How did the Wright story start?

In his appraisal today of what the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy means for the Obama campaign, Thomas Lifson mentions the "media claque" that praised to high heaven Obama's Philadelphia speech on March 18 -- a speech that, in retrospect, looks to have been a mistake.

The question of What It All Means will be hashed over by legions of pundits and commentators in the coming days, but Lifson's mention of the media's role in the Wright controversy reminds me of another question, one that's been nagging at my brain for weeks now.

What bugs me is this: Why, on March 13, did ABC News decide to go with their story on Wright?

Conservative media had been trying to draw attention to Wright's radicalism for months, without any MSM outfit following on. And then out of thin air -- two days after the Mississippi primary, with the six-week Pennsylvania campaign just getting underway -- ABC News jumped on it, thus inaugurating the long crisis.

There are three obvious possibilities:

• The timing was entirely coincidental. Maybe ABC had been working on it for a while and it was not until March 13 that they were able to put together a story worth airing; or else, one of their producers just happened to stumble onto the Wright angle at that time. But nobody who knows anything about bigtime politics believes in coincidences, so maybe . . .
• Republican operatives pushed the story. By early March, it was possible to count delegates and conclude that Obama had the nomination locked. Therefore, Karl Rove and the GOP Brain Trust decide that the six-week lull before Pennsylvania would be a good time to hit Obama with this Wright-the-radical-preacher angle. But does that make sense? Wouldn't it be better to time it until August? So maybe . . .
• Team Clinton was behind it. Sid Blumenthal called in a favor from his old buddy George Stephanopoulos at ABC, and this conspiratorial collusion results in a story perfectly calculated scares Pennsylvania's working-class white voters into delivering a miracle comeback for Hillary.

None of these explanations, however, is entirely satisfactory. The paranoid tinfoil-hat conspiracy crackpot would rather think it was Halliburton or the Mossad than to buy any of those theories. Which leads us to a fourth -- less obvious, but genuinely twisted -- possibility:

• The Obama people did it themselves. Obama's handlers had to know this Wright thing was going to make news sooner or later. After the Mississippi primary, Team Obama counted the delegates, concluded they had the nomination locked up and said, "Better sooner than later." So they got their friends at ABC to do the story in early March, figuring that the negative impact wouldn't hurt Obama in terms of the Democratic nomination, and it would be better to get the story out early -- months before the general election campaign began -- than for it to leak into the media in August or September.

One of the reasons that this possibility makes sense is the fact that, just five days after ABC broke the story, Obama was ready with a 5,000-word "More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia.

Since when does a major presidential campaign uncork a 5,000-word speech in just five days? While I concede such a thing is possible -- a team of top speechwriters laboring long hours to improvise a major speech -- but I just don't think it's too bloody likely.

It smells like a set-up, and if I'm right -- if Obama's team got the Wright story to ABC in March as a sort of pre-emptive move against the Republicans -- then they did so expecting that Obama would emerge mostly unscathed by the self-inflicted controversy. The Philadelphia speech would fix the problem, Obama would move forward to victory in Pennsylvania, and that would be the last they'd hear about Wright for the rest of the campaign.

If so (and I admit we're now dangling at the end of a long string of hypothetical suppositions), then Team Obama badly miscalculated. Because of the "bitter" controversy, Obama got beaten badly in Pennsylvania, and Rev. Wright has refused to be silenced.

Most of all, if Team Obama believed the Democratic nomination was a lock as of March 11, they forgot to tell the news to Hillary Clinton. Notice how you're hearing a lot less pundit talk this week about how Hillary can't win?

Whatever the ultimate outcome of this election, the Wright controversy and Obama's handling of it will be one of the major episodes in this saga. And the mystery of that March 13 ABC News story will linger. It may be a blogosphere cliche, but I question the timing.

The damage is done

I e-mailed my American Spectator article to lots of bloggers, but forgot to put Powerline on the list. Great minds think alike, I guess:

In his widely lauded Philadelphia speech, Barack Obama declared of Reverend Jeremiah Wright: "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community." It wasn't quiite up to George McGovern's expression of "1,000 percent" support for Thomas Eagleton as his running mate after revelations of his shock therapy, but it left Obama and Wright closely joined. Something about the revelation of Eagleton's shock therapy made his ultimate dumping by McGovern inevitable. Something about Wright's frank racism, among other things, now calls for some further response by Obama.
It's too late for Barack Obama to have his own Sister Souljah moment with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. After Wright's performances before the NAACP in Detroit and before the National Press Club in Washington, however, it may be time for Obama's own Thomas Eagleton moment. As with Eagleton, the brain may be critical.

What's most interesting, by the way, about my apparent mental convergence with Scott Johnson is that he focuses on the same quote from Obama's Philly speech that I saw as crucial -- and links NR's Byron York, who highlights the same quote.

From convergence to divergence: Both Johnson and York put themselves in the position of advisors, telling Obama what he should do next. Frankly, I think that ship has sailed. It seems to me that the damage done by Wright is, at this point, beyond remedy.

The question is not how the damage can be repaired, but rather how bad is it? The problem is, we don't have enough recent polls in Indiana or North Carolina to be able to judge the impact in any concrete way.

So we won't know until next Tuesday, when primary voters go to the polls in those states. My gut hunch would be that Hillary wins Indiana fairly handily, although Obama's lead in North Carolina may be insuperable -- and neither of those results will be significantly different than they would have been before Wright went on his Farrakhan Lite Tour.

In politics, however, perception is reality, and a Hillary win in Indiana would be perceived as some sort of referendum on Wright.

It isn't hard to picture the TV pundits and commentators sitting around their "Decision '08 HQ" sets next Tuesday, asking each other how much Wright hurt Obama among working-class voters in Indiana. And if Hillary wins Indiana, her spin team will point out that, combined with Obama's defeats in Ohio and Pennsylvania, this shows that he can't win crucial swing states (or crucial swing voters). That goes straight to the "electability" argument Team Clinton is using to sway super-delegates.

The damage is done and, at this point, I don't know what Obama can do to undo it.

UPDATE: At the American Thinker, Thomas Lifson assesses the situation:

Was it the enthusiasm of his press claque that deceived him into believing that the story would just go away? If so, Obama is revealed as completely unprepared for the responsibilities of defending the nation from its enemies. A man who takes the optimistic view of his opponents, and makes best case assumptions only is not someone we want facing down our real enemies in Tehran, Damascus, and Pyongyang.

I'm not sure that Obama's handling of the Wright controversy necessarily implicates his Commander-in-Chief capabilities, but Lifson's point that Obama (or his campaign staff) may have counted on a sympathetic MSM to squelch the controversy is interesting. The Philly speech was the key blunder -- nearly 5,000 words, and yet not enough to close the controversy.

Finally, Texas cites specifics

Texas officials have finally put forward some specifics about widespread sexual abuse by the polygamist cult:

More than half of the teenage girls seized from a West Texas polygamist sect are pregnant, have children or both, state officials said Monday.
Thirty-one of the 53 girls ages 14 through 17 are either mothers or expectant mothers, said Stephanie Goodman, a spokeswoman for the state's Health and Human Services Commission.
A handful of the girls are both, said Darrell Azar, a spokesman for the Department of Family and Protective Services. . . .
There also is one pregnant 13-year-old, "but most are in the 15 and 16 range at the time they conceived," Azar said. "Some teens have multiple children.
"It shows you a pretty distinct pattern, that it was pretty pervasive," he said.

Pervasive indeed -- a 58 percent pregnancy rate among girls 14-17, even excluding those instances of girls who were pregnant more than once.

If, as the state alleges, most of these girls were forced into illegal polygamous unions with much older men who already had other wives, then public sympathy for the FLDS mothers should evaporate rather quickly. After all, if state officials had not intervened, many of the FLDS girls who are now 10, 11 and 12 would have faced a similar fate within just a few years.

Questions occur: Were these FLDS girls delivering their babies at the ranch? Surely, local hospitals would have said something about a rash of teenage mothers checking in. But pregnancies among such young girls are often attended by complications and difficult deliveries, so how would the FLDS deal with such problems in a midwife situation?

Texas will now have to prove paternity of the teenage mothers' children, and try to get witnesses among the FLDS who will testify as to exactly who was married to who, how the marriages were arranged, etc. I'd expect at least two dozen of the men in the cult -- and perhaps even some women who abetted this pattern -- to be indicted on various charges.

The precedent of '72

Monday afternoon, after hearing Dick Morris invoke Willie Horton in reference to the Jeremiah Wright controversy, I knew I had to write this article:

The scandal that refuses to go away, the blunder that cripples a candidacy, the error that defies every effort at correction -- this is what the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has become for Sen. Barack Obama's campaign. . . .
Obama's predicament now resembles nothing so much as that faced by George McGovern in July 1972, after the Democratic presidential nominee belatedly discovered that his vice-presidential choice, Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton, had previously been hospitalized for mental illness. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

McGovern's mishandling of the Eagleton affair had been in my mind for several days, primarily because I'd recently finished re-reading Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72.

Thompson believed that the way the Eagleton affair was bungled was what doomed McGovern, completely changing public perception of him. The alternative hypothesis was that Nixon's re-election was inevitable. Yet Nixon had his own brewing scandal that year -- the break-in at the Watergate happened about a month before Eagleton was announced as McGovern's running mate. Democrats, however, were unable to get any traction on that scandal, in large part because they were so demoralized by the Eagleton affair.

McGovern, as I explain in the Spectator article, had delayed picking his No. 2 until the week of the convention. That in turn led to a last-minute scramble, and Eagleton essentially lied his way onto the ticket by failing to divulge his previous hospitalizations. Once that was discovered by the press, Eagleton should have resigned -- but he refused to do so, and thus began a 10-day melodrama that made McGovern look ineffective and indecisive.

Obama's failure to put away the Wright controversy in March, so that Wright is still making headlines six weeks later, is very much reminiscent of how the Eagleton affair plagued McGovern's campaign.

Wright's CNN apologists

Hot Air links video of CNN's Roland Martin and Soledad O'Brien making excuses for Jeremiah Wright -- and insulting the intelligence of viewers.

Martin and O'Brien parrot Wright's claim that his comments have been taken out of context -- in "sound bites" -- and that his overall message is not offensive. But to tell people that they are only offended because they are ignorant of the "African-American religious tradition"? In other words:

I apologize for your ignorance. If you weren't such an intolerant, uneducated bigot, you wouldn't be offended.

Millions of Americans will be tempted to reply by quoting that noted sociologist, The Outlaw Josey Wales: "Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining."

Michelle Malkin:

CNN’s Roland Martin and Soledad O’Brien are now official Jeremiah Wright groupies. . . . Wonder if they’ll be part of his permanent traveling press entourage now.

Their commentary from the scene could in no way be called reporting or analysis. For example, they made no reference to Wright's idiotic "left-brain/right-brain" claims, which Ed Morrisey compares to the controversy surrounding The Bell Curve.

UPDATE: No less an Obamaphile than Salon's Joan Walsh recognizes Wright as a "stone-cold narcissist . . . a man of enormous self-regard" who is "clearly trying to hurt Barack Obama."

It's sad, really. A huge element of Obama's appeal was his apparent ability -- and desire -- to transcend race. And now Wright appears to be saying, "Uh-uh. You ain't transcending me, brother. You're just another crab in the bucket!"

If even a left-of-Lenin liberal like Joan Walsh sees the writing on the wall, the MSM can't be pleased. Here's Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, writing about Wright's National Press Club appearance:

Wright suggested that Obama was insincere in distancing himself from his pastor. "He didn't distance himself," Wright announced. "He had to distance himself, because he's a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American." . . .
Wright also argued, at least four times over the course of the hour, that he was speaking not for himself but for the black church. . . .
That significantly complicates Obama's job as he contemplates how to extinguish Wright's latest incendiary device. Now, he needs to do more than express disagreement with his former pastor's view; he needs to refute his former pastor's suggestion that Obama privately agrees with him.

The thing about the Wright controversy is that Obama failed to deal with it properly when the uproar began in mid-March. Wright was willing to recant or apologize, which gave Obama an excuse to repudiate Wright. Instead, Obama went to Philadelphia and declared:

As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. . . .
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.

Now, Obama's stuck with Wright. And if Obama wins the nomination, the Democrats are stuck with Wright, too.

UPDATE II: If there's a Pulitzer Prize for understatements, Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press is going to be a strong contender this year:

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is going after his critics on an incendiary tour that is doing his one-time congregant, Barack Obama, little good.

Ya think? Pickler continues:

Wright's tour couldn't come at a much worse time for Obama, who is campaigning for white working class voters in Indiana and North Carolina. Many of Wright's most controversial comments are angry condemnations of the United States for its treatments of blacks — thoughts that were applauded by the black church leaders in his audience Monday but risk offending white voters.
An Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Monday suggests the Wright controversy may be hurting Obama among whites.

Hillary beat Obama 55-45 in Pennsylvania, even though he outspent her 3-to-1 in the state, and you need a poll to tell you that renewed media attention to the Wright controversy "may be hurting Obama"? More from Pickler:

Obama said Monday, after Wright's latest comments, "None of the voters I talk to ask about it. There may be people who are troubled by it and are polite and not asking about it. It's not what I hear."

Like nobody will mention your dandruff or bad breath. And now Obama offers his own Understatement of the Year contender:

"I have said before and I will say again that some of the comments Rev. Wright has made offend me and I understand why they have offended the American people. ... Certainly what the last three days indicates is we're not coordinating with him."

LOL!

Video: Wright-brained

As I said, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is well on his way to becoming the Tom Eagleton of 2008. Barack Obama's top political advisors must be on suicide watch after Wright's performance at the National Press Club this morning. Video via Conservablog:



Again, Wright attempts to deflect criticism by invoking race and religion (1:34):

"This is an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African American religious tradition."

Notice Wright's self-satisfied smile after that remark, as if he'd said something extraordinarily clever in dismissing all his critics as ignorant bigots.

Next: Louis Farrakhan is "one of the most important voices of the 20th and 21st centuries. . . . When Louis Farrakhan speaks . . . all black America listens. . . . I'm not going to put down Louis Farrakhan any more than Mandela would put down Fidel Castro. . . . Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy."

If Obama fails to get the nomination, don't blame Karl Rove. Don't blame the media. Don't blame Hillary Clinton. Blame Jeremiah Wright and his irresponsible nonsense:

"As I said to Barack Obama . . . . last year, 'If you get elected, November the fifth, I'm coming after you, because you'll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.' . . . This country's leaders have refused to apologize."

Who is being "ground under" by America's policies? Do we need to apologize to the thousands of immigrants who come to this country every week? Would we have an illegal immigration problem if America was so horribly oppressive? When people are risking life and limb in the desert, paying money to coyotes to smuggle them into the United States, doesn't that suggest that America is a land of incredible opportunities, and the envy of the world?

It is impossible to reconcile this reality with Wright's rhetoric of "a government whose policies grind under people." He is not preaching the Gospel, he's peddling the politics of resentment and self-pity.

UPDATE: BTW, I just figured something out. The media notice from the National Press Club said "this event is sold out" and the event was open to "credentialed media only" -- the NPC even told The American Spectator's Phil Klein that he couldn't cover the event unless he had either White House or congressional press credentials. I've been in Washington for more than 10 years and never heard of such a thing at a Press Club event.

Watching the video, I now see why this is. Wright packed the room with his supporters. You'll see him repeatedly look off to his right and grin when they cheer and laugh at his "jokes." This explains why Wright keeps playing to the crowd as if he were a standup comedian.

UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin, commenting on Wright's Detroit "analysis" of brain differences between blacks and whites, says:

If he’s this comfortable mocking black/white differences in front of media cameras, I can only imagine what he says in private to his faithful black liberation ideology adherents.

A disturbing thought.

UPDATE III: A friend just e-mailed me the transcript of Obama's NPC appearance. The mind boggles. Asked about when he compared the U.S. Marine Corps to the Romans who crucified Christ, he defended the comparison:

The Roman oppression is the period in which Jesus was born. And comparing imperialism that was going on in Luke, imperialism was going on when Caesar
Augustus sent out a decee that the whole world should be taxed -- they were in charge of the world; sounds like some other governments I know -- that yes, I can compare that. We have troops stationed all over the world, just like Rome had troops stationed all over the world, because we run the world. That notion of imperialism is not the message of the Gospel of the Prince of Peace nor God, who loves the world.

Venezuela? Do we have troops stationed in Venezuela, Rev. Wright? Does America "run" Venezuela?

How about Zimbabwe? France? Pakistan? Chad? Sweden? Cuba? Indonesia? Mexico? How is it that "we run the world" and yet all of these nations remain under the delusion that they are sovereign and independent?

Notice that the very example Wright cited -- Caesar's tax -- is one power that the American "empire" has never exerted. The whole point of Rome's imperial conquests was that it relieved Roman citizens of the burden of taxation, since the state's coffers were filled by plundering the provinces. By contrast, Americans are taxed to provide foreign aid to nearly every government in the world.

America is engaged in the exact opposite of imperialism. Rome plundered the world; the world plunders America.

UPDATE IV: Hmmm. Numbering my updates with Roman numerals? An imperialistic gesture, maybe? But never mind that, listen to Joe Klein:

Wright's purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself -- the guy is going to be a go-to mainstream media source for racial extremist spew, the next iteration of Al Sharpton -- and destroy Barack Obama.

That's what I'm saying. Wright's egotistical desire to hog the media spotlight is 180 degrees at odds with the Obama campaign's desire to put this story behind them. Every time Wright opens his mouth, he creates more problems for Obama.

Simple question: Do you think the average Democratic primary voter in Indiana is more or less likely to support Obama as a result of Wright's recent performances?

I almost wonder if Hillary's people somehow found a backdoor way to encourage Wright to keep stirring this up.

Video: Obama's pastor, unleashed

UPDATED & BUMPED: Michelle Malkin liveblogged Rev. Jeremiah Wright's National Press Club appearance.

Somebody on Team Obama needs to tell Rev. Wright to stop making news. He's rapidly becoming the Thomas Eagleton of 2008.

** PREVIOUSLY **

Addressing an NAACP conference Sunday in Detroit. Via HipHopMusic.com:



Rev. Jeremiah Wright starts getting wound up about the 4-minute mark. Notice that this is not improvised. He's reading from a text when he says (about the 9:10 mark):

Whites saw blacks as being deficient. It was none other than Rudyard Kipling who saw 'the white man's burden' as a mandate to lift brown, black, yellow people up to the level of white people, as if white people were the norm, and black, brown, yellow people were abnormal subspecies on a lower level, or deficient."

Wright's interpretation of Kipling's 1899 poem is essentially false. Kipling was writing at the beginning of the Second Boer War, and his poem is actually a warning about the dangers of imperialism. British boys were going being sent to fight to consolidate British rule in South Africa, and Kipling noted that by conquering foreign lands, the British would "bind your sons to exile/To serve your captives' need."

Kipling surely did not see any "mandate" to lift up anyone. But what does a British poet's musings on the perils of empire have to do with

Michelle Malkin comments:

In Detroit tonight at the NAACP’s Church of the Racial Hustle, Wright patted himself on the back for his “descriptive” powers of an America that he believes deserved 9/11. It’s not “divisive,” you see, to shout “God damn America” with your veins popping at the pulpit. That’s just “descriptive.” And anyone who says otherwise is a God-damned racist!

Here's Part 2 of the video:



Wright here, beginning around the 3-minute mark, gets into some nonsense about how "European-American" children have a "left-brain cognitive object-oriented learning style," while African-American children come from a "right-brain aural culture." Anyone who doubts that this is nonsense -- at least so far as academic achievement is concerned -- should ask themselves whether a "right-brain creative aural" learning style is an efficient way to learn calculus.

Bonus: At the 9-minute mark, Wright mocks John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural speech.

Before posting Part 3 of the video, let me first finish disassembling Wright's ranting about educational differences. It may indeed be true, as he says, that many black children are raised in an "aural culture"; that is to say, they are raised in a culture where the importance of literacy is not emphasized. But in a society where academic achievement requires high level of literacy, an "aural" culture is not merely a difference -- as Wright claims -- but is indeed a deficiency.

Furthermore, it is not merely black children who suffer as a result of being raised in culture that do not emphasize literacy and academic achievement. This is equally true among poor whites. There are still many white families in America where getting a high-school diploma is regarded as a signal accomplishment, white families where children are raised by semi-literate parents, where white children grow up in an environment where none of their relatives or close acquaintances have ever attended college.

It is mypoic for Wright to suggest that African-American children are the only ones disadvantaged in education due to their cultural background. Lots of poor little hillbilly children suffer similarly.

OK, now Part 3:



Holy cow! Mocking Ted Kennedy? Look, the Boston accent is eminently mockable, but it's only an accent. What's the point here?

Plenty of people who speak accented English nevertheless succeed in America. Hell's bells, go to the physics department at MIT and nearly half the students are Asian-Americans, including many whose heavy accents indicate that they only recently immigrated to the U.S. Speaking of Asian-American immigrants, perhaps Rev. Wright has heard of a guy named Dinesh D'Souza?

Wright goes on and on about "linguistics," and then goes into musicology, as if backbeat were something novel, and then mocks white people as lacking rhythm. I know that some white people -- perhaps even most white people -- lack rhythm, but it is a stereotype to imply that all white people lack rhythm. Rev. Wright misreads 6/8 time; the backbeat in a 6/8 soul ballad (e.g., "Always and Forever" by Heatwave) is still 1 and 4.

From all of this, beginning about 7:30 p.m., Wright begins ranting in defense of his "black religious tradition," declaring: "Some of our haters can't get their heads around that."

This is not helping Obama. Once some video editors get hold of this speech and throw some highlights up on YouTube, the entire issue will be revived and recycled. And to give you a hint of why some white people will resent the hell out of this, Ed Morrisey:

This racial demagoguery can easily be seen in his choice of “European” for whites in the US. We’re not European; we’re American. My family stopped being European when my great-great-great grandfather stepped off the ship about 160 years ago. “European” didn’t really describe us even then; my family came from Ireland, Italy, and what is now Poland over a period of 60 years. Nobody I know considers themselves “European”, and the only time I hear this applied is when racial divisionists use the term.

Part 4:

Just saw 'Deception'

"Deception" with Hugh Jackman, Ewan McGregor and the ssssmokin' Michelle Williams is a smart, sinister and very sexy suspense flick.

My wife and I went to the multiplex without any particular film in mind and picked "Deception" based on the exciting commercials we'd both seen. There were other good choices -- including the comedy "Leatherheads" and Ben Stein's "Expelled" -- but we figured, based on the commercials, that "Deception" would be a good thriller, and we weren't disappointed.

It's not a spoiler to say that there's plenty enough sex and skin to deserve the R rating. "Deception" is the kind of Hitchcock-influenced story that, 15 years ago, would have featured Michael Douglas in one of the roles. It's also a great-looking film. Director Marcel Lagenegger and cinematographer Dante Spinotti are fond of close-focused, natural-lit scenes in which you can see every pore on the actors' skin.

Amazingly enough, even Michelle Williams has pores. But she's still sssssmokin' -- I particularly remember one scene near the end where she gets out of a car and walks up steps in a tight, clingy black dress. Niiiiice. A very good-looking woman in a very good-looking movie.

So, yeah, suspenseful story with lots of sex and plot twists, excellent cinematogaphy, and one ssssmokin' hot leading lady. It was definitely worth the $9.

If it didn't actually exist . . .

. . . Ace would have to make this up:

A visit to the Guolizhuang Restaurant in Beijing is not for the faint-hearted. Here the menu consists almost entirely of penis and testicle dishes -- made from the private parts of deer, snakes, yaks, horses, seals and ducks, among others. . . .
"For thousands of years, Chinese medicine has used animal penises to cure kidney and erection problems," she says. But for their medicinal effect to work, the dishes have to be consumed regularly.
"But if you want something that works faster, we have a wine that contains extracts of heart, penis, and blood from a deer," she explains. "That has an effect within 30 minutes." This potency cocktail has been said to be better than Viagra, and it has no side effects.
Raw or roasted, whole or sliced, tip or base: the penis binge is not meant for Chinese guests as a superficial test of courage, but rather as a serious treatment for the libido. "The sexual act of this Russian dog lasts 48 hours and its mating season is seven months out of the year," is how the colorful, photo-filled menu praises a . . .$25 penis dish.

The belief that the consumption of sexual organs -- or of symbolic items like rhino horn -- can have an aphrodisiac effect is the most primitive sort of superstition. It's amazing how this kind of Stone Age belief has persisted in a nation like China that has endured 60 years of Marxist rule.

A sticky wicket

Politicians in India are in an uproar over a professional cricket league's decision to add cheerleaders to the sport:

Sparsely clad cheerleaders are facing a performance ban at Indian Premier League tournament matches in the western port city of Mumbai as the authorities have declared them "crude and vulgar".
"The scantily clad foreign girls' dances are obscene and do not gel with Indian sensibilities, culture and ethos," state home minister Siddharam Mhetre said.
"These are things meant for foreigners and not us. Mothers and daughters watch these matches on television and it does not look nice", he added.

Being an uptight, sexually repressed right-winger, I naturally share the Indian home minister's horror at the idea of "scantily clad" girls engaged in "obscene" dances. However, I suspect that the key word here is "foreign." Let's take a gander at these scantily clad gals, shall we?

Methinks that the Indian politicians are in large measure outraged by the superior hotness of the American hotties, which insults the ethnic pride of caste-conscious subcontinentals. And I suspect the women of India are hurt to see their menfolk lusting for foreign flesh:

In Bangalore beer-addled spectators exhorted the girls to come down and dance with them, screaming in unison to a Bollywood song: "Come to us, come to us, now!"
And in Mumbai, swooning men implored the shimmying girls: "Madam, madam, shake hand, shake hand!"

In other words, the anti-cheerleader sentiment appears to be a sort of nativism, and the outraged politicians are just doing a Pat Buchanan shtick. Sexual protectionism, in other words. (Once E.J. Dionne teaches you how to spot racial undertones, you see undertones everywhere.)

Joke of the Day

Huffington Post highlights the New York Times story about John McCain "exploiting" his wife's inherited wealth. Now, if only John McCain would divorce Cindy, who would subsequently come out of the closet as gay, and pay him a fat divorce settlement, which the ex-Republican McCain would then use to buy a reputation as a crusading liberal activist, maybe then Arianna Huffington would approve.

Layers, as Allahpundit might say.

Name That Party, Part MCMLXXIV

Paging Don Surber! A politician makes an overtly religious appeal, and yet his party affliation is mysteriously omitted.

Here's a hint: He's been accused of corruption.

Is it just me, or is Instapundit guilty of "racial overtones"? Speaking of overtones, Ace of Spades asks:

In what version of the Bible can one ask for forgiveness for someone else's sins (or in this case, capital crimes)? There was a bit of this is in the Middle Ages with the buying of indulgences for others who had sinned, but that theory of redemption-by-proxy has been long discredited.
It's the same stupid liberal impulse to pretend that evil-doers are not themselves blameworthy and instead make a great show of one's own enlightenment by ostentatiously "taking responsibility" for one's contribution to someone else's evil.

Me? I'm just too lazy to be evil.

Is this 'racism'?

Why does John McCain distance himself from the NC GOP ad about Rev. Jeremiah Wright? The heart of the ad is a short video clip of Wright's "God d--- America" quote and the ad says nothing at all about race. Yet, as Peter Wehner notes at NRO, liberals are insisting (and McCain seems to agree) that the ad is some kind of coded subliminal appeal to white racism. Here's E.J. Dionne:

Republicans clearly know that they can find ways to play on racial feeling while fully denying they are doing so. On Wednesday, the North Carolina Republican Party released a television ad showing Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, giving his now-famous sermon in which he declared, "God damn America."
Of course Wright's comments were offensive, but to pretend that the ad does not have racial undertones would be to deny the obvious.

Why? Where are the "racial undertones"? What is so "obvious"? E.J. never says. Apparently, it's so self-evident that any political attack ad involving a black candidate must be racist, that these "undertones" require neither examination nor explanation.

Since E.J. doesn't explain this curious accusation, allow me to provide the deconstruction. First, watch the video again:

The reason that E.J. sees "racial undertones" in the North Carolina ad is this: Wright's sermon is delivered in a voice that might be called culturally black -- and thus at odds with Obama's post-racial image.

The "racial undertones" don't come from the actual words that Wright speaks -- which are not different in any substantial way from the anti-American rantings of Ward Churchill or Bill Ayers -- but in the way he speaks them. Wright delivers these words in a stylized African-American gospel-preacher voice, the kind of voice often used in political oratory by such figures as Jesse Jackson, John Lewis and Al Sharpton.

Wright sounds culturally black, in a way that Obama does not. I've said before that if Obama had gone to Hollywood, he could have had a succesful career playing a forensic scientist on "CSI," a heart surgeon on "Grey's Anatomy, " or a district attorney on "Law & Order," while earning extra money doing voiceovers in commercials for allergy medications. He's got that resonant voice and reassuring manner that would make him a casting director's dream for such roles.

By associating Obama's name and image with Wright's gospel-preacher voice, the NC GOP is meant to remind us that Obama is black -- or so E.J. Dionne seems to suggest. I say "seems to suggest" because, as noted, E.J. never comes right out and says so. He just intuits the "racial undertones" and expects the enlightened reader to nod in agreement.

The big problem with E.J.'s method of "argument" (which is no argument at all) is that it makes blackness a sort of Kevlar shield against criticism. The candidate's pastor can say anything at all -- he can say, "God d--- America" -- and no one can make an issue of his remarks without inviting this kind of insinuation about "racial undertones." The mere fact that the Democratic candidate is black means that liberals can play the race card any time they feel like it.

Personally, I like Obama. He's a cigarette smoker, which makes us both members of an oppressed minority. Politically, of course, Obama's just another liberal. There's no meaningful policy difference between him and Hillary. So in that regard, I don't give a damn who the Democrats nominate, and it would at least be fun to have four years of Jay Leno jokes about Obama trying to sneak out into the Rose Garden to puff a Camel Light.

What troubles me about the way the campaign is shaping up is that liberals are beginning to suggest that they want this election to be a referendum on race: Vote for Obama, or you're a racist. We're seeing that theme already developing in the Democratic primary, and I think there can be no doubt that it will be exponentially enlarged during the general-election campaign if Obama should win the nomination.

Liberals evidently fail to see the inherent risks in waging a campaign on that basis. Just like the Rodney King incident or the O.J. trial, a racialized campaign -- where liberals automatically interpret any Republican attack as racist -- would divide the country in a dangerous way. And what if the Obama presidency should turn out to be a one-term failure? What if there is a scandal or a blunder in foreign policy? If Obama is elected on the basis of his blackness, and if all of his critics are tarred as racists, then what would be Obama's "legacy" if he should prove as unsuccessful as Jimmy Carter?

It is not Republicans who are raising the race issue vis-a-vis Rev. Wright's rants -- or anything else, for that matter. It's white liberals like E.J. Dionne who are playing the race card, and they must bear the responsibility for the result.

Going for the Blog-o-Bucks

This blog began as, and remains, a hobby. I love blogging. My co-author Lynn Vincent once said I was "born to blog" -- a genetic condition involving a rare combination of ADD and OCD.

I was fortunate enough, while working at The Washington Times, to have been sort of an unofficial liaison between the newspaper and the blogosphere. That duty not only gave me an excuse to blog, but also to read dozens of other blogs -- and call it "work"!

So after I left the paper in January, I kept blogging just to keep my hand in the blogosphere while working as a freelancer, and it's been fun and cool. And reasonably successful -- lately, the traffic's been between 20K and 30K page-views per month, which ain't too shabby considering I've only been blogging continually since late February.

But now Mrs. McCain is kind of giving me the Evil Eye -- hey, we've got six kids and bills to pay -- and so I'm going to try to hustle up some Blog-o-Bucks, as Ace would say. Therefore, I've installed an Amazon.com Honor System thingy, which allows readers to send me money:

Hillary's debate challenge

Allahpundit calls it "part of her new strategy to make him look like a complete wimp" -- keep challenging Obama to more debates:

Clinton took the debate dispute to a new level, challenging Obama to face off with her in a debate without a moderator, Lincoln-Douglas style.
"Just the two of us, going for 90 minutes, asking and answering questions, we'll set whatever rules seem fair," Clinton said while campaigning in South Bend. . . .
Trailing in delegates and the popular vote, Clinton has been stepping up the pressure on Obama for more debates in advance of primaries in nine days in Indiana and North Carolina. Clinton argued that Obama won't debate because he's unhappy with questions from moderators during the April 16 debate just before the Pennsylvania primary.

This is Politics 101: If you're comfortably ahead, avoid debate, since that tends to give legitimacy to your opponent. If you're behind, demand debates -- and accuse your opponent of ducking you if he refuses.

Obama was all in favor of debates when there were more than a half-dozen candidates in the Democratic primary field. The Democrats had more than 20 debates, and most of the time, the candidates took turns (a) bashing Bush, and (b) tag-teaming Hillary.

Once the field narrowed down to Obama and Hillary -- and once Rev. Jeremiah Wright's anti-American rants became an issue -- suddenly Obama decided he didn't need to debate as much. Funny how that happens.

Naturally, Obama declined Hillary's latest challenge:

Asked why he was repeatedly “ducking” Clinton’s debate challenges before the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, Obama said, as he has before, that he just wants to spend time with voters.
“I’m not ducking. We’ve had 21 (debates), and so what we’ve said is, with two weeks, two big states, we want to make sure we’re talking to as many folks possible on the ground taking questions from voters,” he said, so no debates.
“We’re not going to have debates between now and Indiana,” he said.

Obama wants to keep "taking questions from voters" -- and continue saturating the airwaves with attack ads -- without having to answer tough questions in a live debate. Funny how that happens, too.

Remember that Obama's sitting on a huge mountain of campaign cash, while Hillary's campaign -- at least before she got a big haul after winning Pennsylvania -- was practically broke. Obama outspent Hillary about 3-to-1 in Pennsylvania.

When I covered Hillary for The American Spectator last week, I filed my story from the lobby bar at the Harrisburg Hilton (where they have free WiFi). There was a TV in the bar, and it seemed like every time I looked up, there was another Obama ad slamming Hillary for taking money from "special interests." In fact, one Obama ad even accused Hillary of "the same old politics, misleading negative ads":



The most amazing thing about Hillary's comeback in Pennsylvania is that she did it despite this tsunami of TV ads from Obama -- in which he repeatedly claims that he doesn't take money from special interests (corrupt slumlords like Tony Rezko apparently don't qualify as "special interests").

Democratic double standard?

Hillary Clinton strategist Geoff Garin:

On the one hand, it's perfectly decent for Obama to argue that only he has the virtue to bring change to Washington and that Clinton lacks the character and the commitment to do so. On the other hand, we are somehow hitting below the belt when we say that Clinton is the candidate best able to withstand the pressures of the presidency and do what's right for the American people, while leaving the decisions about Obama's preparedness to the voters.
Who made up those rules? And who would ever think they are fair?

Team Obama has repeatedly claimed that Clinton is "Swiftboating" Obama. "Swiftboating," of course, is the sin of telling the truth about a Democrat. Unlike John McCain, the Clintons aren't afraid to hit hard in the full-contact sport of politics.

Yee. Haw.

Appomattox undone, says Newsweek senior editor Michael Hirsch:

In the summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee led an ill-advised incursion into Pennsylvania. His army was defeated at Gettysburg, and thence afterward Lee beat a fighting retreat until the South lost the Civil War. One hundred and forty-five years later, the South--or what has become the South-Southwest--has won another kind of Civil War. It has transformed the sensibility of the country. It is setting the agenda for our political, social and religious mores--in Pennsylvania and everywhere else.

(Via Hot Air.) My great-grandfather, Pvt. Winston W. Bolt of the 13th Alabama Infantry, was captured during that "ill-advised incursion," so I suppose I should smile at Hirsch's metaphor. Instead, I must confess my shock at Hirsch's assessment of this belated triumph of the Lost Cause. After trundling through a non sequitur paragraph about an "American Idol" contestant, Hirsch looks down from the Olympian heights and shares with us this "analysis":

As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge observed in their 2004 book, "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America," the nation's population center has been "moving south and west at a rate of three feet an hour, five miles a year." Another author, Anatol Lieven, in his 2005 book "America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism," describes how the "radical nationalism" that has so dominated the nation's discourse since 9/11 traces its origins to the demographic makeup and mores of the South and much of the West and Southern Midwest--in other words, what we know today as Red State America.
This region was heavily settled by Scots-Irish immigrants--the same ethnic mix King James I sent to Northern Ireland to clear out the native Celtic Catholics.
After succeeding at that, they then settled the American Frontier, suffering Indian raids and fighting for their lives every step of the way. And the Southern frontiersmen never got over their hatred of the East Coast elites and a belief in the morality and nobility of defying them. Their champion was the Indian-fighter Andrew Jackson. The outcome was that a substantial portion of the new nation developed, over many generations, a rather savage, unsophisticated set of mores. Traditionally, it has been balanced by a more diplomatic, communitarian Yankee sensibility from the Northeast and upper Midwest. But that latter sensibility has been losing ground in population numbers--and cultural weight.
The coarsened sensibility that this now-dominant Southernism and frontierism has brought to our national dialogue is unmistakable. We must endure "lapel-pin politics" that elevates the shallowest sort of faux jingoism over who's got a better plan for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Note that Hirsch attributes to the North "a more diplomatic, communitarian Yankee sensibility" -- a sensibility that seems lacking in any actual Yankees anyone has ever met. Far from being "diplomatic" and "communitarian," the typical Yankee is a rude, pushy, vulgar, grasping materialist, Donald Trump being the perfect embodiment of this type.

Anyone who has lived in both North and South can testify to the difference in manners. Southerners are, in general, more friendly and courteous. Visit any commercial establishment in the South -- especially the small-town South -- and you will be thoroughly sirred and ma'amed and thanked and pleased. While the small-town North lacks the pushy rudeness of Northern cities, even small-town Yankees are less outgoing, their courtesy more formal and less enthusiastic, than in the South.

Yet Hirsch calls the South "savage" and "unsophisticated" -- quite true, if patriotism and courage are "savage," and faith and honor are "unsophisticated."

Best of all, Hirsch is a graduate of Tufts University (in Massachusetts) who's spent nearly his entire journalism career as a foreign correspondent and has never even set foot in the South, so far as one can tell from his Newsweek biography.

The arrogance of infernal Yankeedom!

UPDATE: In re-reading Hirsch's column just now, I find myself asking, "What's your point?" Is there any actual newsworthy relevance to this?

Hirsch contrasts "nativism and yahooism versus eagerness for the new and openness to innovation," then he says that in the Texan Bush there is "little trace left of the Eastern WASP sensibility into which he was born and educated," and there are some references to John McCain and Barack Obama. But there's no actual point, except that Michael Hirsch hates Southerners.

A senior editor at Newsweek has leisure to compose a 1,200-word screed telling more than 80 million Americans that he considers them uncouth barbarians? Nice work, if you can get it.

UPDATE II: Welcome Ace of Spades HQ readers. I've been a closet AOSHQ Moron for a long time, but I've never been a "Top Headline" before. I feel so ... special. Please give me money.

UPDATE III: Just for the heck of it:

How's that for savage and unsophisticated? If that doesn't make you stand up and salute, I don't know what will.

UPDATE IV: Instapundit:

"Jeez, they used to at least wait until after they lost the election to start this talk."

Zimbabwe crisis worsens

Recounts confirm that Mugabe's party lost the election:

Zimbabwe's electoral commission said Saturday that a recount of votes for 10 parliamentary seats confirmed the original results, including opposition victories, making it unlikely that the ruling party can wrest control of parliament.

But it looks unlikely Mugabe will go peacefully

Zimbabwean army and police raided the headquarters of the main opposition party in the capital, Harare, yesterday and arrested more than 100 people, some of whom had taken shelter in the building after falling victim to purported government-sponsored violence . . .
One of the arrested activists who managed to escape from police custody said the security officers took away at least 120 people in police and army vehicles.
He spoke last night to The Washington Times but asked not to be identified for fear the army would carry out reprisals against his family.
"At around 10 a.m. ... dozens of police and army trucks pulled up outside the MDC headquarters at Harvest House in Harare. They swarmed into the building, assaulting and handcuffing people as they went," he said.

If Jimmy Carter really wants to do something for peace and democracy, why doesn't he stop fooling around with Hamas and go do something about Zimbabwe?

Fear of Hillary's payback

Eleanor Clift:

I'm beginning to think Hillary Clinton might pull this off and wrestle the nomination away from Barack Obama. If she does, a lot of folks -- including a huge chunk of the media -- will join Bill Richardson (a.k.a. Judas) in the Deep Freeze. If the Clintons get back into the White House, it will be retribution time, like the Corleone family consolidating power in "The Godfather," where the watchword is, "It's business, not personal."

The post-Pennsylvania possibility of a Hillary comeback -- which grows more credible as Team Obama continues to flounder around with Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- is sure to strike fear in the hearts of many big-name Democrats who jumped on the Obama bandwagon in recent months. I'm guessing Ted Kennedy won't get invited to too many state dinners if Hillary re-occupies the White House.

Funniest line in Eleanor Clift's column:

During the 1992 campaign the pundits wrote off Bill Clinton, certain he couldn't survive allegations of infidelity and draft dodging.

Oh, come on, Eleanor! At this late date, I think we can all agree that those were not merely "allegations." Bill Clinton is, was, and always will be, a compulsive horndog. That's an objective fact.

UPDATE: Bob Herbert of the New York Times:

Barack Obama is winning, so why does it look like Hillary Clinton is having all the fun? . . .
You can almost feel the air seeping out of the Obama phenomenon. The candidate and his aides are brainstorming ways to counter the Clinton death-ray machine and regain the momentum.

Herbert's one of those left-of-Lenin liberals, but I like his "death-ray machine" phrase. I'm picturing Hillary's minions as the Martian invaders in "War of the Worlds," vaporizing everything in their path.

Lear jet liberalism

When you're a globetrotting rock star with seven (seven!) homes, you tend to rack up lots of frequent-flyer miles. Just ask Sting:

Sting, for instance, notched up an incredible number of air miles with his band’s world tour.
And it was revealed that his wife Trudie Styler travels between their seven homes in private jets or their fleet of cars, as well as importing farm produce hundreds of miles. . . .
Miss Styler, 53, was challenged on the issue when extolling the benefits of organic and locally-grown food.
The interview at the Earls Court Real Food Festival had been going well, until one journalist pointed out that the couple’s carbon footprint has been estimated as 30 times greater than the average Briton’s.

What caught my eye when I saw this story at Michelle Malkin's blog was the logo that said "My Carbon Footprint Is Bigger Than Yours." I feared that Sting had acquired one of the biggest carbon-producing accessories of all -- a baby. Hypocritical in all things, liberals love to preach the need for population control, even while they themselves produce large broods -- Nancy Pelosi has five kids, Ted Turner also has five, Al Gore has four.

Anyway the logo at Michelle's reminds me of one of my favorite double-entendres. People are often shocked to discover that my wife and I have six children.

"Six?" people say. "Why did you have six children?"

To which I answer, "Well, you know what they say about a man with a big carbon footprint."

In other celebrity news from The Daily Mail, they've got photos of Britney Spears in a bikini and Heather Locklear in a bikini. Reminds me of a Benny Hill joke:

Q. What's the hottest part of the sun?
A. Page Three!