The Democrats’ Fairy Tale
By WILLIAM KRISTOL
Published: January 14, 2008
“Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” Thus spoke Bill Clinton last Monday night, exasperated by Barack Obama’s claim that he — unlike Hillary Clinton — had been consistently right (or wrong, depending on your point of view) on the Iraq war. Now in fact, Obama has been pretty consistent in his opposition to the war. But Bill Clinton is right in this respect: Obama’s view of the current situation in Iraq is out of touch with reality. In this, however, Obama is at one with Hillary Clinton and the entire leadership of the Democratic Party.
When President Bush announced the surge of troops in support of a new counterinsurgency strategy a year ago, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Democratic Congressional leaders predicted failure. Obama, for example, told Larry King that he didn’t believe additional U.S. troops would “make a significant dent in the sectarian violence that’s taking place there.” Then in April, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, asserted that “this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything.” In September, Clinton told Gen. David Petraeus that his claims of progress in Iraq required a “willing suspension of disbelief.”
The Democrats were wrong in their assessments of the surge. Attacks per week on American troops are now down about 60 percent from June. Civilian deaths are down approximately 75 percent from a year ago. December 2007 saw the second-lowest number of U.S. troops killed in action since March 2003. And according to Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of day-to-day military operations in Iraq, last month’s overall number of deaths, which includes Iraqi security forces and civilian casualties as well as U.S. and coalition losses, may well have been the lowest since the war began.
Do Obama and Clinton and Reid now acknowledge that they were wrong? Are they willing to say the surge worked?
No. It’s apparently impermissible for leading Democrats to acknowledge — let alone celebrate — progress in Iraq. When asked recently whether she stood behind her “willing suspension of disbelief” insult to General Petraeus, Clinton said, “That’s right.”
When Obama was asked in the most recent Democratic presidential debate, “Would you have seen this kind of greater security in Iraq if we had followed your recommendations to pull the troops out last year?” he didn’t directly address the question. But he volunteered that “much of that violence has been reduced because there was an agreement with tribes in Anbar Province, Sunni tribes, who started to see, after the Democrats were elected in 2006, you know what? — the Americans may be leaving soon. And we are going to be left very vulnerable to the Shias. We should start negotiating now.”
But Sunni tribes in Anbar announced in September 2006 that they would join to fight Al Qaeda. That was two months before the Democrats won control of Congress. The Sunni tribes turned not primarily because of fear of the Shiites, but because of their horror at Al Qaeda’s atrocities in Anbar. And the improvements in Anbar could never have been sustained without aggressive American military efforts — efforts that were more effective in 2007 than they had been in 2006, due in part to the addition of the surge forces.
Last year’s success, in Anbar and elsewhere, was made possible by confidence among Iraqis that U.S. troops would stay and help protect them, that the U.S. would not abandon them to their enemies. Because the U.S. sent more troops instead of withdrawing — because, in other words, President Bush won his battles in 2007 with the Democratic Congress — we have been able to turn around the situation in Iraq.
And now Iraq’s Parliament has passed a de-Baathification law — one of the so-called benchmarks Congress established for political reconciliation. For much of 2007, Democrats were able to deprecate the military progress and political reconciliation taking place on the ground by harping on the failure of the Iraqi government to pass the benchmark legislation. They are being deprived of even that talking point.
Yesterday, on “Meet the Press,” Hillary Clinton claimed that the Iraqis are changing their ways in part because of the Democratic candidates’ “commitment to begin withdrawing our troops in January of 2009.” So the Democratic Party, having proclaimed that the war is lost and having sought to withdraw U.S. troops, deserves credit for any progress that may have been achieved in Iraq.
That is truly a fairy tale. And it is driven by a refusal to admit real success because that success has been achieved under the leadership of ... George W. Bush. The horror!
Monday, January 14, 2008
Monday, January 07, 2008
Barack Obama's Racist Church
If Sen. Obama rejects the Rev. Wright’s warped view of this country, why does he continue to attend his church?
Monday, January 7, 2008 10:16 AM
By: Ronald Kessler
Imagine if Mitt Romney’s church proclaimed on its website that it is “unashamedly white.”
The media would pounce, and Romney’s presidential candidacy would be over. Yet that is exactly what Barack Obama’s church says on its web site — except in reverse.
“We are a congregation which is unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian,” says the Trinity United Church of Christ’s website in Chicago. “We are an African people and remain true to our native land, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization.”
That’s just the beginning. The church has a “non-negotiable commitment to Africa,” according to its website, and its pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. subscribes to what is called the Black Value System.
While the Black Value System includes such items as commitment to God, education, and self-discipline, it refers to “our racist competitive society” and includes the disavowal of the pursuit of “middle-classness” and a pledge of allegiance to “all black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System.” It defines “middle-classness” as a way for American society to “snare” blacks rather than “killing them off directly” or “placing them in concentration camps,” just as the country structures “an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.”
In sermons and interviews, Dr. Wright has equated Zionism with racism and Israel with South Africa under its previous policy of apartheid. On the Sunday after 9/11, Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later, Wright suggested that the attacks were retribution for America’s racism.
“In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01,” Wright wrote in a church-affiliated magazine. “White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”
In one of his sermons, Wright said, “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!...We [in the U.S.] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.”
As for Israel, “The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for over 40 years now,” Wright has said. “Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community and wake up Americans concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism.”
Obama says he found religion and Jesus Christ through Wright, whom he met in the mid-1980s. He has been attending Wright’s church regularly since 1988.
The church occupies a tan building on West 95th Street near a public housing project and railroad tracks. Since becoming pastor in 1972, Wright has seen the church’s membership grow to more than 8,500. The church is the largest congregation in the United Church of Christ, a predominantly white denomination known for its liberal politics.
In 1991, Obama joined the church and walked down the aisle in a formal commitment of faith. Wright later married Obama and Michelle Robinson and baptized their two daughters.
The title of Obama’s bestseller “The Audacity of Hope” comes from one of Wright’s sermons. Wright is one of the first people Obama thanked after his election to the Senate in 2004.
But Obama’s life does not exactly support Wright’s thesis that blacks in America are oppressed. A Harvard Law School graduate, Obama married a black Princeton graduate who also has a degree from Harvard Law School. Obama is a U.S. senator from Illinois; his wife is a vice president of the University of Chicago Hospitals. With his wife, Obama has been making more than $1 million a year.
On a few points, Obama has sought to distance himself from Wright’s teachings or explain them away. While Wright is his pastor and friend, Obama has said, they do not see eye to eye on everything. In particular, Obama has said he “strongly disagrees with any portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that advocates divestment from Israel or expresses anything less than strong support for Israel’s security.”
As for Wright’s repeated comments blaming America for the 9/11 attacks, Obama has said it sounds as if the minister was trying to be “provocative.”
Just before Obama’s nationally televised campaign kickoff rally last Feb. 10, the candidate disinvited Wright from giving the public invocation. Wright explained: “When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli” to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, “a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”
According to Wright, Obama then told him, “'You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.'” But privately, Obama and his family prayed with Wright just before the presidential announcement.
To his credit, Obama so far has avoided race-specific appeals as part of his candidacy, accounting in part for his widespread appeal.
Obama “has taught the black community you don’t have to act like Jesse Jackson, you don’t have to act like Al Sharpton,” conservative commentator Bill Bennett said on CNN on Jan. 3. “You can talk about the issues. [Obama has] great dignity.”
But if Obama rejects Wright’s warped view of this country, why does he continue to attend his church, raising the question of whether Obama secretly agrees with his friend and mentor? At the least, Obama’s membership in Wright’s church suggests a lack of judgment and an insensitivity to views that are repugnant to the vast majority of white Americans who are not bigots.
That same lack of judgment has shown up in Obama’s gaffes—threatening to invade Pakistan and offering prompt negotiations with anti-American despots. More frightening, Obama voted last August to give Osama bin Laden and other terrorists the same rights as Americans when it comes to intercepting their overseas calls in order to pick up clues needed to stop another attack.
Jen Psaki, a spokesman for Obama’s campaign, has tried to paper over the candidate’s support of the Black Value System by saying that Obama “believes its basic tenets of commitment to God, to community, to self-discipline and self-reliance continue to have applicability not only to the African-American community but to all people.”
But that is not what the Black Value System says. One can only imagine the outrage that would erupt if a white presidential candidate like Romney subscribed to something called the White Value System. Yet while Obama has been referred to in the media tens of thousands of times in the past month, only one story in the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire offhandedly mentioned Obama’s church’s “unashamedly black” slogan.
In contrast, in an exquisite example of the double standard they apply to Democrats versus Republicans, the media love to focus on Romney’s religion, which is not relevant to how he would perform as president. Close to half the media references to Romney refer to the fact that he is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Very few of them mention that he is both a Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School graduate, credentials that are relevant to how he would perform as president.
When Romney’s father ran for president, his religion was not an issue simply because the media rightly recognized that it was not pertinent to his candidacy. Today, as part of their coverage of Romney, the media run denigrating quotes about Mormonism that they would never dare to run about any other religion. At the same time, the media have largely ignored or downplayed the clearly racist slogan of Obama’s church and the anti-American and anti-Israel stances of its pastor.
In two exceptions to the media blackout, Tucker Carlson of MSNBC described Trinity as having a “racially exclusive theology” that “contradicts the basic tenets of Christianity.” Sean Hannity of Fox News confronted Wright on TV and asked how a black value system is any more acceptable than a white value system.
If a white presidential candidate’s church had a similar statement and “you substitute the word black for white, there would be an outrage in this country,” Hannity said. “There would be cries of racism in this country.'”
“If your spiritual advisor makes outrageous statements, it’s incumbent on you as a leader to denounce those statements,” says Brad Blakeman, a former Bush White House aide who heads the conservative Freedom’s Watch. “Silence is an admission that you agree with what your spiritual advisor pronounces.”
If his church membership calls into question Obama’s judgment, the dichotomy in the coverage of his and Romney’s religious affiliations spotlights the media’s double standard and how its skewed reporting influences who will become president.
But media bias or not, if Obama is his party’s nominee, his Republican opponent will rightly be able to make use of Rev. Wright and his radical teachings as effectively as supporters of George H.W. Bush used Willie Horton’s furlough to help Bush win the presidency.
If Sen. Obama rejects the Rev. Wright’s warped view of this country, why does he continue to attend his church?
Monday, January 7, 2008 10:16 AM
By: Ronald Kessler
Imagine if Mitt Romney’s church proclaimed on its website that it is “unashamedly white.”
The media would pounce, and Romney’s presidential candidacy would be over. Yet that is exactly what Barack Obama’s church says on its web site — except in reverse.
“We are a congregation which is unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian,” says the Trinity United Church of Christ’s website in Chicago. “We are an African people and remain true to our native land, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization.”
That’s just the beginning. The church has a “non-negotiable commitment to Africa,” according to its website, and its pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. subscribes to what is called the Black Value System.
While the Black Value System includes such items as commitment to God, education, and self-discipline, it refers to “our racist competitive society” and includes the disavowal of the pursuit of “middle-classness” and a pledge of allegiance to “all black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System.” It defines “middle-classness” as a way for American society to “snare” blacks rather than “killing them off directly” or “placing them in concentration camps,” just as the country structures “an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.”
In sermons and interviews, Dr. Wright has equated Zionism with racism and Israel with South Africa under its previous policy of apartheid. On the Sunday after 9/11, Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later, Wright suggested that the attacks were retribution for America’s racism.
“In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01,” Wright wrote in a church-affiliated magazine. “White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”
In one of his sermons, Wright said, “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!...We [in the U.S.] believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.”
As for Israel, “The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for over 40 years now,” Wright has said. “Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community and wake up Americans concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism.”
Obama says he found religion and Jesus Christ through Wright, whom he met in the mid-1980s. He has been attending Wright’s church regularly since 1988.
The church occupies a tan building on West 95th Street near a public housing project and railroad tracks. Since becoming pastor in 1972, Wright has seen the church’s membership grow to more than 8,500. The church is the largest congregation in the United Church of Christ, a predominantly white denomination known for its liberal politics.
In 1991, Obama joined the church and walked down the aisle in a formal commitment of faith. Wright later married Obama and Michelle Robinson and baptized their two daughters.
The title of Obama’s bestseller “The Audacity of Hope” comes from one of Wright’s sermons. Wright is one of the first people Obama thanked after his election to the Senate in 2004.
But Obama’s life does not exactly support Wright’s thesis that blacks in America are oppressed. A Harvard Law School graduate, Obama married a black Princeton graduate who also has a degree from Harvard Law School. Obama is a U.S. senator from Illinois; his wife is a vice president of the University of Chicago Hospitals. With his wife, Obama has been making more than $1 million a year.
On a few points, Obama has sought to distance himself from Wright’s teachings or explain them away. While Wright is his pastor and friend, Obama has said, they do not see eye to eye on everything. In particular, Obama has said he “strongly disagrees with any portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that advocates divestment from Israel or expresses anything less than strong support for Israel’s security.”
As for Wright’s repeated comments blaming America for the 9/11 attacks, Obama has said it sounds as if the minister was trying to be “provocative.”
Just before Obama’s nationally televised campaign kickoff rally last Feb. 10, the candidate disinvited Wright from giving the public invocation. Wright explained: “When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli” to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, “a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”
According to Wright, Obama then told him, “'You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.'” But privately, Obama and his family prayed with Wright just before the presidential announcement.
To his credit, Obama so far has avoided race-specific appeals as part of his candidacy, accounting in part for his widespread appeal.
Obama “has taught the black community you don’t have to act like Jesse Jackson, you don’t have to act like Al Sharpton,” conservative commentator Bill Bennett said on CNN on Jan. 3. “You can talk about the issues. [Obama has] great dignity.”
But if Obama rejects Wright’s warped view of this country, why does he continue to attend his church, raising the question of whether Obama secretly agrees with his friend and mentor? At the least, Obama’s membership in Wright’s church suggests a lack of judgment and an insensitivity to views that are repugnant to the vast majority of white Americans who are not bigots.
That same lack of judgment has shown up in Obama’s gaffes—threatening to invade Pakistan and offering prompt negotiations with anti-American despots. More frightening, Obama voted last August to give Osama bin Laden and other terrorists the same rights as Americans when it comes to intercepting their overseas calls in order to pick up clues needed to stop another attack.
Jen Psaki, a spokesman for Obama’s campaign, has tried to paper over the candidate’s support of the Black Value System by saying that Obama “believes its basic tenets of commitment to God, to community, to self-discipline and self-reliance continue to have applicability not only to the African-American community but to all people.”
But that is not what the Black Value System says. One can only imagine the outrage that would erupt if a white presidential candidate like Romney subscribed to something called the White Value System. Yet while Obama has been referred to in the media tens of thousands of times in the past month, only one story in the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire offhandedly mentioned Obama’s church’s “unashamedly black” slogan.
In contrast, in an exquisite example of the double standard they apply to Democrats versus Republicans, the media love to focus on Romney’s religion, which is not relevant to how he would perform as president. Close to half the media references to Romney refer to the fact that he is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Very few of them mention that he is both a Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School graduate, credentials that are relevant to how he would perform as president.
When Romney’s father ran for president, his religion was not an issue simply because the media rightly recognized that it was not pertinent to his candidacy. Today, as part of their coverage of Romney, the media run denigrating quotes about Mormonism that they would never dare to run about any other religion. At the same time, the media have largely ignored or downplayed the clearly racist slogan of Obama’s church and the anti-American and anti-Israel stances of its pastor.
In two exceptions to the media blackout, Tucker Carlson of MSNBC described Trinity as having a “racially exclusive theology” that “contradicts the basic tenets of Christianity.” Sean Hannity of Fox News confronted Wright on TV and asked how a black value system is any more acceptable than a white value system.
If a white presidential candidate’s church had a similar statement and “you substitute the word black for white, there would be an outrage in this country,” Hannity said. “There would be cries of racism in this country.'”
“If your spiritual advisor makes outrageous statements, it’s incumbent on you as a leader to denounce those statements,” says Brad Blakeman, a former Bush White House aide who heads the conservative Freedom’s Watch. “Silence is an admission that you agree with what your spiritual advisor pronounces.”
If his church membership calls into question Obama’s judgment, the dichotomy in the coverage of his and Romney’s religious affiliations spotlights the media’s double standard and how its skewed reporting influences who will become president.
But media bias or not, if Obama is his party’s nominee, his Republican opponent will rightly be able to make use of Rev. Wright and his radical teachings as effectively as supporters of George H.W. Bush used Willie Horton’s furlough to help Bush win the presidency.
Saturday, January 05, 2008
Wow, it has certainly been a while since I have posted anything on this blog. It is most definately the season to post. It is 2008 and the presidential elections are in full swing. Can you believe that Obama took a decisive victory in the Iowa caucus. I was a little surprised that he won as big as he did. I would wager that Hillary was more surprised than anybody. The last time I posted on this site I did not know who Barack Obama was.
It is very interesting that He won in Iowa; not so much because he is black and so much of Iowa is white, not so much that he has questionable ties with a church that is reportedly racist,(www.tucc.org) Trinity United Church of Christ, and so many people in Iowa are Christians; not so much because he is a liberal with Islamic ties, and most of Iowa is so conservative and not Islamic; but mainly because Barack Obama has made such a strong point to rid himself of simple American and Patriotic conduct while on his campaign, and the people of Iowa are so American.
He refused to wear an American Flag lapel pin while campaigning. He never puts his hand over his heart when he hears the national anthem. He prides himself with a voting record of never supporting the troops while at war. He touts that he is the candidate for change, but shunning simple acts of country honor and patriotism is certainly not the kind of change that Americans want, especially those in Iowa. Perhaps California liberals and nut cases would buy into this nonsense but not Iowans. Don't get me wrong, I hope he gets the nomination, because I still have enough blind faith in the American people to believe they would never elect someone like him. Too young, inexperienced, shady past and unamerican. It is scary when Hillary starts to look good.
It is very interesting that He won in Iowa; not so much because he is black and so much of Iowa is white, not so much that he has questionable ties with a church that is reportedly racist,(www.tucc.org) Trinity United Church of Christ, and so many people in Iowa are Christians; not so much because he is a liberal with Islamic ties, and most of Iowa is so conservative and not Islamic; but mainly because Barack Obama has made such a strong point to rid himself of simple American and Patriotic conduct while on his campaign, and the people of Iowa are so American.
He refused to wear an American Flag lapel pin while campaigning. He never puts his hand over his heart when he hears the national anthem. He prides himself with a voting record of never supporting the troops while at war. He touts that he is the candidate for change, but shunning simple acts of country honor and patriotism is certainly not the kind of change that Americans want, especially those in Iowa. Perhaps California liberals and nut cases would buy into this nonsense but not Iowans. Don't get me wrong, I hope he gets the nomination, because I still have enough blind faith in the American people to believe they would never elect someone like him. Too young, inexperienced, shady past and unamerican. It is scary when Hillary starts to look good.
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