The Dish

An older reader writes:

With respect to the Gen Y person who wrote to say that he is abandoning politics for good if Obama loses, please tell him and his demographic cohorts to grow up! Obama is a young, one-term Senator. He may have to make a couple of runs to have a shot at the White House. Even John Kennedy had more Congressional experience under his belt (not to mention combat experience and a well-funded family political and media machine). God willing, this is not the last Presidential election in American history, and Obama, like Reagan, Nixon, and others before them, may have to try another time if he doesn’t win this one. For myself, I’m not going to vote for Obama (I’ll probably vote for the Libertarian candidate, if that candidate is pro-life like Ron Paul), but I’d be happy to see him win, since he is the closest thing we have to an antiwar candidate who could actually win. I would just be happier if he had a bit more experience.

The more I listen and read the more thoughtful people who oppose Obama the more I think that the very simple fact of his newness and youth and inexperience in Washington is what gives many pause. And I think these are completely valid reservations. I don’t see it that way. I think of politicians as jejune as Tony Blair was when he won office – with absolutely zero executive experience – and see in Obama qualities that will serve him well. An Obama-McCain match places these two qualities – freshness versus experience – baldly in front of is and gives them a new and profound contrast.

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.