Bookworm Room

The most un-rev Jeremiah Wright elaborated today on his various statements during an appearance at the National Press Club. What he had to say was most enlightening since, when he wasn’t prevaricating or deflecting a point with self-deprecating humor, he sounded pretty ugly. Here are a few things that caught my attention:
MODERATOR: [...]

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Some months ago, the British papers were filled with the story of Shannon Matthews, a little girl who vanished from her home in West Yorkshire, sparking a huge manhunt. She was eventually found, 24 days later, at the home of her stepfather’s uncle. The big shocker, though, was the fact that both her [...]

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It turns out that Barack Obama might have been on to something with his bitterness speech. In case you’ve forgotten, he said:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, a lot of them — like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and [...]

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Here’s the headline: “Judge admits mistake in kicking whites out of court.” Upon reading that headline, I assumed that this was going to be the familiar story about some crackpot anti-white judge who issued a ruling, a la the Jeremiah White mode of thinking, that blacks can’t get a fair trial with whites [...]

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At American Thinker, James Edmund Pennington definitively explodes the myth that Obama is a “post-racial” candidate. In other words, Geraldine Ferraro had it absolutely right when she said, without any of Pennington’s careful analysis, that Obama ascended as quickly as he did solely because of his race. And as Pennington points out, that [...]

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Many have commented on the fact that Barack Obama, both in his race speech and in interviews he gave after the speech, threw granny to the wolves, painting the woman who raised him, not only as a racist but, negatively, as a “typical white person.”  The way in which he did this was to say [...]

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I found myself in the car yesterday afternoon listening for perhaps the 30th time to an episode of Avatar being played on the car DVD. I happen to think that Avatar is a rather unusually good kids’ show. Since this was routine car pooling, with the same passel of tired and cranky kids getting [...]

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The AP is diving into damage control, assuring us that, not only is Pastor Wright just your ordinary black improvement activist, but his style of rhetoric is dying away anyway:
As shocking as they may be, the provocative sermons of Barack Obama’s pastor come out of a tradition of using the black church to challenge its [...]

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In that portion of the speech in which he refused to disavow Wright by comparing Wright to his grandmother, Obama essentially “forgave” his grandmother for the “sin” of being worried about seeing black youths on the street as she walks by.  I kind of ignored that attribution when I said Grandmother Obama never bad-mouthed anybody.  [...]

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In my look-see at Obama’s speech, I sort of backed my way into saying that Obama’s speech basically just gives credence to the black sense of victimhood. Thus, at the end, I noted that I could bored and tuned out because Obama started bloviating about the same old cycle of poverty and victimhood which, [...]

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As is always the case with me for any speech, especially an Obama speech, I’ve opted to read it, not listen to it, so that I can have the best sense of the words themselves, without getting sidelined by someone’s rhetorical style (or lack thereof).
Obama opens by talking about the promise of the new nation’s [...]

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Yesterday, the print news, the blogosphere, and the radio world were filled with stories about the MSM’s sudden discovery that Obama’s spiritual mentor is a very angry man, who speaks hatefully of whites and of the United States of America. The common conclusion: Jeremiah Wright is a racist, and it doesn’t help Obama’s [...]

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God bless Geraldine Ferraro for pointing out the obvious, which is that a slightly corrupt, vapid (albeit intelligent) neophyte could never have risen as fast and as quickly as he did in politics if it hadn’t been for the fact that he has the skin color the media is looking for in a presidential candidate. [...]

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Here it is, my first day back from a long-ish vacation, and I’m not finding any blogging inspiration in today’s news. Instead, it’s exactly the same stuff that was in the news when I left: unrest in Pakistan; Hillary’s free-fall; alleged campaign shenanigans from the Hillary camp aimed at the Obama camp; Obama’s [...]

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My post title imagines what I bet a lot of the older generation of Jewish Americans will think when they learn about the latest campaign tactics from the party that knows how to do identity politics. Steve Cohen, whose name is a giveaway as to his Jewishness, is running for reelection in Tennessee’s 9th [...]

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John McWhorter, who supports Obama, has pointed out what he sees as a profound problem with the Obama campaign, which is the way identity politics has made it impossible to treat Obama as an adult, rather than a child, for fear of being called “racist”:
Yet there is an element of surprise, a tincture of dismay, [...]

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Noemie Emery perfectly summarizes the nightmare the Dems have created for themselves:
Sometime back in the 1990s, when the culture wars were the only ones we thought we had going, a cartoon showed three coworkers viewing each other with narrowed and questioning eyes. “Those whites don’t know how to deal with a competent black man,” the [...]

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The problem with Obama’s race is that you’re not allowed to dislike him simply because you don’t like him. From my point of view, irrespective of skin color, I find Obama boring and platitudinous, I dislike and distrust his friends, I find appalling his lack of practical experience, and I disagree with him from [...]

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If you’re a liberal Jewish voter, and tremendously excited about Obama’s candidacy as the fulfillment of the civil rights movement, slow down, Pardner.  Jews have always assumed that, because they supported the civil rights movement with enthusiasm and hard work, there would be a quid pro quo by which blacks, recognizing Jews as fellow victims, [...]

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I’m still enjoying every page of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, and I thought I’d share with you a few more points that I thought either summed up perfectly something most of us have already figured out or explained why [...]

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As many have commented before, and as I’ve commented here, politics is ever more becoming a process of analyzing ones own “feelings,” rather than actually looking at the candidates’ positions and history. Hillary bore the brunt of just the latest “you hurt my feelings” attack against her (which is a nice irony, I guess, [...]

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The San Francisco Chron has a long article about the fact that, in the Bay Area, blacks are locked up disproportionately for drug crimes, as compared to whites:
San Francisco imprisons African Americans for drug offenses at a much higher rate than whites, according to a report to be released today by a nonprofit research institute.
In [...]

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In a debate about lagging Hispanic and Black achievement scores, people are getting an inkling that culture is an issue, but they’re still getting confused by trying to phrase the problem as one of race, not culture — a way of categorizing the issue that’s always going to make it a target for easy arguments [...]

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Last night I watched a wonderful movie.  It’s called Street Fight, and it follows the unsuccessful 2002 mayoral campaign political neophyte Cory Booker ran against long-time Newark, New Jersey incumbent Sharpe James.  Both are Democrats and African Americans, with the former being a light skinned Rhodes Scholar, and the latter being a dark-skinned “man of [...]

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In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, declaring that they did not want to see racial or gender preferences used in public contracts, employment and education.  Turns out that, in a wonderful anti-Democratic display, San Francisco has been ignoring that voter mandate, and the California Supreme Court is now going to decide whether a City [...]

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