Showing posts with label Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.. Show all posts

April 30, 2008

Rev. Wright: Black Internationalist

Back in the winter of 2007 I used the term "black nationalist" to describe Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, but on further reflection, that can give the wrong impression of Wright's politics. "Black nationalism" tends to imply a fairly conservative form of separatism with an important role for capitalism. Although, judging from his Porsche and the mansion he's building in a gated community, Rev. Wright is a talented capitalist himself, his ideology, which attracted Obama to him, might better be described as "black internationalist."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 29, 2008

One thing I like about Obama ...

... is that he prefers, all else being equal, not to lie.

Some politicians are like Chevy Chase's character in "Fletch." They'd rather make up lies than tell the truth, for the same reason that composers like to make up music -- that's what they're good at.

In contrast, Barack Obama's preferred mode is the intellectual puzzle. He likes to bury the truth in there somewhere under so many dependent clauses, thoughtful nuances, and "I have understood you" gestures that most people give up trying to decipher what he's saying and just make up little fantasies about how he agrees with them. Obama's view seems to be that it's not his fault that the press and public aren't as smart or hard-working as he is. (I can't say I totally disagree with him there ...)

Unfortunately, with his back finally to the wall over Rev. Wright, with Sen. Howard Baker's question during the Watergate hearings -- "What did the [candidate for] President know and when did he know it?" -- coming to the fore, Obama has been reduced to blatant Sgt. Schultz-style denials("I saw nuthink!!!!") about his exposure to Rev. Wright's beliefs.

More interestingly, Obama asserts:
"You know, I have been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ since 1992. I have known Reverend Wright for almost 20 years. The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago."

The fascinating question is why Obama insists that the person who has changed is Jeremiah A. Wright, not Barack Obama. Why not just say, "Well, we've both changed over the years, in opposite directions"?

The person Obama has to disown to be elected President is not Rev. Wright but his own younger self, the one who carefully chose Rev. Wright out of the dozens of black South Side ministers he met as a community organizer.

Why won't Obama admit that he's matured into moderation? As I pointed out a week ago, he's going to need to do a speech along the lines of, "Yeah, I used to be a radical, but then ... I had kids!" But he hasn't come close to that yet.

Clearly, part of the problem is that that would demolish his carefully crafted myth that racial moderation is in his "DNA" (as he asserted today).

Another problem Obama has is that he's strongly emphasized his connections with Rev. Wright and Trinity Church in his campaign materials aimed at Christian voters. My guess is that Obama is a secular nonbeliever who just plays up his church membership for political gain and because its racialist aspect fills the hole in his soul left by his father's abandonment of him, helping him feel "black enough." But that's left him in the ridiculous position of asserting that he went to Trinity all the time, just not, through some amazing statistical fluke, on the days when Rev. Wright did what Rev. Wright does.

Yet, there may be other reasons for refusing to disown his own younger self. Perhaps fear of his wife? Mrs. Obama made herself into a social lioness among Chicago's elite, which may help explain the family's inability to build up any savings until very recently, despite averaging over $200,000 income per year from 1997-2004. Perhaps Mrs. Obama, deep down, is worried that she sold out, so Trinity remains a symbol to her that she's still keepin' it real.

Or perhaps it's Obama who is appalled by his own selling out of his youthful radicalism?

That touches on a different question about who Obama is: Is he the cold-blooded political operative who destroyed the career of a beloved elder stateswoman by having her nomination signatures disqualified to win office for the first time in 1996? Or is he the sensitive, self-absorbed literary artiste who recounted the mild buffets that fate has dealt him with so much anguish in his autobiography? Clearly, he's both, but it's hard to get a sense of the balance within him.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama: "That's in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding."

Obama denounced Rev. Wright today for, in effect, exposing the basic lie upon which Obama's campaign is built: that Obama's genetic racial make-up, his "DNA," has meant that he has devoted his whole career to racial conciliation. His opening statement about "my DNA" speaks directly to the fantasy Obama has carefully nurtured:

"SENATOR BARACK OBAMA: Before I start taking questions I want to open it up with a couple of comments about what we saw and heard yesterday. I have spent my entire adult life trying to bridge the gap between different kinds of people. That's in my DNA, trying to promote mutual understanding to insist that we all share common hopes and common dreams as Americans and as human beings. That's who I am." ...

"The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago. ... They certainly don't portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that's political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn't know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought, either. ... It contradicts everything that I'm about and who I am. ...

And anybody who has worked with me, who knows my life, who has read my books, who has seen what this campaign's about, I think, will understand that it is completely opposed to what I stand for and where I want to take this country.

Of course, in reality, Obama's nature and (especially) nurture left him worried that he won't be perceived as "black enough," so he has devoted much of his career to working to extract money from whites and spend it on blacks (e.g., getting jobs as a community organizer, civil rights lawyer, and state legislator). That's why he joined Rev. Wright's church -- it made him feel black enough.

I'm always being denounced as "obsessed" about race, genetics, and the interplay of nature and nurture because I've learned a lot about them and think about them in a dispassionate manner. And yet, it keeps turning out that everybody else is obsessed, too. (That certainly includes Barack Obama, who subtitled his 442-page autobiography, A Story of Race and Inheritance.)

The problem is that everybody else keeps getting their thinking about race and inheritance wrong, because they only allow themselves to think ignorantly and emotionally about it. For example, Obama has, quite intentionally, elicited in the minds of tens of millions of white people a crude genetic-determinist fantasy that racial reconciliation is in his "DNA."

I'm sorry, but human beings are a lot more complicated than that. Obama is the product of a complex and unusual nurture -- to understand his life, you both have to put yourself in his shoes and pull way back and view him in context, knowing a lot about the sociology of race, including seemingly minor aspects like the Hawaiian view of race.

I was just about the first to put together a plausible story of who Obama is precisely because I'm interested in the same things that interest Obama about himself and so many of his fans about Obama -- the difference is that I allow myself to think logically, objectively, and empirically about "race and inheritance," while respectable people only allow themselves to think with non-rational and intentionally ill-informed parts of their brain.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Why hasn't Obama dealt with Rev. Wright?

One little-mentioned aspect of Barack Obama's on-going fiasco involving his spiritual mentor is that it makes him look feckless.

Rev. Wright has been a problem Obama knew he was going to have for, roughly, ever. But what has he done about it, besides giving a 5,000 word speech? Did he switch to a Washington D.C. church when he was elected to the Senate in 2005? Did he persuade Trinity to stop selling Wright's sermons on DVD? Did he provide any sort of narrative about the evolving ideological differences between the young and mature Barack Obamas?

In contrast, do you remember how in February 2004, Democratic frontrunner John Kerry was rocked by rumors that he was having an adulterous affair with a young woman? You probably don't remember because, although for about a day it looked like it might derail Kerry's victory march through the primaries, the story quickly went away -- when the young lady went away, leaving the country.

Problem dealt with.

I have no idea if the rumors about Kerry were true or if the girl's timely departure from America was a coincidence or what. But, let's assume the worst about Kerry: he wrote a big check from the allowance his wife gives him to his mistress in return for making herself scarce. What can you then say about Kerry?

Well, one thing you can say is that he had a problem and he dealt with it. All else being equal, I'd rather have a President who had a problem and dealt with it than a President who had a problem and failed to deal with it.

Wright should not have been an unsolvable problem for Obama. Wright likes the spotlight, but he also likes other things. (He drives a Porsche, for example).

So, Wright likes money. Obama has friends with money. Right there, you have the makings of a deal. (The payoff didn't have to be crass -- just that in return for Wright maintaining a low profile all year, in December 2008 Obama's supporters would start up a charitable foundation for Rev. to run. Obama could have asked Bill and Hill for advice on the fine points of foundations.)

So, why hasn't Obama dealt with it?

1. Maybe it's all part of some brilliant plan Obama has got to heighten the drama before he delivers his master-stroke.

2. Is Mrs. Obama the key to Sen. Obama's Wright problem? Michelle Obama is a formidable woman, and Sen. Obama wouldn't be the first Presidential candidate who's scared of his wife. Maybe she won't let him deal with Wright? It's an intriguing idea, but I haven't been able to find much evidence for a strong connection between Mrs. Obama and Rev. Wright.

3. Rev. Wright is all tied up with Obama's complicated issues of personal identity, as expounded at endless length is his autobiography, so his normally cold-blooded brain fails to work rationally here. It's not uncommon for highly ambitious and effective people like Obama to have an Achilles heel, an area where their feelings of guilt and inauthenticity get concentrated and paralyze them.

4. He's terrified of losing the black vote? I dunno, that sounds implausible.

5. So what if he can't deal with it? He's not running against FDR and Reagan -- he just has to beat Hillary and McCain.

6. His campaign, going back to the opening of his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address, is based on white people's assumption that being half-white made him less anti-white than other black leaders. So, Obama is worried that anything having to do with Rev. Wright will just unravel the logic of those fantasies he's elicited in his followers' minds.

I suspect, though, that Obama's overthinking this. People are slow to give up their fantasies due to logical disproof. Sure, Obama misled people about who he really was, but they wanted to be misled. And they still want to be misled.

At the moment, though, Obama doesn't looke like a leader. Obama's problem now is that Rev. Wright's vigor and enjoyment of the situation makes Obama, by contrast, look like a loser. Think about how Reagan wrapped up the 1980 election by turning to Carter in the debate and saying, with a smile on his face, "There you go again." What the hell did that mean? Not much on paper, but on TV it showed that Reagan was enjoying his dominance over the President. Reagan learned that from FDR, who always wore a look of amused mastery as he stuck the shiv in his political opponents. The public likes that in their leaders.

In the Obama vs. Wright battle, Wright is now playing the alpha male.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 28, 2008

Rev. Wright on black-white cognitive differences

Here's an interesting excerpt from Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.'s Sunday night Detroit NAACP speech:

Turn to your neighbor and say different does not mean deficient. It simply means different. In fact, Dr. Janice Hale was the first writer whom I read who used that phrase. Different does not mean deficient. Different is not synonymous with deficient. It was in Dr. Hale's first book, "Black Children their Roots, Culture and Learning Style." Is Dr. Hale here tonight? We owe her a debt of gratitude. Dr. Hale showed us that in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks. [Ha-ha.]

And in so doing, we kept coming up with meaningless labels like EMH, educable mentally handicapped, TMH, trainable mentally handicapped, ADD, attention deficit disorder.

And we were coming up with more meaningless solutions like reading, writing and Ritalin. Dr. Hale's research led her to stop comparing African-American children with European-American children and she started comparing the pedagogical methodologies of African-American children to African children and European-American children to European children. And bingo, she discovered that the two different worlds have two different ways of learning. European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style and the entire educational learning system in the United States of America. Back in the early '70s, when Dr. Hale did her research was based on left brained cognitive object oriented learning style. Let me help you with fifty cent words.

Left brain is logical and analytical. Object oriented means the student learns from an object. From the solitude of the cradle with objects being hung over his or her head to help them determine colors and shape to the solitude in a carol in a PhD program stuffed off somewhere in a corner in absolute quietness to absorb from the object. From a block to a book, an object. That is one way of learning, but it is only one way of learning.

African and African-American children have a different way of learning.

They are right brained, subject oriented in their learning style. Right brain that means creative and intuitive. Subject oriented means they learn from a subject, not an object. They learn from a person. Some of you are old enough, I see your hair color, to remember when the NAACP won that tremendous desegregation case back in 1954 and when the schools were desegregated. They were never integrated. When they were desegregated in Philadelphia, several of the white teachers in my school freaked out. Why? Because black kids wouldn't stay in their place. Over there behind the desk, black kids climbed up all on them.

Because they learn from a subject, not from an object. Tell me a story. They have a different way of learning. Those same children who have difficulty reading from an object and who are labeled EMH, DMH and ADD. Those children can say every word from every song on every hip hop radio station half of who's words the average adult here tonight cannot understand. Why? Because they come from a right-brained creative oral culture like the (greos) in Africa who can go for two or three days as oral repositories of a people's history and like the oral tradition which passed down the first five book in our Jewish bible, our Christian Bible, our Hebrew bible long before there was a written Hebrew script or alphabet. And repeat incredulously long passages like Psalm 119 using mnemonic devices using eight line stanzas. Each stanza starting with a different letter of the alphabet. That is a different way of learning. It's not deficient, it is just different. Somebody say different. I believe that a change is going to come because many of us are committed to changing how we see other people who are different.

Rev. Dr. Wright resents not being taken seriously as an intellectual, and I think he has a point. So, I'll respond at some length.

This is pretty similar to a lot of stuff that I wrote in the late 1990s: for example, "Great Black Hopes" in National Review, my "Nerdishness" essay, and my review of Arthur Jensen's The g Factor.

The problem, of course, is that while Rev. Wright's ex-parishoner Oprah Winfrey can make a billion dollars being America's best nonrational subjective interpersonal improvisational thinker, it's a limited market. If you are the 100,000th best accountant in America, you probably live on a golf course. But if you are the 100,000 best talk show host, you are unemployed.

In my NR review of economic historian David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, I wrote:

Interestingly, many of the most striking racial differences can be thought of as resembling faint sex differences. For example, contrast the triumph of Japanese manufacturing with Japan's near-total failure in the brutally competitive global market for celebrities. (A recent survey revealed that Americans believe the most famous living Japanese person is Bruce Lee, a dead Chinese guy.) It's the mirror image of African-Americans' undistinguished technological achievements versus their outstanding performance in producing media personalities.

Why? Japanese talents extend far beyond chopstick-handling to a set of extremely masculine intellectual skills. Tests show they tend to excel at objective abilities like mathematics and mentally manipulating 3-d objects through "single-tasking" (focusing deeply upon a one impersonal logical problem). Blacks, on the other hand, are often better at typically feminine, more subjective cerebral skills like verbalization, emotional intuition and expression, sense of rhythm, sense of style, improvisation, situational awareness, and mental multi-tasking. Michael Jordan's brain, for instance, enables him to anticipate his opponent's every move while simultaneously demoralizing his foe with nonstop trash-talking. (Try it sometime. It's not easy.)

Next, think about physical and emotional/personality traits. Here the races are arrayed in the opposite order. Blacks tend to display more of typically male qualities like muscularity, aggressiveness, self-esteem, need for dominance, and impulsiveness. In contrast, the Japanese economy benefits from a male workforce endowed with more typically feminine virtues like small fingers and fine motor skills, cooperativeness, humility and anxiety, loyalty, long-term orientation, diligence, and carefulness. Combined with their first-rate masculine mental skills, these make Japanese companies powerhouses at exporting superbly engineered machinery.

Compared to Japanese organizations, black communities tend to be physically and psychologically masculine, sometimes to the point of disorderliness. Yet a relatively high percentage of individual black men achieve fame by possessing charismatically masculine looks and personalities, without the nerdishness that Dilbert-style male intellectual skills often induce."

The problem, of course, with the difference not deficiency approach is that there's no subjective way to keep the bridge from falling down. Thus, I suggested in NR in 1996:

The nice liberal white who beseeches black men, "I'm your friend, be like me," isn't always somebody they could be like and frequently isn't somebody they would be like, and thus can't give them a job they'll do themselves proud in. On the other hand, the not-so-nice white often holds the keys to what could be the right career. Another little-understood problem that will also continue to slow black male economic progress is that while Asian immigrants have flourished in part by their objective skills with numbers, blacks' advantages are typically in working with people. Thus, blacks are more susceptible than Asians both to residual bias and to debilitating fear of bias. I don't know of any quick solutions to either of these difficulties.

That said, what careers should black men consider more seriously in the next century? Since this type of question has been unthinkable under the reigning intellectual orthodoxy, my answers haven't yet been adequately assayed by public debate. But somebody has to stick his neck out first. So here goes:

Conservatives often advise blacks to start their own small businesses. However, African-Americans tend to face fierce competition from immigrants who can call upon more dependable relatives for advice, loans, and labor. Thus, for those African-Americans who are the most ambitious members of their families, integrated profit-seeking companies often provide better opportunities. But which jobs within those firms? For better educated black youths, the good news is that there are some fairly lucrative corporate careers that blacks have not yet widely discovered, but that especially reward persuasiveness and masculine charisma. There is always a price to be paid for breaking into new sectors, but these might hold long-run promise: selling big ticket contracts, stock-brokering, headhunting, and motivational speaking. In a word: Sales.

Unfortunately, the media climate saps the confidence blacks need. A salesguy must overflow with the assurance that the next account will love him more than the last one did. By automatically ascribing all gaps between whites and blacks to discrimination, the press drums up the menace of racism to the point of paranoia. This saps both motivation and that virile self-confidence that inspires customers to buy. Of course, some clients are anti-black, but over time blacks can mitigate that by discovering the less-biased industries and sales territories. Anyway, unfair as it is, the relevant question for a young black career-seeker is not whether he'd get richer if he was a white salesman. No, he needs to ask himself whether he'd ultimately end up generating more money and pride as a black salesman than as quota fodder in a make-work posting like Diversity Sensitivity Liaison.

And finally, here's how I summed it up in my review of Arthur Jensen's The g Factor:

Ironically, while diversity models are now popular in the abstract, it's nearly a hanging offense in the current mainstream media climate to actually mention particular talents in which minorities are superior to whites. (Today, "celebrating diversity" is automatically assumed to mean "insisting upon uniformity.") Gardner, for instance, coyly refuses to discuss the obvious racial and sexual disparities implicit in his seven factor model.

In the most publicized recent attempt to honestly flesh out a diversity model, the Reverend Reggie White of the Green Bay Packers asked the Wisconsin legislature, "Why did God make us so different?" He then listed what he saw as the different strengths of America's races, and concluded, "When you put all of that together … it forms a complete image of God." Despite being black, a football hero, an outstanding citizen, obviously well-intended, and in at least some of his examples undeniably right (e.g., Asians are gifted at invention, "they can turn a TV into a watch"), the Rev. White was pilloried by the press: "Stereotypes!"

Of course, none of the tut-tutters asked: Is a diversity model needed to describe specific black mental advantages overlooked by g? As a Reggieist (i.e., one who considers human biodiversity both a reality and a net blessing), I'm pleased to point out that IQ tests can't accurately measure at least one mental faculty in which blacks tend to outperform whites and Asians in real life. Despite lower mean IQ's, African-Americans are not a race of talentless dullards, but are instead the most charismatic contributors to 20th Century popular culture. What mental factor underlies the black revolutions in music, sport, oratory, dance, and slang? Subjective, improvisatory creativity.

For example, like a lot of NBA stars, Scottie Pippen's below-market contract, ill-timed trade demands, team-damaging pouts, and numerous child-support obligations imply that when given time to think, he often chooses unwisely. Yet, in the flow of the game, he's a Talleyrand at real-time decision-making. Leading a fast break, there are no permanent right answers. Even "Pass the ball to Michael Jordan" gets old fast as defenses habituate. Similarly, the NFL running back, the jazz soloist, the preacher, and the rapping DJ all must heed others' expectations and instantly respond with something a little unexpected. IQ tests -- by necessity objective and standardized -- can never measure this adequately.

Further, despite his data's inevitable shortcomings in this regard, Jensen does report that blacks possess particular mental weaknesses and strengths. Among individuals with equal g's, whites and Asians (like males) are typically stronger in those visual-spatial skills so useful in engineering and many skilled trades. In contrast, blacks (like females) often enjoy better short-term memories and thus can mentally juggle more balls in social situations. (This probably contributes to the black advantage in improvisation). Jensen's findings confirm my intuition (NR, 4/6/98) that while whites and Asians tend to be less masculine than blacks in physique and personality, they are typically more masculine than blacks in mental abilities. Put bluntly, whites and Asians tend to be nerdier than blacks. How many blacks would sincerely disagree?

Thus, the IQ disparity is less apocalyptic than is generally assumed. In fact, it's not all that unique -- diversity is among the oldest and most pervasive problems / opportunities inherent in the human condition. Because everybody is less innately talented than somebody else at something, the human race has worked out some pragmatic ways to deal with this.

Since Adam Smith and David Ricardo, economic theory has recommended specializing in whatever's your greatest comparative advantage. The peculiar problem facing blacks, though, is their specific talents are most valuable in winner-take-all professions like entertainment and sports. Still, the masculine bermishness common among blacks should also be helpful in more broadly remunerative occupations like sales.

Even if blacks had no special skills, just a deficiency of g, methods used by white and Mexican athletes to deal with black superiority in team sports might offer blacks practical hints in partially mitigating the g-gap. Specialization, for instance, is still valuable. (As illustrated by their most famous star Fernando Valenzuela, Mexicans don't tend to be endowed with ideal, Ken Griffey Jr.-style bodies for baseball. Yet, through an intense focus on the game they've built a critical mass of baseball expertise.) Avoid affirmative action programs that prevent critical masses from emerging. Look for fields where the inherent demands are less (e.g., golf rather than football) or competition is lighter (e.g., volleyball instead of basketball).

Work harder than your more gifted rivals. Master the fundamentals. Nail the easy stuff. (E.g., the only category in which whites are over-represented among NBA leaders is free-throw shooting). Don't improvise: listen to your coach's wisdom. (E.g., the decline of traditional sexual morality has not lead to a high pregnancy rate among coldly logical Dutch teens. For African-American teens, though, the rise of do-it-yourself morality in the 1960's was a disaster.) Challenge yourself, but realistically. (E.g., I need to get in shape, but an affirmative action program for Sedentary-Americans that sets-aside for me an opening in Evander Holyfield next heavyweight title bout might not be in my best interest. The same goes for racial quotas at elite colleges.)

Finally, the U.S. Army offers the bracing example of an institution that has elicited a high level of black achievement, in part by demanding that those with high-IQ's search out what Richard Epstein calls simple rules for a complex world. In dismal contrast, research universities fail blacks because the publish-or-perish system encourages the high-IQ to wallow in abstruseness. Denouncing Jensen proclaims one's faith in empirical egalitarianism, which serves as the perfect excuse for ignoring the irksome demands of moral egalitarianism. By declaring that everyone could Be Like Me (if only they were properly socialized), the clever can, with clear conscience, continue to surreptitiously wage class war against the clueless.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Rev. Wright has a book coming out later this year!

Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. told the big NAACP dinner in Detroit last night:

"So let me give you the outline of the rest of this message. You can either fill in the blanks for yourselves or you could wait for my book that will be out later this year."

I blogged on April 2:

If you were a literary agent, say, wouldn't you want to sign Wright up for a quickie bestseller, with a release date targeted at, say, 10/1/08? Hustle your best ghostwriter out to Tinley Park and get Wright's memoirs and views on current issues slapped together by the Fourth of July. Make that deadline and you could have it on the bookshelves five weeks before Election Day!No, I don't think we've heard the last from Rev. Wright.

Do you think Obama's campaign manager David Axelrod is wondering what Wright is going to fill into the blanks?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Rev. Wright as an intellectual

One of the things I've been pointing out is that Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. takes himself seriously as an ideological intellectual.

Obama and Wright have both been saying that the Youtubes of Wright's sermons are just snippets, but they are trying to imply different things by that. Obama wants you to believe that Wright is actually much more moderate than a few out-of-context clips might show. Wright, on the other hand, means that he's got lots more where that's coming from, that he's actually a deep thinker who has elaborate reasons backing up the opinions summarized in the notorious clips.

To his credit, despite Wright's ego, I don't get the impression that he sees himself as a creative genius, just as a well-read intellectual who keeps up on the scholarly work of leftist black theologians and philosophers such as James H. Cone.

This seems like a fair self-assessment, so it's frustrating for Wright that almost nobody in the white media has taken seriously his ideology, in fact, has barely noticed that he has an ideology. To whites, it's all just some black thing that we don't have to -- indeed, better not -- pay attention to.

It's especially annoying to Wright that nobody in the white press has paid much attention to the idea that a very bright young man named Barack Obama chose, out of all the black ministers he'd come into contact with during his four years as a community organizer, Rev. Wright because Obama was impressed with Wright's intellect and agreed with his ideology.

To the white media, all black ministers are alike, but not to an ultra-competitive black minister like Wright, who has outcompeted every other minister on the South Side of Chicago, that's a racist travesty.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

I told you so

As I've been saying for a long time, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. is an attentionaholic far leftist whose career interests do not necessarily coincide with Barack Obama's. Indeed, Wright may well wish to go down in history as the Willie Horton of 2008 who proved what Wright's been saying his whole life, that a black man can't a fair break in America. And I've said for a long, long time that Obama would have to do a Sister Souljah on Wright and do it as early as possible.

Today, the whole world finally noticed. Dana Milbank writes in the Washington Post:

Wright's Voice Could Spell Doom for Obama

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, explaining this morning why he had waited so long before breaking his silence about his incendiary sermons, offered a paraphrase from Proverbs: "It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Barack Obama's pastor would have been wise to continue to heed that wisdom.

Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama's presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama's longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered - and added lighter fuel.

Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks ("God damn America") and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.

In front of 30 television cameras, Wright's audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama's vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio's April Ryan, confirmed that Wright's security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

Wright suggested that Obama was insincere in distancing himself from his pastor. "He didn't distance himself," Wright announced. "He had to distance himself, because he's a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American."

Explaining further, Wright said friends had written to him and said, "We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected." The minister continued: "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."

Wright also argued, at least four times over the course of the hour, that he was speaking not for himself but for the black church.

"This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright," the minister said. "It is an attack on the black church." He positioned himself as a mainstream voice of African American religious traditions. "Why am I speaking out now?" he asked. "If you think I'm going to let you talk about my mama and her religious tradition, and my daddy and his religious tradition and my grandma, you got another thing coming."

That significantly complicates Obama's job as he contemplates how to extinguish Wright's latest incendiary device. Now, he needs to do more than express disagreement with his former pastor's view; he needs to refute his former pastor's suggestion that Obama privately agrees with him.

Wright seemed aggrieved that his inflammatory quotations were out of the full "context" of his sermons -- yet he repeated many of the same accusations in the context of a half-hour Q&A session this morning.

His claim that the September 11 attacks mean "America's chickens are coming home to roost"?

Wright defended it: "Jesus said, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles."

His views on Farrakhan and Israel? "Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion. He was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter's being vilified for and Bishop Tutu's being vilified for. And everybody wants to paint me as if I'm anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago. He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century; that's what I think about him. . . . Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn't make me this color."

He denounced those who "can worship God on Sunday morning, wearing a black clergy robe, and kill others on Sunday evening, wearing a white Klan robe." He praised the communist Sandinista regime of Nicaragua. He renewed his belief that the government created AIDS as a means of genocide against people of color ("I believe our government is capable of doing anything").

And he vigorously renewed demands for an apology for slavery: "Britain has apologized to Africans. But this country's leaders have refused to apologize. So until that apology comes, I'm not going to keep stepping on your foot and asking you, does this hurt, do you forgive me for stepping on your foot, if I'm still stepping on your foot. Understand that? Capisce?"

Capisce, reverend. All too well.

April 27, 2008

You can't keep a good publicity hound down

The Guardian reports that Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. has resurfaced in the media, just in time to help Barack Obama woo working class white voters in the final primary states.

If only the Obama family had tithed the full $700,000, instead of a measly $53,000 out of the $7 million they've earned since Barack was elected to the U.S. Senate...

In other news, Sen. Obama has announced remodeling plans for the White House: "I have sworn that we're taking out the bowling alley in the White House and we're putting in a basketball court."

Before he's finished, though, he may feel like inviting a certain minister down to his private bowling alley to discuss money and milkshakes.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 18, 2008

In 2007, Obama gave $26,270 to Rev. Wright's church

The Washington Post reports:

Barack Obama released his 2007 tax returns yesterday as the latest move in a running dialogue with Hillary Clinton over which presidential candidate has been more open about personal finances.

Obama's tax returns showed that he made $4.2 million last year, most of it ($3.9 million) a result of profits from his best-selling books. He reported paying $1,396,772 in federal taxes and making charitable contributions totaling $240,370. Those donations included $26,270 to the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which was the parish of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., his controversial former longtime pastor.

The funny thing is that I bet Rev. Wright considers Obama an ungrateful tightwad. After all, Obama makes $3.9 million in one year off his two books, for one of which Wright's "Audacity of Hope" sermon provides the title and for the other it provides the central climax.

Does Obama do the Christian thing and tithe? Hardly. Instead of 10%, Obama chips in 0.7% of his income.

Betrayed, I tell you. Betrayed.

Just like with Oprah Winfrey. She starts making 9 figures annually, but does she tithe as a reward to Rev. Wright for all the spiritual uplift he's provided her?

No. In fact, she quits the church.

Poor Rev. Wright will have to spend his retirement years living in a mansion in a gated community on a public golf course, Odyssey in Tinley Park, and not a particularly superb one either, only $78 to play on weekends.

Do you think Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. might be in the mood to sign a contract to write a book himself? Something with a title like "Me and My Spiritual Mentee, Sen. Esq. Barack H. Obama, Jr." only catchier. Publication date, say, October 1, 2008?

I was also wondering if anybody has made more money off of nonfiction books that fewer people have finished than Sen. Obama (Stephen Hawking, maybe?). But then I started thinking about what percentage of all best-selling books that don't reveal who the murderer is on the last page or whether the kids escape being eaten by the tyrannosaurus ever get finished. I bet it's low.

Update: A reader points out that one definite answer to the question of "Who has made more money off unfinished books than Obama" is Obama's opponent's husband, Bill Clinton, who has made $29.6 million in advances and royalties for his 1008 page autobiography (and miscellaneous quasi-books). Heck, I could barely finish reading Bill's opening sentence, with its 11 prepositional phrases:

"Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 11, 2008

"Obama's Mr. Wright"

From my "Obama's Mr. Wright" article in the April 7, 2008 issue of The American Conservative on why the press overlooked for so long the obvious fact that Barack Obama wasn't actually Tiger Woods:

"That Barack Obama is black offers the country a potential advantage: it makes his intellectual sophistication and verbal adeptness more acceptable to the bulk of voters, many of whom found Al Gore and his 1330 SAT score too inhumanly cerebral to trust. If Obama, a superb prose stylist, were white, he’d be written off as an effete intellectual. But white voters are hungry for a well-educated role model for blacks. And blacks see the preppie from paradise’s membership in Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ as evidence that he’s keepin’ it real."

More

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 4, 2008

Murray Rothbard is to Lew Rockwell is to Ron Paul as ...

James H. Cone, creator of "black liberation theology," is to Jeremiah A. Wright is to Barack Obama. The analogy isn't perfect, but it's not at all bad.

But nobody in the white media takes black intellectuals seriously, so you are not supposed to care, either.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 2, 2008

Obama's eloquence deserts him

Obama-worshipper Chris Matthews briefly pressed his idol tonight on the matter of Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. Without 5,000 prepackaged words of patented Baroque O'Blarney nuanced thoughtfulness, Obama sounded like a Time-Life Records two-for-the-price-of-one deal on the Greatest Hits of George W. Bush and Dan Quayle:

OBAMA: I think that what has happened is we took a loop out of — and compressed the most offensive things that a pastor said over the course of 30 years, and just ran it over and over and over again. There is that other 30 years. I never heard him say those things that were in those clips.

MATTHEWS: But you did say you heard him say controversial things.

OBAMA: But I’ve heard you say controversial things.

MATTHEWS: You didn’t give me $27,000 dollars either.

OBAMA: The point is this is a church that is active in AIDS. It’s active on all kind of thing. And so this is a wonderful church. But as I said, look at the amount of time that’s been spent on this today, Chris. At a time when we haven’t talked about a whole host of issues.

The LA Times reports:

And while insisting -- as he has previously -- that he was not present when Wright made the pronouncements that fueled the recent furor, he steered clear of specifying the "controversial" statements he has said he did hear from the preacher.

What did the Presidential candidate know and when did he know it?

Look, that's a stupid question, but only because the answer is clear from Obama's own autobiography. Before Obama ever met Wright in the 1980s, he had heard from other South Side black pastors that Wright was a radical. That's the main reason Obama was attracted to Wright rather than all the other pastors he had met as a community organizer: Wright was the optimal combination of leftism and successfulness.

Isn't anybody else getting tired of Obama repeatedly yanking our chains about his relationship with Rev. Wright? Unlike his protege, Wright has made sure to leave a paper (and DVD) trail decades long, and it's not thoughtfully nuanced to the verge of utter incomprehensibility, either. The Rev. says what's on his mind, and in no uncertain terms.

C'mon, Obama, be a man. Stand up and admit to one of two logical possibilities:

- Yes, I used to be about as leftist as Rev. Wright, but I changed my mind for the following reasons ...

Or

- Yes, I still am about as leftist as Rev. Wright, and here's why ...

What Obama is counting on is that white Americans don't take blacks' ideological views seriously. Obama is betting on everybody treating his relationship with Wright as a racial matter rather than as an ideological matter, and since all nice people shy away from thinking about racial matters, they'll just let it drop.

In contrast, if Wright were a white minister who was an outspoken advocate of Sandinista-style "liberation theology," a white Obama would, at a minimum, be spending a lot of time answering searching questions about his ideological evolution. But, because Obama and Wright are black, nobody takes the disagreeable Wright's ideology seriously, and everybody assumes that the personable Obama must share their ideology.

It must be driving Wright crazy. Here he goes on Fox News a year ago and tells Sean Hannity a half dozen times that he is a follower of black liberation theologian James H. Cone, and that if you want to have an argument with him about where he stands, you should first read a stack of academic books by Cone and by Dwight Hopkins. And nobody paid any attention.

Wright doesn't seem to consider himself a creative intellectual in the class of Cone, but he does view himself as a man who has thought hard for decades about subjects like the immorality of corporate capitalism.

And yet, Obama is getting away with going around the country on national television implying that the 66-year-old Wright is some kind of elderly uncle who has, tragically, gone crazy in his dotage. In reality, Wright holds the same political views today as he had when he first reeled in Obama two decades ago.

And the white media believe Obama's lies about Wright because nobody takes a black man seriously as an intellectual!

So, I don't expect we've heard the last from Rev. Wright. All summer, he's going to be sitting in his new mansion on the golf course in the gated community in 93% white suburban Tinley Park brooding on how Obama has betrayed him, and what he's going to do about it.

He'll think of something.

For example, last November 2, he invented the Jeremiah Wright Trumpeter Lifetime Achievement Award and gave it to Louis Farrakhan at a big bash at the Chicago Hyatt Regency, but it took the white media ten weeks to even notice what a black man had done. This year, there are all sorts of people he could give his award to on, say, Saturday night November 1st. And I bet this year it won't take ten weeks before the white press talks about it!

Or maybe somebody else will think of something for Wright to do. If you were a literary agent, say, wouldn't you want to sign Wright up for a quickie bestseller, with a release date targeted at, say, 10/1/08? Hustle your best ghostwriter out to Tinley Park and get Wright's memoirs and views on current issues slapped together by the Fourth of July. Make that deadline and you could have it on the bookshelves five weeks before Election Day!

No, I don't think we've heard the last from Rev. Wright.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 27, 2008

Down with Middleclassness! Up with Upper Middleclassness!

One item in Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ's "Black Value System" is "Disavowal of the Pursuit of ‘Middleclassness.’"

Yet, after decades of preaching to his congregation that blacks shouldn't move from the ghetto (where, coincidentally enough, his megachurch is located), the retiring Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. says, in effect, "So long, suckers!"

FOX News has uncovered documents that indicate Wright is about to move to a 10,340-square-foot, four-bedroom home in suburban Chicago, currently under construction in a gated community.

Those must be big bedrooms to have only four in a 10,340 sq. ft. house.

The house and land were apparently paid for by Trinity.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Obama supporter who can solve his Rev. Wright problem

In my new VDARE.com column, I offer Sen. Obama a free suggestion about how he could relieve his festering Rev. Dr. Wright problem by turning to one of his own supporters for aid. I'm not going to tell you who it is here so that you go read the whole thing.

The Wright problem didn't get any better for Obama today when he came back from vacation with a new and even less plausible spin:

"This is somebody that was preaching three sermons at least a week for 30 years and it got boiled down ... into a half-minute sound clip and just played it over and over and over again, partly because it spoke to some of the racial divisions we have in this country."

Oh, come off it. This is somebody who visited Gadaffi in 1984 and gave Louis Farrakhan his "Lifetime Achievement" award in 2007. This is somebody whose first sermon Obama ever heard, according to his own memoir, included the line, "where white folks' greed runs a world in need." This is somebody who boasted of his church's "black liberation theology" and its similarities to the ideology of 1970s Nicaraguan Marxists.

By the way, how come Hillary gets roasted alive for embellishing an old [non]war story, while Obama's flat-out lie of a couple of weeks ago in response to the toughest question of his campaign -- his lie that he wasn't in church for controversial comments by Wright -- is forgotten, dead and buried under his 5,000 words of thoughtful nuance and nuanced thoughtfulness?

Here's some of the opening of my new column:

At VDARE.COM. we’ve never been in the business of endorsing Presidential candidates. And considering who's left in the running in 2008, we're certainly not going to start now.

But by publishing revelations about one candidate, aren't we tacitly just helping the others?

For example, when Sen. Barack Obama, who has been running largely on his autobiography, makes campaign claims about his relationship with his pastor or his grandmother and I point out that his 1995 autobiography says something very different, I always receive messages denouncing me for being culpable for electing Hillary Clinton and/or John McCain. …

In this view, a presidential campaign is a zero-sum contest. Somebody has to win and everybody else has to lose. So any revelation about Candidate X is seen, not as contribution to the sum total of human knowledge, but as a dirty trick intended to elect Candidate Y or Z.

In contrast, I believe that the more that voters know about the candidates, the better. Of course, I would say that: as a nonfiction writer, that's my professional bias.

Still, I do believe the zero-sum model is simplistic….

For example, for over a year, I've been pointing out that Obama isn't the centrist post racial conciliator he plays on television. His campaign has been as disingenuous as if Ronald Reagan had run for President in 1980, not as a proud conservative, but as a bipartisan middle-of-the-roader.

In truth, Obama is a liberal somewhat to the left of the Democratic median, and with a recent radical background. And slowly, the MainStream Media [MSM] is starting to wake up to the phoniness of Obama's marketing of himself. This week, the New York Times [Obama’s Test: Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?, By Robin Toner, March 25, 2008] and Washington Post [In Obama's New Message, Some Foes See Old Liberalism, By Alec MacGillis, Washington Post, March 26, 2008]have finally gotten around to admitting in major stories that Obama is well to the left of where many imagine him to be.

This slow debunking of Obama might have crucial implications for his Vice Presidential selection. The more people who understand who Obama really is, the more pressure he will be under to pick as a ticket-balancing running mate an anti-Obama, such as Sen. James Webb (D-VA).

Moreover, within a President Obama, there would always be an ongoing struggle between his cautious head and his radical heart. The more a gullible press and public persist in imagining him the equally loving son of a happy biracial home, the more leftist actions his heart will be able to get away with. But the more we are alert to the two sides of this complicated man, the more likely his intelligent prudence would triumph over the passion to prove himself "black enough" that is the remnant of his psychologically-damaging childhood.

For example, the more he is seen, correctly, as a man who chose to devote much of his adult life to pursuing political power in order to take from whites and give to blacks, the more scrutiny a President Obama would receive over seemingly minor questions such as appointments to jobs at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the civil rights section of the Justice Department.

These obscure offices can be tremendously important.

[More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 26, 2008

Jeremiah A. Wright's Darker Shade of Pale

The blog "Chris Matthew's Other Leg" offers an Irish analogy providing some perspective on the molding of the tres cafe au lait Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.:
Hugh Leonard Thompson Murphy, known to history as Lennie, was born in The Village in East Belfast in 1952, a fanatically loyalist Protestant area ... Now little Lennie was stuck with that quintessential emblem of Paddydom, his very name. Murphy ( from the Gaelic Ó Murchú) is as Irish as "Danny Boy" and as Catholic as the Rosary.

In the lunatic environment in which he grew up there were widespread suspicions - and suspicions in Belfast, like unexploded bombs, tend to tick away if not swiftly disarmed - that his father William, a mild inoffensive fellow, was a 'Teague' (= Catholic, from the Irish name Tadhg =Thaddeus, Timothy). Hence Lennie, carrier of tainted blood, was called "Murphy the Mick" (Mick = Teague)...

Lennie, the emotional type, as will become clear, reacted by becoming Proddier than the Proddiest of the Prods... His obsessive hatred of Papists galvanized an essentially psychopathic nature and by the age of twenty he was slaughtering innocent Catholics at the head of a bunch of thuggish misfits who over the bloody years came to be known as the Shankill Butchers....

Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama come to mind though not because they are psychopathic killers, let me add. They are perfectly sane and not in the least criminal or violent. They are in fact pillars of their community. But they have something in common with the unlovely Lennie - a need to prove to themselves and the world that they are totally committed to their assigned identities. In an historically divided social environment, such as Belfast, fencing sitting was not a recognized way of achieving prestige in one's community or establishing the basis for a political career. Life in general, especially as regards politics and religion, was a zero sum game. ... Unimpeachable political-religious tribal credentials were necessary because absolute loyalty to and identification with the tribe was the be all and end all. ...

Jeremiah Wright, a generation before Obama, had a similar but more subtle problem that might not occur to whites who see all people of African descent as just black. Black people themselves of course are naturally more discerning. ... As anyone can attest who has seen him in his pulpit against the congregation massed behind him Pastor Wright is extremely light-skinned even to the extent that one can easily discern him actually flushing with passion at the more emotionally charged moments of his sermons, a phenomenon not to be observed with the vast majority of black preachers however riled up they get.

This might seem trivial but in the American context it can have significant psychological effects. (This whole question is explored with great subtlety by Philip Roth in The Human Stain, a true American masterpiece.) The 1960s - the seed-time of so many of today's more florid neuroses - was a period when emerging black activists, understandably enough, over-compensated for the shame historically associated with their race by proclaiming an overweening pride in their blackness or rather Blackness. "Black", they declared, "is beautiful", as indeed in so many ways it is because a socially and morally coherent black community is one of the glories of American civilization.

This radical attitude was a necessary corrective to the marginalization by law and by racial stigmatization which blacks had endured for centuries. However this was the Sixties, so in about 3.2547 seconds everyone involved went OTT and healthy radicalism transmogrified into a rabid fanaticism at the core of which throbbed a racism which was the mirror-image of that which it sought to eradicate.

Within this heady scene young Jeremiah Wright, a middle-class graduate of a white Philadelphia high school, was coming into his own. It is not to be wondered at if he felt a psychological imperative to more than emphatically establish his ethnic authenticity in the face - no pun intended - of the paleness of his own complexion when all the cadres of the cause were sporting chic afros the size of the Super Dome and wearing as a badge of honor the very blackness of which he barely possessed enough to bring a scowl to Bull Connor's unpleasing countenance.

He thus became a Super Black, the ranting, rabble-rousing Moses of an Unchosen People for whom no anti-American (because ipso facto anti-white) delusions, however demonstrably paranoid, were off limits.

So, each riding his own distinct yet not very different demons, the pale black Preacher and the half-white black Politician came together and added their own chapter to the Great Adventure that is America. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 25, 2008

The Hitch on Obama-Wright

In Slate, Christopher Hitchens brags of his prescience:

It's been more than a month since I began warning Sen. Barack Obama that he would become answerable for his revolting choice of a family priest. But never mind that; the astonishing thing is that it's at least 11 months since he himself has known precisely the same thing. "If Barack gets past the primary," said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the New York Times in April of last year, "he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen." Pause just for a moment, if only to admire the sheer calculating self-confidence of this. Sen. Obama has long known perfectly well, in other words, that he'd one day have to put some daylight between himself and a bigmouth Farrakhan fan. But he felt he needed his South Side Chicago "base" in the meantime. So he coldly decided to double-cross that bridge when he came to it. And now we are all supposed to marvel at the silky success of the maneuver.

You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily. (Yet why do I say I am surprised? He still gets away with absolutely everything.)

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. It would be interesting to know whether her charismatic grandson made her aware that he was about to touch her with his grace and make her famous in this way. By sheer good fortune, she, too, could be a part of it all and serve her turn in the great enhancement.

This flabbergasting process, made up of glibness and ruthlessness in equal proportions, rolls on unstoppably with a phalanx of reporters and men of the cloth as its accomplices. Look at the accepted choice of words for the ravings of Jeremiah Wright: controversial, incendiary, inflammatory. These are adjectives that might have been—and were—applied to many eloquent speakers of the early civil rights movement. (In the Washington Post, for Good Friday last, the liberal Catholic apologist E.J. Dionne lamely attempted to stretch this very comparison.) But is it "inflammatory" to say that AIDS and drugs are wrecking the black community because the white power structure wishes it? No. Nor is it "controversial." It is wicked and stupid and false to say such a thing. And it not unimportantly negates everything that Obama says he stands for by way of advocating dignity and responsibility over the sick cults of paranoia and victimhood. ...

And what a shame. 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." ...

To have accepted Obama's smooth apologetics is to have lowered one's own pre-existing standards for what might constitute a post-racial or a post-racist future. It is to have put that quite sober and realistic hope, meanwhile, into untrustworthy and unscrupulous hands. And it is to have done this, furthermore, in the service of blind faith. Mark my words: This disappointment is only the first of many that are still to come.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 21, 2008

The botched solution to Obama's Rev. Wright Problem

Obama had to know all along that his Rev. Wright was a potential millstone around his neck. Last fall, though, fate handed him a potential solution when Don Imus made a vulgar off-hand comment on the radio about black lady basketball players. This set off one of our routine national moral panics over race where the usual suspects rushed to call for the white guy's head.

My vague recollection is that Obama was a little slow off the mark to demand Imus's firing, but with Jesse Jackson taking the lead, Obama, always worried about being black enough, soon fell into line and denounced Imus. And Imus got fired. (But now he's back on the air on a different network, because it was all pretty stupid).

What Obama should have done with the silly Imus brouhaha was to take a stand for Imus in order to pre-emptively laugh off the Wright controversy before it (inevitably) started. Obama should have said, "Imus apologized, so let's give it a rest. Come on, lots of people say something outrageous now and then. Hey, at my church, we'd have to fire our pastor about once a month -- he's alway saying something over the top to get a reaction out of the congregation. Yeah, Rev. Wright's kind of a shock jock of the pulpit. So, let's not get so huffy about every little thing somebody says."

Would this have worked?

Maybe. It certainly would have reframed Rev. Wright as a less serious figure, while letting Obama look even-handed and even-tempered.

But there would have been problems:

- It would have been out of sync with the High Pompousness of the rest of the Obama's campaign.

- Obama was trailing Hillary among blacks at that point, and without a majority of blacks, he had no chance in the primaries, so breaking ranks with Jesse and Co. would have been dangerous.

- Wright might have gone ballistic. Keep in mind that Wright is not necessarily on Obama's side. He just might prefer to go down in history as the Willie Horton of 2008. It's not implausible that he's been passively-aggressively sabotaging Obama for some time -- his November 2007 lifetime achievement award for Farrakhan was clearly a bid for attention at Obama's expense. Who knows what damage Wright could do to Obama if his amour propre was seriously offended? Perhaps he taped a few private conversations with Obama?

So, the Obama-Axelrod calculation that it was best to rely on media political correctness to bulldoze over their Rev. Wright problem may well still be proven correct.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 18, 2008

So, what was the bottom line of Obama's speech?

Lots of eloquent words, but what was the action?

No, he's not ending his membership in Trinity church.

And here's the policy implications he takes from the controversy:

"In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper."

In other words, let's just do everything that LBJ did, only more so.

Am I missing something in his speech? Or is that it?

P.S. Man Sized Target has some excellent reflections upon Obama, if I do say so myself.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama throws his own 85-year-old grandmother under the wheels of the BS Express

From Obama's Wright speech:

I can no more disown [Rev. Dr. Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

A careful look at this incident as Obama described it on pp. 88-91 of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (which I reviewed in 2007) shows that Obama is slandering his elderly grandmother to make Rev. Dr. Wright look better. Obama's white grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who was raising him and earning most of the money in the family while his own mother was off in Indonesia working on her 1067 page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing, rode the bus each morning to her job as a bank executive. One day, the 16-18 year old Obama wakes up to an argument between his grandmother and grandfather. She didn't want to ride the bus because she had been hassled by a bum at the bus stop. She tells him:

"Her lips pursed with irritation. 'He was very aggressive, Barry. Very aggressive. I gave him a dollar and he kept asking. If the bus hadn't come, I think he might have hit me over the head."

So why didn't Obama's lefty grandfather want to drive his own wife to work? Because to help his wife avoid the hostile, dangerous panhandler would be morally wrong, because the potential mugger was ... Well, I'll let Sen. Obama tell the story:

"He turned around and I saw that he was shaking. 'It is a big deal. It's a big deal to me. She's been bothered by men before. You know why she's so scared this time. I'll tell you why. Before you came in, she told me the fella was black.' He whispered the word. 'That's the real reason why she's bothered. And I just don't think that right.'

"The words were like a fist in my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure. In my steadiest voice, I told him that such an attitude bothered me, too, but reassured him that Toot's fears would pass and that we should give her a ride in the meantime. Gramps slumped into a chair in the living room and said he was sorry he had told me. Before my eyes, he grew small and old and very sad. I put my hand on his shoulder and told him that it was all right, I understood.

"We remained like that for several minutes, in painful silence. Finally he insisted that he drive Toot after all, and I thought about my grandparents. They had sacrificed again and again for me. They had poured all their lingering hopes into my success. Never had they given me reason to doubt their love; I doubted if they ever would. And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fear."

Then Obama drives over for counseling to the house of his grandfather's friend Frank, an old black Communist Party USA member, who tells him:

"What I'm trying to tell you is, your grandma's right to be scared. She's at least as right as Stanley is. She understands that black people have a reason to hate. That's just how it is. For your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it's not. So you might as well get used to it."

"Frank closed his eyes. His breathing slowed until he seemed to be asleep. I thought about waking him, then decided against it and walked back to the car. The earth shook under my feet, ready to crack open at any moment. I stopped, trying to steady myself, and knew for the first time that I was utterly alone."

Man, what a family full of drama queens! And now Obama is equating his own grandma, who was the main breadwinner in this dysfunctional family circus (and who is still alive, living in the Honolulu highrise where this scene took place), with Rev. Dr. God Damn America.

Classy.

The Washington Monthly's liberal blogger Kevin Drum, who voted for Obama, commented about this scene and others:

"Obama routinely describes himself feeling the deepest, most painful emotions imaginable (one event is like a "fist in my stomach," for example, and he "still burned with the memory" a full year after a minor incident in college), but these feelings seem to be all out of proportion to the actual events of his life, which are generally pretty pedestrian."

So, in summary, let's look at how Obama smeared his own elderly but very much alive grandmother, calling her:

"a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

Well, no, according to Obama's 1995 book, it is not at all true that she "once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street." Instead, she once confessed her fear of one aggressive black beggar who didn't pass by her but instead confronted her, demanded money, and then gave her -- an intelligent, level-headed woman who had worked her way up to a mid-level corporate management position -- good reason to believe he would have violently mugged her if her bus hadn't pulled up.

If this was some doofus politician like Bush or Biden who retold the story in a misleading fashion, you might view it as just their usual struggle with using the English language to get across what they really kind of, sort of mean. But Obama is so superb with words that it's perfectly reasonable to hold him accountable for choosing to slander his own living grandmother for his political advantage.

[Thanks to a reader for the Photoshopped poster.]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer