Cool Hand Barack

Despite McCain's best efforts, Obama glides through his contradictions with ease

Ahead in the polls, Barack Obama used last night's debate to portray himself as a nonradical if vague agent of change. Despite John McCain's best efforts, the Arizona Senator didn't knock Mr. Obama from his cool evasion or even do much to rebut the Democrat's routine talking points. This isn't enough to change the dynamics of the race.

Not that Mr. McCain didn't have opportunities. The Illinois Democrat made his by now familiar claim that eight years of "deregulation" caused the current panic, but Mr. McCain never challenged him to explain what policies he's referring to. Bill Clinton debunked the deregulation line the other day on the public record, but the Republican never mentioned that. Mr. McCain did make a stab at hanging the failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac around Mr. Obama, but without any real explanation for why they mattered or how they represent Washington's status quo.

The one surprise in the debate was Mr. McCain's new proposal to have the government buy underwater mortgages as a way to stabilize the housing market. The idea must have puzzled many viewers and we'll reserve judgment until we see the fine print. At a glance, it doesn't sound like something Democrats would oppose -- and elections are decided on differences.

One of Mr. Obama's gifts is his ability to glide over contradictions with the greatest of ease. He spent minutes explaining that we spend "$10 billion a month" in Iraq that should be spent here in the U.S. But a short time later he was promoting what sounded like a surge in Afghanistan, and vowing to spend even more money to assist "the economies" of Eastern Europe. He also proposes to provide free health care while claiming he'd cut more spending from the overall budget than his new ideas would cost. If Mr. McCain lets that last claim go unrebutted, he deserves to lose.

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More on Obama's terrorist associations

A great video with 1970's news footage of these communist punk terrorists making their revolutionary plans known and bragging about their atrocities. Then it switches to some modern interviews and coverage of the ties between Obama and Ayers. At the end is an interview Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn gave to Connie Chung, where they repeat on camera that they wish they had done more damage.

That interview was done during the time Obama was associated with Ayers.



If this stuff doesn't take a chunk out of Obama, I could be convinced that Ayers and his kind actually won the war against America they started back in the '70s.

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The Real Obama

by Thomas Sowell



Critics of Senator Barack Obama make a strategic mistake when they talk about his "past associations." That just gives his many defenders in the media an opportunity to counter-attack against "guilt by association." We all have associations, whether at the office, in our neighborhood or in various recreational activities. Most of us neither know nor care what our associates believe or say about politics.

Associations are very different from alliances. Allies are not just people who happen to be where you are or who happen to be doing the same things you do. You choose allies deliberately for a reason. The kind of allies you choose says something about you.

Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, William Ayers and Antoin Rezko are not just people who happened to be at the same place at the same time as Barack Obama. They are people with whom he chose to ally himself for years, and with some of whom some serious money changed hands. Some gave political support, and some gave financial support, to Obama's election campaigns, and Obama in turn contributed either his own money or the taxpayers' money to some of them. That is a familiar political alliance-- but an alliance is not just an "association" from being at the same place at the same time.

Obama could have allied himself with all sorts of other people. But, time and again, he allied himself with people who openly expressed their hatred of America. No amount of flags on his campaign platforms this election year can change that.

Unfortunately, all that most people know about Barack Obama is his own rhetoric and that of his critics. Moreover, some of his more irresponsible critics have made wild accusations-- that he is not an American citizen or that he is a Muslim, for example.

All that such false charges do is discredit Obama's critics in general. Fortunately, there is a documented, factual account of what Barack Obama has actually been doing over the years, as distinguished from what he has been saying during this election campaign, in a new best-selling book. That book is titled "The Case Against Barack Obama" by David Freddoso. He starts off in the introduction by repudiating those critics of Obama who "have been content merely to slander him-- to claim falsely that he refuses to salute the U.S. flag or was sworn into office on a Koran, or that he was born in a foreign country."

This is a serious book with 35 pages of documentation in the back to support the things said in the main text. In other words, if you don't believe what the author says, he lets you know where you can go check it out.

Barack Obama's being the first serious black candidate for President of the United States is what most people consider remarkable but how he got there is at least equally surprising.

The story of Obama's political career is not a pretty story. He won his first political victory by being the only candidate on the ballot-- after hiring someone skilled at disqualifying the signers of opposing candidates' petitions, on whatever technicality he could come up with.

Despite his words today about "change" and "cleaning up the mess in Washington," Obama was not on the side of reformers who were trying to change the status quo of corrupt, machine politics in Chicago and clean up the mess there. Obama came out in favor of the Daley machine and against reform candidates.

Senator Obama is running on an image that is directly the opposite of what he has been doing for two decades. His escapes from his past have been as remarkable as the great escapes of Houdini.

Why much of the public and the media have been so mesmerized by the words and the image of Obama, and so little interested in learning about the factual reality, was perhaps best explained by an official of the Democratic Party: "People don't come to Obama for what he's done, they come because of what they hope he can be."

David Freddoso's book should be read by those people who want to know what the facts are. But neither this book nor anything else is likely to change the minds of Obama's true believers, who have made up their minds and don't want to be confused by the facts

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The Audacity of Obama

When Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination, many had high hopes that his breakthrough would move American social consciousness forward into a post-racial era. Many thought the time had come when candidates would be judged by their qualifications and dedication to our country, not by their race. To see why it is impossible for Obama to play this transcending role, read his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." His Dreams are obsessed with race and race conflict.

This book is an extraordinary 442 pages that appear to be written by an experienced novelist who knows how to tell a compelling story laced with minute detail about everything from clothes to odors, fictional characters and invented conversations. It is complete with the colloquialisms, ungrammatical English and four-letter words that the author thinks are appropriate to the people he quotes.

Obama describes how he deliberately separated himself from his multiracial heritage in order to give himself a 100 percent black persona, different and alienated from the white world around him. Obama writes that the book is "a record of a personal, interior journey" to establish himself as "a black American."

With his new all-black identity, Obama stews about injustices that he never personally experienced and feeds his warped worldview by withdrawing into a "smaller and smaller coil of rage." He lives with a "nightmare vision" of black powerlessness.

Obama says that the hate doesn't go away. "It formed a counter-narrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people -- some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives."

Obama's worldview sees U.S. history as a consistent tale of oppressors and oppressed. He objects to the public schools because black kids are learning "someone else's history. Someone else's culture." He even criticizes his white grandparents, who worked hard to give him a privileged life. Their motives are a mystery to Obama because they came from the "landlocked center" of the United States, which, he asserts, is full of "suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty."

Obama grew up in Hawaii, the exemplar of a melting pot of races, yet he sees it as a place of "aborted treaties and crippling diseases brought by the missionaries." Although his mixed race was not a handicap in Hawaii, he whined that "we were always playing on the white man's court ... by the white man's rules."

One day his grandmother, while waiting for a bus to take her to work, was accosted by a panhandler. She gave him a dollar, but he aggressively demanded more -- and she was scared because he looked like he might hit her.

When Obama learned that the panhandler was black, he said the news hit him "like a fist in my stomach." Obama objected to the fact that his grandmother was "scared of a black man," and his resentment at her (not at the panhandler) was such a big deal that he referred to this incident repeatedly.

Obama immersed himself in the writings of radical blacks: Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. Obama's favorite became Malcolm X.

Obama scarcely knew his father, yet he wrote: "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela."

Obama described his happiness in going to Kenya: "For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide." He felt he "belonged" and had come home. Apparently, the only other place he felt at home was in Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago. Obama rejects racial integration because it is "a one-way street" with blacks being "assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around." Does he think America would be a better country if whites were assimilated into African culture?

There is absolutely nothing in this book that expresses pride in or love of or appreciation of America. In 442 pages of introspection extending over his life as a teen, undergraduate and law student at prestigious institutions, community organizer and working adult, he doesn't say anything positive about American government, culture, society, freedom or opportunity.

Obama's refusal to wear an American flag pin on his lapel sounded too trivial for a campaign issue. But since there is nothing in his book about respect for the flag, or the republic for which it stands, maybe the flag-pin flap does indicate his disdain for patriotism.

In his autobiography, Obama accepts the view that "black people have reason to hate." His later book is called "The Audacity of Hope," but his autobiography, which he has never disavowed, should be titled "The Audacity of Hate."

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Most media "fact-checking" is just pro-Obama bias

In a September 1984 campaign speech, Walter Mondale, the Democratic presidential nominee and former vice president, asked, "Do you really want Jerry Falwell to pick the next two judges to the Supreme Court?" What reminded us of this was a story from yesterday's New York Times, written by Patrick Healy, which begins as follows:

There is no way, of course, that Senator Barack Obama would ever nominate three controversial figures from his past to serve on the United States Supreme Court: the convicted felon Antoin Rezko; the former Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers; or Mr. Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

Yet the names and faces of the three men appear in a new television advertisement--running in Michigan and Ohio this week and nationally on Fox News on Monday, at a total cost of $500,000--arguing that Mr. Obama's judgment about his associates shows that he cannot be trusted to pick justices for the Supreme Court.

We wondered if the Times had thought it necessary back in '84 to point out that only the president has the power to make nominations to the federal bench, that Falwell was not running for president, that there was no way he would end up holding any office that would put him in the line of presidential succession, and, therefore, that the premise of Mondale's question was false.

Nope. Times reporter Fay Joyce merely quoted Mondale, apparently confident that her readers would be smart enough to distinguish political hyperbole from fact.

So why, a generation later, does the Times begin an article by rebutting an assertion that the ad in question (watch it here) does not even make? Because 2008 is the year in which "fact checking" of political ads and statements became a full-blown journalistic fad. May it soon go the way of streaking and Mexican jumping beans.

The "fact check" is opinion journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news. The object is not merely to report facts but to pass a judgment. The Washington Post's Fact Checker blog ends each assessment with between one and four "Pinocchios," just like movie reviewers giving out stars.

Like movie reviewing, the "fact check" is a highly subjective process. If a politician makes a statement that is flatly false, it does not need to be "fact checked." The facts themselves are sufficient. "Fact checks" end up dealing in murkier areas of context and emphasis, making it very easy for the journalist to make up standards as he goes along, applying them more rigorously to the candidate he disfavors (which usually means the Republican). Example: USA Today has a "reality check" of a McCain ad whose script runs as follows:

Narrator: "Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are . . .

Obama: ". . . just air-raiding villages and killing civilians."

Narrator: "How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops, increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and congressional liberals: too risky for America."

The USA Today headline reads "Quote From Obama Taken Out of Context." In a way this is a tautology, since a quotation by definition is taken out of its original context (and placed in a new one). But of course the phrase out of context usually connotes "used in a misleading way." Is that the case here? Here is a longer version of the Obama quote, per USA Today:

"We've got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there."

One the one hand, Obama was making a broader argument, which the McCain ad ignores: that America should send more troops to Afghanistan. On the other hand, Obama clearly did assert that America is "air-raiding villages and killing civilians" (the subsequent clause makes that undeniable), though one could argue about whether he was asserting or merely worrying that we are "just" doing so. USA Today's "reality check" quotes another news organization's "fact check":

After Obama made that statement, the Associated Press produced a "fact check." It concluded that "Western forces (in Afghanistan) have been killing civilians at a faster rate than the insurgents have been killing civilians."

This certainly raises more questions than it answers. Given that the enemy in Afghanistan does not distinguish itself from the civilian population, how many of the putative civilians who have died in attacks by the West were actually enemy combatants? And on what basis does one assign blame for civilian casualties when the West attacks terrorists who are hiding among civilians?

A look at the original AP "fact check" shows that it is based on number from . . . the Associated Press! The AP admits that "tracking civilian deaths is a difficult task," but it takes its own numbers as definitive, although it apparently makes no effort to deal with the questions we raised in the preceding paragraph.

In any case, the AP's dubious numbers are hardly relevant to the truth of the McCain ad's assertion about what Obama said. And why is it necessary for USA Today to have an opinion on the latter point anyway? Why not just report what the McCain ad said, report what Obama said, and let the reader make up his own mind?

Somehow these reportorial "checks" almost always seem to come out in Obama's favor. Is that because he is the more honest candidate, or because he is the candidate reporters find more attractive? Here's an example that strongly suggests the latter, again from the Associated Press:

Corsi's book claims the Illinois senator is a dangerous, radical candidate for president and includes innuendoes and false rumors--that he was raised a Muslim and attended a radical black church.

Obama is a Christian who attended Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and his campaign picks apart the book's claims on the Web site FightTheSmears.com.

It is a "false rumor" that Trinity United is a "radical black church"? It's hard to see how anyone could believe this even as a matter of opinion, but for the AP to present it as fact makes a mockery of journalism.

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