A conversation on race? The Amercian Left can't stop talking about it

City Journal's Heather Mac Donald rips Eric Holder over his claim that Americans are "cowards" for not talking more about race:

The Clinton-era Conversation also purported to be frank, and we know what that meant: a one-sided litany of white injustices. Please raise your hand if you haven’t heard the following bromides about “the racial matters that continue to divide us” more times than you can count: Police stop and arrest blacks at disproportionate rates because of racism; blacks are disproportionately in prison because of racism; blacks are failing in school because of racist inequities in school funding; the black poverty rate is the highest in the country because of racism; blacks were given mortgages that they couldn’t afford because of racism. I will stop there.

Not only do colleges, law schools, almost all of the nation’s elite public and private high schools, and the mainstream media, among others, have “conversations about . . . racial matters”; they never stop talking about them. Any student who graduates from a moderately selective college without hearing that its black students are victims of institutional racism—notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of black students there will have been deliberately admitted with radically lower SAT scores than their white and Asian comrades—has been in a coma throughout his time there.

Read the whole thing. There is, of course, one group of Americans who are truly cowardly when it comes to matters of race: the Democrats, for stoking racial tensions, and conjuring alleged instances of racism out of thin air (see the New York Post cartoon 'controversy') to advance their political and social agendas, regardless of the harm done to race relations, and to black families.

Obama will divide, not unite, says UK equality chief

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, is likely to stir up a hornet’s nest after claiming that Barack Obama might prolong racial divisions in the US, rather than heal them, if he becomes President.

In an article entitled ‘Healing postponed’, which appears in the new issue of the UK current affairs magazine Prospect, Phillips - who is black - suggests more forcefully than many US commentators have that Obama’s success is in large part due to white guilt (they'll vote for him 'so long as they don't have to live next door to him'), and goes so far as to suggest that he’s taking advantage of racial divisions.

Phillips, whose observations on the failure of multiculturalism in Britain have drawn criticism from white ‘progressives’ such as odious London mayor Ken Livingstone, draws on many of the arguments put forward by Shelby Steele in his book on Obama, A Bound Man, in which he divides America’s black leaders into ‘challengers’ (Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson) whose power derives from real or imagined black victimhood, and bargainers (Cosby, Oprah).

Phillips, like Steel, portrays Obama as the quintessential bargainer, and claims that Obama is more Bill Clinton that JFK, writing:

Both challengers and bargainers offer a strategy that needs the racial divide to stay at the centre of US life. In truth, Obama may be helping to postpone the arrival of a post-racial America, and I think he knows it. If he wins, the cynicism may be worth it to him and his party.

But he takes issue with Steele’s assertion that underachievement by blacks is primarily the result of a lack of responsibility, characterised by violent rappers and feckless fathers, pointing to factors such as the effects of globalisation on poor communities.

And he also suggests (although not very convincingly) that domestic issues of race may have become less of an issue since 9/11, with Osama bin Laden representing a ‘new other’ for both blacks and whites.

Phillips writes that Britain hasn’t produced an Obama-like figure partly because it has proportionally much smaller black population, but also because ‘At a personal level, few people are as charismatic, capable and ruthless as this mixed-race political phenomenon.’

Read the whole thing. It's a serious contribution to the analysis of Obama-mania from a man who hasn’t been afraid to address difficult issues about race in his own country.

Thanks to Dan for linking.

Lieberman on the Democrats' treason

With the exception of Fox News, the media seems to be largely ignoring Joe Lieberman's speech at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies on Thursday, in which he slammed Democrats for abandoning the foreign policy tradition of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy. This is news suppression worthy of Soviet Russia, but hopefully reports of the speech will spread via the blogs. If you haven't seen it you can read the whole speech here. A couple of key paragraphs:

Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically-elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush.

Iraq has become the singular litmus test for Democratic candidates. No Democratic presidential primary candidate today speaks of America’s moral or strategic responsibility to stand with the Iraqi people against the totalitarian forces of radical Islam, or of the consequences of handing a victory in Iraq to al Qaeda and Iran. And if they did, their campaign would be as unsuccessful as mine was in 2006. Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus’ new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq, reluctant to acknowledge the progress we are now achieving, or even that that progress has enabled us to begin drawing down our troops there.

Why on earth is Lieberman still in the Democratic party? Some commenters at Hot Air see him as a possible running mate for Rudy, and others are pinning their hopes on a Lieberman/Zell Miller dream ticket. Meanwhile the New York Sun suspects that the speech is part of a build-up to a run by Michael Bloomberg.

NYT's exercise in damage exacerbation

After prevaricating for almost two weeks, the New York Times has admitted it made a ‘mistake’ in giving MoveOn.org a discounted rate for its now infamous ad attacking General Petraeus, and various executives have gone on the record to try and explain away the scandal. The trouble is, their explanations just don’t ring true.

A notable exception is the paper’s Public Editor, or ‘ombudsman’, Clark Hoyt, who in a strikingly honest editorial about the affair, confirms that MoveOn.org should indeed have paid $142,083, rather than $64,575, and questions whether the Times should have carried the ad in the first place. MoveOn has reluctantly agreed to pay the balance.

The row over the discount centres on the fact that the Times gave MoveOn a ‘standby’ rate for the ad. As Hoyt explains, customers who pay this rate ‘aren’t guaranteed what day their ad will appear, only that it will be in the paper within seven days’.

Such an arrangement would clearly have been of no use to MoveOn, whose ad could only have run on Monday September 10, the day Petraeus made his report to Congress. And while the Times would have us believe that the foul-up was due to some misunderstanding between MoveOn and a lowly and anonymous sales rep, it’s also inconceivable that senior ad people weren’t aware of the time-sensitive nature of the ad, and how much it was sold for.

Hoyt quotes Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, as saying that, while he regarded its contents as ‘rough’, he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office, and therefore acceptable for the Times to carry.

If Jespersen approved the ad then he must surely have been aware that it needed to run on the Monday, and it’s hard to believe that he wasn’t also aware of how much MoveOn was paying. I don’t know what kind of seniority Jespersen holds in the Times’ advertising hierarchy, but the buck clearly didn’t stop with that anonymous sales rep.

There’s also the issue of how much Rudi Giuliani paid, or should have paid, for his ad rebutting the attack on Petraeus, which ran in the Times the following Friday. Hoyt writes that Rudolph Giuliani ‘demanded space in the following Friday’s Times to answer MoveOn.org. He got it — and at the same $64,575 rate that MoveOn.org paid’.

So if Giuliani got the same deal as MoveOn, then he should now have to pay the higher rate as well, right? MoveOn’s Eli Pariser certainly thinks so. In a statement that stands as a masterpiece of self-indulgence and equivocation, Pariser blames the whole debacle on the Times, grudgingly agrees to stump up the extra $77,083 (which is hardly going to leave much of a hole in the organisation’s Soros-lined pockets) and calls on Giuliani to pay the higher fee, because he 'received exactly the same ad deal for the same price'.

However this doesn’t in fact appear to be the case. According to Giuliani, his people were given the ‘standby’ rate because the Times was unable to guarantee that the ad would run on Friday 14th. Speaking on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on the Thursday, Giuliani said: “We submitted the ad, and they wouldn’t tell us whether they were going to put it in tomorrow.”

In the event Giuliani’s ad did appear on the Friday. However, while we're not privy to the exact nature of the agreement between Giuliani’s people and the Times, if placement on that day wasn’t guaranteed – as it obviously was with MoveOn – then there’s no reason why Giuliani should have to pay any more than the standby rate.

Of course, both MoveOn and the Times would have you believe that piffling disputes over who paid how much for what are diverting attention away from the loftier issues that lie at the heart of this affair. In his statement, Pariser says the ‘dishonesty’ of the Bush Administration ‘is more worthy of the attention of the electorate and the media than the mistake of an advertising representative or the wording of an advertisement'.

And here’s Arthur ‘Pinch’ Sulzberger Jr, publisher of the Times, who claims he wasn’t aware of MoveOn’s ad until it appeared in the paper: “If we’re going to err, it’s better to err on the side of more political dialogue. ... Perhaps we did err in this case. If we did, we erred with the intent of giving greater voice to people.”

Fine words indeed – they could well be the Times' epitaph some day. Meanwhile the paper faces serious questions about the integrity and incompetence of senior executives and about its relationship with far-left organisations such as MoveOn, and could yet attract the interest of the Federal Election Commission. Likewise, for MoveOn, which disastrously miscalculated the outrage its ad would cause, and for those Democrats who failed to distance themselves from the ad, the matter isn’t likely to go away any time soon.

You’d think that, given almost two weeks, such an august body of wordsmiths could have come up with a rather more convincing account of what went on. As Thomas Lifson wrote at The American Thinker yesterday: ‘Once again, the Watergate maxim that "the cover-up is worse than the crime" is proving valid.’

Rudy takes down Hillary and MoveOn:

Whoever gets the Republican nomination, this is the sort of stuff that will sink Hillary:


Related: Kim Strassel at WSJ.com has a piece on the changing political fortunes in Washington. A key excerpt:

In short, the war is in a better place, and by extension those politicians who have supported the war are in a better place. The most obvious winners are congressional Republicans. The pressure they had faced to join with Democrats on withdrawal deadlines has now ebbed, primarily because Gen. Petraeus is himself advocating bringing troops back home – and from a position of strength. Those members who have fought the hardest for a principled stand in Iraq, say Sen. Joe Lieberman, are looking smarter, and will be able to tackle upcoming legislative battle – over the defense budget and a later war supplemental – with renewed firepower.

And as for the Democrats…

Their decision to throw in with the antiwar left has left them with nowhere to go now that the better news is rolling in. That much has been obvious by the speed with which they've been blowing through new political strategies – each one less convincing than the one before.

Do BBC listeners care about Larry Craig?

I've just listened to the news headlines on the BBC's Radio Five Live. The fourth item was the resignation of Idaho senator Larry Craig following his arrest in the men's toilets at Minneapolis-St Paul airport. The report was brief, but managed to squeeze in the facts that Craig was both a Republican and a 'family values campaigner' – facts which are irrelevant in terms of the case, but extremely relevant to creating the impression of hypocrisy.

I would fully expect the BBC to carry the story on its website, which is widely viewed in the US and elsewhere. But running the story on a domestic news bulletin is a different matter altogether; most listeners wouldn't have the faintest idea who Craig is, and the BBC would never dream about running a story about the indiscretions of, say, a French or German politician unless he was a senior minister.

The item was included simply because it was an opportunity to attack the Republicans that the BBC felt it couldn't pass up. You can just imagine the sniggering in the newsroom (the one with the poster of Bush as Hilter); no matter that the story will barely have registered with most listeners. Meanwhile I'm still waiting for the BBC to carry a story on the Hillary/Norman Hsu fundraising scandal.

Don Surber has further evidence of the media's double standards.

Snow tells it like it is

Tony Snow gives an eloquent defence of his boss, and of the War on Terror.



At one point Snow is asked by one of the White House press corps how he squares his view of Bush with the "unpopularity outside". Snow politely declines to give the obvious reply, which would have been something along the lines of: "Well I think you people have a lot to answer for in that respect."

The left are doubtless happy that Snow is stepping down as White House spokesman (they've refrained from the nastier attacks for now on account of his health problems), but I like to think that, like Obi-Wan Kenobi after he was slain by Darth Vader, Snow will now become more powerful than they can possibly imagine and will continue to harass them, whether by returning to TV or going into talk radio, or even as a senator. Radio Blogger has more.

Karl Rove gives his take on the Bush legacy at NRO. His conclusion:

I have come to understand true leadership leans into the wind. It tackles big challenges with uncertain outcomes rather than taking on simple, sure tasks. It does what is right, regardless of what the latest poll or focus group says. History demands much of America and its leaders and I am confident it will judge the 43rd president as a man more than worthy of the great office the American people twice entrusted to him.

Dems get the BBC's vote – again

Just in case anyone's in any doubt as to where the BBC's loyalties lie when it comes to US politics, here's further proof: of the Beeb's choice of six 'key stories' about the 2008 presidential race, three are positive stories about the Democrats, one's a neutral story on the Democrats YouTube debate, and two are negative stories about Republicans.








I'm baffled by what motivates the Beeb. It can't hope to cover the candidates and the issues in the same depth as the US media, and its reporting is unlikely to influence anyone outside of a few UK-based Americans, but still it cheers for the Democrats as if the election were tomorrow and too close to call, and it thinks it can still win over crucial swing voters.

Okay, I'm not that baffled.

Barack Obomba

Mitt Romney on Barack Obama: "He's gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week."

Thanks to Gateway Pundit for linking!

Do they want us to win?

The US House of Representatives has passed wiretap legislation that will make it harder for terrorists to kill people, and the New York Times can't conceal its disappointment, writing:

Under pressure from President Bush, the House gave final approval Saturday to changes in a terrorism surveillance program, despite serious objections from many Democrats about the scope of the executive branch’s new eavesdropping power.

By some accounts, since the wiretap program was placed under the jurisdiction of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts the amount of intelligence on al-Qaeda has fallen by two-thirds, because of legal obstacles being placed in the way of the security services by judges acting in the name of civil liberties and the reluctance of phone companies to cooperate for fear of being sued.

Now it appears that sanity is prevailing, and it's not surprising that the Times is upset – it did, after all, reveal the existence of the wiretap program back in 2005, just one of its many attempts to undermine the fight against terrorism.

Predictably the Democrats and the Times whine about hypothetical threats to privacy. What they never explain is why intelligence agencies that are stretched to the limits trying to prevent terrorist attacks and support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would want to waste time and resources spying on US citizens who aren't doing anything wrong.

Once again Democrats and their supporters in the media have made it clear that there's no price in terms of loss of life and destruction of property that they aren't willing to pay in order to make a political point.

Hugh Hewitt has a couple of good posts on the subject (you'll need to scroll down a little).

Obama-mania at the BBC

What is it with the BBC and Barack Obama? (Okay, that's a rhetorical question, and I'll answer it shortly). I posted earlier on Obama's fantastical claim that he would invade Pakistan to attack al-Qaeda terrorists, which was itself a ludicrous over-reaction to the criticism he's been getting for saying that he would be happy to meet with any tyrant or leader of a terror-sponsoring state who rolls out the red carpet for him.

Tonight the BBC has decided that Obama's desperate attempt at damage control is currently the most important news story in the world, making it the lead item on their worldwide news home page. Think about this for a moment: the BBC thinks that the most important story in the world tonight is what a man who almost certainly won't win the Democratic nomination, let alone the presidential election, might do if he were elected President – and he wouldn't be able to do much of anything before 2009.

In fairness to the BBC, you can imagine their confusion: they want Barack to win, because, although they're largely ignorant of American politics, and about what American people outside of Manhattan think, a) he's a Democrat, and b) he's got dark skin, which in and of itself is a Good Thing, and trumps even Hillary's gender (oh, and he also believes in 'hope', which presumably the other candidates don't). They don't understand that this story makes him look like an even bigger idiot than he did last week; all they can see is that it's a story about Barack Obama, so they feel they should run with it.

Of course, this isn't to say that the BBC won't throw their weight behind Hillary if and when she secures the nomination – just like all the good defeated Democrat candidates, the Beeb will support whichever Democrat is chosen, and will work tirelessly for their election.

In case you think I overstate the Beeb's bias towards Obama, and the Democrats in general, I tried a quick, and admittedly unscientific test, searching the BBC's website for stories about Obama, Hillary, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. Hillary came out way ahead, with 92 pages, not surprising considering how long she's been around. But here's the interesting thing: Obama, despite having been virtually unknown outside Illinois until a few months ago, returned 23 pages of results; Giuliani, despite having been mayor of New York for eight years, including during the aftermath of 9/11, returned 20 pages. Romney, who has a better chance of securing the Republican nomination than Obama does the Democrat nomination, returned just 10 pages.

No bias there then.

Obama gets tough

Via Hugh Hewitt: Barack Obama today threatens to send US troops into Pakistan to hunt down al-Qaeda terrorists, saying "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

This puts in a whole new light Obama's remarks in the YouTube debate last week, when he said he would meet, without precondition, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea – about as impressive a collection of high-value terrorist targets as you could wish to find. It's now clear that he wants to get 'up close and personal' with these guys so he can take them out with a single well-aimed blow, thus minimising the risk of collateral damage.

There's flip-flopping and there's flip-flopping.