Over at spiked, Brendan O’Neil has an excellent retrospective on our Babylonian fiasco that better than most everything else I’ve read, discusses the interconnected failures of the antiwar and pro-war camps, as well as the Iraq war’s emergence from a crisis in domestic legitimacy. 

“[B]oth the war’s authors and the war’s opponents have reunited around a blinkered post-Iraq thesis: that we now need to focus Western interference on other parts of the world, be it fighting the ‘good fight’ in Afghanistan, rescuing genocide victims in Darfur, upping the ante with the Russians, or encouraging instability in the violent, polluting beast of the East: China.

spiked has consistently argued that the real problem today is the West’s disjointed, disconnected foreign policy, which is driven by a domestic crisis of legitimacy rather than by a clear global framework or by definable foreign aims. This means foreign policy is both ravenous, as it searches out new crises in foreign fields to which it can attach itself, and deeply destabilising… spiked has explored how every crisis in Iraq has been a result, not simply of ‘making mistakes’ as many claim, but of the internal incoherence of the invading powers.”

Iraq is not product of some blunder in calculating the national interest but a rather an expression of the hollowness of the ruling philosophies of the current American Left and Right. Bush and McCain require the “transcendent challenge” of the war on terror, or a new Cold War with bad old Russia and China, to gain some sort of legitimacy as they preside over a collapsing currency and no semblance of the limiting of government or enforcing of the border. The Right wants to win at all costs—that is, they’re willing to put up with Gitmo, water boarding etc.—but then victory must still be defined as a hokey utopia—“we’ll be greeted as liberators” sled easily into “a free, prosperous, pluralistic nation that will join us in fighting terror.” The Left is worse as the very concept of national interest is thrown out the window. The lessons they’ve learned from Iraq are that Rummy is mean, Bush is a dunderhead, and that we should seek to regain the world’s affection by offering them a kinder, gentler, multi-cultier face that will have much more legitimacy as we intervene everywhere at will. None of these problems will change with the upcoming election. 

Obama’s big speech was pretty much what I thought it would be. He offered up the standard Obamian deal: “let me give you a little ‘Rev. Wright was wrong’ and then you’ll give me a little ‘legacy of discrimination’ to justify the continuation of all the social programs of the past 40 years.”

The gushing responses by most of the media were also to be expected. A few lines from Andrew Sullivan are enough to give you a sense of the general drift, and make you want to go take a bath—“This is a candidate who does not merely speak as a Christian. He acts like a Christian.” OK, let’s look closely at what Obama actually did yesterday. While I guess Obama should be given a few merit points for candor and honesty—that is, for actually detailing his connections with Rev. Wright—this speech hardly amounted to an exercise in Christian humility or self-examination. Obama makes it clear that while his grandmother and Rev. Wright might have their flaws, Obama himself—who stands outside, indeed, above, both the black and white communities—is still the immaculate great transcender.

With regard to what this speech portends for policy, It’s remarkable how Obama, even while acknowledging the concerns of many average Americans, stood his ground, didn’t even budge, regarding the policies that matter. As Sailer points out, the “path to a more perfect union” is still “LBJ All The Way,” and one should drop any notion that Obama’s would ever consider criticizing affirmative action, the enforcement of “anti-discrimination” legislation, and the “investing” in education that continues to expand with little in the way of results. Obama is remarkable in that he seems to mention these tired old programs of 1960’s as if they were bold new ideas he just came up with while considering how much he loves his imperfect country—“hey, did any every think of setting up a program for that inequality thing?” 

The public is right to react so harshly to the Fed’s bailout of Bears Stern; however, I’m beginning to sense that most are not opposing it for the right reasons and are generally coming to the wrong conclusions. A headline that’s representative of the national mood reads, “Homeowners need help, not Wall Street—Consumer groups decry Bear Stearns bailout while foreclosures soar”.

The Fed can only “help” consumers by riving up the old printing press, and as bad as bailing out the Fed’s Wall Street friends was, simply buying up mortgages—that is, propping up bad loans with government cash—would have far worse effects. 

A little over a week ago, the price of Oil topped the inflation-adjusted record of the early ’80s. This had little too do with “peak oil” or any nefarious Arab cartel and everything to do with the weakening of the U.S. dollar (the old greenback can’t get you as much crude as she used to). It might sound nice for the Fed to “help,” but simply printing out more mullah will cause averages Americans lives to get much worse.

Just as I was spell-checking my post on how the GOP is a bunch of wimps afraid to attack Obama for having little substance and way too much baggage, a barrage of attacks were launched against the senator after video of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright doing his thing emerged on cablenews. Obama quickly dispensed with his “spiritual adviser.” If you haven’t seen Wright in action, a good montage can be found here. 

None of this disproves my thesis, for it’s important that the material was released by the right-leaning media—NewsMax, FOX News etc.—not the McCain campaign nor a 527 group associated with the GOP à la the Swift-boaters. 

I don’t have much to say about the video; it doesn’t strike me as particularly surprising: the “God Damn America” being but a rhetorical flourishes on a self-evidently black nationalist program that has long be available at the Trinity United Church of Christ’s website. 

It is worth noting, with satisfaction, that long before NewsMax broke the story of Wright’s presenting Louis Farrakhan with a Lifetime Achievement Award and FOX’s propagating of the Wright videos, the dissident, antiwar Right was well out in front of the pack—beginning with Steve Sailer’s profile of Obama in TAC and much comment on VDARE and this site. And as Evan McLaren noted not too long ago, Rush & Co. have tried to keep their hands off any talk of Obama’s church until very recently.

It’s also worth noting that Scott McConnell’s thesis that Obama would be a sitting duck might for right-wing snipers might soon be proven true. Average Americans, especially Democrat voters, are willing—eager—to vote for a black candidate who gives them the hope of finally “getting beyond race,” “turning a new page,” yada-yada-yada. They are, however, rather repulsed by the Al Shartpon’s of the world, and Obama’s new association in their minds with black nationalism and anti-Americanism might prove extremely damaging.

I don’t want to get in the habit of quoting from Jonah Goldberg, but he’s clearly onto something important when he writes:

“[I]t says something fascinating about our political and racial landscape that the Democratic voters with the most experience living in multiracial, multicultural communities are the ones most immune to Obama’s “beyond race” rhetoric. At the same time, the whitest states are the most gaga for Obama. (He beat Clinton 80 percent to 17 percent in white-supremacist-rich Idaho.) […]

It’s easy for upscale liberals to talk about the glories of diversity because they live at Olympian heights, above the reality of multicultural America. For Obama’s wealthy, white, liberal supporters, diversity is knowing a rich black lawyer, a wealthy Latino accountant, and lots of well-to-do gay folks.”

If Obama looses that “beyond race” aura and begins to be associated with a crazy black-nationalist minister, then Americans, even the overeducated, upper-middle-class Obamaniacs, will begin leaving his camp in droves.

Until these past few days, I was convinced that Obama would win the Democrat nomination and the general election. I’m beginning to have second thoughts. It’s still early, but Democrat voters, the DNC, and the Super Delegates might be concluding that Obama has too much baggage to lead them to the Promised Land. Moreover, within the Democratic Party, blacks are quickly being displaced by Latinos as the valued ethnic block. The Democratic leadership’s tolerance for a candidate with ties to an “Unashamedly Black” preacher are waning.   

After spending so much time in grad school, and witnessing the Duke Lacrosse hoax first hand, I thought that I had built up a general immunity to academic PC—“there they go again” was my usual response to the latest advance in sensitivity training.

But even a hardened veteran like myself was a little taken aback when my friend Michael Brendan Dougherty sent me this report on Keith Sampson, a janitor at Indiana-Purdue who was convicted of “racial harassment” for—publicly reading a book!

The book in question wasn’t exactly the latest by David Duke, it was instead an academic tome lauding Notre Dame for resisting the Klu Klux Klan. One would think a janitor would be commended by the administration for being an autodidact. It seems the Affirmative Action Office would prefer that he instead study the latest from Mark Anthony Neal, the corpulent “radical intellectual” comfortably ensconced in the Duke African and African Studies department. 

Here’s the letter from the AA Office in full: 

”The Affirmative Action Office has completed its investigation of Ms. Nakea Vincent’s allegation that you racially harassed her by repeatedly reading the book, Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan by Todd Tucker in the presence of Black employees. In conducting this investigation, we interviewed you, Nakea Vincent, and other employees with information relevant to the mailer.

This concludes this matter with the Affirmative Action Office. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.”

In one of my articles for TAC I traced the trickling down of academic PC from the tenured professorate to the middling intellects of the university bureaucracy. Now it seems the university employees have joined in the fun—taking part in the accusations, denouncements, and public floggings—as a good way of bashing those they don’t like and getting “empowered” by the Affirmative Action Office.   

(Hat tip to the Volokh Conspiracy and the well-intentioned if profane “Freedom and Shit.”)

When Keith Olbermann decided to make a “special comment” on his MSNBC program regarding Geraldine Ferraro’s pointing out of patently obvious, he really pulled out all the stops—a “necessary preface,” a quotation from Hamlet, righteous indignation that was stagey and excessive even by Oldermannian standards.

He was also completely wrong when he made his head-liner statement, “[Clinton] is now campaigning as if Barrack Obama were the Democrat and [Clinton] were the Republican.” 

There is actually no evidence that the Republicans are preparing to really go after Obama as an affirmative action golden boy whose secret to his success is that blacks have voted for one of their own and the media and academic elite have projected all their post-racial hopes and dreams upon him. 

Olbermann, of course, assumes that Republicans are a bunch of crypto-racists who would love to tear Obama down. The reality is that internal documents reveal that McCain is more likely to do a lot of walking on egg shells and pussy footing around so as not to be labeled a “racist” in an election of “historic firsts” Perhaps he’ll outsource the tough stuff to an “attack dog” VP or a loud-mouth on the right—as Scott McConnell suggested in his excellent article for TAC—however, McCain’s repentant, endless apologies after l’affiar Cunninham make me believe that he will disown and denounce any edgy attack on the Illinois senator. 

I don’t think McCain will come anywhere close to this sardonic performance by Hillary when she went on her “celestial choirs” riff.

McCain won’t even try to equal this—and his supporters on the talk-radio right are going to start getting tired of doing the dirty work for him and then getting repaid with condemnation.

Attacking Obama for being black is certainly out of bounds (not to mention strategically unwise); however, making fun of him for being vacuous and feckless as a legislator is the best tactic for defeating him, as Hillary’s victories in Texas and Ohio prove.

No, in November, McCain will stay above the fray; he’ll talk about that “transcendent challenge” and the evil that is the earmark.

—Oh, yes, and he’ll also lose. 

The Geradine Ferraro scandal—still a sideshow to the national feelings of Spitzerfreunde, but getting its due attention—quickly became a kind of perfect storm of all the petty little neuroses of the American Left.

Let’s count them, shall we: First there’s dueling identity politics in which groups vie for the biggest collective victimization. Second comes the melodramatic takings of umbrage: Obama campaign on Ferraro: “She should be censured!!!”—Ferraro to Obama campaign: “I’m … hurt—absolutely HURT!” Thirdly enter the sociologically minded, who, while shaking their heads in great concern, remind us all that Ferraro’s comments are ridiculous because “as a black man” Obama actually faces tremendous hard-ship, institutional racism, and inner city violence—an example of a collectivist fallacy as rich Michelle’s comment that, “as a black man, “Barrack could, like, get shot going to the gas station.” Fourthly, there’s the assumption that those evil Clintons made Ferraro do it in order to scare away the white vote. Have I missed anything?

What’s lost in all this is that old Geraldine is speakin’ the truth—and not merely regarding the obvious fact that Obama’s ivy-league education is due in no small part to affirmative action and that he couldn’t quite have captured the imagination of the nation on the strength of his conventionally liberal, vacuous political programs alone but needed a little, you know, projection upon him of voters’ hopes and dreams for a post-racial future, or something like that. 

More important than all this—which everyone already knew in their gut—Ferraro was willing to pinpoint one of the most important rhetorical devises in American politics—and one which very few others are brave enough to discuss:

“Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says, ‘Let’s address reality and the problems we’re facing in this world,’ you’re accused of being racist, so you have to shut up,” she told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, California. “Racism works in two different directions. I really think they’re attacking me because I’m white. How’s that?”

Sure, she’s self-righteous, but that doesn’t mean that she’s wrong. 

Peter Brimelow stated somewhere that the term “racist” is something a liberal calls a conservative who’s winning the argument—it’s a classic rhetorical technique used to foreclose further debate.

I prefer not to throw around the word “racist”—the ideological weight it bears renders it basically useless. Still, there certainly are a few out there who aren’t just “losing the argument” and deserve the title. But Ferraro, perhaps despite herself, said something honest and accurate, and for this she should be commended. 

Steve Sailer seems to have located an early cut of McCain’s response to Hillary’s “3 a.m.” ad—priceless. 

Under the guidance of Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican has released a new list of the “7 Social Sins,” all of which appear to be some color between pink and green.

They include:

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious’’ experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

Numbers 1-3 are not controversial; the rest are. Leaving aside the “Sin of Carbon Emission” (#4), numbers 5-7 seem to be of one kind, all aimed at enforcing a sense of “social justice.”

For the life of me, I don’t know how exactly one “creates poverty”—although welfare programs seem to be succeeding at the task. Ditto for “Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor.” 

Do we really need “Excessive wealth”? Wasn’t the mortal sin of “gluttony” working just fine? While “excessive wealth” is hard to measure, we generally know gluttony when we see it. Consuming four Pizzas in one sitting can usually qualify one for this distinction. 

“Gluttony” also references a repulsive life-style as opposed to, say, some Stanford wiz kids who accumulate an “excessive” amount of lucre because Google buys up their latest software idea. I don’t think such people have sinned, and, unlike the fat slob gorging himself on calzones, they’ve greatly benefited society in the process of getting filthy rich. 

The Telegraph gets it spot on.

”Some priests give the impression of having missed their vocation as therapists, social workers or eco-warriors. One such is Mgr Gianfranco Girotti, the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, who has drawn up a new version of the Seven Deadly Sins: accumulating excessive wealth, taking drugs, polluting the environment. His list reads like a sixth-form essay.

Who would want to do the same with the Vatican’s milk-and-water peccadilloes? Allow us to suggest our own list of Seven Vices Best Avoided in Ecclesiastical Pronouncements: prissiness, moralising, over-familiarity, self-righteousness, babyishness, cant and, above all, banality.”

Archbishop Girotti made a rather lame attempt to bring Catholicism up to date, make it hip. I expect those serious about their theology to ignore the “social sins” and heed those original deadly seven. 

After my extended stay in graduate school, I became inured to racial hysteria dressed up as literary exegesis, so when I opened up the Times this morning, I wasn’t particularly surprised to read this emanating from the Harvard Sociology department:

On first watching Hillary Clinton’s recent “It’s 3 a.m.” advertisement, I was left with an uneasy feeling that something was not quite right — something that went beyond my disappointment that she had decided to go negative. Repeated watching of the ad on YouTube increased my unease. I realized that I had only too often in my study of America’s racial history seen images much like these, and the sentiments to which they allude.

And then the kicker—while Professor Orlando Patterson watched on with increasing “unease,” he ”couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society.”

I never knew that the image of women in pearls answering telephones at 3 a.m. was one of the great symbols of American racism, apparently right up there with the flaming cross, but then I’ll take Patterson’s word for it. To most of us who haven’t “spent [our lives] studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery,” Patterson’s critical method seems a lot like illogical free association. 

I’m reluctant to defend the Clintons; however, the allegations that their campaign is engaging in constant “race-baiting” is becoming rather tiresome.

Academia and the MSM have been diligently searching for signs of unconscious, subliminal, and coded racism in every nock and cranny for years, and it’s natural that the Clinton’s would be next in line to get scrutinized—particularly when they have the gaul to criticize the great race transcender himself! 

It’s also of little surprise that commentators on the right have hopped on the “Hillary’s race baiting” bandwagon as simply a new variation of their perennial, useless pastime of Clinton hating—the latest being Andrew Sullivan who claims to have found a racial “meme” disseminated by the nefarious pair from Arkansas. 

Let’s look at the Clinton’s alleged wickedness more closely:

1) Obama won in lily-white Iowa; then Clinton won in lily-white New Hampshire. The first marked a great “transcendence,” the second an instance of the “Bradley Effect” and New Hampshire’s barely repressed racism.

2) Clinton made the entirely incontestable, banal even, historical claim that MLK could not have passed the civil rights acts alone but needed LBJ.  Bob Herbert called this a “cheap shot at, of all people, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”   

3) When discussing Obama’s victory in South Carolina, Bill Clinton said that “he ran a good campaign” and referenced Jesse Jackson, who also “ran a good campaign”  back in 1992. As Marcus pointed out, it seems rather odd to interpret these compliments as “racist.” 

The Clinton’s deserve to be bashed in many areas; however, their race-baiting tactics exist only in the mind of the beholder.