A Dark Past

Contraception, abortion, and the eugenics movement.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com
June 24, 2008, 7:31 a.m.

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Liberal Fascism.


Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth-control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of modern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the Progressive pantheon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, “I stand by Margaret Sanger’s side,” leading “the organization that carries on Sanger’s legacy.” Planned Parenthood’s first black president, Faye Wattleton — Ms. magazine’s “Woman of the Year” in 1989 — said that she was “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger.” Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards to individuals and organizations who advance Sanger’s cause. Recipients are a Who’s Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC’s West Wing. What Sanger’s liberal admirers are eager to downplay is that she was a thoroughgoing racist who subscribed completely to the views of E. A. Ross and other “raceologists.” Indeed, she made many of them seem tame.

Sanger was born into a poor family of eleven children in Corning, New York, in 1879. In 1902 she received her degree as a registered nurse. In 1911 she moved to New York City, where she fell in with the transatlantic bohemian avant-garde of the burgeoning fascist moment. “Our living-room,” she wrote in her autobiography, “became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.’s could meet.” A member of the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist Party, she participated in all the usual protests and demonstrations. In 1912 she started writing what amounted to a sex-advice column for the New York Call, dubbed “What Every Girl Should Know.” The overriding theme of her columns was the importance of contraception.

A disciple of the anarchist Emma Goldman — another eugenicist — Sanger became the nation’s first “birth control martyr” when she was arrested for handing out condoms in 1917. In order to escape a subsequent arrest for violating obscenity laws, she went to England, where she fell under the thrall of Havelock Ellis, a sex theorist and ardent advocate of forced sterilization. She also had an affair with H. G. Wells, the self-avowed champion of “liberal fascism.” Her marriage fell apart early, and one of her children — whom she admitted to neglecting — died of pneumonia at age four. Indeed, she always acknowledged that she wasn’t right for family life, admitting she was not a “fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration.”

Under the banner of “reproductive freedom,” Sanger subscribed to nearly all of the eugenic views discussed above. She sought to ban reproduction of the unfit and regulate reproduction for everybody else. She scoffed at the soft approach of the “positive” eugenicists, deriding it as mere “cradle competition” between the fit and the unfit. “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control,” she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, “We want fewer and better children...and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.” Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world “swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny.”

A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger’s books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugenics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. As editor of The Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racists we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, The Birth Control Review ran articles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For example, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, The Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need,” by Ernst Rüdin, Hitler’s director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1926 Sanger proudly gave a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

One of Sanger’s closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: “Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.” When the book came out, Sanger was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join the board of directors of the American Birth Control League.

Sanger’s genius was to advance Ross’s campaign for social control by hitching the racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation. In her “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” published in 1934, she decreed that “no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit...no permit shall be valid for more than one child.”47 But Sanger couched this fascistic agenda in the argument that “liberated” women wouldn’t mind such measures because they don’t really want large families in the first place. In a trope that would be echoed by later feminists such as Betty Friedan, she argued that motherhood itself was a socially imposed constraint on the liberty of women. It was a form of what Marxists called false consciousness to want a large family.

Sanger believed — prophetically enough — that if women conceived of sex as first and foremost a pleasurable experience rather than a procreative act, they would embrace birth control as a necessary tool for their own personal gratification. She brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women they weren’t going along with a collectivist scheme but were in fact “speaking truth to power,” as it were. This was the identical trick the Nazis pulled off. They took a radical Nietzschean doctrine of individual will and made it into a trendy dogma of middle-class conformity. This trick remains the core of much faddish “individualism” among rebellious conformists on the American cultural left today. Nonetheless, Sanger’s analysis was surely correct, and led directly to the widespread feminist association of sex with political rebellion. Sanger in effect “bought off” women (and grateful men) by offering tolerance for promiscuity in return for compliance with her eugenic schemes.

In 1939 Sanger created the above-mentioned “Negro Project,” which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The project’s racist intent is beyond doubt. “The mass of significant Negroes,” read the project’s report, “still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes...is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.” Sanger’s intent is shocking today, but she recognized its extreme radicalism even then. “We do not want word to go out,” she wrote to a colleague, “that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

It is possible that Sanger didn’t really want to “exterminate” the Negro population so much as merely limit its growth. Still, many in the black community saw it that way and remained rightly suspicious of the Progressives’ motives. It wasn’t difficult to see that middle-class whites who consistently spoke of “race suicide” at the hands of dark, subhuman savages might not have the best interests of blacks in mind. This skepticism persisted within the black community for decades. Someone who saw the relationship between abortion and race from a less trusting perspective telegrammed Congress in 1977 to tell them that abortion amounted to “genocide against the black race.” And he added, in block letters, “AS A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE I MUST OPPOSE THE USE OF FEDERAL FUNDS FOR A POLICY OF KILLING INFANTS.” This was Jesse Jackson, who changed his position when he decided to seek the Democratic nomination.

Just a few years ago, the racial eugenic “bonus” of abortion rights was something one could only admit among those fully committed to the cause, and even then in politically correct whispers. No more. Increasingly, this argument is acceptable on the left, as are arguments in favor of eugenics generally.

In 2005 the acclaimed University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt broke the taboo with his critical and commercial hit Freakonomics (co-written with Stephen Dubner). The most sensational chapter in the book updated a paper Levitt had written in 1999 which argued that abortion cuts crime. “Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.” Freakonomics excised all references to race and never connected the facts that because the aborted fetuses were disproportionately black and blacks disproportionately contribute to the crime rate, reducing the size of the black population reduces crime. Yet the press coverage acknowledged this and didn’t seem to mind.

In 2005 William Bennett, a committed pro-lifer, invoked the Levitt argument in order to denounce eugenic thinking. “I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” What seemed to offend liberals most was that Bennett had accidentally borrowed some conventional liberal logic to make a conservative point, and, as with the social Darwinists of yore, that makes liberals quite cross. According to the New York Times’s Bob Herbert, Bennett believed “exterminating blacks would be a most effective crime-fighting tool.” Various liberal spokesmen, including Terry McAuliffe, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, said Bennett wanted to exterminate “black babies.” Juan Williams proclaimed that Bennett’s remarks speak “to a deeply racist mindset.”


Steven Levitt

In one sense, this is a pretty amazing turnaround. After all, when liberals advocate them, we are usually told that abortions do not kill “babies.” Rather, they remove mere agglomerations of cells and tissue or “uterine contents.” If hypothetical abortions committed for allegedly conservative ends are infanticide, how can actual abortions performed for liberal ends not be?

Some liberals are honest about this. In 1992 Nicholas Von Hoffman argued in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Free cheap abortion is a policy of social defense. To save ourselves from being murdered in our beds and raped on the streets, we should do everything possible to encourage pregnant women who don’t want the baby and will not take care of it to get rid of the thing before it turns into a monster... At their demonstration, the anti-abortionists parade around with pictures of dead and dismembered fetuses. The pro-abortionists should meet these displays with some of their own: pictures of the victims of the unaborted — murder victims, rape victims, mutilation victims — pictures to remind us that the fight for abortion is but part of the larger struggle for safe homes and safe streets.

Later that same year, the White House received a letter from the Roe v. Wade co-counsel Ron Weddington, urging the new president-elect to rush RU-486 — the morning-after pill — to the market as quickly as possible. Weddington’s argument was refreshingly honest:

[Y]ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I’m not advocating some sort of mass extinction of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can’t afford to have babies. There, I’ve said it. It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it, because as liberals who believe in individual rights, we view any program which might treat the disadvantaged as discriminatory, mean-spirited and... well... so Republican.

[G]overnment is also going to have to provide vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions. . , . There have been about 30 million abortions in this country since Roe v. Wade. Think of all the poverty, crime and misery . . . and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don’t have a lot of time left.

How, exactly, is this substantively different from Margaret Sanger’s self-described “religion of birth control,” which would, she wrote, “ease the financial load of caring for with public funds . . . children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation”?

The issue here is not the explicit intent of liberals or the rationalizations they invoke to deceive themselves about the nature of abortion. Rather, it is to illustrate that even when motives and arguments change, the substance of the policy remains in its effects. After the Holocaust discredited eugenics per se, neither the eugenicists nor their ideas disappeared. Rather, they went to ground in fields like family planning and demography and in political movements such as feminism. Indeed, in a certain sense Planned Parenthood is today more eugenic than Sanger intended. Sanger, after all, despised abortion. She denounced it as “barbaric” and called abortionists “bloodsucking men with M.D. after their names.” Abortion resulted in “an outrageous slaughter” and “the killing of babies,” which even the degenerate offspring of the unfit did not deserve.

So forget about intent: Look at results. Abortion ends more black lives than heart disease, cancer, accidents, AIDS, and violent crime combined. African Americans constitute little more than 12 percent of the population but have more than a third (37 percent) of abortions. That rate has held relatively constant, though in some regions the numbers are much starker; in Mississippi, black women receive some 72 percent of all abortions, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Nationwide, 512 out of every 1,000 black pregnancies end in an abortion. Revealingly enough, roughly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s abortion centers are in or near minority communities. Liberalism today condemns a Bill Bennett who speculates about the effects of killing unborn black children; but it also celebrates the actual killing of unborn black children, and condemns him for opposing it.


Peter Singer

Of course, orthodox eugenics also aimed at the “feebleminded” and “useless bread gobblers” — which included everyone from the mentally retarded to an uneducated and malnourished underclass to recidivist criminals. When it comes to today’s “feebleminded,” influential voices on the left now advocate the killing of “defectives” at the beginning of life and at the end of life. Chief among them is Peter Singer, widely hailed as the most important living philosopher and the world’s leading ethicist. Professor Singer, who teaches at Princeton, argues that unwanted or disabled babies should be killed in the name of “compassion.” He also argues that the elderly and other drags on society should be put down when their lives are no longer worth living.

Singer doesn’t hide behind code words and euphemisms in his belief that killing babies isn’t always wrong, as one can deduce from his essay titled “Killing Babies Isn’t Always Wrong” (nor is he a lone voice in the wilderness; his views are popular or respected in many academic circles). But that hasn’t caused the Left to ostracize him in the slightest (save in Germany, where people still have a visceral sense of where such logic takes you). Of course, not all or even most liberals agree with Singer’s prescriptions, but nor do they condemn him as they do, say, a William Bennett. Perhaps they recognize in him a kindred spirit.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism and editor-at-large of National Review Online.

Derek Jeter showing lower numbers than normal this season

BY MARK FEINSAND
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER

Tuesday, June 24th 2008, 2:20 AM



NEW YORK - JUNE 19: Derek Jeter #2 of the New York Yankees hits a first inning single against the San Diego Padres on June 19, 2008 at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx borough of New York City. (Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)


If there were ever a year when Derek Jeter could be called overrated, this has been it.

The Yankees' captain, the highest-paid shortstop in baseball, has a .279 batting average, a whopping 37 points below his career mark, while his 10 doubles and 39 runs scored put him well below his usual pace. Fourteen shortstops in the majors have more extra-base hits than Jeter's 17.

Not that Jeter is concerned.

"I don't judge a year after three months," Jeter said. "I've had good halves and bad halves. I still have until the end of the year. I don't complicate things."

Still, it's clear that something hasn't been right with the shortstop, who was voted the most overrated player in the game in a Sports Illustrated players poll released last week.

Then again, Alex Rodriguez was tied for third in that poll, bringing the voters' motives into question as far as one big-league scout is concerned. (Rodriguez and Jeter were voted 1-2 in an SI poll the previous week that had players selecting one person to build a franchise around.)

"I don't agree with that for a second," the scout said. "That's just plain jealousy. It's ridiculous. They're two of the best players to play the game in the last decade and both will be Hall of Famers. How can that be overrated?"

Based on his current statistics, Jeter is on pace for 87 runs, 22 doubles and nine home runs, while his on-base and slugging percentages sit at an unusually low .336 and .379, respectively.

Those totals would all mark career lows for Jeter, who has averaged 114 runs and 32 doubles in his 12 full seasons, not to mention his career on-base and slugging percentages of .386 and .459.



Antonelli/News
At .279, Jeter is batting 37 points below his career mark.

Jeter won't even offer a guess at the reason for his declining numbers, but Yankees hitting coach Kevin Long has his own theory.

"I can tell you that he probably lost 30-35 points in his average due to his hand injury, but he'd never admit that," Long said. "His swing wasn't the same, he was favoring it and he got into some problems when it came to staying behind the baseball, which has always been his strength. He still contributed and helped us in other ways, but his hitting suffered."

The injury happened on May 20, when Jeter was drilled in his left hand by a Daniel Cabrera fastball. Jeter missed the rest of that game, but he was back in the lineup the next night.

When Jeter was hit, his average was .312 and his on-base .351. Over the next 10 games, Jeter went 4-for-40 with only one extra-base hit, dropping his average down to .269.

Nevertheless, his presence in the lineup and on the field remained a crucial piece of the Yankees' puzzle as the team struggled to find its way over .500.

"There's a grinding attitude when he's out there," Joe Girardi said. "He's important to our club on a daily basis - not just for what he does on the field, but the whole picture."

Jeter began expanding his strike zone, swinging at pitches on the corners or off the plate. As Long watched those bad habits, he knew something wasn't right.

"How much damage can you do with a pitch that's (a foot) off the plate?" Long said. "Since he's been healthy, he's had to get out of some of those bad habits, and now he's starting to put a little something together."

Since the calendar turned to June, Jeter has looked like a different hitter. He's hit safely in 19 of 21 games, batting .301 with a .370 on-base percentage. Jeter is riding a season-high 11-game hitting streak, though he cringes when asked about his hot bat.

"It's just a feel. You can't explain it," Jeter said. "Sometimes you're comfortable and it feels like nobody can get you out. Other times, you're trying to find it. If people knew how to fix it, no one would ever go through bad streaks, but sometimes it's hard to figure out."

The scout, who has watched Jeter several times over the past two months, said he didn't see any noticeable differences in the shortstop's approach compared to any of his recent seasons.

"His bat is still quick," the scout said. "When the leaves turn brown, he'll be around that .300 or .315 mark he always is."

Johnny Damon can relate to Jeter's early-season struggles. Damon was hitting .250 when Jeter was hit by Cabrera's pitch, but just when Jeter went cold, the left fielder became the hottest hitter in the majors, batting .418 (51-for-122) since that day.

"He knows it's not how you start, but how you finish," Damon said of Jeter. "We know when the season is over, he's going to be hitting .300 with 100 runs scored. He doesn't get affected too much. He knows what New York is about and what baseball is about, so he just goes about his business."

"There's a hot streak right around the corner," Long said. "Sooner or later, it's coming. He's a model of consistency. Keep putting his name in the lineup and, in the end, the numbers will be there. He'll make something out of this season."

Today's Tune: Eddie Cochran - Somethin' Else

(Click on title to play video)

Class sweeps crass: Piniella ignores Sox insults

BY JAY MARIOTTI
Chicago Sun-Times
June 23, 2008



A rainbow over Wrigley before the game. (Tom Cruze/Sun-Times)

Only at Wrigley Field can the sun shine during a downpour, leaving a massive rainbow cascading over right field Sunday evening. Obviously, the pretty backdrop wasn't conducive to a rumble. The White Sox tried their damndest to provoke ill will all weekend, acting like mannerless rubes bent on insulting and tweaking Cubdom every way possible.

But the silly onslaught of South Side verbal exhaust - A.J. Pierzynski referred to Cubs fans as "idiots," John Danks claimed Wrigley reeks of urine, Ozzie Guillen said the shrine is infested with rats and dissed Jim Edmonds - didn't result in any on-field mayhem in the finale of the Crossdown Showdown, Act One. In fact, all it did was further shame the Sox, who managed more cheap shots than runs in a three-game no-show that exposed their vulnerabilities as serious contenders.

"We really stink," Guillen said after the 7-1 loss, the Sox' ninth in a row on the road. "They kicked our butt, and a loss is a loss no matter who you lose against. They played better than we did. They performed better. They hit better, pitched better. Not a lot you can say."

Then please be quiet.

If anybody needed nose plugs over the weekend, it was a Sox fan. That's because the Cubs are more into winning ballgames than seeking retribution, a byproduct of Lou Piniella being a much cooler and, yes, much better manager than the whirlybird in the other dugout. The biggest mistake people make is lumping in Piniella with Guillen on the volatility meter. Unlike the Blizzard of Oz, who is a 24/7 pinball capable of throwing a tirade or quitting his job at any time, Lou has mellowed more than a bit at 64. There was the dust-up with the umpire last year, sure, and he has had a few snippy moments with local writers. But to compare him to Guillen, as the national media instinctively tend to do, simply is inaccurate and unfair.



Ryan Dempster kept the Sox hitters at bay through eight innings of work to pick up the win. (Tom Cruze/Sun-Times)

Somebody asked Piniella what he thought of the open fire from the other camp. Ever so wisely, he downplayed it. "All I concern myself with is the Chicago Cubs. Nothing more, nothing less," he said. "That's my job, that's what I do.

"Put it this way: I've only been in town a year and a half, and I certainly enjoy the competition against the White Sox, but I don't go crazy over it. I respect their team and respect their organization, but I just do what's best for the Chicago Cubs in my mind. I'll let it go at that. That's all I can do."

Which helps explain why the Cubs looked so efficient and relaxed in continuing their home dominance, finishing the sweep behind Ryan Dempster's latest All-Star-bid gem. There was a potential flashpoint in the fifth inning, when Sox starter Javier Vazquez plunked Kosuke Fukudome above the right elbow with none out. How did the Cubs respond? With lumber, not fists. Eric Patterson used the national TV showcase to drop his first major-league home run into the basket in right-center, a shot followed by smokin' Aramis Ramirez's fourth homer of the series. Like that, the Cubs had a 5-0 lead, and it was plainly obvious which team is the best in town, if it wasn't already.

Rowdy? Piniella doesn't do rowdy when his team has baseball's best record and the Sox are reeling. "It might get rowdy out in the stands, but not on the field," he said. "We're just going to go play a baseball game. What are we on, ESPN tonight? I don't see any reason why it should be rowdy or anything else. We're just gonna play as well as we can against a good White Sox team. This is a game on our schedule. It so happens both teams are from Chicago, and the fans really get into it and the media really get into it. It makes for a good story and good copy. But let's be perfectly honest: It's one game."



Aramis Ramirez passes A.J. Pierzynski and points skyward after his solo HR. Ramirez belted four homers during the three-game series. (Tom Cruze/Sun-Times)

Piniella and his players knew what was being said by the Sox. They responded the honorable way, on the field, as they should. Besides, other than Guillen's unnecessary ho-humming of Edmonds, the slights had to do with the ballpark and the fans and not the Cubs themselves. Guillen described Wrigley as a rat-infested hellhole: "The rats look bigger than a pig out there. You want to take a look? I think the rats out there are lifting weights." Pierzynski, in a rockheaded remark, ignored the socioeconomic transformation of Cubdom over the last 30 years when he said of Wrigley fans, "They're idiots. It's like what Lee Elia said: 'Eighty-five percent of the people work, the other [bleeps] come out here.'"

Danks, kid pitcher, brought nose plugs to Wrigley. "Try not to smell all the urine over there ... That place is a [bleep] hole," he said. And general manager Ken Williams, forgetting a 2005 suggestion by Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf that "the time has come for everybody to root for both teams," dumped on the Cubs and their 100-year drought, saying, "You might as well build a border, a Great Wall of China on Madison, because we are so different. We might as well be in two different cities. The unfortunate thing for me is it's a shame a certain segment of Chicago refused to enjoy a baseball championship being brought to their city. The only thing I can say is, 'Happy anniversary.'" He added that he would "really, really have to need the job," to ever work for the Cubs.

How small and foolish do the Sox look today?

Might they possibly do the city a favor and shut up as they feebly try to stay in first place?



Ozzie Guillen and catcher AJ Pierzynski confer at the mound with pitcher Javier Vazquez in the first inning. (Tom Cruze/Sun-Times)

Not Guillen. Never Guillen. In mentioning the rats, he thinks he's helping the Cubs get a new ballpark built, not understanding that the bleachers area he targeted will be preserved - thankfully - in any future Wrigley rehab job. "I talked to [Cubs general manager Jim Hendry], and he said the best quote was about the rats lifting weights," said Guillen, who should be trying to win a Manager of the Year award and not the Best Quote Contest. "Meanwhile, I helped them to build a new ballpark. They should thank me every day I say something about this ballpark, because hopefully we can come with a new ballpark in the city."

Piniella, who loves Wrigley, defended the old joint. "It's fine. It's small. It's an old park, and you're not going to have as spacious or luxurious accommodations as other stadiums," he said. "But I'll be honest - I think quaintness in a clubhouse keeps a team together. You get too big, you get too modern, you get too spaced out, and you lose that closeness in the clubhouse. Our clubhouse here is fine. Are training rooms bigger somewhere else? Are weight rooms better equipped? Yes. What can you do? It's better than some clubhouses where you don't see your players or see your coaches," he said. "You have to walk half a mile to see your trainer."

Guess who almost fell over upon hearing that? "God Bless, Lou Piniella," Guillen said. "I can't believe he said that."

I can. Lou Piniella is a smart, mature man. I'll let it go at that.

Obama Loses His Teflon Sheen

A trifecta of gaffes has Obama taking heat even from some of his biggest fans. A McCain opportunity?

June 23, 2008 - by Jennifer Rubin
http://pajamasmedia.com/

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., speaks during a meeting of Democratic Governors at the Chicago History Museum in Chicago Friday, June 20, 2008. A new seal debuted on Obama's podium Friday, sporting iconography used in the U.S. presidential seal, the blue background, the eagle clutching arrows on left and olive branch on right, but with symbolic differences. Instead of the Latin 'E pluribus unum' (Out of many, one), Obama's says 'Vero possumus', rough Latin for 'Yes, we can.' Instead of 'Seal of the President of the United States', Obama's Web site address is listed. And instead of a shield, Obama's eagle wears his 'O' campaign logo with a rising sun representing hope ahead.
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Barack Obama is endangering his status as the media darling of the 2008 presidential campaign. In fact, he has been the villain in the campaign story over the last few days. Two decisions — one small and one large — showed the dangers he faces. And a third showed that the post-racial candidate is no longer in evidence. It is no secret that the media has been openly rooting for Obama for months. His gaffes would have felled other candidates, his relationship with hate-mongering preachers would have disqualified mere mortal candidates and, of course, his lack of any national record of accomplishment might have prevented all much the most ego-inflated from even mounting a White House run. But it was hanging together fairly well until last week.

The trigger for the downward slide was his decision to abandon public financing. The decision made cold political sense given his likely enormous advantage over the McCain camp but there were two complicating factors: he had shaped his career as a “reformer” and he specifically promised that he would take public financing and the rules that go along with it.
To make matters worse he concocted a false and misleading, indeed an “operatic” explanation that those mean Republicans forced him to take private money.

Not unexpectedly, the McCain camp went nuclear, accusing Obama of all manner of dishonesty and making the connection between this reversal flip-flops on other substantive issues.

Moreover, many of his good government, liberal allies were distressed. What’s more, they went public with their distress.

And for once, the media joined in the Obama-bashing and perhaps was even harsher. It was the “low point” according to a usually sympathetic David Brooks. Clearly, the press, which had sheltered Obama from virtually every dicey incident to date, had had enough. The criticism was sharp and virtually uniform. When added to his decision to duck town hall meetings with McCain –which Obama had also said he would do, before he thought better of it — the dean of the mainstream media, David Broder was forced to admit that Obama’s “motives” might be open to question.

And the self-serving explanation was too much even for mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post. The negative reception suggested that the mainstream press may be re-evaluating their subservient behavior. At the very least, when an issue is near and dear to them, as “the corruption of money in politics” is, they appeared ready now to call foul when Obama goes a step too far.

Now ordinarily, campaign finance reform does not register high with the general public. This is a quintessential inside-the-Beltway issue. However, given the firestorm from the media and the effort by the McCain camp to expose a pattern of hypocrisy or at least cynical position-shifting by Obama, the risk for Obama is that he will lose the underlying rationale for his candidacy: the harbinger of the New Politics, a leader unlike any we have ever seen.

In short, the campaign finance move exposed the Great and Powerful Oz as an ordinary man behind that curtain.

The second incident was comical but telling. Obama had a faux seal of the U.S. — a knock off of the Great Seal — constructed for his benefit. He and others spoke with the Obama Seal in front of them last week at an appearance in Chicago. The stunt brought howls of derision from the media. It was significant for several reasons.

First, in all the Obama-mania and Obama girl swooning the media has played along, indeed has been infected by the emotional frenzy. Never have they questioned or examined the messiah-complex which envelops the Obama movement. Certainly, they have not seriously examined the arrogance of a man who knows so little but claims such grand wisdom. By laughing not with, but at, Obama the mainstream media again demonstrated the type of emotional distance one might almost mistake for journalistic independence. (Conservative pundits have been mocking Obama’s elite iconography for some time.)

Second, for patriotic Americans holding traditional value this was a bit of civic blasphemy. Will he next come up with a new flag with his image or paint his Chicago mansion white and add some columns? The presumptuousness was only outdone by the lack of reverence for existing symbols of the U.S. (And it might not have been even legal.)

The final incident in Obama’s trifecta of political problems must have come as a disappointment to those who were still holding out hope that we were entering an era of post-racial politics. Obama played the race card - loudly and blatantly. He suggested, with no evidence whatsoever, that Republicans were pointing to his race as a reason to question his fitness for the presidency. (It was reminiscent of his accusation that Jewish voters were suspicious of him, not because of his affiliation with Reverend Wright and his willingness to meet directly with Holocaust denier Ahmadinejad, but because of his middle name or because of internet rumors that he is a closet Muslim.)

That tactic seemed further evidence that his effort to minimize race are over and he now intends to use race as a sword to attack his Republican opponent. It however is a potentially dangerous strategy, almost certain to turn off some segment of white voters who do not want to be bludgeoned by racial politics.

Sometimes a political opponent does to himself what others cannot even attempt to do. It would have been virtually impossible for the McCain camp without provocation to attack Obama as a fraud and an arrogant one to boot. The media would have rolled their eyes, the Obama camp would have called it a schoolyard taunt and the public would have yawned.

But here Obama has done what weeks, if not months, of McCain ads and speeches could not: scuff up almost beyond recognition the veneer of superior political virtue which Obama heretofore enjoyed. And if Reverend Wright did not do the trick, Obama’s decision to play racial politics seems to signal that he has abandoned the post-racial, post-partisan message which held such promise when the race began. This week doesn’t look like it’s getting off to a very promising start either for the Obama camp, kicking off with yet another unwanted endorsement - this time from North Korea.

Will these incidents have a lasting impact on the race? That depends on how effectively McCain’s team can make the point that these incidents relate to a larger picture - a candidate falsely wearing the clothes of a game-changing reformer who is merely a bare-knuckle pol, and a not very experienced or knowledgeable one at that.

If McCain can do that, and more importantly, if the media re-adjusts their outlook to cover Obama as they would any ordinary politician, the result may be significant and the race more competitive than only the most optimistic Republicans thought possible.

- PJM's special DC correspondent Jennifer Rubin is a writer living in Virginia. She is a regular contributor to Human Events, American Spectator and the New York Observer and blogs at Commentary’s Contentions.

ANTI-TERROR OOPS

BARACK BUMBLES LEGAL QS

By SCOTT W. JOHNSON
New York Post
June 23, 2008



Abdel-Rahman: Continued jihad from jail

SPEAKING without a text in front of him, Barack Obama betrays a troubling lack of knowledge on important issues - such as the law and terrorism.

In his ABC interview last Monday, for example, Obama attacked the Bush approach on fighting terror. He claimed that, in the case of "the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated."

As an assistant US attorney, Andrew McCarthy prosecuted the perpetrators of the 1993 WTC attack. He calls Obama's statement "a remarkably ignorant account of the American experience with jihadism."

Writing for National Review Online, McCarthy notes: "While the government managed to prosecute many people responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing, many also escaped prosecution because of the limits on civilian criminal prosecution.

"Some who contributed to the attack, like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, continued to operate freely because they were beyond the system's capacity to apprehend. Abdul Rahman Yasin was released prematurely because there was not sufficient evidence to hold him - he fled to Iraq, where he was harbored for a decade (and has never been apprehended)."

Pointing to the later terrorist attacks on Americans and US assets, culminating in 9/11, McCarthy concludes that the law-enforcement approach to combating terrorism was futile.

But Obama's comments fall short on other grounds, too.

The convicted spiritual mentor of the 1993 WTC bombers is Omar Abdel-Rahman ("the blind sheik"). By Obama's logic, the blind sheik was "incapacitated" and therefore rendered harmless by his conviction and imprisonment. In fact, Abdel-Rahman continued to wage jihad from behind bars, issuing instructions to his followers in Egypt.

Attorney Lynne Stewart was convicted in February 2005 of conspiracy and providing and concealing material support of terrorism for her actions in smuggling messages from Abdel-Rahman to his followers in the terrorist group Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group).

The jihadist activities of Abdel-Rahman from behind bars, plus the collaboration of his attorney, illustrate the challenges President Bush sought to confront fairly with the arrangements for the detention and isolation of captured enemy combatants in Guantanamo.

Of course, the Supreme Court just upended those arrangements with its controversial ruling in the Boumediene case, which gave Gitmo detainees the right to challenge their confinement through habeas corpus proceedings in federal court.

Obama approves: He recently asserted that the "principle of habeas corpus, that a state can't just hold you for any reason without charging you and without giving you any kind of due process - that's the essence of who we are."

He explained: "I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are, but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle."

Oops. At Nuremberg, an international military commission composed of representatives of the victorious Allies put the top surviving Nazi leaders on trial starting in late 1945.

Yet, in Boumediene, the Supreme Court disapproved of the system of military commissions that Congress had adopted for Gitmo (at the high court's previous urging). Thus, the Nuremberg defendants' "day in court" came before a kind of tribunal found constitutionally inadequate in the decision Obama was praising.

The Nazi war criminals had no access to US courts. The fair-trial provision of the charter governing the trial was relatively skimpy - and the provision on appeal rights was even shorter and sweeter: The defendants had no right to appeal. The procedures the court found deficient in Boumediene, by contrast, provided for appeal rights to the DC Circuit, the most prominent US bench below the Supreme Court.

In short, the procedural protections for Gitmo detainees under the statute before the Supreme Court in Boumediene exceed those accorded the Nuremberg defendants.

Obama's unfavorable comparison of the legal treatment at Gitmo with that at Nuremberg suggests either that he doesn't know what he's talking about - or that he feels free to exploit the ignorance of audiences that don't know the truth of the matter.

Scott W. Johnson is a Minneaopolis attorney and contributor to the blog Power Line (powerlineblog.com).

601 homers, a million what-ifs

Johnette Howard
New York Newsday
June 23, 2008



Cincinnati Reds Ken Griffey, Jr. hits a solo homerun in the eighth inning off New York Yankees Kyle Farnsworth. (Newsday / Audrey C. Tiernan / June 22, 2008)

He's working on his 20th season in the big leagues, and he's not what he was. But Ken Griffey Jr. still has that sweeping home run swing and he still has a terrific hold on people's imagination.

He stepped up to the plate in the sixth inning yesterday at Yankee Stadium just as the sky was darkening and the wind started whipping. A game-delaying cloudburst was about to cut loose and something striking, something right out of the movies, happened in the rapidly dimming light.

For the first time all afternoon, it was possible to see the camera flashes firing - dozens of them - when Griffey stepped to the plate.

Griffey ended up hitting into a forceout that time up. But in his next at-bat in the eighth, he turned on a fat pitch from Yankees reliever Kyle Farnsworth and lined home run No. 601 of his career just over the rightfield fence.

This time, fans didn't just take photos. Knowing the 38-year-old Griffey might never be back for a regular-season game at Yankee Stadium, they gave him a standing ovation that finally coaxed a little wave from him once he was back in the dugout.

Asked later if he thought the fans were saying goodbye to him, Griffey said: "Nah. No. No."

But it was a sentimental gesture, all right - the kind Griffey studiously tried to avoid all weekend on his first trip back to play the Yankees since 1999.

Back then, he and Alex Rodriguez still were teammates in Seattle. And Griffey was almost exactly at the career juncture that A-Rod is at now.

Griffey was supposed to be the player of his generation who would break the all-time home run records, not Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire. When Griffey joined the Reds in 2000 at age 30, a little younger than Rodriguez is now, Griffey was the superstar who was supposed to hit so many more home runs, he'd not only go flying past Mantle and Mays, Ruth and Aaron, he'd reset the records so high that no one could touch them.

Maris' single-season record of 61, Aaron's career mark of 755? They all seemed possible. Even 800 career homers didn't seem out of the question for Griffey. Then the injuries hit.

Now all that's considered A-Rod's destiny instead.

"If he stays healthy ... I don't see why not," Griffey agreed.

And that's as far as he went.



NEW YORK - JUNE 21: Ken Griffey Jr. #3 of the Cincinnati Reds talks with Alex Rodriguez #13 of the New York Yankees on June 21, 2008 at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx borough of New York City. (Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)


Griffey could've gone on to stress how injuries turned his own career into a cautionary tale, or how a lot of so-called "sure things" can go wrong on the way to Cooperstown. He eventually had so many physical problems that some wise-guy comedian came out one year and said he was looking forward to the start of another major-league season, "especially the traditional National League opener featuring the Cincinnati Reds and Ken Griffey Jr. throwing out the first hamstring."

It was sarcastic. But it also was true. In four of his first five seasons with the Reds, Griffey missed 331 games - an average of 83 in those four years. Entering this season, he was averaging a home run every 14.9 at-bats. If you do the math, he really might have passed Aaron before Bonds did.

But Griffey won't go there. He seemed determined this weekend to fight off even the slightest suggestions of sentimentality or what-ifs, even on the day when Babe Ruth's 91-year-old daughter was in the house to give A-Rod a home run award.

You can ask him, all right. But Griffey doesn't do serious or traffic in regrets.

Though he's never been accused of using steroids, Griffey won't even confess to sharing the pride that Mets pitcher Pedro Martinez expressed earlier this season about having the ability to dominate during baseball's steroid era despite being clean himself.

Griffey just laughed yesterday and said: "Nah. Pitchers have five days to sit around thinking about things like that. I play every day. I hit my 600th on a Sunday. Had a flight back to Cincinnati that night, got in at 3:30 a.m. And it was back to work on Monday."

Of course, what Griffey omitted is what he actually said the day he hit No. 600: that he didn't even remember running the bases. "I think I floated around."

Getting to 600 meant something to him, all right. Simply being able to play at all seems to make Griffey grateful. Yesterday, it felt familiar to watch him slap his cap on backward, same as he did when he was the effervescent 19-year-old kid who everyone called Junior, then head out for some pregame batting practice, ribbing a couple of teammates as he went.

When a clubhouse guy complimented Griffey on his remarkably good mood, Griffey smiled and said: "You know me, man. I'm always happy."

Now it's A-Rod's turn to deal with What Could Be.

A Chance for McCain

By Robert Novak
Chicago Sun-Times
June 23, 2008


Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When John McCain met privately with Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin after a political event in the Milwaukee suburbs May 29, the Republican presidential candidate might not have realized that he had just come face to face with an opportunity and a test. Ryan showed him his plan to reform the economy. McCain expressed interest and said he would turn it over to his campaign's economists.

That was truly ominous. If the Kemp-Roth tax cut had been handed over to economists three decades ago, it likely would have died in its crib and aborted the national and Republican revival under President Ronald Reagan. Ryan's plan is more sweeping than the proposal by his boss and mentor Jack Kemp, who dealt only with taxes. In 70 pages, "Ryan's Roadmap for America's Future" shows the way to reform taxes, control spending and brake runaway entitlement outlays.

Ryan has proposed far too much to handle for nervous House Republican leaders. They have refrained from publicly knocking Ryan down only because they are in a state of terror over their party's desperate condition, as indicated by plummeting polls and special election defeats. More important is the yet unstated reaction by McCain, famously uninterested in economics but never shy on courage to defy the conventional wisdom.

Actually, to embrace Ryan's Roadmap requires more political insight than courage. Ryan was met with enthusiastic approval at some 35 town meetings in his southern Wisconsin industrial district, where he unveiled his plan over the last two months. His constituents, who sent liberal Democrat Les Aspin to Congress for 22 years, are legendary "Reagan Democrats" who have soured on the GOP. Ryan believes they are far ahead of politicians in their alarm over entitlements. "Do we have the guts to act?" asks Ryan.

Ryan fears potential national disaster is ahead because we "will exceed the European extent of government and bring our economy to extinction." With the U.S. government share of the economy at 20 percent, he sees it rising to a calamitous 40 percent when his three children (ages 3, 4 and 6) reach their 30s, requiring a doubled tax rate. President Bush's appropriations rose $49 billion over the last year, and the Democratic-controlled House upped that ante. But spending enacted by Congress is dwarfed by statutory increases in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlements.

Ryan's Roadmap makes a serious effort, as neither Congress nor the Bush administration did, to cut appropriated spending. Ryan calls it "Gramm-Rudman on steroids" (referring to successive spending control measures beginning in 1985).

But his boldest thrust comes in radical changes to entitlements, including an option for persons under 55 years old to buy private retirement insurance, plus reduced benefits and delayed retirement for Social Security. His Internal Revenue reform would amount to an optional modified flat tax (advocated in principle by McCain) and substituting a small business consumption tax for the corporate income tax rate -- while holding federal taxes to 18.5 percent of gross domestic product.

It is hardly likely the Republican leadership would embrace Ryan's daring agenda if it cannot even bring itself temporarily to forego pork-barrel spending by passing a moratorium on earmarks. But Ryan represents a younger breed of reform Republicans who now have junior leadership positions.

Ryan, 38, top Republican on the House Budget Committee, has been working closely with freshman Rep. Kevin McCarthy, 43, who has been named chairman of the national platform by Minority Leader John Boehner, and Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, 45, the party's chief deputy whip. After another expected bad GOP defeat in the 2008 congressional elections, Ryan, McCarthy and Cantor could constitute the party's new House leadership.

But who will be in the White House? McCain so far has generated little excitement in his own Republican base, much less among Reagan Democrats. His cautious political and economic advisers flinch at complicated tax changes, massive budget cuts and tampering with Social Security. But a campaign based on Barack Obama's shortcomings may not be enough on Election Day. While Ryan says the people are more than ready for his strong medicine, McCain has not yet agreed.

Today's Tune: The Del-Lords - Cheyenne

(Click on title to play video)

More Prisoners, Less Crime

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Sunday, June 22, 2008; Page B07

Listening to political talk requires a third ear that hears what is not said. Today's near silence about crime probably is evidence of social improvement. For many reasons, including better policing and more incarceration, Americans feel, and are, safer. The New York Times has not recently repeated such amusing headlines as "Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling" (1997), "Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops" (1998), "Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction" (2000) and "More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime" (2003).

If crime revives as an issue, it will be through liberal complaints about something that has reduced the salience of the issue -- the incarceration rate. And any revival will be awkward for Barack Obama. Liberalism likes victimization narratives and the related assumption that individuals are blank slates on which "society" writes. Hence liberals locate the cause of crime in flawed social conditions that liberalism supposedly can fix.

Last July, Obama said that "more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities." Actually, there are more than twice as many black men ages 18 to 24 in college as there are in jail. Last September he said, "We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives." But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, writing in the institute's City Journal, notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population. Furthermore, Mac Donald cites data indicating that:

"In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer."

Obama sees racism in the incarceration rate: "We have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from." Indeed, in 2006, blacks, who are less than 13 percent of the population, were 37.5 percent of all state and federal prisoners. About one in 33 black men was in prison, compared with one in 79 Hispanic men and one in 205 white men.

But Mac Donald cites studies of charging and sentencing that demonstrate that the reason more blacks are disproportionately in prison, and for longer terms, is not racism but racial differences in patterns of criminal offenses: "In 2005 the black homicide rate was over seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined. . . . From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed over 52 percent of all murders." Do police excessively arrest blacks? "The race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data."

As for the charge that the incarceration rate of blacks is substantially explained by more severe federal sentences for crack as opposed to powder-cocaine defendants (only 13 states distinguish between the two substances, and these states have small sentence differentials), Mac Donald says:

"It's going to take a lot more than 5,000 or so [federal] crack defendants a year to account for the 562,000 black prisoners in state and federal facilities at the end of 2006 -- or the 858,000 black prisoners in custody overall, if one includes the population of county and city jails."

James Q. Wilson, America's premier social scientist, notes that "the typical criminal commits from 12 to 16 crimes a year (not counting drug offenses)" and says that 10 years of scholarly studies "have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime, even after controlling for all of the other ways -- poverty, urbanization, and the proportion of young men in the population -- that the states differed. A high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works." It works especially on behalf of blacks, who are disproportionately the victims of crimes by black men.

A recent report by the Pew Center on the States asserts that America incarcerates too many people and in the process diverts money from higher education. Wilson notes that the report does not examine whether the slower growth of public spending on higher education than on prisons may be explained by the surge in private support for public universities. And, Wilson dryly adds, the report does not explore "whether society gets as much from universities as it does from prisons." A good question, but not one apt to be studied in academia.

georgewill@washpost.com

The Two Obamas

By DAVID BROOKS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
Published: June 20, 2008

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.

But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.

Back when he was in the Illinois State Senate, Dr. Barack could have taken positions on politically uncomfortable issues. But Fast Eddie Obama voted “present” nearly 130 times. From time to time, he threw his voting power under the truck.

Dr. Barack said he could no more disown the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than disown his own grandmother. Then the political costs of Rev. Wright escalated and Fast Eddie Obama threw Wright under the truck.

Dr. Barack could have been a workhorse senator. But primary candidates don’t do tough votes, so Fast Eddie Obama threw the workhorse duties under the truck.

Dr. Barack could have changed the way presidential campaigning works. John McCain offered to have a series of extended town-hall meetings around the country. But favored candidates don’t go in for unscripted free-range conversations. Fast Eddie Obama threw the new-politics mantra under the truck.

And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie Obama had his finest hour. Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.

But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that Obama’s got more money now.

And Fast Eddie Obama didn’t just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style. He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa’s final steps to sainthood.

The media and the activists won’t care (they were only interested in campaign-finance reform only when the Republicans had more money). Meanwhile, Obama’s money is forever. He’s got an army of small donors and a phalanx of big money bundlers, including, according to The Washington Post, Kenneth Griffin of the Citadel Investment Group; Kirk Wager, a Florida trial lawyer; James Crown, a director of General Dynamics; and Neil Bluhm, a hotel, office and casino developer.

I have to admit, I’m ambivalent watching all this. On the one hand, Obama did sell out the primary cause of his professional life, all for a tiny political advantage. If he’ll sell that out, what won’t he sell out? On the other hand, global affairs ain’t beanbag. If we’re going to have a president who is going to go toe to toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, maybe it is better that he should have a ruthlessly opportunist Fast Eddie Obama lurking inside.

All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.

Princess Obama Derangement Syndrome

By Melanie Phillips

http://www.spectator.co.uk/
Friday, 13th June 2008

Barack Obama - whose father was Kenyan - being dressed as a tribal elder during an official visit to a Muslim area of the country in 2006.

My oh my, what a firestorm I appear to have started with my remarks two days ago on Obama’s background! It was wholly expected, of course, but nevertheless the posters’ comments are so revealing. They graphically illustrate the way in which Obamania has quite obviously destroyed the capacity for reason.

First, it is quite clear that any questioning at all of Obama’s background is entirely off-limits. Next, the posters fail totally to grasp that the real point isn’t what faith he professed or was brought up in as a child – it is the fact that he has not told the truth about his early background. Then, some even compare such questioning with the ‘truthers’ who allege that 9/11 was perpetrated by a conspiracy between America and Israel. They thus demonstrate that they cannot tell the difference between rationality and lunacy, evidence and fantasy, failing to grasp that the sole reason for the questions about Obama is the many discrepancies in the accounts of his early life -- including his own accounts -- plus his many questionable associations.

Ignoring all this substantive evidence and the legitimate questions to which it gives rise (can you imagine how they would be slavering about all this were Obama a Republican candidate?) they instead hurl insults at both me and my sources such as Daniel Pipes – a fine and authoritative scholar (and who has also exposed those who claim he has peddled falsehoods as themselves peddling falsehoods) whose own observations about Obama’s background are clearly and reliably sourced and are couched in Pipes’s characteristically cautious manner -- and then annouce that they have won the argument hands-down!

Oh dear. America really does have a problem here. Looks like what I wrote months ago, that the Obama phenomenon might mean the Americans too are succumbing to Princess Diana Derangement Syndrome, was a serious understatement.

To address a few specific points which have come up and which are not merely hysterical abuse. First, it’s been pointed out that Robert Spencer has said Islam does not mandate the death sentence for children who become apostates, a point subsequently acknowledged by Daniel Pipes. I don’t see, however, that this alters anything. The death sentence is mandated for adults who renounce Islam. The fact that all that is known about Obama’s Muslim roots relates – as I wrote -- to his early childhood is irrelevant. For as Spencer also notes, the real question is therefore when Obama converted to Christianity. By his own account, he did so when he was received by Pastor Wright into the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago some twenty years ago (although at other times he has also said he was ‘always a Christian’). In which case Pipes’s argument remains absolutely salient.
As for the ‘Islamic experts’ who poured cold water on a similar argument by Edward Luttwak in the New York Times -- who are hailed as Voices of Absolute Truth by my more excitable commenters despite the fact that they know zilch about them -- these prove nothing other than the existence of commentators who sanitise Islam.

Those who still insist that Obama was never brought up as a Muslim ignore the numerous reports of his Islamic education as a young child -- including his own statements, as in this deeply respectful article in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof:

He once got in trouble for making faces during Koran study classes in his elementary school, but a president is less likely to stereotype Muslims as fanatics — and more likely to be aware of their nationalism — if he once studied the Koran with them. Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as ‘one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.’

Next, the assertion that Obama and Raila Odinga are not cousins – by a poster who says he is a Kenyan and therefore knows about such things. Well, one might think that Raila Odinga himself might have a rather better claim to know. This is what the Telegraph reported:

Kenya's defeated presidential challenger Raila Odinga has claimed to be a cousin of Barack Obama and said that they had discussed his country's post-election violence. Mr Odinga, 63, said that the US senator's father, from western Kenya's Luo tribe, was his maternal uncle... Mr Obama has not commented on the Kenyan opposition leader’s claim to be a relative.

As I have already said -- but let me repeat very slowly for those suffering from Princess Obama Derangement Syndrome – the concerns about Obama’s Muslim antecedents arise from the fact that a) he has tried to conceal them and b) that he has a puzzling number of indirect connections with radical Islamists or their supporters.

1) He has gone out of his way to support in Kenya Raila Odinga, head of the Luo tribe, who promised to introduce sharia law if elected. Obama interrupted his New Hampshire campaign to speak by phone with Odinga. As the Investor’s Business Daily has reported, his half-brother Abongo ‘Roy’ Obama is a Luo activist in Kenya and a militant Muslim who argues that the black man must ‘liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture’ and urges Barack to embrace his African Muslim heritage.

Barack Obama has said he disagrees with his brother. But as the IBD has also reported:

In 1991, when Obama joined the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, he pledged allegiance to something called the Black Value System, which is a code of non-Biblical ethics written by blacks, for blacks. It encourages blacks to group together and separate from the larger American society by pooling their money, patronizing black-only businesses and backing black leaders. Such racial separatism is strangely at odds with the media's portrayal of Obama as a uniter who reaches across races. The code also warns blacks to avoid the white ‘entrapment of black middle-classness,’ suggesting that settling for that kind of ‘competitive’ success will rob blacks of their African identity and keep them ‘captive’ to white culture.

2) His mentor, the black power-supporting Christian pastor Jeremiah Wright, is a close associate of Louis Farrakhan, the demagogue leader of the black power, Jew-hating militant organisation Nation of Islam. A number of Obama’s own staffers have been members of the Nation of Islam.

3) Tony Rezko, who was recently convicted of fraud, money laundering and bribery conspiracy, has been a major supporter of Obama and contributor to his cause – the full extent of which Obama tried to conceal. The Chicago Sun-Times reported:

During his 12 years in politics, Sen. Barack Obama has received nearly three times more campaign cash from indicted businessman Tony Rezko and his associates than he has publicly acknowledged, the Chicago Sun-Times has found. Obama has collected at least $168,308 from Rezko and his circle. Obama also has taken in an unknown amount of money from people who attended fund-raising events hosted by Rezko since the mid-1990s.

He also did a land deal with Rezko in 2005, buying land from him to enlarge his own adjoining house at what has been reported to be a discount -- a transaction Obama has subsequently called ‘bone-headed’. In a further twist, as the Times reported earlier this year, a British-Iraqi billionaire, Nadhmi Auchi, who is said to have had connections with Saddam Hussein and who was convicted for corruption in France, lent millions of dollars to Rezko just weeks before that ‘bone-headed’ land deal.

But what has received far less attention is Rezko’s connections with the Nation of Islam. Reszko, born in Syria, was a business associate of Jabir Herbert Muhammad, the son of the founder of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, serving as a vice president and general manager of JHM’s firm Crucial Inc. And finally, Rezko was bailed from jail by Ali Baghdadi, the ‘Middle East adviser’ to the Nation of Islam.

Who know what all this adds up to? But isn’t it rather important that someone finds out before November?

To repeat once again for sufferers from PODS: the issue is NOT Obama’s religion, now or in the past. It is the many questions which need to be answered about a) why he has sought to conceal his early background; b) why he has so many indirect associations with radical Islamism; and c) whether these two questions are in some way related.

Anyone who doesn’t think all this cries out for proper investigation is either a fool or a knave.

Today's Tune: Ramones - Do You Remember Rock 'N Roll Radio?

(Click on title to play video)

Obama and the Giant Blogosphere Conspiracy

By Melanie Phillips
http://www.spectator.co.uk/
Wednesday, 11th June 2008

Malik Obama (Barack's half-brother) holds a photo of Barack Obama and him in Muslim dress, reportedly when the two first met in 1985.

Today’s Guardian reports that Barack Obama is setting up an entire unit to combat ‘virulent rumours’ about him on the internet. Doubtless one of the blogs in the sights of team Obama is Little Green Footballs, which in the last few days has been excavating examples of wildly anti-Jewish and anti-American prejudice and conspiracy theories posted up by fans on Obama’s own website. LGF is making hay with the fact that the Obamanables are belatedly taking (some of) this stuff down from the site while simultaneously insisting that its presence is nothing to do with them because the website has no moderators. Yeah, right.

The Guardian quotes the director of some monitoring outfit as saying that the blogosphere’s smears about Obama are particularly vicious.

He added that one of the most persistent is that Obama, a Christian, is ‘some kind of Muslim Manchurian candidate, planted by Islamic fundamentalists to betray the country and it is very widespread’.

Well now. Crazed Jew-hating American-loathing moonbats posting comments on Obama’s website are one thing. But the fact is that there are serious and troubling questions about Obama’s ancestry and associations and what he himself has said about them, which have surfaced in the blogosphere but have been almost wholly ignored by the mainstream media in its collective Obamanic swoon.

First is his childhood background. Last November, his campaign website carried a statement with the headline:

Barack Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim

followed by:

Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian.

Obama has also said:

I've always been a Christian

and

I've never practised Islam.

But none of this is true. As is explored in detail on Daniel Pipes’s website, Obama was enrolled at his primary schools in Indonesia as a Muslim; he attended the mosque during that period; his friends from that time testify that he was a devout Muslim boy. A former teacher at one of these schools, Tine Hahiyary, remembers a young Obama who was quite religious and actively took part in ‘mengaji’ classes which teach how to read the Koran in Arabic. The blogger from Indonesia who reported this commented:

‘Mengagi’ is a word and a term that is accorded the highest value and status in the mindset of fundamentalist societies here in Southeast Asia. To put it quite simply, "mengaji classes" are not something that a non practicing or so-called moderate Muslim family would ever send their child to... The fact that Obama had attended mengaji classes is well known in Indonesia and has left many there wondering just when Obama is going to come out of the closet.

His father was a Muslim, as was his stepfather. His grandfather was a Muslim convert. His wider family appear to have been largely devout Muslims. Yes, we only know about Obama’s early years as a Muslim; and yes, twenty years ago he became a Christian. The issue, however, is why he has been less than candid about his early background and his family. Indeed, he appears to have actively deceived the public about it. That is why the blogosphere is so exercised about it.

Now here’s another curious thing. Much has been made of his membership of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago whose former pastor and his long-standing mentor, Jeremiah Wright, Obama was forced finally to renounce on account of his obnoxious views (although he has signally failed unequivocally to denounce those views themselves and the no less obnoxious philosophy of the Trinity United black power church). But according to a passing reference in a profile in The New Republic last year, Pastor Wright was himself a Muslim convert to Christianity. He seems to have moved from being a Muslim black power fanatic to a Christian black power fanatic – which might go some way to explaining his close affinity to the Muslim black power ideologue Louis Farrakhan.

Then there is also Obama’s troubling support for the Kenyan opposition leader -- and his cousin -- Raila Odinga, the leader of the violent uprising a few months ago against the newly elected Kenyan government and who signed a memorandum of understanding with Kenyan Muslims to turn Kenya into an Islamic state governed by sharia law. At the time, the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya released a statement in which church leaders said Odinga

comes across as a presumptive Muslim president bent on forcing Islamic law, religion and culture down the throats of the Kenyan people in total disregard of the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of worship and equal protection of the law for all Kenyans.

As the Atlas Shrugs site reported, Obama actually went to Kenya in 2006 and spoke at rallies in support of Odinga, causing the Kenyan government to denounce him as ‘Raila’s stooge’. Why was Obama supporting such a person? Why has no-one bothered to find out?

Daniel Pipes makes another highly significant point about Obama’s Muslim background. He points out that, in the eyes of the Muslim world, Obama remains a Muslim regardless of what religion he now professes because he was born to a Muslim father. By his own admission (of Christianity) therefore, he is a Muslim apostate – a status regarded by the Muslim world as a sin to be punished by death. Pipes thinks this would put his life in danger and undermine his initiatives towards the Muslim world. But surely the more significant point is that much of that Muslim world has actually embraced him. Indeed the Muslim Brothers of Hamas – who most certainly would regard any Muslim apostate as someone to be eliminated – actually came out publicly in support of him (until Obama blotted his copybook by professing undying support for Israel).

We are entitled therefore to ask whether the Muslim world supports him because it believes he is still a Muslim. We are entitled to ask precisely when he stopped being a Muslim, and why. Did Obama embrace Christianity as a tactical manoeuvre to get himself elected? Why indeed has he dissembled about his family background if not for that end?

These multiple known deceptions by someone who may become President of the United States are deeply alarming. The concealment is the issue. To dismiss such concerns and the related questions they provoke as a smear campaign is to attempt to browbeat into silence those who legitimately raise them and require urgent answers as a matter of the most acute public interest.

Update: In this entry I originally included the following quote from the American Expatriate in Indonesia blog quoted above: 'Another of Obama’s former classmates, Emirsyah Satar, now CEO of Garuda Indonesia, has been quoted as saying: At that time, he was quite religious in Islam but after marrying Michelle, he changed his religion.' It has been pointed out to me that comments posted on that blog claimed that this was a mistranslation, and that the quote attributed to Satar was written instead by the author of the article.

Islam’s War Doctrines Ignored

by Raymond Ibrahim
MESH (Middle East Strategy at Harvard)
http://www.victorhanson.com
June 19, 2008



At the recent inaugural conference for the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA), presenter Ltc. Joseph Myers made an interesting point that deserves further elaboration: that, though military studies have traditionally valued and absorbed the texts of classical war doctrine — such as Clausewitz’s On War, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, even the exploits of Alexander the Great as recorded in Arrian and Plutarch — Islamic war doctrine, which is just as, if not more, textually grounded, is totally ignored.

As recent as 2006, former top Pentagon official William Gawthrop lamented that “the senior Service colleges of the Department of Defense had not incorporated into their curriculum a systematic study of Muhammad as a military or political leader. As a consequence, we still do not have an in-depth understanding of the war-fighting doctrine laid down by Muhammad, how it might be applied today by an increasing number of Islamic groups, or how it might be countered.”

This is more ironic when one considers that, while classical military theories (Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, et. al.) are still studied, the argument can be made that they have little practical value for today’s much changed landscape of warfare and diplomacy. Whatever validity this argument may have, it certainly cannot be applied to Islam’s doctrines of war; by having a “theological” quality, that is, by being grounded in a religion whose “divine” precepts transcend time and space, and are thus believed to be immutable, Islam’s war doctrines are considered applicable today no less than yesterday. So while one can argue that learning how Alexander maneuvered his cavalry at the Battle of Guagamela in 331 BC is both academic and anachronistic, the same cannot be said of Islam, particularly the exploits and stratagems of its prophet Muhammad — his “war sunna” — which still serve as an example to modern day jihadists.

For instance, based on the words and deeds of Muhammad, most schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that the following are all legitimate during war against the infidel: the indiscriminate use of missile weaponry, even if women and children are present (catapults in Muhammad’s 7th century, hijacked planes or WMD by analogy today); the need to always deceive the enemy and even break formal treaties whenever possible (see Sahih Muslim 15:4057); and that the only function of the peace treaty, or hudna, is to give the Islamic armies time to regroup for a renewed offensive, and should, in theory, last no more than ten years.

Quranic verses 3:28 and 16:106, as well as Muhammad’s famous assertion, “War is deceit,” have all led to the formulation of a number of doctrines of dissimulation — the most notorious among them being the doctrine of taqiyya, which permits Muslims to lie and dissemble whenever they are under the authority of the infidel. Deception has such a prominent role that renowned Muslim scholar Ibn al-Arabi declares: “[I]n the Hadith, practicing deceit in war is well demonstrated. Indeed, its need is more stressed than [the need for] courage” (The Al Qaeda Reader, 142).

Aside from ignoring these well documented Islamist strategies, more troubling is the fact that the Defense Department does not seem to appreciate Islam’s more “eternal” doctrines — such as the Abode of War versus the Abode of Islam dichotomy, which in essence maintains that Islam must always be in a state of animosity vis-à-vis the infidel world and, whenever possible, must wage wars until all infidel territory has been brought under Islamic rule. In fact, this dichotomy of hostility is unambiguously codified under Islam’s worldview and is deemed a fard kifaya — that is, an obligation on the entire Muslim body that can only be fulfilled as long as some Muslims, say, “jihadists,” actively uphold it.

Yet despite all these problematic — but revealing — doctrines, despite the fact that a quick perusal of Islamist websites and books demonstrate time and time again that current and would-be jihadists constantly quote, and thus take seriously, these doctrinal aspects of war, apparently the senior governmental leaders charged with defending America do not.

Why? Because the “Whisperers” — Walid Phares’ all-too-apt epithet for many Middle East/Islamic scholars, or, more appropriately, apologists — have made anathema anyone who dares imply that there may be some sort of connection between Islamic doctrine and modern-day Islamist terrorism, such as in the recent Steven Coughlin debacle. This is a long and well known tale for those in the field (see Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand: the Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America).

But consider for a moment: though there are today many Middle East studies departments, one will be sorely pressed to find any courses dealing with the most pivotal and relevant topics of today — such as Islamic jurisprudence and what it has to say about jihad or the concept of Abode of Islam versus the Abode of War — no doubt due to the fact that these topics possess troubling international implications and are best buried. Instead, the would-be student will be inundated with courses dealing with the evils of “Orientalism” and colonialism, gender studies, and civil society.

The greater irony — when one talks about Islam and the West, ironies often abound — is that, on the very same day of the ASMEA conference, which also contained a forthright address by premiere Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis (“It seems to me a dangerous situation in which any kind of scholarly discussion of Islam is, to say the least, dangerous”), the State Department announced that it had adopted the recommendations of a memo stating that the government should not call al Qaeda-type radicals “jihadis,” “mujahidin,” or to incorporate any other Arabic word of Islamic connotation (“caliphate,” “Islamo-fascism,” “Salafi,” “Wahhabi,” and “Ummah” are also out).

Alas, far from taking the most basic and simple advice regarding warfare — Sun Tzu’s ancient dictum, “Know thy enemy” — the U.S. government is having difficulties even acknowledging its enemy.

- Raymond Ibrahim is the editor of The Al Qaeda Reader, which contains many never-before-translated texts written by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

McCain’s Partial Fix

An energy-policy change Americans can — and do — believe in.

By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.nationalreview.com/
June 20, 2008, 0:00 a.m.

Gas is $4 a gallon. Oil is $135 a barrel and rising. We import two-thirds of our oil, sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the likes of Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia. And yet we voluntarily prohibit ourselves from even exploring huge domestic reserves of petroleum and natural gas.

At a time when U.S. crude oil production has fallen 40 percent in the last 25 years, 75 billion barrels of oil have been declared off-limits, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That would be enough to replace every barrel of non-North American imports (oil trade with Canada and Mexico is a net economic and national-security plus) for 22 years.

That’s nearly a quarter century of energy independence. The situation is absurd. To which John McCain is responding with a partial fix: Lift the federal ban on Outer Continental Shelf drilling, where a fifth of the off-limits stuff lies.

This is a change for McCain, but circumstances have changed. When the moratorium was imposed in 1982, gasoline was $1.20 and oil was $30 a barrel. Since the moratorium was instituted, we’ve had two wars in the Middle East, and in between a decade of garrisoning troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE to preserve the peace and keep untold oil riches out of the hands of the most malevolent of our enemies.

Technological conditions have changed as well. We now are able to drill with far more precision and environmental care than a quarter-century ago. We have thousands of rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, yet not even hurricanes Katrina and Rita resulted in spills of any significance.

McCain’s problem is that he’s only able to go halfway on energy production because he has locked himself into opposition to the other obvious source of domestic oil — the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

His fastidiousness on this is inexplicable. “I believe that ANWR is a pristine area,” he explains. Is it more pristine than the ocean, where he now wants to drill? More pristine than the Arabian Desert from which we daily beg the Saudi princes to pump more oil?

The entire Arctic refuge is one-third the size of the United Kingdom (which includes Scotland and Wales). The drilling site would be one-seventh the size of Manhattan Island. The footprint is tiny. Moreover, forbidding drilling there does not prevent despoliation. It merely exports it. The crude oil we’re not getting from the Arctic we import instead from places like the Niger Delta, where millions live and where the resulting pollution and oil spillages poison the lives of many of the world’s most wretchedly poor.

Our environmental imperialism does not just redistribute pollution to people who can least afford it. It generally increases the total overall damage because oil extraction in the wealthier and more technologically advanced U.S. is far more environmentally sensitive.

McCain’s unwillingness to include ANWR lacks even political logic. His policy on offshore drilling is a flip-flop from his past positions. Perfectly justified, but a reconsideration nonetheless. If you are going to take the hit for flip-flopping and for offending environmentalists, why go halfway?

The oil crisis handed McCain an unexpected and singularly effective campaign issue. A majority of Americans now favor drilling in the Arctic and offshore. Democrats stand in the way of increased production just as they did 13 years ago when President Clinton vetoed drilling in ANWR. Domestic oil production would be about 20 percent higher today if the Republican Congress had been allowed to prevail.

As expected and right on cue, Barack Obama reflexively attacked McCain. “His decision to completely change his position” to one that would please the oil industry is “the same Washington politics that has prevented us from achieving energy independence for decades.” One can only marvel at Obama’s audacity in characterizing McCain’s proposal to change our policy as “old politics,” while the candidate of “change” adheres rigidly to the no-drilling status quo.

McCain is a lot of things, but the man who opposed ethanol in Iowa — as Obama shamelessly endorsed the most abysmally stupid of our energy policies — is no patsy of the energy producers. Americans know that increased production is needed to complement reduced consumption as the only way to get us out from oil shocks, high prices and national security blackmail.

Alas, McCain’s proposed reform is only partial. Still better than Obama, however, who refuses to deviate from liberal orthodoxy. But that is the story of his campaign, is it not?

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Today's Tune: Emmylou Harris - Waltz Across Texas Tonight

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