, McCain said, ““Make it a hundred. We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me, as long as American, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” The non-partisan Factcheck.org says Obama’s claim that McCain wants 100 years of war in Iraq is a “twisted” and “serious distortion of what McCain actually said. So much for the candidate of hope and change, and so much for claiming to run and honest campaign.

Barack Obama’s biggest lie of all may well be the central promise of his entire campaign that – as the candidate of undefined “hope” and “change” – he can bridge the gap between liberals and conservatives. In reality, Barack Obama – winner of the prestigious “Most Liberal Senator of 2007 Award” handed out by the National Journal as determine by voting record – has established himself as a radically left of center politician. He is currently having to distance himself from his own views. An Illinois voter group’s detailed questionnaire, filed under his name during his 1996 bid for a state Senate seat, presents extremely liberal stands on gun control, the death penalty and abortion – positions that appear completely at odds with the more moderate image he’s projected during his presidential campaign. Yet another lie, I believe. In running for president, Barack Obamama must literally run away from himself.

Thus the Democratic primary becomes a question of “Which liar told bigger lies?” And, “Which group cares more about which lie?”

Meanwhile, General David Petraeus’ character, honesty, and integrity stands out like the giant Gulliver must have stood out among the Lilliputians.

But let’s not be too harsh on Senator Hillary Clinton or Senator Barack Obama. They are Democrats, after all. What do you really expect? They come from the Party of Bill Clinton, who sought to become our Commander in Chief in spite of his letter directly expressing his “loathing the military” (a direct quote completely accurate in context).

The Democratic Party is the party of Senator John Kerry, who said of American soldiers:

“I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command….

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal andvery particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

The Democratic Party is the party of Senator Dick Durbin, who – on the floor of the U.S. Senate – compared American soldiers to Nazis, and the Guantanamo Bay Detention facility with Soviet Gulags. Durbin’s comment resonated in perfect pitch with actress Jane Fonda’s calling U.S. soldiers war criminals during her visit to North Vietnam in 1972. And I give as my source an al Jazeera article to demonstrate just how harmful to the United States – and how helpful to our vicious enemies – statements such as Durbin’s really are.

The Democratic Party is the party of Representative Jack Murtha, who went on record as the first on-the-record U.S. official regarding the events that took place with U.S. Marines in Haditha. Before any investigation – and certainly before any trial – Murtha said, “Well, I’ll tell you exactly what happened. One Marine was killed and the Marines just said we’re going to take care – we don’t know who the enemy is, the pressure was too much on them, so they went into houses and they actually killed civilians.”

In another interview Murtha said, “There was no firefight. There was no IED that killed those innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them. And they killed innocent civilians in cold blood. That is what the report is going to tell. ”

The aftermath should demonstrate just how despicable Murtha was in publicly convicting these young Marines without a trial. Charges have been repeatedly dropped. Others have been acquitted. One Marine – clearly believing the zealous prosecution line – agreed to testify against another Marine. Thus far, the Marines have been vindicated. The results of subsequent investigations have clearly exonerated the Marines. Again and again, the details provided by Marines confirmed their story; again and again, the details alleged by the Iraqi witnesses have been demonstrated to be false.

I have heard Murtha apologists claim that Murtha himself was a Marine and therefore his character should be beyond question. Well, so was Lee Harvey Oswald! Should we therefore not question his character?!?! As a further observation, I find a former Marine railroading fellow Marines to be even more contemptible than a non-Marine railroading Marines. It’s like finding out that the man who publicly and maliciously framed you was your own father; there’s just something profoundly wrong with the moral wiring of a man who does this kind of thing.

The Democratic Party is the Party of Representatives Jim McDermott of Washington and David Bonior of Michigan, who, back in 29 Sep 2002 appeared on This Week from the foreign (make that enemy) soil Baghdad and blasted U.S. foreign policy. Their clear point was that Americans should believe the documented torturer and murderer Saddam Hussein and distrust Republican President George Bush. During the course of this on-air fiasco, a clearly stunned George Will said of McCermott and Bonior’s vicious remarks, “”Why Saddam Hussein doesn’t pay commercial time for that advertisement for his policy, I do not know.”

Well, it turns out he did.

We now know that – in the opening words of a recent AP article – that “Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. An indictment unsealed in Detroit accuses Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a member of a Michigan nonprofit group, of arranging for three members of Congress to travel to Iraq in October 2002 at the behest of Saddam’s regime.” See the full article at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080326/ap_on_re_us/iraq_junket

Even if these Democratic Congressmen didn’t know they were being used by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Intelligence, their actions were beneath all contempt. These elected American officials allowed themselves to be used as pawns by the intelligence agency of a ruthless tyrant.

The Democratic Party is the party of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said “This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything” on 20 April 2007. Again, I offer as my source al Jazeera to show just how harmful such statements can be to us, and how they can and ARE being used to embolden our enemies.

Anyone who is capable of stepping back from political party partisanship for just a moment ought to have difficulty with a leader who so blithely claims defeat for his country in time of war. Winston Churchill famously said, “We will never give up! We will never surrender!” Henry Reid says, “This war is lost.” Thank God Churchill didn’t think that way, or we’d all be speaking German. As it is – if the terrorists and over a billion Muslims have their way – we might well all end up speaking Arabic.

And the Democratic Party is the party of House Majority Whip Representative James Clyburn, who acknowledged in an inverview on 30 July 2007 before General Petraeus’ first report that good news inIraq amounted to a problem for Democrats.

As General David Petraeus wraps up his visit to the snake pit of Washington, don’t forget who the Democrats are. They are the Party that is invested in American failure, the Party that roots for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan for the sake of opportunistic political advantage.

Christopher Hitchens has a piece in Slate.com titled, “Flirting With Disaster: The vile spectacle of Democrats rooting for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan.” It’s definitely worth reading.

I often wonder: had the Democrats continued to support the war that was authorized by a vote of 77-23 in the Senate (with 29 Democrats supporting [Senator Clinton among them] and only 21 opposed) and 296-133 in the House, and presented the world with a united front, how different could things have turned out? Would our enemies have remained emboldened in the face of steadfast American resolve? Would our allies have continued to refuse to help us had we presented a united face determined to prevail against the forces of international terrorism?

Imagine what would have happened in World War II had Republicans done everything they could have done to undermine, question, distort, and misrepresent Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt? Imagine what would have happened had Republicans en masse called for a withdrawal from the war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan? Had they characterized American fighting men as war criminals? Had they demanded that Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur come to Senate and defend themselves against charges that they were dishonest and incompetent? Do you think it would have helped or hurt the war effort? [This amounts to an IQ test, Democrats: and you have failed horribly].

For the Democrats to turn against the President in time of war and work to undermine American efforts to attain victory out of political opportunism is both craven and cowardly.

If good news in Iraq is bad news for Democrats, then Americans should hope for nothing less than really, really bad news for Democrats this November.