Thought for the day:

As a former psychiatrist, I know how difficult it is to try to understand the soul of even someone you have spent hundreds of hours alone with in therapy. To think that one can decipher the inner life of some distant public figure is folly. . . .

“Know thyself” is a highly overrated piece of wisdom. As for knowing the self of others, forget it. Know what they do and judge them by their works.

Hubbard posted this at 9:17 AM EDT on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 as The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past, Kraut-hammered

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Krauthammer:

“I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother.” What exactly was Grandma’s offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus’s time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.

Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one’s time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?

And Steyn:

The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years.

Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.

One quibble: it’s AIDS, not AIDs. AIDS stands for “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome,” and all letter of the acronym should be capitalized.

In a peculiar way, it may turn out that Obama will do more damage to race relations than Bill Clinton did. When Sister Souljah suggested that black people kill white people rather than other blacks, Clinton rightly slammed her, on the grounds that remarks like that deserve no respect. When given the opportunity to criticize the venom Wright spews, Obama whiffed. As Krauthammer noted above, Obama’s grandmother never spread divisiveness like Wright, and her remarks have been echoed by Jesse Jackson, who has also been afraid of strange black men. Obama had a chance to excise a tumor from the body politic.
But Obama chose differently, as Steyn put it:

Instead of distancing himself from his pastor, he attempted to close the gap between Wright and the rest of the country, arguing, in effect, that the guy is not just his crazy uncle but America’s, too.

To do this, he promoted a false equivalence. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother,” he continued. “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.” Well, according to the way he tells it in his book, it was one specific black man on her bus, and he wasn’t merely “passing by.” When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life.” In Philadelphia, Senator Obama topped that: Greater love hath no man than to lay down his gran’ma for his life.

I was curious, so I picked up Dreams from my Father and read pages 88-91, which discuss the incident where his grandmother felt threatened. Money quote [emphases in original]:

I [Obama] took her into the other room and asked her what had happened.

“A man asked me for money yesterday. While I was waiting for the bus.”

“That’s all?”

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.”

I returned to the kitchen. Gramps was rinsing his cup, his back turned to me. “Listen,” I said, why don’t you just let me give her a ride. She seems pretty upset.”

“By a panhandler?”

“Yeah, I know—but it’s probably a little scary for her, seeing some big man block her way. It’s really no big deal.”

He turned around and I saw now 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 this fella was black.” He whispered the word. “That’s the real reason why she’s so bothered. And I just don’t think that’s right.”

The words were like a fist to my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure.

A few pages later, Obama talks to an older black man, Frank, who explains things to him:

Frank opened his eyes. “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.”

Let’s look at the relevant passage from Obama’s speech again [emphases added]:

I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.

If I’m reading Obama right, the author of the speech and the author of Dreams from my Father, it looks like Obama used his grandmother’s legitimate fears to try to whitewash Wright’s illegitimate conspiracy theories. And Obama must know (on some level) that his grandmother deserved better. This isn’t the audacity of hype; it is the mendacity of ambition.

Hubbard posted this at 11:18 AM EDT on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 as Kraut-hammered, Audacity of Hype

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If you think I’ve been harsh on Obama, I listened in stunned amazement when I heard a clip of Dr. K talking about his speech. From yesterday’s Brit Hume:

KRAUTHAMMER: The reaction was rubbish that we just saw. His speech was nothing more than less than apologia, an explaining away of Jeremiah Wright’s rants done with elegance, nuance, and complexity.

Essentially, it said that — if you look at his remarks, this is what Obama was saying — he explained it away in two ways — moral equivalence, and white racism.

The moral equivalence is on the one hand you have Jeremiah Wright, and on the other hand you have Geraldine Ferraro –

HUME: And his grandmother.

KRAUTHAMMER: — and grandma, who occasionally would utter a private, racist epithet, as if she had shouted these in a crowded church or a crowded theater as a way to arouse and envenom the audience as Wright did.

Obama is a guy who glories in his capacity for intellectual distinctions. There is a huge distinction between a woman of the generation of a Truman, who also uttered epithets about Jews and blacks in private, and the propagation of race hatred in a congregation on behalf of a pastor.

And the second element of that speech was extenuating, and explaining in a way as a reaction to white racism. He says, look, you have to put Wright in context, context is history, and the history he gave is a history of racism starting with slavery and ending at Jeremiah Wright and his anger and frustration.

This kind of extenuation is what you used to hear from Jesse Jackson, except in Obama’s case, dressed up in Ivy League language and Harvard Law School nuance. And that’s why the commentary that we saw on this was so rhapsodic. It touched two erogenous zones — white guilt and intellectual flattery. And that’s all it was. I think it was a brilliantly conceived failure.

It always makes me feel better about myself when I’m in concurrence with Krauthammer; I just wish I could express the thought so well.

Apollo posted this at 12:08 PM EDT on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 as Race, Kraut-hammered, Audacity of Hype

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Back in November 2006, Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko died of Polonium-210 poisoning.  At the time, Charles Krauthammer summarized well what many of us thought:

Some say that the Litvinenko murder was so obvious, so bold, so messy — five airplanes contaminated, 30,000 people alerted, dozens of places in London radioactive — that it could not possibly have been the KGB.

But that’s the beauty of it. Do it obvious, do it brazen, and count on those too-clever-by-half Westerners to find that exonerating. As the president of the Central Anarchist Council (in G.K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday”) advised: “You want a safe disguise, do you? . . . A dress in which no one would ever look for a bomb? Why, then, dress up as an anarchist, you fool!”

The other reason for making it obvious and brazen is to send a message. This is a warning to all the future Litvinenkos of what awaits them if they continue to go after the Russian government. They’ll get you even in London, where there is the rule of law. And they’ll get you even if it makes negative headlines for a month.

Some people say that the KGB would not have gone to such great lengths to get so small a fry as Litvinenko. Well, he might have been a small fry, but his investigations were not. He was looking into the Kremlin roots of Politkovskaya’s shooting. And Litvinenko claimed that the Russian government itself blew up apartment buildings in Moscow and elsewhere in 1999, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, in order to blame it on the Chechens and provoke the second Chechen war. Pretty damning stuff.

But even Litvinenko’s personal smallness serves the KGB’s purposes precisely. If they go to such lengths and such messiness and such risk to kill someone as small as Litvinenko, then no critic of the Putin dictatorship is safe. It is the ultimate in deterrence.

Edward Jay Epstein, as noted here before, has been busy asking hard questions to get to the truth.  Mr. Epstein has a long piece in today’s New York Sun that explains that explains the connection between Polonium-210 and arms smuggling.  As it turns out, lots of of places other than Russia can produce Polonium-210: America, Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Taiwan, North Korea.  This means that the exotic murder weapon didn’t necessarily come from Russia.  Litvinenko, Epstein argues, may have had ties to arms dealers.  This makes him a bigger fish than we realized.  It also means that someone other than the Russians may have had a motive to keep Litvinenko quiet.

Another peculiarity is that Britain has refused to release the autopsy report or medical records.  Admittedly, this may be Britain’s way of preventing an inquiry into its perpetually struggling National Health Services.  After detailing the many tangled strands that surrounds Litvenenko, Epstein his conclusion:

After considering all the evidence, my hypothesis is that Litvinenko came in contact with a polonium-210 smuggling operation and was, either wittingly or unwittingly, exposed to it. Litvinenko had been a person of interest to the intelligence services of many countries, including Britain’s MI-6, Russia’s FSB, America’s CIA (which rejected his offer to defect in 2000), and Italy’s SISMI, which was monitoring his phone conversations. His murky operations, whatever their purpose, involved his seeking contacts in one of the most lawless areas in the former Soviet Union, the Pankisi Gorge, which had become a center for arms smuggling. He had also dealt with people accused of everything from money laundering to trafficking in nuclear components. These activities may have brought him, or his associates, in contact with a sample of polonium-210, which then, either by accident or by design, contaminated and killed him.

To unlock the mystery, Britain must make available its secret evidence, including the autopsy report, the comprehensive list of places in which radiation was detected, and the surveillance reports of Litvinenko and his associates. If Britain considers it too sensitive for public release, it should be turned over to an international commission of inquiry. The stakes are too high here to leave unresolved the mystery of the smuggled polonium-210.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Hubbard posted this at 9:21 AM EDT on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 as Those Wacky Foreigners, Commie Recrudescence, Walking the Cat Backwards, Kraut-hammered

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Dr. K. neatly sums up the misgivings that Apollo and I have over Obama.

There’s no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: Bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more than reprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay for gasoline. Or consider how Google found a way to sell dictionary nouns — boat, shoe, clock — by charging advertisers zillions to be listed whenever the word is searched.

And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.

This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity — salvation — for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a “salvational fervor” and “idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria.”

“We are the hope of the future,” sayeth Obama. We can “remake this world as it should be.” Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country — nay, we can become “a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest.”

snip

Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He’s going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can’t possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran’s Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war — with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.

A good piece that succicntly demostrates the problems with voting for “hope” - what happens when you elect someone on “hope” and find out that theres nothing backing it up?

Jamie posted this at 2:44 PM EST on Friday, February 15th, 2008 as Kraut-hammered, Audacity of Hype

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Perhaps the thing I find most bewildering about the Obama fad is the belief of some that “uniting” the country (whatever that means) is more important than good policy and wise leadership. Moreover, how Obama could “unite” the country was never addressed. The only way I can think of this working out is to shame a sufficient number of whites into supporting Obama simply because he’s black. Thankfully, it appears that may not yet happen.

In attacking Obama, Dr. K. discusses this overwrought yearning for unity by using one of my favorite memes (blame everything on the Baby Boomers):

Or that Obama’s media acolytes wax poetic that his soaring rhetoric and personal biography will abolish the ideological divide of the 1960s — as if the division between left and right, between free markets and the welfare state, between unilateralism and internationalism, between social libertarianism and moral traditionalism are residues of Sergeant Pepper and the March on Washington. The baby boomers in their endless solipsism now think they invented left and right — the post-Enlightenment contest of ideologies that dates back to the seating arrangements of the Estates-General in 1789.

He should have pointed out that the Boomers in question are those who are now in control of the media; they embody the very worst aspects of that worst generation. All in all, I think Krauthammer’s right that we should be thankful for Hillary’s New Hampshire primary. The Obama messianism was getting, frankly, frightening.

Apollo posted this at 2:52 AM EST on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 as Kraut-hammered, Audacity of Hype

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