Category: The Dish

Obama stands his ground. Weigel outlines why the tax holiday is a shameless pander. It has to be one of the most depressingly crude pieces of political pandering I’ve seen in ages. But Clinton and McCain are at one on it, which tells you something about their fitness to be president. Personally, I want a president able to resist this kind of crap, not endorse it.

A primer on how much Republican cheer-leader Hugh Hewitt hates John McCain.

Noam has an interesting and largely persuasive take. How many black ministers in Chicago could discuss post-modernism, be gay-inclusive and socially progressive?

A reader writes:

I’m a Democrat, and I’ve been watching O’Reilly and Hannity a lot lately, as well as reading The Corner and listening to Rush every day. And I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re right.

I am totally not voting for Reverend Wright anymore.

Me neither.

A reader thinks so:

Andrew stop despairing. There is nothing to despair. The underdog HAS to take the champ to the 13th round, be beaten within an inch of his life and fight through all the dirty tricks the champ will use. Otherwise any victory will be second guessed forever. Go watch Cinderella Man.

And Obama denouncing Wright today? All part of the plan. What conversation serves Obama better – talking about religion or talking about health care? Religion. Clinton is left out of that conversation. And Obama gets to denounce a racist! How cool is that? Heck, even within the constructs of the hero’s journey, Obama has now had to sacrifice a loved one. Perfect!!

She’s on O’Reilly and her surrogate is accusing her opponent of being a "pansy". Classy – but vintage Clinton. Never miss an opportunity to exploit homophobia. Remember DOMA? Remember doubling the discharges from the military? Remember inaction on AIDS? Remember the Clintons’ using anti-gay marriage ads in the South in 1996? And yet the gays keep coming back for more. I don’t understand why. I really don’t.

A reader writes:

I saw your post about the flier that is running connecting Ayers to Obama.  Wow. Ayers only contributed $200 to Obama’s campaign?  I’m WAY more connected to Obama.  In fact I’ve:

• Contributed more than $200 to his campaign
• Ran registration at a convention he attended and spoke at
• Ate dinner in the same restaurant as him, and at one point, was within 10 feet of him
• I’m a member of several Obama related facebook groups

So I think Obama should probably repudiate me now and avoid the rush.

Me too. I’ve been in the same room as Obama and have spoken with him on the phone. I support the flat tax, oppose affirmative action, want social security means-tested, published "The Bell Curve", helped kill off Clinton’s healthcare plan in the 1990s, favored the Iraq war, and endorsed Bush in 2000.

Brendan Loy makes an obvious point:

The truth is that Obama is speaking to black people, too — he’s speaking to everyone — and he is sending a very clear message: enough with the bullshit. Haven’t conservatives been waiting for a black leader to do that for, like, forever?

This is the promise of the Obama candidacy, encapsulated and made real. Obama is urging blacks to leave behind, once and for all, the politics of conspiratorial victimhood — the politics of Jeremiah Wright and, although Obama can’t afford politically to say so explicitly, of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton — and embrace the politics of unity and hope and, ultimately, self-empowerment.

It’s extremely depressing that the first major national black politician who takes on the victimology of Sharpton and Jackson is greeted by the right with the kind of cynicism you see at Malkin or the Corner or Reynolds. It reveals, I think, the deeper truth: the Republican right only wants a black Republican to do this. They are not as interested in getting beyond the racial question, in changing the hopes and dreams of black America, as they are in exploiting it for partisan advantage. Their response to the first major black candidate for president tackling the old racial politics? "We don’t believe him."

Brendan expresses dismay at Glenn Reynolds. But Reynolds voted against Harold Ford. There’s no black Democrat who could ever pass muster. Because they’re Democrats.

A reader observes:

The point has been made before, but we need a reminder.  Obama did not have a strong model of masculinity, a father figure to know intimately and revere, in his earliest years.  He yearned desperately for it; somehow, finding the patriarch would make him whole and normal in a way he thought others felt.   

So he found Wright a few decades ago.  But he’s flying blind.  If we’re lucky enough, and our fathers live long enough, we can see them for the humans they are. We don’t love them less, but in the process of maturing we begin to grow independent by seeing them with new eyes.  We separate, and in doing so, enter a new ambivalence about what the father-son role means as it transforms.  We might be watching a limnal process for Obama in real-time here.  The sad thing is that (and I believe Obama is sincere) I don’t think any of us could know the inner turmoil this causing Obama.  Sometimes its easy to forget how privileged those of us who know well the father-son dynamic are; its just too easy to yell "throw Wright under the bus."  Obama is human, too.

Clay Shirky contrasts using free time on the internet with spending it watching TV:

…if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.