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In A Bound Man, Shelby Steele’s insightful book about Ba

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I wish PowerLine would leave Barack Obama alone… for now. I want him to get the nomination and then lose his bloom in the general election. As it is, I see this very effective campaign against him as helping to take him down too soon. Hillary is posting a double-digit lead in PA polls, and if she wins that she might still take the nomination. Let’s not help her. Frankly, I think she is a much stronger general election candidate than Obama, at least on the electoral map.

Let’s let Obama get the nomination - THEN let’s expose him. Until then, I wish right wing blogs would leave him alone. We’re going to help take him down before it matters.

Yabbut, Shooter ...

It’s like laying off a big fat hanging curve ball right over the center of the plate while the count is 3 and 0 and yer hoping for a walk.

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SJshooter - 20 March 2008 08:06 PM

I wish PowerLine would leave Barack Obama alone… for now. I want him to get the nomination and then lose his bloom in the general election. As it is, I see this very effective campaign against him as helping to take him down too soon. Hillary is posting a double-digit lead in PA polls, and if she wins that she might still take the nomination. Let’s not help her. Frankly, I think she is a much stronger general election candidate than Obama, at least on the electoral map.

Let’s let Obama get the nomination - THEN let’s expose him. Until then, I wish right wing blogs would leave him alone. We’re going to help take him down before it matters.

I agree that contrary to conventional wisdom, which is wrong once again, Obama is the weaker candidate.  I don’t think Powerline or anyone else can be expected to keep this stuff under wraps, but Pubbies should not have prevented Obama from dealing Clinton a knockout blow in Texas by voting for Clinton in the primary.

Paul, I appreciate this insightful and eloquent statement on Obama in the Shelby Steel context. This is the truth of it. It informs the decision-making process, which is always a good thing. Obama was a genuine and complete leftist before he was the “post-racial” candidate of hope, and remains so. With or without the mask, he was to be confronted and challenged on his repulsive leftist leanings and the odius consequences for America. In the abstract, this unmasking should make it a bit easier to effectively meet this challenge and win. The reality of it is up to team McCain.

The AP moved a story by Nedra Pickler last Friday, March 14. She wrote:

In a sermon on the Sunday after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright suggested the United States brought on the attacks.

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Wright said. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

In a 2003 sermon, he said blacks should condemn the United States.

“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”

Senator Obama has said that he never heard those and other remarks in sermons on some DVD. (I think I have read that the sermons were contained on a DVD the church itself made available for sale. Is that true? Why did the contents of the DVD surface now and who first publicized its contents?) Ms. Pickler also wrote:

He explained that he joined Wright’s church nearly 20 years ago. He said he knew Wright as a former Marine and respected biblical scholar who lectured at seminaries across the country.

“Reverend Wright preached the gospel of Jesus, a gospel on which I base my life,” he wrote. “… And the sermons I heard him preach always related to our obligation to love God and one another, to work on behalf of the poor, and to seek justice at every turn.”

He said Wright’s controversial statements first came to his attention at the beginning of his presidential campaign last year, and he condemned them. Because of his ties to the 6,000-member congregation church — he and his wife were married there and their daughters baptized — Obama decided not to leave the church.

The senator could be telling the truth. It may be unlikely that Rev. Wright’s wrong rage and false accusations never manifested when Obama was present in the congregation--but not impossible. One wonders: who filmed the sermons? Why? Who decided what should be on the DVD? Oh, how this writer wishes he still had the powers of a reporter to get answers to those and other questions.

How many Americans, especially likely voters, know the specifics of anything Rev. Wright has said? The newspaper in Worcester, Mass. did not run the March 14 Pickler story. One of its readers blasted the paper in an e-mail for ignoring the uproar and for other examples of obvious partisanship and incredibly bad news judgment on past occasions. The paper ran Ms. Pickler’s story Wednesday reporting on the Obama “race relations” speech, because the speech was too important to ignore.

But its readers still do not know what Rev. Wright said. I doubt the newspaper ever will provide those words, which let one judge not only Rev. Wright, but the truth of Obama’s campaign pretensions. From one of its run-of-the-paper columns supporting Obama--those columns are much stronger and more effective than the paper’s briefer, insipid, and badly reasoned editorials: 

[W]ow, what a magnificent speech.. . . His speech was nuanced and complex, so naturally the right-wing talk show hosts are apoplectic with disdain and indignation. , , , It does no justice to the speech to pull out sound bites or paragraphs. If you haven’t heard it or read it, you should, because it’s breathtaking.

I read Power Line. How many people in Worcester, Mass. do? I hear Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham on local radio and I assume many others do, too. It’s up to Power Line, Limbaugh, Ingraham, and others of like mind to pound the Democratic candidates, because the mainstream press won’t. One will read and hear rhapsodies on whoever gets the Democratic Party’s nomination. Waiting till September to try to get the word out on Obama or Clinton strikes this writer as inadvisable. Most inadvisable.

Shelby Steele’s book isn’t social science, it’s science fiction.

Successful blacks are either “bargainers” or “challengers?”

Tell that to Thomas Sowell or Larry Elder or Ward Connerly. 

Those three guys bargain with or challenge whites?  Give me a break. 

White Conservatives don’t even notice those guys are black unless someone, usually a leftist, demands that we take notice.

By the way, is Shelby Steele a bargainer or a challenger?

“By the way, is Shelby Steele a bargainer or a challenger?”

One CAN possess the traits of both OR be in transition from one to the other.  It is when one gets hung up on “challenging”, but never learning or growing, that one becomes an annoying and unserious caricature.

Just look at all the squandered lives of blacks who never made the move from one to the other.

One may also proceed bass ackwards like Julian Bond - a one-time reasonable black politician who found more votes and air time by playing the victim role of the Angry Black Man.  The bargainer became the perennial whining challenger.

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