Barack is Done. He is Unelectable.

Money Quote:

"...and I don't have to compromise with not one of you nappy head people..."

:headbang:
 
egg shell soup and pigon dropping gravy :)

The comment of mexicans running everything is priceless :)
 
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2008/03/19/obamas_speech

Obama's Speech
By Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Did Senator Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia convince people that he is still a viable candidate to be President of the United States, despite the adverse reactions to statements by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright?

The polls and the primaries will answer that question.

The great unasked question for Senator Obama is the question that was asked about President Nixon during the Watergate scandal; What did he know and when did he know it?

Although Senator Obama would now have us believe that he is shocked, shocked, at what Jeremiah Wright said, that he was not in the church when pastor Wright said those things from the pulpit, this still leaves the question of why he disinvited Wright from the event at which he announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination a year ago.

Either Barack Obama or his staff must have known then that Jeremiah Wright was not someone whom they wanted to expose to the media and to the media scrutiny to which that could lead.

Why not, if it is only now that Senator Obama is learning for the first time, to his surprise, what kinds of things Jeremiah Wright has been saying and doing?

No one had to be in church the day Wright made his inflammatory and obscene remarks to know about them.

The cable news journalists who are playing the tapes of those sermons were not there. The tapes were on sale in the church itself. Obama knew that because he had bought one or more of those tapes.

But even if there were no tapes, and even if Obama never heard from other members of the church what their pastor was saying, he spent 20 years in that church, not just as an ordinary member but also as someone who once donated $20,000 to the church.

There was no way that he didn't know about Jeremiah Wright's anti-American and racist diatribes from the pulpit.

Someone once said that a con man's job is not to convince skeptics but to enable people to continue to believe what they already want to believe.

Accordingly, Obama's Philadelphia speech -- a theatrical masterpiece -- will probably reassure most Democrats and some other Obama supporters. They will undoubtedly say that we should now "move on," even though many Democrats have still not yet moved on from George W. Bush's 2000 election victory.

Like the Soviet show trials during their 1930s purges, Obama's speech was not supposed to convince critics but to reassure supporters and fellow-travelers, in order to keep the "useful idiots" useful.

Best-selling author Shelby Steele's recent book on Barack Obama ("A Bound Man") has valuable insights into both the man and the circumstances facing many other blacks -- especially those who were never part of the black ghetto culture but who feel a need to identify with it for either personal, political or financial reasons.

Like religious converts who become more Catholic than the Pope, such people often become blacker-than-thou. For whatever reason, Barack Obama chose a black extremist church decades ago -- even though there was no shortage of very different churches, both black and white -- in Chicago.

Some say that he was trying to earn credibility on the ghetto streets, to facilitate his work as a community activist or for his political career. We may never know why.

But now that Barack Obama is running for a presidential nomination, he is doing so on a radically different basis, as a post-racial candidate uniquely prepared to bring us all together.

Yet the past continues to follow him, despite his attempts to bury it and the mainstream media's attempts to ignore it or apologize for it.

Shelby Steele depicts Barack Obama as a man without real convictions, "an iconic figure who neglected to become himself."

Senator Obama has been at his best as an icon, able with his command of words to meet other people's psychic needs, including a need to dispel white guilt by supporting his candidacy.

But President of the United States, in a time of national danger, under a looming threat of nuclear terrorism? No.
 
THROW GRANDMA UNDER THE BUS
by Ann Coulter
March 19, 2008

Obama gave a nice speech, except for everything he said about race. He apparently believes we're not talking enough about race. This is like hearing Britney Spears say we're not talking enough about pop-tarts with substance-abuse problems.

By now, the country has spent more time talking about race than John Kerry has talked about Vietnam, John McCain has talked about being a POW, John Edwards has talked about his dead son, and Al Franken has talked about his USO tours.

But the "post-racial candidate" thinks we need to talk yet more about race. How much more? I had had my fill by around 1974. How long must we all marinate in the angry resentment of black people?

As an authentic post-racial American, I will not patronize blacks by pretending Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is anything other than a raving racist loon. If a white pastor had said what Rev. Wright said -- not about black people, but literally, the exact same things -- I think we'd notice that he's crazier than Ward Churchill and David Duke's love child. (Indeed, both Churchill and the Rev. Wright referred to the attacks of 9/11 as the chickens coming "home to roost.")

Imagine a white pastor saying: "Racism is the American way. Racism is how this country was founded, and how this country is still run. ... We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority. And believe it more than we believe in God."

Imagine a white pastor calling Condoleezza Rice, "Condoskeezza Rice."

Imagine a white pastor saying: "No, no, no, God damn America -- that's in the Bible for killing innocent people! God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human! God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme!"

We treat blacks like children, constantly talking about their temper tantrums right in front of them with airy phrases about black anger. I will not pat blacks on the head and say, "Isn't that cute?" As a post-racial American, I do not believe "the legacy of slavery" gives black people the right to be permanently ill-mannered.

Obama tried to justify Wright's deranged rants by explaining that "legalized discrimination" is the "reality in which Rev. Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up." He said that a "lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families."

That may accurately describe the libretto of "Porgy and Bess," but it has no connection to reality. By Rev. Wright's own account, he was 12 years old and was attending an integrated school in Philadelphia when Brown v. Board of Education was announced, ending "separate but equal" schooling.

Meanwhile, at least since the Supreme Court's decision in University of California v. Bakke in 1978 -- and obviously long before that, or there wouldn't have been a case or controversy for the court to consider -- it has been legal for the government to discriminate against whites on the basis of their race.

Consequently, any white person 30 years old or younger has lived, since the day he was born, in an America where it is legal to discriminate against white people. In many cases it's not just legal, but mandatory, for example, in education, in hiring and in Academy Award nominations.

So for half of Rev. Wright's 66 years, discrimination against blacks was legal -- though he never experienced it personally because it existed in a part of the country where he did not live. For the second half of Wright's life, discrimination against whites was legal throughout the land.

Discrimination has become so openly accepted that -- in a speech meant to tamp down his association with a black racist -- Obama felt perfectly comfortable throwing his white grandmother under the bus. He used her as the white racist counterpart to his black racist "old uncle," Rev. Wright.

First of all, Wright is not Obama's uncle. The only reason we indulge crazy uncles is that everyone understands that people don't choose their relatives the way they choose, for example, their pastors and mentors. No one quarrels with the idea that you can't be expected to publicly denounce your blood relatives.

But Wright is not a relative of Obama's at all. Yet Obama cravenly compared Wright's racist invective to his actual grandmother, who "once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

Rev. Wright accuses white people of inventing AIDS to kill black men, but Obama's grandmother -- who raised him, cooked his food, tucked him in at night, and paid for his clothes and books and private school -- has expressed the same feelings about passing black men on the street that Jesse Jackson has.

Unlike his "old uncle" -- who is not his uncle -- Obama had no excuses for his grandmother. Obama's grandmother never felt the lash of discrimination! Crazy grandma doesn't get the same pass as the crazy uncle; she's white. Denounce the racist!

Fine. Can we move on now?

No, of course, not. It never ends. To be fair, Obama hinted that we might have one way out: If we elect him president, then maybe, just maybe, we can stop talking about race.

COPYRIGHT 2008 ANN COULTER
 
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=59226

Posted: March 18, 2008
by David Limbaugh

The racist, anti-American rantings of Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's spiritual mentor and pastor of the church Obama attended for 20 years, raise many red flags about the Democrat's supposedly best selling point: his unique capability for healing societal divisions.

Considering our deep-seated societal disagreements over cultural and political issues, promises by politicians to end societal divisiveness are dubious enough on their face. But when the promiser's personal history contradicts his promises, even further scrutiny is required.

It's difficult to gauge Obama's genuineness in standing on this kind of platform because he has such a short political history to evaluate. Stories have been written, pointing to his extreme liberalism and scant record of reaching across the aisle, which cast serious doubt on his unifying claims. Until now, his lofty speeches have obscured these inconsistencies.

But with reports of his pastor saying "blacks should not sing God bless America, but G-d d--- America," and, concerning the 9/11 attacks, America's "chickens are coming home to roost," the burden of proof has now shifted to Obama. He must demonstrate not only that his claims to offer healing are sincere, but also that he does not actually share his pastor's and, manifestly, his congregation's deeply disturbing views on race and America.

What can Obama say to meet this burden of proof?

Before this story heated up beyond the mainstream media's ability to suppress it, Obama casually dismissed the pastor's tirades merely as "controversial" remarks – as if they had some legitimacy and were not outright indefensible but in any event should not be taken too seriously. Now he appears to be saying he was unaware of the offensive statements. But if Obama's deepest passion in life is to heal, wouldn't it follow that he would make it his business to know – taking the willing suspension of disbelief here to new heights – what driving passions stir his pastor?

We must recognize the double standard liberals typically apply to immunize themselves from accountability for bigotry. When the remotest connection can be inferred between a conservative and a bigoted supporter, there is always hell to pay. No excuses are permitted. Guilt attaches – not even by so much as true association but by passive receipt of an endorsement from anyone the left believes to have bigoted views.

Liberals, on the other hand, can be overtly racist toward conservative blacks like Condoleezza Rice and Clarence Thomas and earn accolades rather than condemnation. And in Obama's case, we have more than passive receipt of an endorsement. We have more than guilt by casual association.

Obama chose this pastor and picked this church, and has been attending for two decades, presumably because he embraced its message and its approach. His wife's curious statements about America, such as when she told the New Yorker that our country is "downright mean," provide further grounds for our skepticism. It will not do for Obama to claim he was unaware of Wright's racism and anti-Americanism.

A brief review of the Wright videos shows that his race-driven spirit was one of the animating forces in that church. We didn't see congregants spilling toward the exits in protest but instead gesturing in participatory approval. It stretches credulity to deny that such vitriol was central to Wright's worldview, or to suggest that Obama was unaware that it was. It is thus silly to quibble over the irrelevant distraction of whether Obama happened to be in attendance at this or that particular hate exhibition.

Viewing all this in a light most favorable to Obama, if he chose this church for political expedience rather than spiritual nourishment, he must tell us what principles he wouldn't compromise in furtherance of his ambitions. If he somehow clears that hurdle, he must next explain how he can possibly deliver on his promises to unite us publicly en route to a post-racial and post-partisan society when he's obviously willing privately to benefit from the energy of divisiveness and racism. This takes the ends-justifies-the-means approach to new extremes.

Democrats, including Clinton supporters, are quick to defend Obama because they realize he is still their likely nominee and they can't afford this issue to have legs into the general election campaign. They insist we should look at "the issues" rather than this side story. Besides, Obama has denounced the pastor's remarks.

The denunciation is hollow, given Obama's long voluntary history with this pastor. And the Democrats' attitude toward character has always been specious. They want it to be an issue only when they are claiming Republicans lack character – as with the falsely alleged lies of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

We all know that one's character cannot be separated from his actions, as the latter springs from the former. Voters must satisfy themselves about a candidate's character since his character will have an impact on their lives.

Instead of giving us answers to supplement our negligible knowledge of his character and history, Obama has given us only more questions – many alarming questions.
 
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=59504

Posted: March 20, 2008
by David Limbaugh

Barack Obama is nothing if not smooth. He seamlessly turned a would-be apology over his pastor's racism into an indictment against society's racism.

It wasn't, "Jeremiah Wright was wrong, and I was wrong for going to his church for 20 years despite his apparently unforgiving spirit, his racist and anti-American utterances, and his vulgarity, including taking the Lord's name in vain from his very pulpit – the one venue above all on God's sacred planet that such irreverence is inalterably forbidden. No matter what racial injustices have been perpetrated over the years by mankind toward mankind, they are never an excuse for disrespecting God, and especially in His house."

Instead, Obama said, essentially, "I reject many of Rev. Wright's remarks as divisive and perhaps even unfairly critical of America, but you have to admit, he has a point."

You can talk all you want to about Obama's "audacity of hope" theme, but the only audacity I heard in his speech was his lecturing Americans on their racism instead of explaining his longtime intimate relationship with Wright.

Obama's forte is not, as many have suggested, waxing eloquent while saying nothing. His real gift is saying one thing while appearing to say the opposite, so mellifluously and disarmingly that audiences shake their heads in affirmation of the very proposition they oppose. Without changing their minds, they believe they have agreed with him. Amazing – and scary.

In his speech, he needed to condemn and distance himself from his pastor. And he did – sort of. But before he was finished, he had virtually excused his pastor's statements and given us a history lesson in precisely why resentments giving rise to such statements came about – and were justified. In other words, "Sure, Pastor Wright sometimes crossed the line, but don't let his tone obscure the underlying message: Racism is still pervasive in this country, which hasn't come close to making amends for its shameful past."

Reasonable people can debate the extent of the continued existence and effects of racism in both directions today, but in the meantime, we should recognize that Obama ducked the questions his speech was purportedly crafted to answer.

Assuming that not everyone listening to the speech was so mesmerized by Obama's intoxicating spell of lofty rhetoric that they forgot its purpose, Obama is not yet out of the woods on this issue. And that's his own fault.

He needed to speak directly, but he obfuscated with cleverly concealed contradictions and evasions. He said his campaign presents a powerful message of unity, but his words stoked racial unease and divisiveness. While paying lip service to our national motto, "Out of Many, One," he couldn't quit talking about people in terms of their color and ethnicity.

He scolded us for our racism, but he:

  • encouraged us to keep race-consciousness at the very forefront of our national psyche;

  • sloppily conflated Pastor Wright's manifest racism and anti-Americanism with his white grandmother's stereotypical remarks and Democrat Geraldine Ferraro's political observation about the effect of Obama's
    race on his electability; and

  • didn't point his accusing finger at the race-hustlers of our time, who fan the flames of racial resentment and hostility.
Rather, Obama fed into feelings of racial distrust by playing to his leftist base and wrongly castigating Reaganism and conservative commentators for their alleged racism. He legitimized the noxious notion that conservative opposition to welfare and affirmative action are born of racism by saying we must "realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams." He implied that conservative resistance to throwing endless money at public education is rooted in a "cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn, that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem." These are misguided and damaging words.

Conservatives promote school choice precisely because they want to deliver disadvantaged children from their confinement in inner-city schools. Conservative opposition to affirmative action and unbridled welfare is not based on greed, selfishness or racism but on a philosophical difference over how best to solve problems while preserving the dignity of all individual human beings.

It is certainly Obama's prerogative to make his campaign about race while saying it transcends it. It is his right to duck the question of his intimate connection to Wright, and he may take the offensive by deftly turning the charges of racism back on conservatives.

But it is up to the voters to evaluate his cultural analysis, his evasiveness and the wisdom of his proposed big-government solutions for our problems. I am unconvinced that his eloquence has successfully masked the deep problems that have begun to haunt his driving presidential ambitions.
 
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2008/03/26/is_obama_ready_for_america

Is Obama Ready For America?
By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Some pundits ask whether America is ready for Obama. The much more important question is whether Obama is ready for America and even more important is whether black people can afford Obama. Let's look at it in the context of a historical tidbit.

In 1947, Jackie Robinson, signing a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers, broke the color barrier in major league baseball. He encountered open racist taunts and slurs from fans, opposing team players and even some players on his own team. Despite that, his first year batting average was .297. He led the National League in stolen bases and won the first-ever Rookie of the Year Award. Without question, Jackie Robinson was an exceptional player. There's no sense of justice that should require that a player be as good as Jackie Robinson in order to be a rookie in the major leagues but the hard fact of the matter, as a first black player, he had to be.

In 1947, black people could not afford a stubble bum baseball player. By contrast, today black people can afford stubble bum black baseball players. The simple reason is that as a result of the excellence of Jackie Robinson, as well those who immediately followed him such as Satchel Paige, Don Newcombe, Larry Doby and Roy Campanella, there's no one in his right mind, who might watch the incompetence of a particular black player, who can say, "Those blacks can't play baseball." Whether we like it or not, whether for good reason or bad reason, people make stereotypes and stereotypes can have effects.

For the nation and for black people, the first black president should be the caliber of a Jackie Robinson and Barack Obama is not. Barack Obama has charisma and charm but in terms of character, values and understanding, he is no Jackie Robinson. By now, many Americans have heard the racist and anti-American tirades of Obama's minister and spiritual counselor. There's no way that Obama could have been a 20-year member of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church and not been aware of his statements.

Wright's racist and anti-American ideas are by no means unique. They are the ideas of many leftist professors and taught to our young people. The basic difference between Sen. Obama, Wright and leftist professors is simply a matter of style and language. His Philadelphia speech demonstrated his clever style where he merely changed the subject. The controversy was not about race. It was about his longtime association with such a hatemonger and whether he shared the Reverend's vision.

Obama's success is truly a remarkable commentary on the goodness of Americans and how far we've come in resolving matters of race. I'm 72 years old. For almost all of my life, a black having a real chance at becoming the president of the United States was at best a pipe dream. Obama has convincingly won primaries in states with insignificant black populations. As such, it further confirms what I've often said: The civil rights struggle in America is over and it's won. At one time black Americans did not have the constitutional guarantees enjoyed by white Americans; now we do. The fact that the civil rights struggle is over and won does not mean that there are not major problems confronting many members of the black community but they are not civil rights problems and have little or nothing to do with racial discrimination.

While not every single vestige of racial discrimination has disappeared, Obama and the Rev. Wright are absolutely wrong in suggesting that racial discrimination is anywhere near the major problem confronting a large segment of the black community. The major problems are: family breakdown, illegitimacy, fraudulent education and a high rate of criminality. To confront these problems, that are not the fault of the larger society, requires political courage and that's an attribute that Obama and most other politicians lack.
 
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2008/03/26/the_audacity_of_rhetoric

The Audacity of Rhetoric
By Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, March 26, 2008

It is painful to watch defenders of Barack Obama tying themselves into knots trying to evade the obvious.

Some are saying that Senator Obama cannot be held responsible for what his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said. In their version of events, Barack Obama just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time -- and a bunch of mean-spirited people are trying to make something out of it.

It makes a good story, but it won't stand up under scrutiny.

Barack Obama's own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far left fringe. In college, "I chose my friends carefully," he said in his first book, "Dreams From My Father."

These friends included "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets" -- in Obama's own words -- as well as the "more politically active black students." He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.

Obama didn't just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college -- members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.

In Shelby Steele's brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama -- "A Bound Man" -- it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were -- and, like many converts, he went overboard.

Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the U.S. Senate is the furthest left of any Senator. There is a remarkable consistency in what Barack Obama has done over the years, despite inconsistencies in what he says.

The irony is that Obama's sudden rise politically to the level of being the leading contender for his party's presidential nomination has required him to project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who can heal divisiveness and bring us all together.

The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleon-like change, and entranced both white and black Democrats, is a tribute to the man's talent and a warning about his reliability.

There is no evidence that Obama ever sought to educate himself on the views of people on the other end of the political spectrum, much less reach out to them. He reached out from the left to the far left. That's bringing us all together?

Is "divisiveness" defined as disagreeing with the agenda of the left? Who on the left was ever called divisive by Obama before that became politically necessary in order to respond to revelations about Jeremiah Wright?

One sign of Obama's verbal virtuosity was his equating a passing comment by his grandmother -- "a typical white person," he says -- with an organized campaign of public vilification of America in general and white America in particular, by Jeremiah Wright.

Since all things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities, it is always possible to make things look similar verbally, however different they are in the real world.

Among the many desperate gambits by defenders of Senator Obama and Jeremiah Wright is to say that Wright's words have a "resonance" in the black community.

There was a time when the Ku Klux Klan's words had a resonance among whites, not only in the South but in other states. Some people joined the KKK in order to advance their political careers. Did that make it OK? Is it all just a matter of whose ox is gored?

While many whites may be annoyed by Jeremiah Wright's words, a year from now most of them will probably have forgotten about him. But many blacks who absorb his toxic message can still be paying for it, big-time, for decades to come.

Why should young blacks be expected to work to meet educational standards, or even behavioral standards, if they believe the message that all their problems are caused by whites, that the deck is stacked against them? That is ultimately a message of hopelessness, however much audacity it may have.
 
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