The Flag of the World

I’ve been saying for weeks now that the biggest problem with an Obama presidency is not a President Obama, per se, but a President Obama’s cabinet. This week has added more evidence that 1) Obama’s judgment about people is terrible, and that 2) that terrible judgment expresses itself in terrible appointments.

For those not clear what all the fuss is about, here’s the short version. Obama put together a 3-person committee to help him choose a vice president. On that team he put one Jim Johnson, one of those millionaire CEOs he’s always railing against–and not only that, but a millionaire CEO deeply involved in the mortgage crisis. Oh, and did I mention that Johnson’s company–the quasi-governmental Fannie Mae–attempted to hide $15 million they gave him? And that he got a sweetheart mortgage deal from a millionaire CEO that Obama has specifically blamed for the mortgage crisis? And those aren’t his only problems. Mickey Kaus pegs Johnson as “a paleoliberal greedhead with a track record of failure.”

But wait, there’s more! Johnson has been dominating the headlines, but the second member of the search team has major problems, too. Eric Holder was the architect of the Marc Rich pardons. Wasn’t the whole point of not nominating Hillary largely to be done with all the ethical messes of the Clinton years?

These are the first important personnel decisions Obama has made as a presidential nominee, and they might be the most important personnel decisions he’s made so far. And they are 66% awful. We can’t afford an executive branch crammed with people chosen by Obama’s obviously poor judgement

Via Powerline, here’s Obama this fine Memorial Day morning:

On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.

Later, Obama said that, if elected, he would be sure to “provide our fallen heroes with all the sweet delicious brains they could ever hope to feast upon.”

From the Baltimore Sun blog:

This message is for that oppressed, neglected, passed over, bitter, gun-toting group of people otherwise known as working-class white males: You really don’t matter.

To all the hand-wringing over Sen. Barack Obama’s alleged problem with winning over the votes of those white men, let’s counter with some other facts.

Obama has a lot of company. John Kerry. Al Gore. Bill Clinton. Michael Dukakis. Walter Mondale. Jimmy Carter. Just to name the six most recent Democratic nominees who lost the white, working-class, male vote.

Two-for-six. (Or three-for-eight, if you want to count elections.) Good work, guys.

After the Service, my first mystery novel, is now available for purchase. What’s that? You’d like to learn more? Well, check out my awesome promo text

When David Kelter started his internship at Seattle’s Grace Baptist Church, he thought it would be a fairly useful experience, if not very exciting. He would get the credits he needs to finish up his senior year at Seattle Pacific University, he’d have a chance to gauge his interest in pastoral ministry, and maybe—just maybe—he’d meet some girls.

But when David stumbles upon the body of a troubled parishoner after the service one Sunday, things change. Now he finds that his internship duties include things like catching a killer, saving the church–and staying alive.

Learn more at the book’s website www.gracebaptistseattle.com.

The WA blogosphere is buzzing with this video of Barack Obama whiffing gracefully on a basic question about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in E. Washington.

On one hand, it’s easy for me to snicker at Obama for not knowing about Hanford. I know plenty about it–but then, I’ve lived in Washington for most of my life, I’ve worked on a senate campaign where the topic came up frequently, and I’ve known a handful of people who have actually worked at Hanford.

In any campaign, a candidate is going to run across issues that they are unfamiliar with. Obama responded well. That’s just about exactly how I remember Mike McGavick responding when he was asked about something he was unfamiliar with. (Actually, Mike didn’t bother with the snide ‘Now here’s something you won’t hear from most politicians’ shtick, but let his words speak for themselves.)

But here’s the thing–I heard Mike asked literally hundreds of different (entirely unscripted) questions, and I can remember one–only one–that he had to bow out on gracefully. Admitting you don’t know something is admirable, but not as admirable as actually knowing something.

And Obama really should know about Hanford. While a local issue, it is also a Federal one, and has significant ramifications for the nation as a whole (the Snake River dams are another such issue–has anyone asked Obama about those?).

In fact, Obama voted on legislation pertaining to Hanford back in 2006. Another bill regarding Hanford is currently before the Homeland Security committee, on which Obama sits.

Not only that, but he pushed nuclear cleanup legislation for Illinois. (And later lied about it, but, whatever.) How someone writes legislation about nuclear cleanup without knowing something about the Hanford situation, I have no idea.

And beyond that, in their letter inviting all the candidates to Washington in the runup to the primary, Sam Reed & Christine Gregoire (an Obama supporter) specifically cited Hanford as a “fundamental issue of the Northwest that merit[s] national attention and commitment.” Apparently Obama didn’t read the letter, though it’s posted on his website.

Back in the 2000 campaign, George Bush demonstrated that he didn’t have a complete grasp of some obscure but moderately important facts pertaining to foreign policy. But then, his job as governor of Texas didn’t involve the president of Pakistan even a little–he obviously knows exactly who the current one is. Obama appears to be flubbing things that his current job has involved–from this domestic policy whiff to his apparent belief that we need more Arabic translators in Afghanistan. It could just be inexperience (bad enough), or it could be that he just hasn’t put much work into his current job. That’s not the way you get a promotion, generally.

UPDATE: I just watched the video again and was struck by something–Obama didn’t say that he was unfamiliar with the situation at Hanford, but the site itself. Is Obama unfamiliar with the Manhattan Project? What does he know about Los Alamos, Oak Ridge or the Trinity test site? This may have something to do with the senator’s reading habits. And while popping over to Jim Miller’s excellent site, I see that Obama has made yet another blunder of this sort, over something a United States Senator really should be familiar with.

So, he can’t choose his staff well, he can’t choose his advisers well, he can’t choose his friends very well, and he certainly can’t choose his mentors well.

And so he’s running on… his judgment?

Even if the idea of an Obama presidency sounds fine to you, the idea of an Obama cabinet should scare the daylights out of you.

I’ve been keeping track of this story about Dartmouth’s sadly beleaguered Priya Venkatesan because it reminds me so strongly of some of the professors I encountered at the University of Washington.

One class, in particular, taught by a Swiss-Sri Lankan doctoral student to us lowly M.Ed candidates, featured reams of articles designed to teach us that a) We were responsible for most of the world’s ills, and B) Our views about truth, ourselves, and other people were wrong. Everything in the course was relative, except for the idea that we privileged whites were mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Eventually, I escaped the class (with an A, make whatever you want of that), and moved on. But every time I think of it, I am reminded of a quote from the estimable Pushing Dasies “The truth ain’t like puppies, a bunch of them running around, you pick your favorite.”

This view of mine that truth is truth caused a lot of trouble at UW, both with professors and my fellow students. I’m glad the Dartmouth students did what they did to Venkatesan, and that it’s getting some press. Postmodernism is particularly dangerous in the Academy, because it makes the very idea of education meaningless. If there’s no truth, why teach anyone anything at all?

One of the things that has always worried me about a potential Obama presidency is the likelihood that he will be entirely dominated by his vastly more experienced cabinet. Considering the fact that Obama has practically zero experience on a national level outside of his current campaign, it’s pretty obvious to me that an Obama administration will be run by his staff & cabinet. (He certainly seems to put an awful lot of misplaced responsibility on his staff already).

Well, today Obama basically admitted that he’s a terrible judge of character. It turns out that, for 20 years, Obama has been wrong about the man variously described as a “sounding board,” a “close confidant” and a “spiritual mentor”. Meanwhile, those of us who heard a few minutes of his sermons had him pegged pretty quickly, as Obama admitted today.

So, between Wright, Ayers and Rezko, the terrifying thing about a President Obama is no longer just that he will be dominated by his cabinet, staff and advisers, but he will be dominated by his incompentent and/or reprehensible cabinet, staff and advisers.

I cannot believe what I just saw.

Our only source for television news in English is CNN–specifically, CNN International. This is the same channel beamed around the planet and watched by English-speaking people on every continent.

A few moments ago, they did a segment on Jeremiah Wright’s press club speech, the heart of which Lorraine addresses below. This segment focused on Wright’s “the USA created AIDS” assertions, and his theory that blacks are right-brained and whites are left-brained–which is actually a mere variation on a standard belief in the American educational community (again, see Lorraine’s post below).

The bitter irony is that of these two ridiculous assertions, the far more reprehensible and, frankly, crazy one was given far more credence than the other. While the ideas that blacks & whites learn differently is purely racialist and worthy of rejection, the fact is that it is believed by an enormous swath of researchers & educators. The idea that the US government created–and then purposefully planted–the AIDS virus, though, is an entirely fictitious delusion of a fevered mind, with no basis in reality.

And yet that is the one that CNN International did its darndest to present as legitimate. First, they quoted Jeremiah Wright, reaffirming his statements–then, they showed the nutball book he referenced as support. Then they played a portion of an interview with the author of the nutball book, who was thrilled to be finally getting some MSM love for his venomous delusion. But, to show both sides of the story, they quoted an unnamed source at the Centers for Disease Control (which is blamed for both AIDS and ebola in the aforementioned screed), as mentioning “another theory” about the origin of HIV–namely, that it originated in sub-Saharan monkeys and was transferred to humans about 50 years ago. This “other theory,” of course, is what most of us like to call “the truth”. Exactly how noncontroversial is this “other theory”? The entry for AIDS origins on Wikipedia, of all places, does not bother to mention any other possibility.

But CNN International was not done. After giving a bare second or two to the forces of reality, they were back to Jeremiah Wright–because he cited another book “with more historical support.” Now, none of this historical support has anything to do with the origin of AIDS, mind you, but rather an actual historical event that, while reprehensible, had absolutely nothing to do with AIDS.

Anyone who does not know better would have almost certainly come away from CNN International tonight believing that the idea that the US government created AIDS is a legitimate belief with “historical support.” Why do they hate us? I think I have part of the reason right here.

Today’s speech by Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a perfect example the kind of benevolent, back-handed bigotry I fought against all through my M.Ed. program at the University of Washington.

In the speech, Wright claimed that white kids and black kids are wired so differently that they can’t be taught in the same ways. White kids are left-brained (which is why there are no white musicians or artists) and black kids are right-brained (which is why there are no black doctors or lawyers), and so they have to be taught using different methods. This notion was expounded in class after class at the UW, and seems to have been bought wholesale by Dr. Wright and the Left.

How can a person (or a nation) venerate Brown v. Board, when, in the same breath, he asks for Plessy v. Ferguson?

My professors at the UW were incensed when I pointed out the opportunity-sucking racism of this proposition. Incensed at me. My classmates were actively hostile–and these weren’t undergrads–they were graduate students, nearly all of us professional educators with some years’ experience in the classroom. One middle-aged white woman made a sobbing speech in support of segregation. Segregation! I never heard such paternalistic nonsense as came out of the mouths of these teachers at the University of Washington.

Well, here in Brazil, I teach classes of students that are positively motley compared to American classrooms. If Dr. Wright’s proposition is true, my classes should never succeed, because I teach them all, no matter what color or blend, the same way.

Another common conceit of liberal educators is that I shouldn’t be able to teach non-white children anything at all, because I have no grounds on which to relate to them. This article was assigned in three separate classes at the UW, which explains just how blind I am. It’s a favorite among white educators–I suggest you read it if you haven’t yet been forced to.

Both of these claims–that black and white children must be taught differently, that white teachers can’t relate–come from the same poisoned root. It is the Marxist idea that people in America function as groups (racial, economic, etc.), and not as individuals. It is the controversion of Jefferson’s claim of individual rights and freedoms as the basis for good government. It is the same root that fosters Barack Obama’s claims that poor Pennsylvanians cling (in herds) to God and guns.

Now, Chester Finn says that all this doesn’t matter–that these ideas are popular among educators, but psychologists deny them. That may be true, but it is immaterial. Psychologists aren’t in classrooms, shaping the next generation of politicians, doctors, and artists. Teachers are.

I’ve been meaning to write a post detailing how the 2008 primary has essentially proved my (admittedly not particularly controversial) thesis from 2004 that the Democratic Party is basically broken down into three groups–the Progressives, the Moderates and the Opportunists.

Not everything I wrote 4 years was entirely accurate. For example, I predicted we’d see the three-way split start to damage the party “in the next year or so”. I forgot that the GOP is the stupid party, not the Democrats. Thanks largely to the “management strategy”, the three wings managed a truce, and had significant success (electorally, not policy-wise)

They did this not by attacking Republican policies, but by attacking Republican competence. Partly, this is because the policies themselves are actually fairly popular (minus the war). Partly, this is because there’s now way the Democrats can make policy their centerpoint, because the three wings won’t agree on it (hence the spectacular failure of the current Dem majority). And partly, alas, this is because the GOP has had some pretty incompetent moments.

But here we are in 2008, and the Democrat War is in full swing, in the form of the presidential primary between Obama, backed, in general, by the Progressives, and Hillary, backed generally by the Moderates. And the really good news is that I don’t have to write about it, because Jim Geraghty pretty much already did.

A few other notes about the split, though:

• The chief Moderate from 2004, Joe Lieberman, after winning his own skirmish in the Democrat Wars against the Progressives & Ned Lamont, has thoroughly jumped ship and is campaigning for John McCain. Regardless of who wins the Dem primary, there will be many more like him.
• Though Clinton’s only hope in the primary is her newfound base of Moderates, she is certainly not one of them. She’s the Queen of the Opportunists, and is doing what Opportunists do–grabbing support where she can. Remember when her big contrast with Obama was that her health care plan was more socialist than his? Yeah, she doesn’t really seem to mention that much anymore.
• Speaking of Opportunists, back in 2004 I called John Edwards their best example from that cycle, and I’ll be darned if I wasn’t spot on. How much of an Opportunist is he? The man still hasn’t made an endorsement for president.
• Back in 2004, I noted that “Barak” Obama (man, that was a long time ago) had the “potential to succeed in any of the three camps”. And he did, to an extent. But the fact is, he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Progressive, and there’s nothing he can do about it. Heaven knows he tried. He positioned himself early on as the one who could transcend, not just his party’s divisions, but the nation’s. But culturally, he’s as Progressive as they come. He can ignore & cover up his voting record, but he can’t disown his nature, any more than he could disown Jeremiah Wright. And thus he quickly rallied the Progressives to his cause. As John Judis writes in The New Republic:
  

  Whereas in the first primaries and caucuses, Obama benefited from being seen as middle-of-the-road or even conservative, he is now receiving his strongest support from voters who see themselves as “very liberal.” … There is nothing wrong with winning over voters who are very liberal and who never attend religious services [Riiight-ed]; but if they begin to become Obama’s most fervent base of support, he will have trouble (to say the least) in November.

Where will all this feuding leave the Democrats in November? Aside from grumbling about President Elect McCain, I mean? Hard to say. Largely, that will depend on how well they do in stitching the gaping wound this primary is going to leave in their party.

The important thing to remember is that the Progressive/Moderate clash in this primary has been almost entirely cultural. There are a whole host of actual policy disputes within the party that still haven’t come to the surface. Should we ever see a bitter fight between Democrats that is both cultural and policy-based… well, let’s just say Lieberman may get a lot less lonely.

So Clinton is busy whooping up on Obama tonight in Pennsylvania. It looks like she’s going to have a victory of somewhere between 8 & 10 points–just big enough to keep this circus going.

And really, I can see her point. Obama likes to point out that he’s won more delegates, states and votes than Hillary, which is totally true. Buuuuttt… that’s not how we vote come November. We’ve got this thing called the Electoral College, and if you look at Hillary & Obama’s victories through that lens, Hillary is far and away the victor.

Even assuming Obama wins all the rest of the states except for West Virginia & Kentucky (Clinton may well do better than that, but we’ll go with it), Clinton comes out with a 297 to 241 victory, almost exactly the victory of Carter over Ford, for historical perspective. That margin shrinks significantly if you take out Florida & Michigan, but it doesn’t disappear.

Though that doesn’t really give us a good picture, because a lot of these states are ones that the Democrats shouldn’t have to work for, or won’t win regardless. Taking out all of these solidly red or solidly blue states, Obama ends up with only half of these “purplish” states–which I’m defining as CO, FL, IA, MN, MI, NH, NM, OH, NV, PA & VA. You can certainly quibble on some of these, but the fact is that Hillary has done much better in the states Democrats need to win in November.

And if you consider the fact that Massachusetts suddenly becomes a purple state if Obama is the nominee, well… Let me just say that if I were a Democrat who actually wanted a shot to win this fall, I know what I’d be begging all my superdelegate friends to do.

As an aside, this little exercise has brought home to me just how spectacularly stupid it was of the Democrats to block the delegates of Florida & Michigan. Between the two of them, those states have 44 electoral votes, more than any single state except for California. They’re also states that could go either way in November. Dumb, dumb, dumb.