Category: The Dish

David Paterson keeps telling the truth.

From McCain’s economic speech today:

I will not play election year politics with the housing crisis. I will evaluate everything in terms of whether it might be harmful or helpful to our effort to deal with the crisis we face now.

I have always been committed to the principle that it is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers.

Government assistance to the banking system should be based solely on preventing systemic risk that would endanger the entire financial system and the economy.In our effort to help deserving homeowners, no assistance should be given to speculators. Any assistance for borrowers should be focused solely on homeowners, not people who bought houses for speculative purposes, to rent or as second homes. Any assistance must be temporary and must not reward people who were irresponsible at the expense of those who weren’t. I will consider any and all proposals based on their cost and benefits. In this crisis, as in all I may face in the future, I will not allow dogma to override common sense.

Couldn’t agree more. But I see little reason why people foolish enough to take out shady mortgages they could not afford should be bailed out either.

I’ve long favored this. Isaac gets it.

If you missed it, don’t. He’s not a Clinton hater like I am, which makes his analysis perhaps more devastating.

He’s my friend and I respect him and he’s entitled to his view that Obama is a cynic and a self-serving fraud, but allow me to write where I think Hitch is being unfair. Item One:

Looking for a moral equivalent to a professional demagogue who thinks that AIDS and drugs are the result of a conspiracy by the white man, Obama settled on an 85-year-old lady named Madelyn Dunham, who spent a good deal of her youth helping to raise him and who now lives alone and unwell in a condo in Honolulu.

This seems to me to elide too many connections, i.e. it’s too cheap a shot. The point Obama was making in referring to his grandmother, whom he evokes with great vividness and love in his first book, written long before he ran for any office, is that we are all full of fear and anger. The anger that Jeremiah Wright still harbors from the indignities of the 1950s and 1960s is not without reason even if it is wrong; and the fear that his own grandmother has of a black male stranger on the street is also not without reason even if it is wrong. And Obama – who doesn’t make the comparison as directly as Hitch implies – says he loves both and that both have a point but that both need to overcome their fear. More: he shows in his book that his grandmother did overcome that fear in many ways, while it is clear that he believes Wright, in some instances, still hasn’t. I also don’t think you can fairly hear or read Obama’s speech and believe he was somehow saying that his grandmother’s racial fear was as objectionable as Wright’s racist outbursts. He doesn’t denounce it in anything like the same terms. These are nuances, but then that speech was indeed nuanced.

Item Two:

I assume you all have your copies of The Audacity of Hope in paperback breviary form. If you turn to the chapter entitled "Faith," beginning on Page 195, and read as far as Page 208, I think that even if you don’t concur with my reading, you may suspect that I am onto something. In these pages, Sen. Obama is telling us that he doesn’t really have any profound religious belief, but that in his early Chicago days he felt he needed to acquire some spiritual "street cred."

Again, if you read those pages and the totality of the book and Obama’s account of his own faith in many other contexts, you will see this passage as a confession by Obama of some of the non-spiritual motives he had for seeking out an authentic black experience as he saw it in Chicago. He is not telling us his own faith isn’t real, and it is absurd to read the book and infer that. In fact, what is remarkable about the book is that Obama is able to show how his mixed motives were at one point overwhelmed by sincere religious faith. What strikes me about that is its human honesty, not its cynicism.

Now Hitch, of course, believes that all religious faith is contemptible and a fraud. I don’t. And I think Hitch’s healthy skepticism toward all forms of uplift, political and religious, has a very important place in our culture and in Western freedom. I would not expect Hitch to feel anything but visceral revulsion to an Obama sermon. And I don’t like some of the messianic tinges to the Obama movement much either. But I think Obama’s foreign policy proposals in the wake of the Iraq debacle, the resort to reason in his dialogue, and his recourse to to civility and to complexity in an age of ugliness and soundbites more than counter-balance this redemptive temptation.

Of course, I cannot see totally into a man’s soul, Obama’s or anyone else’s, and I cannot know for sure that he is pure of motive. That he has confessed that he has not always been pure of motive is for me a good sign, not a bad omen. Perhaps Hitch is right that all of this is some gigantic fraud in which the most sincere matters of faith and family are being cynically used for pure politics. We can only look at a man’s words and actions and self-explanation, and do our best to make a judgment.

This is my judgment. I do not believe Obama is a cynical fraud, a closet anti-Semite, a believer that white people are evil, a man who holds that white men gave black people AIDS, or is so empty that his own beloved grandmother is just another vehicle for his self-advancement. I do not believe his faith as he has tried to express it is phony or cynical. I do not believe his refusal to disown Wright is a function of politics, but a function of human loyalty and love, which can often transcend or even be empowered by that loved one’s flaws, and even malice. Do I wish Obama had never known Wright? In one sense, yes. In another, no. It is partly what makes him who he is – a bridge in some extremely troubled currents.

Hitch predicts I will soon be proven wrong, that the mask will soon be ripped off, and great disillusion will sink in again. Maybe it will, and I will be forced into another humiliating confession of misjudgment. There’s a vital place in the discourse for such skepticism as Hitch’s – and I’m not looking for a savior (I have one already, thanks), just a way forward. But when skepticism lacks the willingness to listen and to grant, even for a moment, the benefit of the doubt to a man whose message is, in tone more than substance, an antidote to our current national and international crisis, it is, I think, missing something important right now. It is getting very close to cynicism.

One of us, I guess, will at some point be proven wrong, or, more accurately, less right. All I can say is that I doubt Hitch will be particularly thrilled when the Clintons move in for the carcass of what was and remains the audacity of hope.

(Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.)

Gene Weingarten spends 24 hours with six TV’s and a computer:

There are too many voices, competing too hard, fighting for attention, ranting, redundant, random. The dissemination of fact and opinion is no longer the sole province of people and institutions with the money to buy network monopolies or ink by the ton, as it was a half-century ago when information was delivered to us, for better or worse, like the latest 1950s-era cigarette: filtered, for an illusion of safety. Now, all is out of control. Everyone with a computer is a potential pundit; anyone with a video camera can be on a screen.

Newbie.

Shanghai, China, 3.40 pm.

All the toxins, less addictive:

"I’m convinced that there’s very little we can do on the toxicant side," Zeller said. "But imagine a world, however many decades from now, in which the cigarette remains as deadly and toxic as it is today, but it’s not addictive because there’s no nicotine in it."

From a public health perspective, Zeller thinks that the lack of the main addictive agent in cigarettes would do more for reducing the overall population susceptibility to the dangers of smoking than any amount of biotech tinkering could do in reducing the carcinogens in tobacco.

A reader makes an often overlooked point about Obama:

Obama isn’t the first credible African-American candidate so much as he’s the first credible Hawaiian candidate.  Everything that’s essential and appealing about him is Hawaiian in character, and reflects his years growing up there.  People in Hawaii don’t fixate on race, because everyone is mixed race, individually or by marriage, and they don’t think in terms of political party, because that’s at best a secondary characteristic; and above all, they don’t think in terms of traditional left/right, red/blue polarities– those are for the mainland.  Hawaii is a place where conservative evangelical Christians are Asian and Polynesian, and the secular liberals are white and not quite local; where "black" isn’t even a common category, because African-Americans are so rare; where liberal Democrats revere military service, largely because a lot of Hawaii’s political leaders are veterans of the legendary all-Japanese 442nd Infantry, starting with Medal of Honor winner Dan Inoyue. In Hawaii, ideological stances are looked at with huge skepticism, because they imply pretension and putting on airs– or as it’s said there, "Hey brah, no act!"

The key to understanding Obama isn’t race, or Kennedy, or any of that: the key is Hawaii.

A twitter marriage proposal.