Goldberg thanks the Almighty for Obama

Does anyone do sarcasm better than Jonah Goldberg? I think not.

Obama the "bargainer"

In this morning's Wall Street Journal Shelby Steele argues that Barack Obama is a "bargainer." "Bargaining," according to Steele, enables white Americans to feel at ease -- absolved even -- with regard to America's past sin. Barack the "bargainer" wears a mask that comforts many. "Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him," writes Steele. "And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence."

More Steele:

Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans -- black and white -- Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America's very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

Wrightgate approaching Nixonian levels of evasion

Victor Davis Hanson's post today on this issue is a must read:

Wrightgate is more and more becoming Nixonian.

Now we hear that Rev. Wright considers Israel a "dirty word". I don't want to sound like a broken-record, but we are back to 1973-4 when almost every day a new disclosure helped doom the stonewalling Nixon.

The gamut of Wright's hatred is amazingly extensive—Israel, whites, rich people, the United States, the American conduct of World War II, moderate blacks, middleclassness, Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice—to such a degree that he seems consumed with hatred and simply fills in the target spontaneously at any given moment.

As long as Sen. Obama remains in that extremist church, and as long as he continues to offer these reprehensible mea culpas for Wright ("scholar," "not particularly controversial," "cherry-pick," "Uncle," etc.), and the more the massive Wright corpus is disseminated, the more Nixonian Obama becomes, as he scrambles to devise a new modified hangout, while allowing the last failed one to become 'inoperative.'

Read it all if you have time. It's no wonder that Hillary is hanging around, much to the dismay of the Hoperoots.

The perils of wearisome tripe

Christopher Hitchens is at his best and most acerbic this morning. A choice selection:

Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think "first woman president." We think -- for example -- "first ex-co-president" or "first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent" or "first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband's perjury rap." One might come up with other and kinder distinctions (I shall not be doing so)... .

The company Obama keeps

Flopping Aces reported yesterday on some troubling ties between Barack Obama and Louis Farrakhan, a detestable racist. Obama has responded to the criticism, attempting to distance himself from his own church. Today, Professor Bernstein explains why Obama's explanation, unlike a Snickers bar, fails to satisfy.

UPDATE: It is instructive to contrast the coverage (or lack thereof) of Obama's equivocal condemnation of Farrakhan with the hue and cry that followed Trent Lott's enigmatic comments at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party. No one in the media then gave Lott the benefit of the doubt. Do you suppose the reaction to Obama's church's decision to honor Farrakhan will be half as merciless? Don't count on it.