Degree of Madness

Karl Rove on John McCain's "essential decency"

I've written plenty about what I consider to be John McCain's negatives.  He was not my 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. choice for the Republican nomination.  But he is the nominee and is head and shoulders above the alternative.  Karl Rove has written a very important column for The Wall Street Journal, Getting to Know John McCain.  Rove tells us some things we need to know about John McCain.  He concludes:

Americans need to know about his vision for the nation's future, especially his policy positions and domestic reforms. They also need to learn about the moments in his life that shaped him. Mr. McCain cannot make this a biography-only campaign – but he can't afford to make it a biography-free campaign either. Unless he opens up more, many voters will never know the experiences of his life that show his character, integrity and essential decency.

These qualities mattered in America's first president and will matter as Americans decide on their 44th president.

Essential decency.  It does matter.

Obama has had enough

Of Jeremiah Wright:

"His comments were not only divisive ... but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate," Obama told reporters.

"Whatever relationship I had with Reverend Wright has changed as a consequence of this," Obama said.

[...]

"At a certain point if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally and then he questions whether or not you believe it -- in front of the National Press Club -- then that's enough," Obama said, referring to Wright's suggestion that Obama's denouncement was what a politician had to say.

"That's a show of disrespect to me. It is also, I think, an insult to what we've been trying to do" on the campaign, he said.

Jeremiah Wright has been disrespecting our country for many, many years.  Now that it affects him personally, Obama is insulted.

Your move Reverend.

Jeremiah Wright Wall-to-Wall

Barack Obama's message of hope and change is being completely drowned out by his preacher's message of hate and damnation.  Jeremiah Wright is dominating the news coverage these days with no slow-down in sight.  Here is a screen-shot from this morning's Memeorandum.  Wall-to-wall Wright.  It looked pretty much the same yesterday.  It appears the hateful reverend is enjoying his 15 minutes of new-found fame. 

Right about now Obama must be wondering what hit him.  Maybe it's that bus he threw his Grandma under.  He should have thrown Wright under there when he had the chance.  Too late now:

After Barack Obama gave his big race speech in mid-March, many critics noted that the Illinois senator had thrown his own grandmother under the bus to defend his controversial pastor. Well, Wright proved over the last few days that he would not be outdone. He not only threw Obama under the bus, he chucked much of the liberal and mainstream media under there with him. If this keeps up, to paraphrase Roy Scheider in "Jaws," he's gonna need a bigger bus.

Wright is a one man wrecking crew.  Joe Klein:

...Wright's purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself--the guy is going to be a go-to mainstream media source for racial extremist spew, the next iteration of Al Sharpton--and destroy Barack Obama.

The problem for Obama is he's already addressed his relationship with Wright in a speech Joe Klein called "stunning":

I'll have a lot more to say about Barack Obama's stunning speech in my print column this week. Right now, though, the immediate, tawdry issue for the Obama campaign is this: How will the media play it? What will the sound bites be on the evening news tonight (especially the local evening news)? After all, the speech was delivered at 10:45 am, to a miniscule cable audience. Most people will never hear the elegant complexity of Obama's speech in full...though they certainly should. As others have already said, it was the best speech about race I've ever heard delivered by an American politician.

Klein's worry about how the media would play it turned out to be misplaced, to say the least.  Jeremiah Wright himself turned out to be the train wreck Obama did not see coming. 

Andrew Sullivan thinks a do-over speech would settle the matter:

Obama needs not just to distance himself from Wright's views; he needs to disown him at this point. Wright himself, it seems to me, has become part of what Obama is fighting against: the boomer, Vietnam era's obsession with its red-blue, white-black, pro and anti-America fixations. That is not what this election needs to be about; and Wright's massive, racially divisive and, yes, bitter provocation requires a proportionate response.

We need a speech or statement from Obama in which he utterly repudiates this poison, however personally difficult that may be, however damaging the impact will be. The statement today will not do it. This is no longer about cynics trying to associate one man's politics with another. It is  now about Wright attempting to associate himself and some of his noxious, stupid, rancid views with the likely Democratic nominee. Wright has given Obama no choice - and he has also given him another opportunity. He needs to seize it.

Too Late, says Tom Maguire:

Here's your newsflash - Obama has already given a speech on Wright. Now he's supposed to give another one?  Saying what - "Gee, when I didn't disown Wright in March for saying "God DAMN America", it was because I didn't realize then that he meant it"?  What has changed? Andrew seems to think that this is a different Jeremiah Wright from the man made famous by his soundbites in March, the man about whom Obama said "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.  I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother".

In the end, Obama could not disown Wright without disowning himself:

...The truth is, whether he disowns him or not, he can't disown his own actions.  Had he attended his church for a few weeks, or months, maybe.  Twenty years?  Kind of hard to disassociate yourself with that.  He can't disown Wright without disowning himself.  So he gives a pretty little speech and we're all supposed to just move on.

I believe the damage is done, not just to Obama but our nation as well.  Victor Davis Hanson:

If conservatives at first thought the Obama/Wright catastrophe was ironic, given Obama’s liberal sermons, or in a political sense timely in helping the McCain candidacy, I think by now they and most other Americans instead see the mess as tragic for the country, and a radical setback in our collective racial relations. Everyone of good conscience should deplore Wright in the strongest terms, and implore Obama once and for all to disown this extremist.

Otherwise I think some day Barack Obama will have a lot of answering to do in empowering a bigot who has done so much damage in so short a time to his country. Right now Wright and what he has said to the nation are the legacy of his campaign.

Conductor-in-Chief

President Bush leads the U.S. Marine Band during the White House Correspondent's Dinner Saturday night:

 

H/T:  Amy Proctor

Obama and Bill Ayers...More to the story

Larry Johnson at No Quarter has a post with more information about Barack Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers.  It appears Obama needs to answer a few more questions, if anyone in the media will ask:

Barack Obama is not telling the truth about his relationship with Bill Ayers. There is more to this story than is already known, but Obama and his campaign are working hard to obfuscate and cover up the matter. Why? Because Barack Obama has had a close personal and business relationship with Bill Ayers that predates his run for the Illinois State Senate, and it is incumbent on the Senator from Illinois to come clean.

In fact, Barack worked for Bill Ayers for at least eight years and the press, so far, has not investigated this matter.

A good question for starters:

Senator Obama, how did you become acquainted with William Ayers? When and how did you and Bill meet?

Has Obama been lying about his relationship with Ayers?  Johnson minces no words here:

It is of vital importance to clarify Barack’s relationship with Ayers. This is not a casual relationship. It is not a recent relationship. And, as reported in an earlier piece on this blog, Ayers has not changed his tune of political radicalism. I don’t challenge his right to believe such things, but Ayers certainly does not reflect the views of most Americans, both Democrats and Republicans. Why is Barack lying about this relationship? That is the question voters deserve to have asked and answered.

Voters do deserve to know the truth.  If Obama has nothing to hide he shouldn't have a problem answering the questions.

***Update 6:36 PM CT***

Tom Maguire observes that politics makes strange bedfellows from time to time.  But hey, you take what you can get:

Politics makes strange bedfellows, and I do not refer exclusively to the odd pairing of Barack Obama and unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers. Larry Johnson, with whom I have had the occasional disagreement in the past, has a fascinating piece on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge which leads us to believe that Obama has been repeatedly misrepresenting and misunderestimating the extent of his relationship with Ayers.

[...]

UPDATE:  Here is how Obama described his relationship to Ayers on Fox News:

Now, Mr. Ayres [Ayers] is a 60 plus year old individual who lives in my neighborhood, who did something that I deplore 40 years ago when I was six or seven years old. By the time I met him, he was a professor of education at the University of Illinois.

We served on a board together that had Republicans, bankers, lawyers, focused on education, who worked for Mayor Daley. Mayor Daley, the same Mayor Daley probably who when he was a state attorney prosecuted Mr. Ayres’s wife for those activities, I (INAUDIBLE) the point is that to somehow suggest that in any way I endorse his deplorable acts 40 years ago, because I serve on a board with him.

The board to which he refers is a bit of a mystery.  Obama and Ayers both served on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, but that was not "focused on education" and working for Mayor Daley.  And I don't think it would be fair to say the Annenberg Challenge Fund worked for Daley.

On the other hand, the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Schools Education Fund, noted above, seems to fit the description, but it was Ayers pere who was on the board.

The plot thickens.  My take is that in this answer Obama is alluding to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund, but inaccurately, while overlooking the well-known Woods Fund of Chicago link.  However, if there is yet another board connection between Ayers and Obama, bring it on.

In any case, the circumstances of the Ayers 1995 fund-raiser for Barack become much more intriguing.  Since Obama and Ayers worked together in 1995 as founder and Chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund, the idea that Ayers was just some guy from the neighborhood who happened to host a 1995 fundraiser for Barack is hard to sustain.

Obama's Ping-Pong Politics

From the Los Angeles Times:

After an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 2000, Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama faced serious financial pressure: numerous debts, limited cash and a law practice he had neglected for a year. Help arrived in early 2001 from a significant new legal client — a longtime political supporter.

Chicago entrepreneur Robert Blackwell Jr. paid Obama an $8,000-a-month retainer to give legal advice to his growing technology firm, Electronic Knowledge Interchange. It allowed Obama to supplement his $58,000 part-time state Senate salary for over a year with regular payments from Blackwell’s firm that eventually totaled $112,000.

A few months after receiving his final payment from EKI, Obama sent a request on state Senate letterhead urging Illinois officials to provide a $50,000 tourism promotion grant to another Blackwell company, Killerspin.

Killerspin specializes in table tennis, running tournaments nationwide and selling its own line of equipment and apparel and DVD recordings of the competitions. With support from Obama, other state officials and an Obama aide who went to work part time for Killerspin, the company eventually obtained $320,000 in state grants between 2002 and 2004 to subsidize its tournaments.

Obama’s staff said the senator advocated only for the first year’s grant — which ended up being $20,000, not $50,000. The day after Obama wrote his letter urging the awarding of the state funds, Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign received a $1,000 donation from Blackwell.

Some nut asked the Obama campaign about his association with Blackwell:

Obama's presidential campaign rejects any suggestion that there was a connection between the legal work, the campaign contribution and the help with the grant. "Any implication that Sen. Obama would risk an ethical breach in order to secure a small grant for a pingpong tournament is nuts," said David Axelrod, Obama's chief political advisor.

Ed Morrissey, obviously not afraid to make a nutty suggestion or two, suspects a little quid pro quo:  

This looks like a rather obvious quid pro quo. Coming from someone who casts himself as a representative of a new brand of politics, the Blackwell connection — especially the campaign donation — reveals something much less new and much more Chicago about Obama’s politics. In exchange for $118,000 in salary, Blackwell received $320,000 in state taxpayer money and influence at the highest level of state politics.

[...]

The media has apparently just decided to start vetting Obama, fifteen months after his entry into the presidential campaign as a neophyte and a political cipher. Better late than never, but unfortunately for Obama, they have plenty of time to keep digging into his political connections.

Drip.  Drip.  Drip.

World Day of Prayer for Zimbabwe Sunday, April 27, 2008

Bob Stumbles, Chancellor - The Anglican Diocese of Harare is calling on Christians around the world to pray for Zimbabwe today:

A desperate cry from the hearts of Zimbabwe screams across the world

It calls upon all Christians of every denomination in every nation to focus their prayers, in churches, halls, homes or elsewhere, on Sunday 27th April, 2008 on the critical situation in Zimbabwe, a nation in dire distress and teetering on the brink of human disaster.

The latest news from Zimbabwe is heart-wrenching:

Scores of children and babies have been locked up in filthy prison cells in Harare as Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, sinks to new depths in his campaign to force the opposition into exile before an expected run-off in presidential elections.

Twenty-four babies and 40 children under the age of six were among the 250 people rounded up in a raid on Friday, according to Nelson Chamisa, spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Yesterday they were crammed into cells in Southerton police station in central Harare.

Out of control:

“What we’re seeing is an undeclared civil war,” said Chamisa. “It’s genocide. This situation is out of control, it’s now beyond the capacity of the MDC alone. It requires the region, the continent, the international community to act.”

“In Mugabe’s Zimbabwe even children are not spared the terror that befalls their parents.”

Rick Monday and The Greatest Play in Baseball

It's got my vote. 

Via Ed Morrissey:

...Over 40,000 baseball fans saw Monday risk his career by grabbing what could easily have been a fireball to rescue the American flag from a couple of asshats, and suddenly it recalled the real patriotism and passion for America that had been missing in 1976. At first in isolated pockets but soon sweeping around the stands like The Wave would later do, Americans stood up and sang “God Bless America” — not prompted by the stadium organist but fueled by love of country.

From USA Today, published April 25, 2006:

The hand was trembling, the voice was quivering and tears were running down his face.

The World War II soldier, who survived the Pearl Harbor attack, looked Rick Monday in the eyes, slowly raised his right arm, and saluted him.

"Thank you," Monday recalls the soldier telling him last year. "And thank you from all of my shipmates."

Thirty years ago today, Monday became an American hero.

It was the day he saved the American flag.

The New York Times race-baiting editorial

The New York Times has joined the fray condemning North Carolina Republicans, calling an ad they're running, "Manipulative. Shameful. Race-baiting.":

Those are the only words to describe a new television ad from the Republican Party running in North Carolina that attacks Senator Barack Obama as “too extreme” for the state.

I agree there's a little race-baiting going on here but it's not the N.C. Republicans doing the baiting.  It's the New York Times.  Here is the ad in question:

Those are Jeremiah Wright's own words, which the NYT itself calls racist:

The ad is built around the well-known video clip of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. — Mr. Obama’s former pastor — declaring “God damn America.” We have said before that we find Rev. Wright’s oratory racist. And we have criticized Senator Obama for waiting too long to denounce it. His relationship with the Rev. Wright is undeniably a liability for his campaign.

According to the Times that's not what the ad is about however.  The Times has found a new code word for racism.  "Extreme".  The Editors have decided if one calls Obama extreme it "is a clear bid to stir bigotry in a Southern state".  Apparently since Obama is black he can't be called extreme.  Because his preacher, of twenty years, is black he can't be used in an ad in the South.  The Times admits Wright is a liability for Obama but somehow they don't think Republicans should be able to bring it up. 

John McCain has denounced the ad as well.  And he hasn't even seen it:

The ad opens with a photo of Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright together and a clip of Wright, whose incendiary comments about race have bedeviled Obama.

“He’s just too extreme for North Carolina,” the narrator says in the 30-second spot. “We asked them not to run it,” McCain told reporters traveling with him in Kentucky. “I’m sending them an e-mail as we speak asking them to take it down.

“I don’t know why they do it. Obviously, I don’t control them, but I’m making it very clear, as I have a couple of times in the past, that there’s no place for that kind of campaigning, and the American people don’t want it,” McCain said.

McCain said the ad was described to him: “I didn’t see it, and I hope that I don’t see it.”

The ad was "described to him".  Michelle Malkin:

He didn’t bother to watch the 41-second video before his campaign leaned on the NC GOP to withdraw it.

He doesn’t want to see it, lest he sully his delicate eyes.

Yet, he’s so indignantly sure “that there’s no place for that kind of campaigning.”

And then he has the gall to turn around and knock Obama’s elitism.

Congratulations, Sen. McCain: You’ve out-snobbed Snobama.

Yes, without having seen the ad or talked directly to the NC GOP officials, he’s absolutely convinced that he’s right about his knee-jerk assessment of their supposedly bigoted motives.

McCain Math is the same as MSM Math: Southern + Republican + video featuring radical leftists who happen to be black = RACISTRACISTRACISTRACISTDANGERWILLROBINSON!

A sure sign of things to come.

And one more thing.  I am sick to death of Southerners being depicted as easily influenced racist bigots.  I don't care what color Obama is, I would never vote for him because is a left-wing liberal and he is too damn extreme.  Plus he hangs out with some pretty slimy people.

Patches

Obama, the common man, patches his own suits:

It's not every day that a candidate's fashion sense makes its way into a press availability, but today in Indianapolis, Indiana, Barack Obama had to defend his wardrobe choices, making the case that he is not an elitist.

The question came from a local reporter, who said he's been looking like the "GQ candidate." And in the wake of the "bitter" controversy, which prompted his opponents to label him an elitist, the timing of the question was particularly poignant.

Obama launched into a long diatribe listing all of the things that he believes place him in the common man category, rather than the elitist side.

"I think this is a fairly standard suit here," he explained, "I haven't changed my approach to dressing too much. . .  I basically buy five of the same suit, and then I patch them up and wear them repeatedly."

Yeah, right.  Does he darn his socks too? 

When asked, the Obama campaign would not divulge what brand of suit Obama wears.

Maybe the labels were torn out.  Not to worry Barack.  The clothes really don't make the man.  It is the other way around.