Obama’s Military Disconnect

Great catch from Stepping Right Up.

A photo that shows Barack Obama in front of cheering U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

It’s a photo the Obama campaign may wish it had never released.

This is not exactly a packed gymnasium of cheering soldiers.

Look at the massive distance between him and the soldiers. (Was Obama afraid he would get military cooties if he got too close?)

The “crowd” is barely three people deep. (My guess is there were more media darlings than soldiers)

What is up with that “Oh God, what am I doing here look on his face”?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This picture shows the massive expanse of space between America’s military and Barack Obama. Clearly there is a huge disconnect here.

Not mentioned is the fact that a vastly disproportionate number of the soldiers are black.

We don’t quarrel with the racial pride of black soldiers who are proud of the Obama candidacy, but they don’t represent the majority of the military. Why should, after all, soldiers want a commander and chief who wants them to lose a war?

Michelle Obama at Princeton: Huge Racial Chip on Her Shoulder

We didn’t see this when it first broke, but better late than never.

From Politico.com, an account of Michelle Obama’s senior thesis at Princeton.

Michelle Obama’s senior year thesis at Princeton University, obtained from the campaign by Politico, shows a document written by a young woman grappling with a society in which a black Princeton alumnus might only be allowed to remain “on the periphery.” Read the full thesis here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before,” the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction. “I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”

Of course, on a campus that practices rather rigorous affirmative action, it’s hard for white students to forget that you are on campus because you are black, not because (like the white students) you met all the qualifications.

Even if a particular black student was as good, academically, as white applicants who got in, white students will not know this about the particular student, and thus the stigma applies.

But just who is to blame if somebody like Michelle Obama is viewed as “black first and a student second.” Consider the following:

The 1985 thesis provides a trove of Michelle Obama’s thoughts as a young woman, with many of the paper’s statements describing the student’s world as seen through a race-based prism.

“In defining the concept of identification or the ability to identify with the black community,” the Princeton student wrote, “I based my definition on the premise that there is a distinctive black culture very different from white culture.” Other thesis statements specifically pointed to what was seen by the future Mrs. Obama as racially insensitive practices in a university system populated with mostly Caucasian educators and students: “Predominately white universities like Princeton are socially and academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their enrollments.”

To illustrate the latter statement, she pointed out that Princeton (at the time) had only five black tenured professors on its faculty, and its “Afro-American studies” program “is one of the smallest and most understaffed departments in the university.” In addition, she said only one major university-recognized group on campus was “designed specifically for the intellectual and social interests of blacks and other third world students.” (Her findings also stressed that Princeton was “infamous for being racially the most conservative of the Ivy League universities.”)

In short, she is constantly playing the race card, constantly pleading victimization and constantly attacking Princeton for having too few black professors and a too-small Afro-American studies program.

Of course blacks who do that are going to be viewed as “black first and a student second.”

Can anybody possibly view Jesse Jackson as “a man first and a black second?”

The notion that the Princeton curriculum slighted “the intellectual and social interests of blacks and other third world students” is, in fact, condescending.

Generations of affluent, academically outstanding white students -- destined for success in later life -- have majored in math, history, English, political science, physics or one or another foreign language. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that most of these disciplines have been tripping over themselves to include more “multi-cultural” and “diverse” (read politically correct) material, are blacks somehow not intellectually capable of handling the courses that white students have?

Actually, given the prevalence of affirmative action, that’s too often true. But ghettoizing black students into inferior victim studies courses -- courses that are widely recognized as inferior, even if few people are sufficiently politically incorrect to say so -- is not a way of respecting and intellectually nurturing them.

It’s a way of pandering to politically correct elements on campus and getting them off your back.

Of course, Michelle’s attitudes are not necessarily the same as her husband’s.

But when we look for any evidence that Barack, before his very recent strategy of appearing to be “post racial” in order to appeal to white voters, was anything other than the standard race hustler, we come up with essentially nothing.

So we have to ask the obvious question: is Obama just Jesse Jackson with a shrewder plan for getting white votes?

Obama Chastized by Washington Post on Iraq

Barack Obama’s pandering to the hard left anti-Iraq War crowd has drawn a sharp rebuke from the liberal Washington Post.

BARACK OBAMA yesterday accused President Bush and Sen. John McCain of rigidity on Iraq: “They said we couldn’t leave when violence was up, they say we can’t leave when violence is down.” Mr. Obama then confirmed his own foolish consistency. Early last year, when the war was at its peak, the Democratic candidate proposed a timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces in slightly more than a year. Yesterday, with bloodshed at its lowest level since the war began, Mr. Obama endorsed the same plan. After hinting earlier this month that he might “refine” his Iraq strategy after visiting the country and listening to commanders, Mr. Obama appears to have decided that sticking to his arbitrary, 16-month timetable is more important than adjusting to the dramatic changes in Iraq.

Mr. Obama’s charge against the Republicans was not entirely fair, since Mr. Bush has overseen the withdrawal of five American brigades from Iraq this year, and Mr. McCain has suggested that he would bring most of the rest of the troops home by early 2013. Mr. Obama’s timeline would end in the summer of 2010, a year or two before the earliest dates proposed recently by members of the Iraqi government. The real difference between the various plans is not the dates but the conditions: Both the Iraqis and Mr. McCain say the withdrawal would be linked to the ability of Iraqi forces to take over from U.S. troops, as they have begun to do. Mr. Obama’s strategy allows no such linkage -- his logic is that a timetable unilaterally dictated from Washington is necessary to force Iraqis to take responsibility for the country.

At the time he first proposed his timetable, Mr. Obama argued -- wrongly, as it turned out -- that U.S. troops could not stop a sectarian civil war. He conceded that a withdrawal might be accompanied by a “spike” in violence. Now, he describes as “an achievable goal” that “we leave Iraq to a government that is taking responsibility for its future -- a government that prevents sectarian conflict and ensures that the al-Qaeda threat which has been beaten back by our troops does not reemerge.” How will that “true success” be achieved? By the same pullout that Mr. Obama proposed when chaos in Iraq appeared to him inevitable.

“What’s missing in our debate,” Mr. Obama said yesterday, “is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq.” Indeed: The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war’s outcome -- that Iraq “distracts us from every threat we face” and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That’s an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world’s largest oil reserves. Whether or not the war was a mistake, Iraq’s future is a vital U.S. security interest. If he is elected president, Mr. Obama sooner or later will have to tailor his Iraq strategy to that reality.

Will he?

Or will he continue to be the leftist that panders to his leftist base? You know -- the people who don’t want America to win the war because they don’t much like America and virulently hate George Bush.

Let’s hope we never have the opportunity to find out.

Which Is the Real One?

Lame Excuse

Another Unsavory Obama Buddy

From FrontPage Magazine:

SHOULD A MAJOR PARTY CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT, WHO HAS PLEDGED HIS SUPPORT FOR OUR TROOPS, REJECT THE MONEY AND SUPPORT of an anti-American extremist who thinks Osama bin Laden had a “valid” argument on 9/11 and says she is currently acting “to undermine the war effort”? Barack Obama should be forced to make that decision about the ample funds he has received from Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans.

According to Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen, Evans has “raised at least $50,000” for the Obama campaign. As long ago as February 2007, the Code Pink co-founder and pampered divorcee co-hosted a Hollywood fundraiser for Obama with her ex-husband (financier Max Palevsky) and Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen of DreamWorks studios.

The article goes on to quote a talk radio interview with Evans in which she, when asked about Osama’s claim that he attacked the U.S. because of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, and whether that was a valid argument said “Sure. Why do we have bases in the Middle East? We totally violated the rights of that, that country. Why do we get to have bases in the Middle East?”

Further:

Evans’ revealing performance could serve as light radio comedy – (e.g., she later blurted out, in earnest, “Why is being a Communist anti-American?”) – if it did not mask a long history of actions designed to demoralize soldiers in harm’s way, vilify the military (and the United States as a whole), provide monetary and military support to jihadists, and popularize the views of Islamic radicals who believe terrorists who kill U.S. troops are “guaranteed Paradise.”

Her statement that “you can’t go to war if you don’t have any soldiers,” dovetails with her work to break the morale of soldiers fighting in Iraq. In July 2003, Jodie Evans joined the Advisory Board of Iraq Occupation Watch (IOW) as a founding member. Castroites Medea Benjamin and Leslie Cagan established IOW in Baghdad to convince American soldiers serving in Iraq to obtain “conscientious objector” status and get sent home. As part of this process, they recycled anti-American news stories to the troops in Iraq, and spread “first-hand” accounts of mythical U.S. “atrocities” back home. At least one fellow Advisory Board member called for the murder of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Tiring of rhetoric, Code Pink tended to the material needs of those who killed U.S. troops or tended to the “insurgents.” In December 2004, Evans and Code Pink delivered $600,000 in cash and supplies to “the other side” in Fallujah, a recent battlefield and terrorist stronghold infamous for killing American soldiers.

In another statement, Evans made it clear that she viewed terrorist death squads as morally superior to American troops.

We must begin by really standing with the Iraqi people and defending their right to resist. I can remain myself against all forms of violence, and yet I cannot judge what someone has to do when pushed to the wall to protect all they love. The Iraqi people are fighting for their country, to protect their families and to preserve all they love. They are fighting for their lives, and we are fighting for lies.

Will Obama return the money she has raised for him?

If he wants to distance himself from this kind of anti-American fanaticism, he will.

But unfortunately for him, Evans views about the war don’t seem too much different from his own. Obama’s judgment and his patriotism are already questionable. If this particular association breaks into the media, they will be a big problem for him.

Obama: May Prosecute Members of Bush Administration for “War Crimes”

We blogged about this back in April, but it has come up again.

From Patrick McIlheran, how the candidate of getting beyond divisiveness and achieving national unity would treat members of the Bush Administration.

From the blog of Will Bunch:

Tonight I had an opportunity to ask Barack Obama a question that is on the minds of many Americans, yet rarely rises to the surface in the great ruckus of the 2008 presidential race -- and that is whether an Obama administration would seek to prosecute officials of a former Bush administration on the revelations that they greenlighted torture, or for other potential crimes that took place in the White House.

Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to “immediately review the information that’s already there” and determine if an inquiry is warranted -- but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as “a partisan witch hunt.” However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because “nobody is above the law.”

And then Bunch goes on to quote Obama directly:

What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can’t prejudge that because we don’t have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.

You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I’ve said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law -- and I think that’s roughly how I would look at it.

Let’s see: a party loses an election. Members of that party are put on trial by the new regime, and punished for this or that supposed “crime.”

What kind of government is that? Not a democracy.

But then, given the friends that Obama has, why wouldn’t we expect this from him?

Good Point, Hillary

Obama as Curious George: Chickens Coming Home To Roost

It’s absurdly offensive, of course: the t-shirt with a picture of Barack Obama in the guise of “Curious George,” the little monkey in a classic series of children’s books.

Patrick McIlheran, however, points out why people on the left have no moral standing to criticize it.

Anyhow, if he were displaying such transgressiveness in an art-school exhibit and his political polarity were reversed, you’d have the beautiful people flocking to his defense.

And then there is this:

Then again, this would be more obvious if we weren’t just wrapping up eight years in which comparisons of national leaders to chimpanzees were just ordinary political dialog from many of the same people all enthused over Obama. What goes around...

Click through to the linked pages to see what he’s talking about.

It Worked For Dorothy!

Obama’s New Pastor

Newsmax.com, where we found this link, finds this sermon clip “inflammatory.”

We’ll let viewers judge.

New Trinity Church minister Otis Moss has been defending his predecessor, Jeremiah Wright, but of course he pretty much has to. It remains to be seen whether he will be in the Wright tradition or not.

Obama’s Buddy Ayers: The Picture Tells It All

Via Badger Blogger, Barack Obama’s friend Bill Ayers in a pose that shows just what he thinks of America.

Ayers is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in Education, which tells you a lot about education schools these days.

His connections with Obama aren’t trivial.

But as Patrick at Badger Blogger put it, “Don’t Question Their Patriotism.”

[Update]

Best comment on this, from Fraley’s Daily Takes: “Now we know why Obama doesn’t wear a flag on his lapel. He’s afraid Bill Ayers will stand on his chest.”

Slippery SOB

Political Jibe of the Day

From a column by Ann Coulter:

Let’s just hope President Obama pays closer attention during national security briefings than he did during 20 years of the Rev. Wright’s church services.

Just How Serious Are Obama’s Ties to Weather Underground Terrorist?

From Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe:

Should voters care that Barack Obama is friendly with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, two onetime leaders of the Weather Underground terrorist group that committed dozens of bombings and other violent crimes between 1969 and 1975? That question came up during the recent Democratic debate in Philadelphia, and scorn by the bucketful was heaped on the ABC moderators who asked it.

The Washington Post’s Tom Shales, for example, was appalled that Obama should be confronted with “such tired tripe” as the fact that he “once associated with a nutty bomb-throwing anarchist.” Michael Grunwald of Time derided the “extremely stupid politics” responsible for questions like the one about the “obscure sixties radical” with whom Obama “was allegedly ‘friendly.’” Other commentators were even more outraged.

The chorus of protests echoed Obama’s own defense. When George Stephanopoulos challenged him to explain his relationship with the unrepentant former terrorists -- “I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayers told The New York Times. “I feel we didn’t do enough” -- the senator dismissed the issue as irrelevant.

“This is a guy,” Obama said, “who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that [my] knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” His links to the ex-Weathermen he brushed aside as “flimsy,” saying he was sure “the American people are smarter than” to think he shares the terrorists’ radical views.

Obama didn’t leave it there. His campaign issued a 1,300-word “fact check” pooh-poohing his connection to Ayers and Dohrn as “phony,” “tenuous,” “a stretch” -- but simultaneously defending them as “respectable fixtures of the mainstream in Chicago.”

Yet Obama’s ties to Ayers and Dohrn aren’t nearly as trifling as he suggests, and their views -- today, not 40 years ago -- are about as “respectable” and “mainstream” as those of, say, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s
incendiary minister.

The key facts, reported by Ben Smith in Politico.com, are these: Barack Obama’s political career was launched in Ayers’s and Dohrn’s home, when a group of “influential liberals” gathered in 1995 to meet the young organizer who was Illinois lawmaker Alice Palmer’s chosen successor. In the years that followed, Obama and Ayers would serve together as (paid) board members of the Woods Fund, a leftist Chicago foundation, and appear jointly on academic panels, at least one of which was organized by Michelle Obama. Ayers would even donate money to one of Obama’s political campaigns.

Arguably, none of this would matter if Ayers and Dohrn had long ago repudiated their violent extremism. But they have always refused to apologize for their monstrous behavior. “We weren’t extreme enough in fighting against the war,” Ayers avowed to the Chicago Tribune in 2001. In a memoir published that year, he exulted: “Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.” America, he said after Sept. 11, “is not a just and fair and decent place. . . . It makes me want to puke.”

In Chicago the other day, radio producer Guy Benson discovered video recordings of Ayers and Dohrn speaking at a reunion of antiwar radicals in November 2007. To live in the United States, Dohrn told the group, is to be “inside the heart of the monster” that is such a “purveyor of violence in the world.” Ayers denounced America as an imperial warmonger steeped in “jingoistic patriotism, unprecedented and unapologetic military expansion, white supremacy . . . attacks on women and girls, violent attacks, growing surveillance in every sphere of our lives, on and on and on.” (Audio clips have been posted at the indispensable PowerLine blog.)

If a Republican candidate had connections this close with a Ku Klux Klan leader, it would fatally taint his candidacy. It’s hard to see why a different standard applies to Obama.

The Brats in the Back Seat

Obama: I Might Put Bush Administration People on Trial for Torture

Via Republicratocracy, an interesting promise that Barack Obama has made in response to a question from a hard leftist.

Obama would ask his AG to “immediately review” potential of crimes in Bush White House

Tonight I had an opportunity to ask Barack Obama a question that is on the minds of many Americans, yet rarely rises to the surface in the great ruckus of the 2008 presidential race -- and that is whether an Obama administration would seek to prosecute officials of a former Bush administration on the revelations that they greenlighted torture, or for other potential crimes that took place in the White House.

Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to “immediately review the information that’s already there” and determine if an inquiry is warranted -- but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as “a partisan witch hunt.” However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because “nobody is above the law.”

And further:

The bottom line is that: Obama sent a clear signal that -- unlike impeachment, which he’s ruled out and which now seems a practical impossibility -- he is at the least open to the possibility of investigating potential high crimes in the Bush White House. To many, the information that waterboarding -- which the United States has considered torture and a violation of law in the past -- was openly planned out in the seat of American government is evidence enough to at least start asking some tough questions in January 2009.

It’s nice to say that we want a candidate who will “bring us together.”

But the problem is that Bush haters don’t want to be “brought together.” They want revenge. And Obama, in this case, has chosen to pander to them -- or at least hold out hope that they will have their revenge.

The Spell is Gone

Lame Explanation

The Political Version