Democrats Still Rooting for Defeat in Iraq

Jennifer Rubin identifies the political bind for the Democrats on Iraq: As progress on the ground continues, the party's increasingly out of touch with political and strategic realities:

Many observers, left and right, have begun to take note of the gap between the Democrats' defeatist rhetoric on Iraq and the reality on the ground. Karl Rove observed in the Wall Street Journal last week that the Democrats' stubborn insistence that the surge has failed makes them look out of touch and, worse, as if they were rooting for America's defeat.

Rove threw in a canny piece of advice: "They'd be better off arguing success allows America to accelerate the return of our troops rather than appear to deny the progress those troops are making."

Why haven't the Democrats declared victory in Iraq and suggested now is the time to go home? The answer is that they have become obsessed with fighting the last war -- the last political war against George W. Bush.

In fact, they are so obsessed with proving Bush's malfeasance and mendacity that they cannot accept that he was right on the surge or that Iraq in any sense can be determined a success.

The reduction in U.S. causalities has deprived Democrats of the most obvious objection to the war. So they have shifted to complaining about the cost of the war. "For the cost of the war we could..." they begin, and then fill in the blank with the social program on which they would most have liked to have spent the money.

Their political dilemma is further complicated by the fact that Republicans have nominated the man who put all of his political chips on the surge and championed the policy that is now succeeding. Admitting "success" is a recognition of the wisdom and tenacity of not only the current president's policy, but also of their current opponent in the fight for the White House.

If they declared "victory" they would be declaring "John McCain's victory," and they certainly will not do that. Ever. The Democrats are left to hope against hope, and their country's interests, that things worsen again in Iraq and the surge proves not so successful after all.

BARRING THAT catastrophe, they are left to argue that the surge's success is really a "trap," obligating us to continue our troop commitment indefinitely. Thus, their obvious delight over (and willingness to twist the meaning of) McCain's remark about a potential "100 year" military presence in Iraq.

But if Americans are willing to listen for a paragraph or two, rather than a soundbite, they will understand that the "trap" is no more a trap than any of our other military commitments, so long as the level of violence in Iraq subsides.

As McCain has pointed out, Americans are mature enough to accept and in fact support our many ongoing military obligations around the world. What they were unwilling to support was a high level of American casualties and an absence of any strategy for reducing them.

So the Democrats have boxed themselves into rooting against victory in a war that their arch enemy Bush began and that their new opponent vows to win. Hillary Clinton promises to "win the war in Afghanistan and end the one in Iraq." The inconvenient truth is that the reasons for prevailing in Afghanistan apply equally in Iraq and the consequences of losing in Iraq would be just as dire as a defeat in Afghanistan.

For now she and the other Democrats have no other position they can advocate. To change course would mean that Bush and McCain were right and they were wrong about the surge's success. They therefore continue to tell us that all is lost and nothing has changed.

They have every right do so, of course. And voters have every right to pick a president who does not live in a political fantasyland.

See also, "Debating the Invasion of Iraq," and "The Lessons of Iraq."

Hezbollah Calls to "Wipe Israel Out of Existence"

Eric Trager, at Commentary, argues that Hezbollah's statement calling to "wipe Israel out of existence" puts Iran's call to wipe Israel off the map in a new light:

In a fiery speech marking forty days since the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah declared that “The Zionist entity can be wiped out of existence!” Of course, by evoking the image of “wiping,” Nasrallah is adopting the rhetoric of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who famously called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” at the 2005 “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran.

Or did he? Just as Ahmadinejad’s “wipe” statement was drawing widespread international condemnation, Juan Cole insisted that Ahmadinejad had been mistranslated. According to Cole, Ahmadinejad’s quotation had come from a Khomeini speech, which stated that, “the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time.” Cole viewed this distinction as significant, writing that the media’s translation gave the false “impression that [Ahmadinejad] wants to play Hitler to Israel’s Poland, mobilizing an armored corps to move in and kill people.” Cole repeated his revisionist claim in a recent Washington Post article, saying that Ahmadinejad was not calling for the “Nazi-style extermination of a people,” but rather expressing his wish that the Israeli government would disappear.

Nasrallah’s speech demonstrates the complete irrelevance of Cole’s argument. Indeed, the Arabic phrase that Nasrallah employs is unambiguous in supporting the utter destruction of Israel, both as a state and a people. Nasrallah begins this section of his speech by declaring that the 2006 Lebanon war exposed Israelis’ weakness: whereas the Lebanese and Palestinians have endured 60 years of displacement, “the Israelis could not endure displacement or living in shelters for 33 days.” Israel’s “loss,” Nasrallah continues, has created “the possibility of a new answer” to the question “can Israel be wiped from existence?” Na’am, wa’alf na’am yumkin an tazul Isra’il min al-wujud (”Yes, and one thousand yeses, it is possible to wipe Israel from existence!”) says Nasrallah.

If Cole objects to my translation of “tazul . . min al-wujud” as “wipe . . . from existence”–”tazul” generally means “cease”–he will first have to correct Hezbollah’s own al-Manar English website. The satellite news channel similarly embraced the terminology of “wiping” in its own translation of Nasrallah’s speech.

When Cole first disputed the translation of Ahmadinejad’s speech back in 2005, he accused “powerful political forces in Washington” of cooking up the “wipe” quotation as a pretext for war on Iran. Nasrallah’s speech should force him to rethink this conspiracy theory. After all, whether or not Ahmadinejad’s speech can be translated as having called for “wiping” Israel off the map, Hezbollah–which has already called for an “open war” on Israel and serves as Iran’s Lebanese appendage–has taken liberties to interpret it as such.

Trager shouldn't hold his breath. Cole and all the academic backers of Israel's enemies will just find some new spin or translation to excuse Hezbollah's campaign to destroy the Jewish state.

Racial Progress for Idiots (or Racists)

Race still matters in American society, especially for those on the left, as they can use it to bludgeon any conservative who suggests that black Americans today have made real progress.

I made this point yesterday, with some examples, in my entry, "Race Still Matters, Obviously: Or, Talking About Black Bitches and Whores."

I cited Bill Kristol at the post, who argued that we didn't need a national conservsation on race, and that America has done "pretty well" in overcoming its national divisions since the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. Kristol indicated, though, that whenever commentators ask society to look within - to stress that civil rights progress has to begin at home, with personal achievement and family culture - they are "unfairly pilloried."

Well, now it's Kristol's turn.

Ari Berman throws out the racism card against Kristol at the Nation:

Preeminent neocon and newly-minted New York Times columnist Bill Kristol embarrassed himself last week by incorrectly stating that Barack Obama was present for one of Jeremiah Wright's fiery sermons and for neglecting to mention that his information came from the notoriously untrustworthy right-wing tabloid, Newsmax.com.

Now Kristol has embarrassed himself again this week by stating, in the wake of Obama's speech on race, that racism is not really a problem in America. "The last thing we need now is a heated national conversation about race," Kristol writes. "Racial progress has in fact continued in America. A new national conversation about race isn't necessary to end what Obama calls the 'racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years' -- because we're not stuck in such a stalemate."

Kristol provides no empirical evidence to back up such an ignorant claim. He fails to mention, for instance, that 50 percent of African-American men in New York City were unemployed as of 2004; or that 1 in 10 black men in their 20s are behind bars; or that more than half of all black men in inner cities do not finish high school; or that the subprime lending crisis is considered to be "the greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern US history," according to United for a Fair Economy.

Of course we've made racial progress in America--and Obama is a testament to that. But only an idiot (or a racist) would allege that racism does not remain a major problem in our country, and that we don't need to do a lot more to address it. Kristol is not an idiot, he just plays one on the Times op-ed page.

His spectacularly bad judgment on the war in Iraq was reason enough to oppose Kristol's appointment as a Times columnist. The Times' own ombudsman called the hiring of Kristol a "mistake." It's worse than that. His basic disregard for facts of any kind is well beneath the Times--or any self-respecting paper of record.

So, Kristol's called "ignorant," "an idiot (or a racist)," and he's pilloried for his "spectacularly bad judgment," with Iraq, no less, used as evidence (Kristol's judgement on that score's looking almost prescient, considering our success today)

Notice how Berman just rolls out the racial victimization shibboleths without any data of his own.

Nope, it's pretty much name-calling and rehashing the attacks on the Times for hiring Kristol in the first place. Just suggesting that we've made progress on civil rights - that blacks have done pretty well in the post-civil rights era - subjects one to such abuse and ridicule.

There's plenty of data available on black progress. Problems remain, of course, but it's undeniable that we've moved so far from the American Dilemma in a little over fifty years ago - at the time of Brown v. Board of Education - that it's journalist malpractice not to cite our gains.

We have a large and growing black middle class (here , here, and here), educational opportunities for blacks are more widely available than at any time in American history, and the number of black public officials at all levels of government has grown dramatical since the passage of the voting rights act in 1965. Barack Obama's own success, and his initial calls to transcend race, signify how far we've come as a people, one people committed to progress on racial equality.

This does not discount continuing poverty and problems of criminalization among the black lower third. But no matter how far we come, racial recrimination activists will refuse to see racial progress, they'll never suggest that the glass is half full. Instead, they'll brand those who do as idiots (or racists).

Dignity Promotion? The Obama Foreign Policy Doctrine

What would Barack Obama do in foreign policy? Bring the troops home? Champion the United Nations?

Sure, and a lot more that than, according to Spencer Ackerman at American Prospect. Obama's international policy is apparently the "most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades":

When Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama met in California for the Jan. 31 debate, their back-and-forth resembled their many previous encounters, with the Democratic presidential hopefuls scrambling for the small policy yardage between them. And then Obama said something about the Iraq War that wasn't incremental at all. "I don't want to just end the war," he said, "but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place."

Until this point in the primaries, Clinton and Obama had sounded very similar on this issue. Despite their differences in the past (Obama opposed the war, while Clinton voted for it), both were calling for major troop withdrawals, with some residual force left behind to hedge against catastrophe. But Obama's concise declaration of intent at the debate upended this assumption. Clinton stumbled to find a counterargument, eventually saying her vote in October 2002 "was not authority for a pre-emptive war." Then she questioned Obama's ability to lead, saying that the Democratic nominee must have "the necessary credentials and gravitas for commander in chief."

If Clinton's response on Iraq sounds familiar, that's because it's structurally identical to the defensive crouch John Kerry assumed in 2004: Voting against the war wasn't a mistake; the mistakes were all George W. Bush's, and bringing the war to a responsible conclusion requires a wise man or woman with military credibility. In that debate, Obama offered an alternative path. Ending the war is only the first step. After we're out of Iraq, a corrosive mind-set will still be infecting the foreign-policy establishment and the body politic. That rot must be eliminated.

Obama is offering the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades. It cuts to the heart of traditional Democratic timidity. "It's time to reject the counsel that says the American people would rather have someone who is strong and wrong than someone who is weak and right," Obama said in a January speech. "It's time to say that we are the party that is going to be strong and right." (The Democrat who counseled that Americans wanted someone strong and wrong, not weak and right? That was Bill Clinton in 2002.)

But to understand what Obama is proposing, it's important to ask: What, exactly, is the mind-set that led to the war? What will it mean to end it? And what will take its place?

To answer these questions, I spoke at length with Obama's foreign-policy brain trust, the advisers who will craft and implement a new global strategy if he wins the nomination and the general election. They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering "democracy promotion" agenda in favor of "dignity promotion," to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It's both and neither -- an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.

Read the whole thing.

There's much more under this than "dignity promotion."

Obama's positions are in essence the dream foreign policy of the antiwar left. When we hear the notion of ending "the mind-set that got us into war in the first place" and eliminating "the rot" in "the foreign-policy establishment and the body politic," we're looking at something a little more substantial than traditional isolationist (or realist) restraint in world politics.

In the quotes here, and in this discussion of "dignity promotion," we're seeing the advancement of a radical left-wing foreign policy agenda hopped-up in people-pleasing phraseology.

Ackerman, the author of this American Prospect piece, as well as folks like Matthew Yglesias, Glen Greenwald, and the terrorist-backers at Newshoggers, are as far from Democratic foreign policy centrism as one can imagine. True, they start with some elements of Clintonian liberal interationalism, but they modify it radically to import the full-blown antiwar foreign policy agenda that's been struggling to break out in the American left since Vietnam.

Note first what Charles Krauthammer indicates about liberal internationalism, which Ackerman cites with glee at the end of the essay:

They [the liberal internationalists] like to dream, and to the extent they are aware of our unipolar power, they don’t like it. They see its use for anything other than humanitarianism or reflexive self-defense as an expression of national selfishness. And they don’t just want us to ignore our unique power, they want us to yield it piece by piece, by subsuming ourselves in a new global architecture in which America becomes not the arbiter of international events, but a good and tame international citizen.

The key point here: Liberal internationalists abhor the use of power for raw realpolitik policy interests, like the protection of oil, or regime change to consolidate America primacy through Middle East democracy promotion.

But the very essence of this new "Obama Doctrine" is its antiwar essentialism. Obama's become the genuine antiwar candidate of the anti-Bush, anti-military forces of the left. With opposition to the Bush/Cheney regime becoming the key litmus test among Democratic Party activists, Obama's got the requisite bona fides for the nihilist hordes (even though, actually, Obama's war positions have been fairly malleable).

For this faction, opposition to the Bush administration and Iraq is rooted in the maturation of antiwar ideology emerging from the Vietnam era. It's composed of the complete moral and political condemnation of the use of American military force. This position has become an unquestionable aspect of left-wing politics. It's preached like gospel, and any advocate for the robust use of military power is pilloried as nothing less than a stormtrooper in a new fascist project of imperial domination. This ideology goes behind mere policy differences, to utter demonization, to the most extraordinarily venomous displays of hatred to any and all things supportive of martial traditionalism in American domestic politics.

Take Ackerman, for example. While he's by day an apparently respectable correspondent at the American Prospect, he's also a prominent attack blogger for the new left-wing blogging commentariat. His blog postings are extremely vile and derogatory, marking some whacked alterego style of antiwar writings. Perhaps the use of four-letter expletives gives more incendiary power to his condemations of the war.

Either way, his oeuvre's representative of much of the commentary among current antiwar radicals who're positioning their work as some righteous new model of foreign policy expertise in the age of online political mobilization.

This is why Obama's purported "transformative" agenda of "dignity promotion" is pumped up by Ackerman with an almost fanatical religious breathlessness. An Obama adminstration provides the best chance for the radical left to implement a drastically new direction in American international affairs - a "most sweeping liberal foreign-policy" for the 21st century.

See more analysis at Memeorandum.

Race Still Matters, Obviously: Or, Talking About Black Bitches and Whores

Barack Obama's Wright controversy is forcing a genuine national conversation on race, something the Clinton adminisration's national race initiative failed to do.

For all of his talk of racial transcendance, as George Packer indicates, Obama can't get away from the issue - indeed, he's haunted by it, which has become increasingly clear in the aftermath of the Illinois Senator's speech last week on race and religion in America:

The political heart of the speech and of his campaign is a call to Americans of all races to come together, on the basis of hopes and concerns that unite them, especially economic ones. He spoke of black Americans “binding our particular grievances—for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs—to the larger aspirations of all Americans: the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family.” Obama’s character and candidacy offer a way out of the divisive identity politics that has, in part, cost the Democratic Party its majority status since the nineteen-sixties.

Packer, of course, discusses campaign '08's build-up to Wright's "God Damn America" moment, including the Clinton campaign's own sleazy racial pandering.

But the larger point underneath all of this - that Obama's the messenger to bind all races together - is simply nonsense. It's not that Obama's insincere, he's just too caught up in the politics of racial polarization to lead us to the promised land. The fact is, we're not going to have a meaningful discussion of race when all hard-left elements of the political system remain so deeply invested in the politics of grievance, victimhood, and racial demonization. Unfortunately for Obama, he's right smack-dab in the middle of it.

Note what Bill Kristol suggests this morning on the idea of a national conversation on race:

The last thing we need now is a heated national conversation about race.

What we need instead are sober, results-oriented debates about economics, social mobility, education, family policy and the like — focused especially on how to help those who are struggling. Such policy debates can lead to real change — even “change we can believe in.” “National conversations” tend to be pointless and result-less.

Or worse. Especially when they’re about race. In 1969, Pat Moynihan, then serving on Richard Nixon’s White House staff, wrote Nixon a memo explaining that “the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect.’ The subject has been too much talked about. ... We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades.” Moynihan, who was reacting against the wild escalation of racial rhetoric on all sides, was unfairly pilloried when the memo was leaked in 1970. But he was right then, and his argument is right now.

Unfairly pilloried?

I'll say. But it's par for the course when commentators want to talk about deep issues of race and mobility in America, especially questions of culture and personal responsibility. At the first mention of black racial deviation from America's historic norms of individualism and the culture of achievement, one is immediatly branded a racist.

Take this weekend's racial controversy around the blogosphere: Yesterday Glenn Greenwald tried to take down Glenn Reynolds and his Easter post linking to Instapunk. It turns out that Instapunk's a group blog with some decidedly politically incorrect comments on race, including the deployment of the "n-word."

Just linking to the entry's apparently turned Reynolds in some grand kleagle white supremacist, according to the cries of outrage. This morning, for example, Lawyers, Guns and Money links Reynolds to the League of the South, a neo-separatist group with ties to the Ku Klux Klan (see also yesterday's blogging links at Memeorandum).

Tom Maguire's also discussing the issue with a post today. He notes Instapunk's obvious political incorrectness, but also notes how just raising questions of race and culture elicits the most vituperative attacks from the left:

Frankly, there is very little in his post I would be inclined to defend, but I would be very curious to learn how widely held his viewpoints might be. As an example, I would guess his aversion to the hip-hop gangsta sub-culture is widely shared.

Well. Rather than trying to look for the message in his message, the Usual Suspects, led by Glenn Greenwald, seized on the offensive sections as an opportunity to brand Glenn Reynolds and the entire conservative movement as racists.

I'm part of that conservative movement, it turns out.

In my post yesterday, I denounced Instapunk's use of the "n-word" as disgusting, but I also raised the point that questions of black culture are legitimate topics of discussion:

I would argue that Instapunk's indeed way out of the mainstream of the appropriate bounds of conservative discussion (or more precisely, language), [yet] I too feel like "smacking" guys with their pants hanging down to their hamstrings.

Am I a racist because I find that culture not only offensive, but one of the greatest challenges to black progress in the post-Civil Rights era?Hardly.

Bill Cosby makes many of the same points.

The reference to Cosby dates to his speech in 2004 commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board decision striking down Plessy v. Ferguson's "separate but equal" doctrine - the case seen as marking the beginning of the modern civil rights era. Cosby argued that many of today's blacks aren't holding up their end of the deal. Rights come hand-in-hand with responsibility, and America's black lower-third has broken its end of the bargain.

For raising these points I too have been attacked as racist. So note, it's not just explicitly deploying hate language that gets one labeled as racist, it's the act itself of raising important issues of black culture and responsibility (remember Bill Kristol's points above).

Well let me dwell on Bill Cosby a bit, as he's certainly one who can speak truth to power on this issue. He's spoken out much on black culture, not just on the 50th annniversary of Brown.

As Juan Williams indicates, Cosby addresses the self-defeating aspects of black behavior as part of his regular lectures, for example, in his discussions of predatory violence glorified in hip-hop music:

The raw charm of street kids boasting about the ability to rap, to put the most delightful rythyms together, was not immune from the darker forces in urban America....

Some of the gritty commentary was improvised reporting from the front lines of the increasingly violent streets of the black inner city during the explosion in violent crime that followed the crack epidemic. But before long the gritty street reporting gave way to nihilistic glorifications of the "thug life." Some of the biggest names in rap, such as Tupac Shakur, swallowed too much of their own poisonous outlaw fantasy and ended up in real-life violent confrontations with real-life controversies: prison, death. Along the same path to corruption, the early hip-hop tradition of young men bragging in their raps about being great, passionate lovers, took a wrong turn down a path degrading women as "whores" and "bitches." Time after time, raising the stakes in rap to get attention from listeners and record companies meant descending to self-hating vulgarity ... In this toxic punch, the power of good sex turned into crass odes to women showing their genitals ("Pop that pussy, ho")....

There was nothing preventing those songs from being recorded and released in massive numbers - except common sense. And common sense was dismissed by rappers and their corporate partners as feeble protests from stuck-up white people and bourgeoise black people who had lost touch with their ghetto roots ... Violence, murder, and self-hatred were marketed as true blackness - authentic black identity....

This led to one of the most interesting in-house social confrontations among black Americans so far in the twenty-first century. It is an argument that fits Bill Cosby's very public challenge to black people, especially the poor, to wise up and turn away from self-defeating behavior that limits their capacity to take advantage of the doors that opened in the fifty years since the Brown decision. Cosby specifically challenged young black women. Talking to a Milwaukee audience about rap music, he asked how many of the women considered themselves "bitches and hos." When no one raised a hand, a wide-eyed Cosby asked, "If you're not a bitch or a ho, why do you dance to that music?"
Good question.

In his interview for this book, Cosby took an even harder line on hip-hop. He pointed to a conversation with the president of Morgan State University about how young black people dress when they first come to the Baltimore school. The young women dress like prostitutes and the young men come in looking like thugs, Cosby said, as a result of rap filling radio and TV with distorted images of black people that have nothing do do with a history of self-determinatinon or pride.

Now, one can see where I'm coming from when I say, "I too feel like "smacking" guys with their pants hanging down to their hamstrings."

I teach kids like this, semester after semester. I see their academic failures first-hand. I talk to students who have no idea what a culture of academic achievement looks like. But I never give up. I never descend to lowering expectations, a true bigotry of there ever was one. I teach, tutor, and mentor, but I don't excuse the failure to master English as the result of lingering disadvantages of slavery and Jim Crow. In other words, I don't cave in to the cult of racial victimology.

An African-American today has more opportunity than at any time in American history. It's not "insitutional racism" that's holding folks back, in my view. It's the ever increasing culture of victimology and racial greivance, exacerbated by the lack of self-pride that Cosby attacks.

It's not racist to point these things out.

Liberal critics of conservatives will always raise the race card as long as there's profit to be made as a racial "challenger." Obama wants to be a racial bargainer, one who assumes good natured, honest motivations and sentiments among white Americans today. Racial challengers assume whites are closet bigots, and they've got to prove that they're down with the victimology agenda before they can get hip with the racial sensitivity mandarins of the left.

So let's bring this discusson full circle. Is Obama the "one"? Is he the messenger of true racial healing in America today? He still has potential, as Packer points out:

Obama is staking his campaign on the very point ... that the dreams and interests of hard-pressed Americans are more important than matters of race. Democrats have been trying to make that argument for a long time, while Republicans have been winning elections. For half a century, right-wing populism has been the most successful political force in America, aided greatly by the tendency of liberals to fall into the competing claims of identity groups. Obama is a black candidate who can tell Americans of all races to move beyond race. As such, he is uniquely positioned to put an end to this era, and uniquely vulnerable to becoming its latest victim.

I'll have more on this topic in future posts. In the meantime, see more commentary at Memeorandum.

Photo Credit: New York Times

Obama Speech Fails to Defuse Wright Attacks

John Heilemann makes the case that Barack Obama's Philadelphia speech on race and religion failed to put the Wright controversy to bed as an election issue. GOP operatives see the Wright videos as "the gift that keeps on giving":

Few events in this relentlessly eventful campaign season have felt as momentous, as freighted with portent, as the speech that Barack Obama delivered last week on race. As a piece of rhetoric, Obama’s address was pretty much everything one could ever hope for from a presidential candidate on the vexed topic of black and white: nuanced, candid, gutsy, and replete with context. But Obama’s oration was more than a speech—it was a political maneuver. And, as such, at least in the short term, it was as nearly as effective as it was eloquent and erudite. It helped Obama move past the raging controversy stirred up by the rantings of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It put him back on the elevated plane where he thrives. And, in the words of one Democratic strategist, “It strummed the mystic chords of the press corps, which has been south on him since Ohio and Texas.”

In the longer term, however, Obama’s speech did nothing to defuse an issue that Republicans clearly intend to beat him senseless with this fall—assuming that, as seems increasingly likely, he secures the Democratic nomination. Quite the contrary.

In GOP circles, the incendiary video clips of Obama’s former pastor are seen, not surprisingly, as a gift that will keep on giving. And indeed, the furor around them has caused Republican strategists to rethink their preconceptions about whether Obama or Hillary Clinton would be a more formidable general-election opponent against John McCain. “Once, there was a clear impression that he would be tougher,” a senior McCain adviser tells me. “But, after these past few weeks, I don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

Heilemann goes on to indicate how Obama's vulnerable to GOP opposition attacks: He's a dissembler who's beginning to sound like Bill Clinton in his parsing evasions, and his refusal to disown Wright makes him vulnerable to ideological attacks, that he's aligned with the far-left fringes of the Democratic Party.

Here's the key passage:

Which brings us back to Obama. The hard guys of the Republican Party have no intention of trying to paint the hope- monger as a closet black nationalist. They intend to portray him as insufficiently allegiant to his nation. They will weave together Wright’s “God damn America” with Michelle Obama’s statement that this is the “first time” she has been “proud of my country,” Obama’s eschewal of the American-flag lapel pin, and a piece of video that captures him standing at a campaign event without his hand over his heart during the national anthem. And, in fact, a trio of right-wing activists have already thrown together a video doing just that: For a picture of what the fall campaign will look like, just go to YouTube and type in “Is Obama Wright?”

The "Is Obama Wright?" video is over the top, but more respectable videos will be produced - short and sweet, like campaign spots - and they'll be devastating.

I disagree with the point about Obama and black nationalism, or at least I think there's more to it.

Reverend Wright proselytizes black liberation theology, as he's stated during interviews. Black liberation is his church doctrine, and Obama's been a loyal member of the flock since 1991. Until the Illinois Senator renounces all ties to Reverend Wright, the relative importance of black nationalist ideology will remain in play as a campaign issue.

America Remains a Majority Christian Nation

Via Chatterbox Chronicles, check out this YouTube showing clips from "The Passion of the Christ" with a soundrack from Jeremy Camp's song "This Man":

Also, on this Easter, note the results of Gallup's new poll showing a strong majority of Americans identifying as Christian:

Easter is a Christian celebration, and a review of Gallup polling continues to reveal a nation that remains strongly Christian in its religious orientation.

Gallup data show that 79% of Americans currently identify as Christian -- either Protestant, Roman Catholic, or some other Christian religion.

Given that about 14% of Americans in Gallup's surveys either say they have no religion or refuse to answer, the proportion of Americans who identify themselves with a particular Christian religion rises to about 92%.

The poll also indicates that nearly two-thirds of Americans planned on attending Easter services this weekend.

This is great news, especially coming as it does when the country's been dragged through a devilishly horrendous round of America-bashing in the images of black liberation from the sermons of Jeremiah Wright.

Here's to wishing all of my readers a peacefully wonderful Easter holiday.

Glenn Greenwald's Guilt by Association

There's a lot of talk about guilt by association this week, with Obama's Wright controversy still dominating the media chatter.

Obviously, one ought to be careful in making overly broad denuncations of Obama's ties to the hate-filled fringe of his party. My view is that the Wright issue has fundamentally clarified matters for us, and that Obama's embrace of his pastor as family - and his claims that he can no more renounce him than he could his own grandmother - suggest that the closeness of the Illinois Senator to the most anti-American theo-ideological currents should not go without notice.

So what's the tactic of the some of the left blogosphere who cheer sentiments like Jeremiah Wright's? Well, how about demonizing the GOP for its own alleged base exclusionism and racism? This is exactly what Glenn Greenwald does in his entry this morning?

It turns out that Glenn Reynolds has linked to a blog called "Instapunk," which has an interesting Easter post up this morning. Make what you want of it. For Greenwald, however, some additional Instapunk postings apparently open up a purported subterranean world of conservative evil essence:

Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds today linked to what he called "EASTER THOUGHTS" from one of his favorite right-wing bloggers, his namesake, "Instapunk." That Easter post has a large picture of a crucified Christ along with a lovely religious poem.

Immediately beneath that righteous celebration of Easter is a somewhat less charitable post purporting to take up Barack Obama's invitation to speak about race. After listing a few black entertainers and sports figures he says he likes, here are some of the thoughts Instapunk offers on race:

On the other hand, I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn't it? I live in an eastern state almost exactly on the fabled Mason-Dixon line. Every day I see young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees -- and jeans belted just above their knees. I'm an old guy. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It's impossible not to think the unthinkable N-Word when they roll up beside you at a stoplight in their trashed old Hondas with 19-inch spinner wheels and rap recordings that shake the foundations of the buildings. . . .

Here's the dirty secret all of us know and no one will admit to. There ARE niggers. Black people know it. White people know it. And only black people are allowed to notice and pronounce the truth of it. Which would be fine. Except that black people are not a community but a political party. They can squabble with each other in caucus but they absolutely refuse to speak the truth in public. And this is the single biggest obstacle to healing the racial divide in this country.

This is disgusting, obviously.

Now, while I would argue that Instapunk's indeed way out of the mainstream of the appropriate bounds of conservative discussion (or more precisely, language), I too feel like "smacking" guys with their pants hanging down to their hamstrings.

Am I a racist because I find that culture not only offensive, but one of the greatest challenges to black progress in the post-Civil Rights era?

Hardly. Bill Cosby makes many of the same points.

But here's more from Greenwald on how this is supposed to be representative of conservative ideology:

This is just a slightly more explicit version of what one hears on so much right-wing talk radio, beginning with conservative hero Rush Limbaugh. Why is there so much hatred and extremism in black churches? Let's talk more and more about all the racism and radicalism among isolated black people and ignore the endless bile that has long spewed forth from the far more powerful appendages of the right-wing noise-machine, exemplified by Instapunk's Easter meditation on race.

While the dominant political faction in the United States built itself and continues to feed and nourish itself with this sort of endless exploitation of racial resentments and grievances -- and while it openly embraces far more powerful religious fanatics who espouse ideas at least as radical and repugnant as anything Jeremiah Wright has ever said -- let's spend the next eight months talking about the controversial comments of a single, comparatively powerless black preacher and have our presidential election decided by that.

Greenwald then updates with some thoughts on the remarks of one of his commenters, who argues that modern conservativism is marked by a sense of "threatened tribalism":

There is no better phrase to describe the animating feature of the modern Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox News conservative faction than "threatened tribalism." The belief that they are good and pure, yet subjected to unprecedented systematic unfairness and threatened by some lurking Evil Other against whom war must be waged (the Muslim, the Immigrant, the Terrorist, the Communist, the Liberal, the Welfare Queen) is the centerpiece of their ugly worldview.

The sentiments expressed here by Instapunk are now most commonly expressed towards the New Enemy -- the Muslim -- but the Wright episode is a nice reminder of how seamlessly it gets directed towards a whole host of other threatening, bad groups. Hence the blithe application of the term "sleeper cells" to black Americans. That's what coalesces them and justifies everything. What matters is that there be some scary, malicious group about to harm them and America. The identity of the particular scary group at any given moment is really secondary.

This is classic Greenwaldian analysis. He sees in every element of conservative cultural criticism a millenarian worldview puportedly geared to the ultimate revival of some 1000-year reich.

Note how Greenwald never denounces the terrorists. He never distances himself from those who leveled the Twin Towers in 2001, from those who beheaded Daniel Pearl in 2002, from the Islamic funamentalists seeking to establish a caliphate across the Mideast, from the Palestianians who work toward the destuction of Israel, from the suicide bombers in Iraq today who kill American soldiers in their nihilist bids for eternal martyrdom.

Nope, it's always the evil Bush/Cheney regime in Washington, and the Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox News conservative faction, who pose the greatest threat to America.

Don't believe it for a second.

Greenwald is feted around the left blogosphere as some deep thinking intellectual pathbreaker, unlocking the keys to some subterranean conservative power elite seeking to implant a far-right theo-fascist dictatorship in the United States.

Instapunk's post is intemperate in its choice of words. The "n-word" is disgusting. The point in question, on the other hand, needs way more discussion in this country. One of the main reasons we don't see such frank discussion is that those who open up this can of worms are labeled racists and modern tribalists. Most people are harassed into silence for even raising such sensitive but troubling topics.

It's too bad too, because the goal of Greenwald and his allies on the left is to install their own version of a far-left wing utopian state. The unflinching support for Obama on the far left - amid the tremendously clarifying round of racial politics in the Wright affair - shows how close the radicals are to achieving their aims of establishing multicultural collectivism as the dominant ideology of Democratic Party governance this year.

Think about that when reading Greenwald's attacks on the Republican Party, and the alleged free ride its getting on the issues of race and politics today. Now that's some guilt by association.

See more at Memeorandum.

What Post-Racial Candidate?

Mark Steyn's essay this morning is a penetrating analysis of Barack Obama's hypocrisy and moral equivalence:

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, two-decade pastor to the president presumptive. The Rev. Wright believes that AIDS was created by the government of the United States – and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Rev. Wright knows the truth. "The government lied," he told his flock, "about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied."

Does he really believe this? If so, he's crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years.

Or is he just saying it? In which case, he's profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDS is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you'll know that it's within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you're told that it's just whitey's latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it's out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior....

The Rev. Wright has a hugely popular church with over 8,000 members, and Sen. Obama assures us that his pastor does good work by "reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS." But maybe he wouldn't have to quite so much "reaching out" to do and maybe there wouldn't be quite so many black Americans "suffering from HIV/AIDS" if the likes of Wright weren't peddling lunatic conspiracy theories to his own community.

Nonetheless, last week, Barack Obama told America: "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community."

What is the plain meaning of that sentence? That the paranoid racist ravings of Jeremiah Wright are now part of the established cultural discourse in African American life and thus must command our respect? Let us take the senator at his word when he says he chanced not to be present on AIDS Conspiracy Sunday, or God Damn America Sunday, or US of KKKA Sunday, or the Post-9/11 America-Had-It-Coming Memorial Service. A conventional pol would have said he was shocked, shocked to discover Afrocentric black liberation theology going on at his church. But Obama did something far more audacious: Instead of distancing himself from his pastor, he attempted to close the gap between Wright and the rest of the country, arguing, in effect, that the guy is not just his crazy uncle but America's, too.

To do this, Obama promoted a false equivalence. "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother," he continued. "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." Well, according to the way he tells it in his book, it was one specific black man on her bus, and he wasn't merely "passing by."

When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest Cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: "Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life." In Philadelphia, Sen. Obama topped that: Greater love hath no man than to lay down his grandma for his life.

In the days that followed, Obama's interviewers seemed grateful for the introduction of a less-complicated villain: Unlike the Rev. Wright, she doesn't want God to damn America for being no better than al-Qaida, but on the other hand she did once express her apprehension about a black man on the bus. It's surely only a matter of days before Keith Olbermann on MSNBC names her his "Worst Person In The World". Asked about the sin of racism beating within Grandma's breast, Obama said on TV that "she's a typical white person."

Which doesn't sound like the sort of thing the supposed "post-racial" candidate ought to be saying, but let that pass. How "typically white" is Obama's grandmother? She is the woman who raised him – that's to say, she brought up a black grandchild and loved him unconditionally. Burning deep down inside, she may nurse a secret desire to be Simon Legree or Bull Connor, but it doesn't seem very likely. She does then, in her own flawed way, represent a post-racial America.

But what of her equivalent (as Obama's speech had it)? Is Jeremiah Wright a "typical black person"? One would hope not. A century and a half after the Civil War, two generations after the Civil Rights Act, the Rev. Wright promotes victimization theses more insane than anything promulgated at the height of slavery or the Jim Crow era. You can understand why Obama is so anxious to meet with President Ahmadinejad, a man who denies the last Holocaust even as he plans the next one. Such a summit would be easy listening after the more robust sermons of Jeremiah Wright.

But America is not Ahmadinejad's Iran. Free societies live in truth, not in the fever swamps of Jeremiah Wright. The pastor is a fraud, a crock, a mountebank – for, if this truly were a country whose government invented a virus to kill black people, why would they leave him walking around to expose the truth? It is Barack Obama's choice to entrust his daughters to the spiritual care of such a man for their entire lives, but in Philadelphia the senator attempted to universalize his peculiar judgment – to claim that, given America's history, it would be unreasonable to expect black men of Jeremiah Wright's generation not to peddle hateful and damaging lunacies. Isn't that – what's the word? – racist? So much for the post-racial candidate.

I agree.

Hillary Clinton was right, some time back, when she pointed out how the media's giving Obama a free ride.

The Illinois Senator loves to talk of post-partisan political transcendance, but the events this last week have clarified the true stakes in this election. Traditional conservatives know that the key issue in this campaign is about protecting the fundamental goodness of our nation. We have big public policy issues before us,of course, but we also face this year the crucible of national identity.

How's it going to be? Will the preachers of "God Damn America" have a hearing on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue come January?

Democrats Stuck in Muck of Race, Gender, and Hatred

I think Michael Goodwin raises some interesting points in his essay on the Democratic nomination, especially how the party's mired in the nasty politics of racial grievance and America-bashing.

But he probably misses some key issues of concern: For all the outrage, Obama's getting a pass from the left-wing Democratic establishment already inclined toward the Illinois Senator, and with presssure mounting on the superdelegates to get behind the Obama movement, we could indeed see much of the divisive radicalism of race, gender, and anti-Americanism finding a home in the Oval Office.

Here's Goodwin:

Despite their frantic efforts to one-up each other on issues large and small, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could soon find themselves sharing the same unhappy burden: the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Unless one of them can find the courage and the sense to forcefully denounce the black pastor, Clinton and Obama both could end up watching John McCain get elected President.

Midway through the second week of the Wright fiasco, and five days after Obama tried to cool the boiling issue with an important speech on race, it is increasingly clear we are witnessing a Democratic train wreck. For months, the collision has been unfolding in slow motion as the closely fought campaign worked its way across the country and the chances for a clear winner slipped away one state at a time.

Suddenly, the wreck is happening at full speed. The dream team is looking like a nightmare.

Race was always a touchy subject, but not the dominant one, at least on the surface. Now there is no other issue.

With only 10 contests left, the campaign is turning on Wright's outlandish anti-American statements and Obama's tepid reaction to them. Obama seems flummoxed by the complexities of the racial polarization he promised to heal and the party is being divided in a way that could sink him. He's even making things worse for himself as his silver tongue has gotten tied in knots.

Polls in Pennsylvania and nationally show that Obama's otherwise-thoughtful speech last week failed to solve the political problem Wright created. Whites are shifting to Clinton or, in hypothetical general election matchups, to McCain.

For those voters, Wright is a clear yes or no question. Trying to split the difference, however amiably, as Obama did by rejecting Wright's most inflammatory comments while also sympathetically explaining them and equating them to white frustrations, created a muddle that has reinforced doubts about Obama's convictions and values.

The fact is, while facing a backlash, Obama's not lost that much ground to Clinton in public opinion, and he's so far steaming along toward victory at the convention.

As for the general election, Goodwin notes:

You can't be a President if you won't stand up to an anti-American bigot. More to the point, you can't become President by running against the country or having people around you who hate it.

On principle he's right. But politically, with all the other issues going on this year - the economy, health care, and so forth - it's going to take a good number of disgusted independent voters to swing over to the GOP side.

We'll need to see how public opinion trends develop before we fully discount the possiblity of an Obama victory in November.

The Dangerous Power of Radical Islam

Some time back, I read Paul Berman's penetrating treatise on the challenge of post-9/11 Islamist extremism, Terror and Liberalism. It's a must read.

Berman, who's intellectually to the left of the spectrum, woke up to the terrorist challenge like many other liberal hawks after the collapse of the Twin Towers.

He's got an essay today at the New York Times, "Why Radical Islam Just Won’t Die." Check it out:

THE big surprise, viewed from my own narrow perspective five years later, has taken place in the mysterious zones of extremist ideology. In the months and weeks before the invasion of Iraq, I wrote quite a lot about ideology in the Middle East, and especially about the revolutionary political doctrine known as radical Islamism.

I tried to show that radical Islamism is a modern philosophy, not just a heap of medieval prejudices. In its sundry versions, it draws on local and religious roots, just as it claims to do. But it also draws on totalitarian inspirations from 20th-century Europe. I wanted my readers to understand that with its double roots, religious and modern, perversely intertwined, radical Islamism wields a lot more power, intellectually speaking, than naïve observers might suppose.

I declared myself happy in principle with the notion of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, just as I was happy to see the Taliban chased from power. But I wanted everyone to understand that military action, by itself, could never defeat an ideology like radical Islamism — could never contribute more than 10 percent (I invented this statistic, as an illustrative figure) to a larger solution. I hammered away on that point in the days before the war. And today I have to acknowledge that, for all my hammering, radical Islamism, in several of its resilient branches, the ultra-radical and the beyond-ultra-radical, has proved to be stronger even than I suggested....

The entire sequence of events [since the invasino of Iraq] may suggest that America is uniquely destined to do the wrong thing. All too likely! But it may also suggest that America is not the fulcrum of the universe, and extremist ideologies have prospered because of their own ability to adapt and survive — their strength, in a word.

I notice a little gloomily that I may have underestimated the extremist ideologies in still another respect. Five years ago, anyone who took an interest in Middle Eastern affairs would easily have recalled that, over the course of a century, the intellectuals of the region have gone through any number of phases — liberal, Marxist, secularist, pious, traditionalist, nationalist, anti-imperialist and so forth, just like intellectuals everywhere else in the world.

Western intellectuals without any sort of Middle Eastern background would naturally have manifested an ardent solidarity with their Middle Eastern and Muslim counterparts who stand in the liberal vein — the Muslim free spirits of our own time, who argue in favor of human rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open society.

But that was then. In today’s Middle East, the various radical Islamists, basking in their success, paint their liberal rivals and opponents as traitors to Muslim civilization, stooges of crusader or Zionist aggression. And, weirdly enough, all too many intellectuals in the Western countries have lately assented to those preposterous accusations, in a sanitized version suitable for Western consumption.

Even in the Western countries, quite a few Muslim liberals, the outspoken ones, live today under a threat of assassination, not to mention a reality of character assassination. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch legislator and writer, is merely an exceptionally valiant example. But instead of enjoying the unstinting support of their non-Muslim colleagues, the Muslim liberals find themselves routinely berated in the highbrow magazines and the universities as deracinated nonentities, alienated from the Muslim world. Or they find themselves pilloried as stooges of the neoconservative conspiracy — quite as if any writer from a Muslim background who fails to adhere to at least a few anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist tenets of the Islamist doctrine must be incapable of thinking his or her own thoughts.

A dismaying development. One more sign of the power of the extremist ideologies — one more surprising turn of events, on top of all the other dreadful and gut-wrenching surprises.

I'd like to see Berman elaborate his points further, particulary with regard to the United States in Iraq.

You see, Berman took the entire foreign policy establishment to task Terror and Liberalism. National security elites, in his view, have not taken new threats as seriously as they should, and while he suggests here that we've perhaps made mistakes in Iraq - even, let's say, stoked the hornet's nest - he illustrates that it's not essentially U.S. policy that is the danger, but Islamist fundamentalism outright.

That's a point the radical left cannot accept. To them the greatest danger is the U.S. and America's alleged neo-imperialism. Consequently, some activists on the hard-left work to aid the forces of Islamist terror in the destruction of our country.

So in that sense, there remains some of that "ardent solidarity" Berman mentions, a solidarity on working toward the utter annihilation of the world's leading liberal capitalist state.

For more to that effect, see my previous post, "Where's the Revolution? Wait Until November".

Where's the Revolution? Wait Until November

We're having quite a bit of antiwar activity these days, but such action appears nowhere near the scale of 1960s radicalism.

For true revolutionaries, today's events signal the lost promise of radical left politics. Tariq Ali, a British public intellectual of Pakistani background, and a member the editorial board of the New Left Review, has an essay at the Guardian lamenting the failure of revolutionary action in today's left wing movement:

A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the US against a poor south-east Asian country was seen every night on television. The cumulative impact of watching the bombs drop, villages on fire and a country being doused with napalm and Agent Orange triggered a wave of global revolts not seen on such a scale before or since.

If the Vietnamese were defeating the world's most powerful state, surely we, too, could defeat our own rulers: that was the dominant mood among the more radical of the 60s generation....

History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away. In the autumn of 2004, when I was in the US on a lecture tour that coincided with Bush's re-election campaign, I noticed at a large antiwar meeting in Madison a very direct echo in a utopian bumper sticker: "Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam." The sound engineer in the hall, a Mexican-American, whispered proudly in my ear that his son, a 25- year-old marine, had just returned from a tour of duty in the besieged Iraqi city of Fallujah, the scene of horrific massacres by US soldiers, and may show up at the meeting. He didn't, but joined us later with a couple of civilian friends. He could see the room was packed with antiwar, anti-Bush activists.

The young, crewcut marine, G, recounted tales of duty and valour. I asked why he had joined the marine corps. "There was no choice for people like me. If I'd stayed here, I'd have been killed on the streets or ended up in the penitentiary serving life. The marine corps saved my life. They trained me, looked after me and changed me completely. If I died in Iraq, at least it would be the enemy that killed me. In Fallujah, all I could think of was how to make sure that the men under my command were kept safe. That's all. Most of the kids demonstrating for peace have no problems here. They go to college, they demonstrate and soon they forget it all as they move into well-paid jobs. It's not so easy for people like me. I think there should be a draft. Why should poor kids be the only ones out there? Out of all the marines I work with, perhaps four or five percent are gung-ho flag-wavers. The rest of us are doing a job, we do it well and hope we get out without being KIA [killed in action] or wounded."

Later, G sat on a sofa between two older men - both former combatants. On his left was Will Williams, 60, born in Mississipi, who had enlisted in the army aged 17. He was sure that, had he not left Mississippi, the Klu Klux Klan or some other racist gang would have killed him. He, too, told me that the military "saved my life"....

Following a difficult period readjusting, Williams read deeply in politics and history. Feeling that the country was being lied to again, he and Dot, his companion of over 43 years, joined the movement opposing the war in Iraq, bringing their Gospel choir voices to rallies and demonstrations.

On G's right was Clarence Kailin, 90 years old that summer and one of the few remaining survivors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade that had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. He, too, has been active in the movement against the war in Iraq. "Our trip was made in considerable secrecy - even from our families. I was a truck driver, then an infantry man and for a short time a stretcher-bearer. I saw the brutality of war up close. Of the five Wisconsinites who came to Spain with me, two were killed... later, there was Vietnam and this time kids from here died on the wrong side. Now we have Iraq. It's really bad, but I still believe there is an innate goodness in people, which is why so many can break with unworthy pasts."

In 2006, after another tour of duty, G could no longer accept any justification for the war. He was admiring of Cindy Sheehan and the Military Families Against the War, the most consistently active and effective antiwar group in the US.

A decade before the French Revolution, Voltaire remarked that "History is the lies we agree on". Afterwards there was little agreement on anything. The debate on 1968 was recently revived by Nicolas Sarkozy, who boasted that his victory in last year's presidential elections was the final nail in the '68 coffin. The philosopher Alain Badiou's tart response was to compare the new president of the republic to the Bourbons of 1815 and Marshal Pétain during the war. They, too, had talked about nails and coffins.

"May 1968 imposed intellectual and moral relaivism on us all," Sarkozy declared. "The heirs of May '68 imposed the idea that there was no longer any difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. The heritage of May 1968 introduced cynicism into society and politics."

He even blamed the legacy of May '68 for greedy and seedy business practices. The May '68 attack on ethical standards helped to "weaken the morality of capitalism, to prepare the ground for the unscrupulous capitalism of golden parachutes for rogue bosses". So the 60s generation is held responsible for Enron, Conrad Black, the subprime mortgage crisis, Northern Rock, corrupt politicians, deregulation, the dictatorship of the "free market", a culture strangled by brazen opportunism.

The struggle against the Vietnam war lasted 10 years. In 2003 people came out again in Europe and America, in even larger numbers, to try to stop the Iraq war. The pre-emptive strike failed. The movement lacked the stamina and the resonance of its predecessors. Within 48 hours it had virtually disappeared, highlighting the changed times.

Were the dreams and hopes of 1968 all idle fantasies? Or did cruel history abort something new that was about to be born? Revolutionaries - utopian anarchists, Fidelistas, Trotskyist allsorts, Maoists of every stripe - wanted the whole forest. Liberals and social democrats were fixated on individual trees. The forest, they warned us, was a distraction, far too vast and impossible to define, whereas a tree was a piece of wood that could be identified, improved and crafted into a chair or a table. Now the tree, too, has gone.

I concede that perhaps Sarkosy went a little far in assigning blame for the collapse of contemporary morality.

But what strikes me about Ali's essay is that which he laments: The failure to completely and decisively follow-up the burst of radical agitation in 1968 with a full-blown world social revolution toppling the capitalist classes in the industrialized West.

Perhaps Ali's just a wistful intellectual, ensconsed cozily in the editorial offices of his prominent left-wing journal of literature and politics.

But for the people on the streets today, the call to revolution is their siren. Code Pink not only breaches ethical protocols with events like the bloodspattering of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but the group's also allied with America's enemies with its financial support for terrorist organizations in the Mideast.

Another contemporary radical organization, the ANSWER Coalition, is composed of neo-Stalinists committed to the revolutionary destruction of the United States. Adam Kokesh, an ANSWER activist, once called for the deployment of American troops against the U.S. government: "It's too bad [the military is] stretched too thin to strike America."

As Ali's essay suggests, today's radical activism hasn't reached the same levels of generational outrage of the 1960s. As of yet, for example, the antiwar movement has failed to bring an end to war in Iraq.

But that's not reason to think these people are without influence.

The antiwar netroots have had a significant effect on electoral politics, and their hope is to elect a radical to the White House in November. Their candidate: Barack Obama. It's no wonder too. The Illinois Senator's refused to renounce his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons blamed the United States for September 11. Indeed, Obama has a long tradition of residing on the fringes of anti-establishment politics.

Gerard Baker, last month at the Times of London, unequivocally called Barack Obama a "dangerous left-winger."

Perhaps the unconventional street protests for which Ali longs - direct action geared to revolution - have gone that way of the Edsel, to be replaced fortuitously by the growth in success of far left-wing poltics via the electoral process. Such a development has equally revolutionary implications.

As I noted earlier, the Democratic Party's Hollywood base has already moved on from the Wright scandal, working to again position Obama as the political superstar of the American left.

The radical blogosphere loves Obama, of course, and has never flinched in their support - indeed, they cheer Obama's regular expressions of anti-patriotism. The hard left sees in Obama the chance to establish a collectivist U.S. government, complete with all the anti-democratic accoutrements.

Beyond this year's regular election issues like the economy, health care, and the war, it's this larger ideological battle with the forces of nihilist radicalism against which American conservatives must contend.

Richardson is Hillary Clinton's Judas

An article at today's New York Times, "First a Tense Talk With Clinton, Then Richardson Backs Obama," has a juicy quote from James Carville comparing Governor Bill Richardson to Judas Iscariot.

Here's the passage from the article, which discusses Richardson's relationship to former President Bill Clinton, who elevated the New Mexico Governor's national profile:

Mr. Clinton helped elevate Mr. Richardson to the national stage by naming him his energy secretary and ambassador to the United Nations. And Mr. Clinton left no doubt that he viewed Mr. Richardson’s support as important to his wife’s campaign: He even flew to New Mexico to watch the Super Bowl with Mr. Richardson as part of the Clintons’ high-profile courtship of him.

But Mr. Richardson stopped returning Mr. Clinton’s calls days ago, Mr. Clinton’s aides said. And as of Friday, Mr. Richardson said, he had yet to pick up the phone to tell Mr. Clinton of his decision.

The reaction of some of Mr. Clinton’s allies suggests that might have been a wise decision. “An act of betrayal,” said James Carville, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Clinton.

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

Mr. Richardson said he called Mrs. Clinton late on Thursday to inform her that he would be appearing with Mr. Obama on Friday to lend his support.

“It was cordial, but a little heated,” Mr. Richardson said in an interview.

I thought Carville's Judas comparison was a little over-the-top when I first saw it this morning. So I'm not surprised Townhall's picked up on it:

James Carville is quoted in the NYT on Bill Richardson's endorsement of Barack Obama today ...

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

Analogies are dangerous. I understand that he is comparing Richardson to Judas -- but in so doing, is he also comparing Bill Clinton to Jesus?

Regardless, I understand why the Clinton folks are angry. They helped build Richardson's career, after all, and now -- when they need him the most -- Richardson abandons them.

I'm not sure what the lesson to be learned is. It could be that people are fickle and will be loyal to you only when it serves their interest. Or it could be that both Clinton and Richardson are opportunists, and that there's no "honor among thieves."

I'm guessing Obama's sales pitch to former Clinton loyalists like Richardson is that they can either be a part of the future or a part of the past. That might be a seductive message if you are hoping to run for president in the future. ... And my guess is Bill Richardson plans on being the president some day.

The Clinton folks are naive to think that Richardson wouldn't back the likely Democratic nominee. I was unfazed when watching Richardson's endorsement yesterday. He'll get a cabinet position in an Obama administration, that is, if he's passed over for the V.P. nod.

Obama should pass him over, of course.

Of all the candidates this year, and that includes Ron Paul, Richardson was at the bottom of the barrel in sophistication and political appeal.

He's the most anguished man I've ever seen when faced with a tough question, for example, about Iran, Iraq, or the immigration crisis. He's completely indecisive - a total disaster.

It's a wonder he's ever gotten this far in politics.

Obama Advisor Sees U.S Century in Iraq

Captain Ed 's got an interesting post up on Ed McPeak, a military advisor to the Obama campaign, who's raised allegations of McCarthyism in the Clinton camp.

McPeak suggests that 100 years in Iraq might not be a bad thing. Here's Captain Ed:

Yesterday I noted the accusation of McCarthyism against Bill Clinton by Barack Obama military adviser Gen. Tony McPeak. The former Air Force Chief of Staff has a history of interesting statements, including a couple at the beginning of the war both McPeak and Obama oppose. In an interview with the Oregonian, posted here but confirmed by me through its purchase from the archives, McPeak essentially makes the exact same argument that John McCain makes about staying in Iraq — and which Obama ridicules:

Is Iraq the last country we confront in the Middle East?
Who wants to volunteer to get cross-ways with us? We’ll be there a century, hopefully. If it works right.

Isn’t this the exact argument McCain has made repeatedly, and which Obama derides as “a hundred-years war”? Of course it is. The interview makes repeated references to American presences in Germany, Japan, and South Korea as models of the engagement McPeak envisioned in 2003, exactly as McCain has explained it in 2007 and 2008. McCain and McPeak both argue for a big footprint in the Middle East for a very long time in order to protect American interests and to overawe the other nations there into behaving themselves.

This should raise some eyebrows on the Obama campaign’s willful deception on this point. Didn’t McPeak bother to explain to Obama the exact same reasoning he had in March 2003, at the start of the war? Did Obama not bother to listen? Or did Obama just decide to demagogue on McCain’s point while gaining credibility by associating himself with a military adviser that publicly endorsed the exact policy as McCain?

This should raise eyebrows, just as the firing of Samantha Power did, after her ill-considered remarks about Hillary.

Keep in mind that Power also suggested that Obama might not be committed to an immediate Iraq drawdown, which raises questions on Obama's propensity to pandering, as well as his honesty and sincerity (of which we're learning more and more, thanks to the Wright controversy).