The Dish

A man waiting for a car repair sees the Obama speech on TV. People come and go and watch. Not everyone in this country is like the National Review crowd:

I’ve watched the speech again since this morning, and it didn’t disappoint, but just at that moment I stopped watching it … and started watching the people around me.  The young black man. The elderly white couple.  The two white women, one college-aged, one in her late-20s.  One middle-aged white woman.  Two white men, one college-aged, one in his late-30s.  One Asian couple.  All of them were watching the speech.  Rapt.  Nodding. 

Gradually, the twentysomething white woman went back to her laptop, but kept smiling when Obama would say something important.  The elderly white couple whispered in their Southern accented way: "He’s really good… He’s saying good things… He’s a good young man…"  The young black man chuckled when Obama said that Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in America, but was otherwise simply watching.  And at one point, the middle-aged white woman asked one of the dealership folks, in another thick, thick Southern accent if she wouldn’t mind turning up the volume, because she really wanted to hear this speech.

She, this white Southern woman from the suburbs, wanted to hear this speech, delivered by a Black man with a funny name running for President.  And she was nodding. 

But she wasn’t the only one.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

An incredible coincidence:

A German fighter ace has just learned that one of his 28 wartime ‘kills’ was his favourite author. Messerschmidt pilot Horst Rippert, 88, said he would have held his fire if he had known the man flying the Lightning fighter was renowned French novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

A big toy.

A pianist gets dramatic.

American Footprints on the Chinese attempt to marginalize the Dalai Lama:

By linking the Dalai Lama to the unrest—which he opposes (and the Chinese know he opposes)—the Chinese are forcing the Dalai Lama either to repudiate the Tibetan militants and split the emigre Tibetan movement, or endorse the insurrection and permit the Chinese to portray him as an impotent captive of extremist forces.

For those unfamiliar with the Chinese pattern of denunciation, polarization, division, and destruction this is a classic tactic–call it Police State 101–intended to isolate the target of a purge by forcing him to denounce his associates—or force the target to incriminate himself by not forswearing alliance with a vulnerable, isolated, and discredited element that the Chinese government is about to land on like a ton of bricks. […]

The most immediate result of Tibetan militancy will be to unite the Chinese and isolate the moderates on the Tibetan side, while undermining the political standing of Tibet’s most effective political figure, the Dalai Lama, as spokesman for a unified, internationally popular political and diplomatic movement.

That’s bad politics and dumb tactics…and it’s exactly what the Chinese have been trying to accomplish for the last five decades.

The worst case is that the Tibetan unrest and toothless Western censure unite Chinese elite and Chinese public opinion in favor of another one of those major security actions against Tibet’s isolated people and fragile institutions that seem to happen every twenty years.

This one might end up destroying the Dalai Lama’s authority as a leader, encourage the Chinese to further interfere in Tibetan politics and culture by aggressively inserting itself into the search for the next reincarnation, split Tibetan Bhuddism between a PRC-sponsored Dalai Lama in Lhasa and an untested child in Dharamsala, redefine the emigres as a collection of secular, angry–and vulnerable–dissidents, and put the Tibetan regions securely under Beijing’s thumb for another generation.

That’s a potential win big enough to compensate for some embarrassment at the Olympics.

A reader makes a good point:

I thought that one of the few things all us Christians agreed on was the maxim "condemn the sin but love the sinner."  Obama’s description of his relationship to Rev. Wright, the man and his opinions, was a model of this goal for all Christians living in a tainted world.  So how can Christians such as Michael Gerson (whom I otherwise respect) continue to demand Obama sever himself from Wright and Trinity Church?  What am I missing?

These repeated gaffes about al Qaeda being helped by Iran are beginning to make me wonder. I assumed he was more cognizant of the complex realities of Iraq than our current president. And it’s staggering to me that it hasn’t even occurred to McCain that exploiting some of the divisions between Shiite and Sunni Islam might actually be a tactic worth considering in our increasingly complex battle over there. Was this more Bush-Rove dumbing-don for the American public? Or is he really that ignorant?

A Clinton testimonial for Paul McCartney’s former wife:

Here’s the judge’s view of Mills:

Having watched and listened to her give evidence, having studied the documents, and having given in her favour every allowance for the enormous strain she must have been under (and in conducting her own case) I am driven to the conclusion that much of her evidence, both written and oral, was not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid. Overall she was a less than impressive witness.

(Hat tip: Danny.)

Leon says to chill.

"[Y]ou can’t hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. It’s interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what … Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable, years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Rev. Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you’d say ‘Well, I didn’t mean to say it quite like that…

As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say ‘That’s a terrible statement!’ … I grew up in a very segregated South. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names…" – Mike Huckabee. YouTube here.