Thomas Sowell On Obama: "The Audacity of Rhetoric"; Plus – Pat Buchanan And Christopher Hitchens Discuss Obama & Race

American economist, political writer, and commentator, Thomas Sowell, makes some excellent points about Senator Barack Obama.

Here's the link: The Audacity of Rhetoric

Here's a quote:

It is painful to watch defenders of Barack Obama tying themselves into knots trying to evade the obvious.

Some are saying that Senator Obama cannot be held responsible for what his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said. In their version of events, Barack Obama just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time -- and a bunch of mean-spirited people are trying to make something out of it.

It makes a good story, but it won't stand up under scrutiny.

Barack Obama's own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far left fringe. In college, "I chose my friends carefully," he said in his first book, "Dreams From My Father."

These friends included "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets" -- in Obama's own words -- as well as the "more politically active black students." He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.

Obama didn't just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college -- members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.

In Shelby Steele's brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama -- "A Bound Man" -- it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were -- and, like many converts, he went overboard.

Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the U.S. Senate is the furthest left of any Senator. There is a remarkable consistency in what Barack Obama has done over the years, despite inconsistencies in what he says.

The irony is that Obama's sudden rise politically to the level of being the leading contender for his party's presidential nomination has required him to project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who can heal divisiveness and bring us all together.

The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleon-like change, and entranced both white and black Democrats, is a tribute to the man's talent and a warning about his reliability.

There is no evidence that Obama ever sought to educate himself on the views of people on the other end of the political spectrum, much less reach out to them. He reached out from the left to the far left. That's bringing us all together?

Is "divisiveness" defined as disagreeing with the agenda of the left? Who on the left was ever called divisive by Obama before that became politically necessary in order to respond to revelations about Jeremiah Wright?

One sign of Obama's verbal virtuosity was his equating a passing comment by his grandmother -- "a typical white person," he says -- with an organized campaign of public vilification of America in general and white America in particular, by Jeremiah Wright.

Since all things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities, it is always possible to make things look similar verbally, however different they are in the real world.

Among the many desperate gambits by defenders of Senator Obama and Jeremiah Wright is to say that Wright's words have a "resonance" in the black community.

There was a time when the Ku Klux Klan's words had a resonance among whites, not only in the South but in other states. Some people joined the KKK in order to advance their political careers. Did that make it OK? Is it all just a matter of whose ox is gored?

Sowell also discusses Obama in these columns:

Obama's Speech

Race and Politics

Pat Buchanan makes some good points, as well:

A Brief For Whitey

Playing by Obama's Rules

I'm even finding myself in (at least partial) agreement with renowned atheist, Christopher Hitchens: Blind Faith

Quote:

You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily. (Yet why do I say I am surprised? He still gets away with absolutely everything.)

Looking for a moral equivalent to a professional demagogue who thinks that AIDS and drugs are the result of a conspiracy by the white man, Obama settled on an 85-year-old lady named Madelyn Dunham, who spent a good deal of her youth helping to raise him and who now lives alone and unwell in a condo in Honolulu. It would be interesting to know whether her charismatic grandson made her aware that he was about to touch her with his grace and make her famous in this way. By sheer good fortune, she, too, could be a part of it all and serve her turn in the great enhancement.

This flabbergasting process, made up of glibness and ruthlessness in equal proportions, rolls on unstoppably with a phalanx of reporters and men of the cloth as its accomplices. Look at the accepted choice of words for the ravings of Jeremiah Wright: controversial, incendiary, inflammatory. These are adjectives that might have been—and were—applied to many eloquent speakers of the early civil rights movement. (In the Washington Post, for Good Friday last, the liberal Catholic apologist E.J. Dionne lamely attempted to stretch this very comparison.) But is it "inflammatory" to say that AIDS and drugs are wrecking the black community because the white power structure wishes it? No. Nor is it "controversial." It is wicked and stupid and false to say such a thing. And it not unimportantly negates everything that Obama says he stands for by way of advocating dignity and responsibility over the sick cults of paranoia and victimhood.

What do you think?

Comments

[Jimbo]

A devastating two weeks for Hillary "bullet ducker" Clinton and Obama. I can't wait to see how this plays out in the weeks to come. They have both, in my opinion, disqualified themselves from the presidency by their amazingly craven propensities.

We have a black man raised by white women trying to up his black bona fides by identifying with the most astonishing black identity church and we have Hillary trying to up her image by constantly lying about herself in the most trivial things: bullet ducking in Bosnia, playing soccer for her high school when in fact her high school didn't have a soccer team, being named after a mountain climber that didn't become famous until after she was born, etc., etc., etc. Has she been hanging out with Al Gore and John Kerry?

Someone needs to do a detailed history on the obvious, blatant mentally ill and personality disordered candidates for president that the Dems have put forward over the past 16 years. It's quite amazing.

Republicans seem to get candidates who are insufficiently conservative or hypocrits, while democrats regularly get nut jobs.

[Fr. J.]

Thanks for saying what needs to be said about Obama. I favored him for a time, but now I'm for McCain.

[Jimbo]

Anyone wanting an unbelievably insightful analysis of Barak Obama must read/listen to Shelby Steele. Recent events in Obama's life and campaign further bolsters his insighful analysis.

[Pius V]

Sowell is a national treasure -- one of the most clear headed and incisive commentators the U.S. has had in the past couple decades.