Category: The Dish

Matt discovers a moment of actual reporting on television:

A reader writes:

I agree and wish the right would be more positive and encouraging about Obama, but the fact is, he is being criticized largely for his proposed liberal policies, associations, and unwise utterances.  And that is fair.

And would strong support of Obama be a sort of repudiation of Black conservative Republicans, who have had the courage to completely repudiate black victimhood-speak?  So it’s not a simple dynamic.

Agreed. And this tension is partly why Shelby Steele cannot bring himself to back Obama. But Obama has definitely pushed the boundaries against victimology within the context of the black Democratic caucus. And that has to be a good thing all round in the end.

"In our image of the Negro breathes the past we deny, not dead but living yet and powerful, the beast in our jungle of statistics.  It is this which defeats us, which continues to defeat us, which lends to interracial cocktail parties their rattling, genteel, nervously smiling air: in any drawing room at such a gathering the beast may spring, filling the air with flying things and an enenlightened wailing. Whereever the problem touches there is confusion, there is danger. Wherever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension of a silence filled with things unutterable.  It is a sentimental error, therefore, to believe that the past is dead: it means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it. It is not a question of memory.  Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him," – James Baldwin, "Many Thousands Gone," 1955. 

Ezra Klein tackles the media’s dislike of policy:

Policy is hard. Lots of people come to different conclusions. Unanimity is rare. Except on this gas tax holiday. Just about no one thinks it a good idea. Conservative economists loathe it, liberal economists loathe it, energy experts loathe it…it’s shameless pandering of the worst sort. So is the media going to create a scandal around McCain’s pander? Around Clinton’s copy-pander? Will they hound them at press conferences, run segments about the derailed "Straight Talk Express," bring on pollsters to ask whether Americans are tired of being lied to?

Well, not quite.

David Corn’s thoughts:

…we’re back to the perennial question: how mature are voters? Do they fall for the no-pain, quick-fix? Can they see through transparent pandering?

This is a small but real deal-breaker for me. It’s very hard to respect any politician who backs such an obvious piece of hooey.

 

"Obviously I’m not rooting for Barack Obama to win the Presidency, but if he does take the election this fall, there will be some compensating pleasures – not only the thrill that will accompany seeing a man ascend to the Oval Office who could have been bought and sold in a different, more unjust America, but the pleasure of knowing that Jeremiah Wright’s attempt at self-aggrandizing sabotage fell flat on its face," – Ross Douthat.

This reader is not alone:

I’ll just put that out there. If Obama is done in by this whole Wright thing I am done with politics. I can’t invest myself in something that is so sure to disappoint me time and time and time again. If the Democratic party decides that it can not risk nominating a great and decent African American man because his pastor is a scary African American man, it does not deserve power because it will have caved to what is worst about America. Racists on both sides of the divide will rejoice at having taking down the biggest threat to their belief system since Martin Luther King….and young people like myself will burrow deeper into to the holes we were in before Barack Obama dug us out.

Poulos counters Bailey’s post on mixing human and chimp DNA:

I shouldn’t need to say this, and it’s quite horrific that any professor of philosophy should need it explained, but the ethical principle behind keeping the human species pure holds that our ethics are human ethics because we are human beings. ‘Naturally’ enough, human ethics includes such principles as ‘don’t torture animals’, but principles like this collapse if torturing animals is bad only, or primarily, from the perspective of the animals being tortured. Torturing animals violates human ethics because it’s bad for the humans doing the torturing. It’s extra-mindbending to think that the people inclined to miss this point might also incline to be the ones who emphasize how torturing humans is wrong from the perspective of the torturer and not just the tortured.

As pissed and depressed as everyone else.

The contest continues. A handful of your entries:

Bosnia exaggerate, I? No! On I tar, egg, axe, in a sob.

Demand delegates offset aged-named!

A mob? O! He ripostes pastor, eh? Obama!

They don’t have to make sense or be political. More here.

I like the thrust of his market-driven approach, but by allowing insurance companies to deny people insurance for pre-existing conditions, and undermining the employer-based insurance system, the risk to people already dealing with medical issues is enormous. I’d love to be able to buy my own health insurance and keep it from job to job. But I’m HIV-positive and no one would sell it to me. And McCain’s plan would leave people like me stranded. Yes, he says he’d work with the states on subsidizing this … but is that really reassurance? Megan has more here.