The lost moral compass
Bookworm on Mar 19 2008 at 6:55 pm | Filed under: Barack Obama
I focused on the myriad details that were wrong with Obama’s speech, as did many other commentators. Victor Davis Hanson hones in on the core flaw in the speech, one that tells us more than I ever wanted to know about Obama and, indeed, our whole society:
The tragedy of Obama’s speech and the mindless endorsement of it was the rejection of any constant moral standard—an absolute sense of wrong and right that transcends situational ethics, context, and individual particulars. And once one jettisons such absolutes, they won’t be there when one wishes to seek refuge in them in a future hour of need.
When he failed to “disown” Rev. Wright, and then brought in parallels of things purportedly as bad, or offered excuses that Wright had done good things to balance the bad, or that there were certain mitigating circumstances that explain his hatred, then the universal wrong of Wright’s racism and lying disappears and with it any ethical standard by which we have moral authority to condemn such vitriol.
That this self-serving relativism was used to address a self-induced political disaster is especially unfortunate for a self-appointed moralist. I think the liberal blanket endorsement of the Obama speech will later come back to haunt its enthusiasts, once they see the creepy freak show that emerges from the woodwork, immune in public discourse now from absolute standards of rebuke.
Read the rest here.
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I appreciated this political extrapolation by Stanley Kurtz on Obama’s speech:
“Remember when we were hearing about the need to purge Michael Moore and the MoveOn crowd from the Democratic Party? Obama is the polar opposite of all that–and in a devilishly clever way…. There will be plenty of the most left-leaning appointees staffing the federal bureaucracy and set into judgeships under Obama, and all of it will be smoothed over by speeches about national healing and understanding pain….
Far from pulling a Hubert Humphrey or a Tony Blair and casting the radical left out of the party, Obama seems to see his job as getting the rest of the country to adopt a stance of relative complacency toward the most egregious sorts of anti-Americanism–all under the guise of achieving national unity.”
My thoughts have always been, if he wins: Will his idea of compromise actually mean governing from the center, or will it be as Kurtz describes it above? That Obama compromises on nothing, but expects all opponents to “compromise” by allowing him to do whatever he wants, under the guise of unity? A thought question without an answer.