Category Archives: Democrats

Updated: Michelle Obama Takes Center Stage

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Democrats, Elections 2008

Michelle Obama will headline the 2008 Democratic National Convention. In a remarkable bit of dissembling or stupidity, Chris Wallace of Fox News—who is nowhere near the journalist Wallace Senior was—found no particular significance in the event. This is the first time a candidate’s wife will front a convention.

I think this is a matter of considerable portent. It speaks to the position this woman will assume in the White House. It’s a legitimate supposition. But Fox News is now fawning over Obama—probably in fear of being snubbed by the royal couple and their fans who want to see them in action all the time. Wallace, for Fox, simply spun Michelle’s surprising prominence as the campaign’s attempt to entrust her with rehabilitating Barack’s life story and giving it the American patina it lacks. Michelle Obama is so obviously the wrong person to do so.

The Obamas will be welcoming on stage “Barack Obama’s sister Maya Soetero-Ng and Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s older brother; [and] Jerry Kellman, mentor and long-time friend of Barack Obama.” A real tribal affair.

How I wish Jeremiah Wright would write a tell-all about The Child.

Update (August 26, 2008): One word for Mrs. Obama’s speech: pure schmaltz: “maudlin sentimentality.” But the Obama Nation was slobbering and spluttering. The “parrot press” too. You can read her remarks in the New York Times.

I have a question about Michelle’s claim that her “story” is the story of an average, working-class American (her family was middle-class):

“And thanks to their faith and their hard work, we both were able to go to college, so I know firsthand from their lives and mine that the American dream endures.”

Mrs. Obama, in all likelihood, was accepted to Ivy League schools based on the robust program of affirmative action that poisons those places. This means that with test scores lower than those of other candidates, likely whites and Asians, she would have gotten a placement; and her betters would have been rejected.

Is this what is meant to share the experience of the majority that dare not speak its name?

The theme the woman kept reciting—changing “the world as it is” to “the world as it should be“: now that was telling. She has the blueprints to the central plan—she and her central planner husband have decided on the shape your world should take under their tutelage.

Update II: Deflating the Democrats?

Bush, Democrats, Iraq

“Washington has acceded to Baghdad’s wish and tentatively agreed to pull all of its combat troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011,” Time reported.

The New York Times seconded: “The United States has agreed to remove combat troops from Iraqi cities by next June and from the rest of the country by the end of 2011 if conditions in Iraq remain relatively stable, according to Iraqi and American officials involved in negotiating a security accord governing American forces there.”

This is one important story that has disappeared from the headlines ever since Barack and Biden made their announcement. (Unimportant by comparison, mainstream media have also forced the John Edwards scoop to fade.)

With this agreement, the Bush administration might just have taken the wind out of the war as an issue for Barack Obama. As it is, Obama had grown weaker on that front, his position increasingly converging with McCain’s. But if Bush finalizes the withdrawal, he will have taken the issue and the decision away from Obama. Strategically, it’s a smart move.

Update (August 24): And what does an agree-upon withdrawal from Iraq, sealed by Bush and Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, say about McCain’s position on the war! This makes the GOP’s Manchurian Candidate look especially lame.

Update II (August 26): The plot thickens. Maliki vouches the US has agreed to withdraw from Iraq; the Bushies say, “Not so fast.”

McClatchy Newspapers report:

“There is an agreement actually reached, reached between the two parties on a fixed date, which is the end of 2011, to end any foreign presence on Iraqi soil,” Maliki said.
But the White House disputed Maliki’s statement and made clear the two countries are still at odds over the terms of a U.S. withdrawal.
“Any decisions on troops will be based on conditions on the ground in Iraq,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said in Crawford, Tex., where President Bush is vacationing. “That has always been our position. It continues to be our position.”

Which is it? And who’s the boss in Iraq?

The John Edwards Thing

Democrats, Ethics, Media, Morality, Politics

Edwards had been carrying on with a younger, less classy, washed-out version of Camilla Parker-Bowles. Check Rielle Hunter out.

What have I gleaned from this unremarkable affair?

Nothing new. The man’s ambulance-chasing legal career already established him as a primo sleaze bag. Oddly enough, his public confession or statement reveals much more about his lack of character than the affair, which is a transgression many good people have committed. Edwards mischaracterized his 100 percent deceitfulness as being “99 percent honest.”

What else, other than that many men like simple, slag-like women?

That the National Inquirer is still the unsung newspaper of record in America, a reputation it established during the O.J. trial.

And that there is a reason Ann Coulter’s shallow fare is more popular than, dare I say, more substantial stuff.

Pelosi Palooza

Democrats, Ethics, Morality, Politics

Pelosi has a best-selling book. Tell me that these unjust deserts don’t come directly from an abuse of her abusive political position.

Politicians should be prohibited by law from exploiting their already exploitative positions for yet more profit. Paid positions as analysts on the networks must be outlawed too—perhaps even after they leave office. I’m open to any of your rationalizations on this front.

Pelosi’s are ill-gotten gains.