Caveat Emptor - Look Beyond Mellifluous Rhetoric

A source reveals rebels associated with Hezballah and forces loyal to Muqtada's renegades are connected and have now been engaged by the Iraq government's own troops in Basara. If this report is correct it is further proof of the linkage of Iran and Syria's involvement in Iraq. Can we sit idly by or are we confident enough Iraq's own troops can be successful and do the fighting? (See 1 below.)

Has the Pope been able to accomplishment somewhat of a miracle as a result of prior talks with Saudi Arabia's ruler? (See 2 below.)

Jewish voters are historically Democrats save for their swing to Reagan and once again they seem to be encamped with the Democrat Party and their vote is fairly evenly divided between Obama and Clinton according to Rosner.

One would think logic would place them in the Republican column but logic seems to escape them as they think with their hearts. (See 3 below.)


Selwyn Duke writes that cultural affirmative action is alive and well. Long article but worth reading. (See 4 below.)

Professor Thomas Sowell writes Obama is the liberal who sought to associate with the more radical during his college days and Obama so stated in his first book. Sowell points out Obama has had an identity problem all along and has masked it with clever rhetoric.

Obama has consciously sought out those on the Far Left, his voting records attests to his convictions and yet he had to project a different persona once he chose to run for president and has been able to do so through rhetoric.

Sowell cites Shelby Steele's book; "A Bound Man" as further evidence of Obama's own racial and identification struggle and concludes it is no accident that Obama associates with and finds comfort in Rev. Wright's church.


Many months ago I wrote a piece and stated that should Obama be elected president America would wake up the next morning and ask: "We did what?"

Hillary is Liberal enough but with Obama and the current Congress this nation will swing even further in that direction. I believe Obama would seek to institute government dictated programs whose very purpose is to right actual and or perceived social injustice under the rubric of healing and change and the consequence will be more divisiveness. He will seek to raise taxes when we actually need tax reform and simplification because the deficit, as high as it is, is still the lowest as a percent of GDP in decades. He will seek to negotiate from a position of weakness and confused belief that you can do business with radical terrorists and achieve agreements that are trustworthy and bankable. Finally, as with President Clinton, much of the money to fund his ideas will come from the defense budget.

I write this because I have looked beyond Obama's mellifluous rhetoric and this is what I believe I have found.

"Caveat Emptor" (See 5 below.)

Dick


1)Lebanese Hizballah fights in Basra in first overt appearance on Iraqi battlefield


Military sources report that heavy fighting was sparked in the southern Iraqi oil hub city Tuesday, March 25, by the major clean-up campaign embarked on by Iraqi government forces under prime minister Nouri al Maliki‘s personal command. It was the governments first challenge to the dominant new armed force, the Hizballah Brigades of Iraq, which our sources report raised its head in mid-January in several parts of the country, including Baghdad. More than 20 dead and 58 injured reported in the first hours of the Iraqi clampdown. The Shiite town of Kut close to Basra is under curfew.

Some of Muqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army followers threatened civil revolt in solidarity with Hizballah. The two radical Shiite groups are closely allied.

2) Report: Saudi King plans interfaith summit for Jews, Muslims, Christians
By Yoav Stern


In a rare departure from government practice, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah is planning to convene an interfaith conference for Muslims, Christians and Jews, according to the Saudi-owned Al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper.

The call for religious dialog to include Jews is the first by the monarch, whose country's laws prohibit the importation of non-Muslim religious objects including Crucifixes and Stars of David.

The Saudi King said representatives of the three major monotheistic faiths need to work together "to defend humanity" from harm, speaking in an address he delivered in Riyadh on Monday.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat, which is published in London, quoted King Abdullah as saying he had discussed idea of a summit to promote religious dialog a number of months ago with the Pope.

"I proposed to him to address God by means of the commandments he commanded the monotheistic faiths in the bible, the New Testament, and the Koran," the king said.

The monarch said he is disturbed by the breakdown of the family unit across the world, as well as the damaged to the principle of "loyalty to humanity."

"I plan, god willing, to hold summits - not just one - so as to hear the opinion of my Muslim brothers all over the world. We will start to meet with our brothers in every faith I have mentioned - the bible and the New Testament," he said.

King Abdullah said the kingdom's top clerics had given him the green light to pursue the idea.

3) Jewish Democrats: Half pro-Clinton, half pro-Obama
By Shmuel Rosner

You will keep hearing many stories and analysts questioning Obama's standing among Jews. A great story, full of drama, with one tiny problem: Where's the proof?

1.

This new Gallup poll, focused on the attention on the Democratic Jewish voters and their preferences, is first and foremost proof that the Jewish vote counts, and that in the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama it plays a distinct role.

As I wrote more than once, some aspects of the debates related to Obama?s background and advisors and true beliefs, originated and culminated in the American Jewish community. For example, the role former Clinton advisor Rob Malley is playing in Obama's campaign, on which I wrote: "This specific showdown over Obama's candidacy is a dispute between Jews."

So, the people of Gallup have decided to dedicate a poll to this small, influential, and unique group of voters. They show a slight preference for Clinton over Obama, 48% to 43%. This should not come as a huge surprise to readers of this column: "Many Jews would vote for Obama, especially the younger generation. With all the brouhaha about him and Israel, and Farrakhan, and the smear campaign, and the emails and all the rest, Obama has many Jewish followers, and will have even more if he wins the nomination."

2.As the exit polls have shown in the past, Obama has won the Jewish vote in a number of states. He faired well in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and was able to overcome Clinton in California.

With the Gallup poll in hand he can now say that the effort to woo the Jewish vote has paid off. Based on interviews with 348 Jewish Democratic voters, the poll tells us that like the rest of the Democratic field, "So far this month, all Democratic voters regardless of religious affiliation are equally divided (46% each) in their nomination preferences between Clinton and Obama".

3.The poll is very sketchy and does not have many other details with which to try and draw further conclusions about the Jewish voters it is talking about. It does contain, though, comparisons to other religious groups.

"Clinton does better among Catholic Democratic voters, leading Obama by nearly 20 percentage points" and Protestants, similarly to Jews, "divide about equally between Obama (47%) and Clinton (44%)". Democrats with no religious preference prefer Obama (54% to 40%), as do "those who practice non-Christian religions (61% to 32%)". The latter, some will definitely point out, include the Muslim voters, who while they may be few in number, are a group that can play an important role in some crucial states.

4. You will keep hearing many stories and analysts questioning the standings of Obama among Jews. Here are some examples from the last couple of days:

Obama Walks a Difficult Path as He Courts Jewish Voters reported the New York Times. And this commentator wrote that "If I were advising Barack Obama, I would make a concerted effort to woo Jewish America back into his camp". And finally, this piece from UPI is quoting the not-exactly bi-partisan American Thinker which states that "Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama is having a difficult time connecting with Jewish voters".

A great story, full of drama, with this one tiny problem: is it even true?

5. One last word of caution: We do not know yet the extent to which the Wright affair will influence the Jewish vote (the Gallup poll, though, can give some indication that it did not hurt badly Obama so far). I believe that John McCain has a better chance of gaining more Jewish voters than his two Republican predecessors (Bush & Bush) did, and I also believe that future surprises might change the tendencies of some of the Jewish voters.

And there is another question: What will the half of Jewish Democratic voters that prefer Clinton over Obama do if he becomes the nominee? Will they vote for him, like most Democrats will definitely do, will some of them defect, or will many do no such thing? We cannot answer this question with the data that's available now.

However, I think that most of those believing that Obama has a real problem with the Jewish vote are those who want him to have such a problem. They have no way of proving it, and tend to ignore the great promise that's inherent to the Obama candidacy from the narrow Jewish point of view. "A promise no Jewish liberal can ignore."

4) Cultural Affirmative-action
By Selwyn Duke

In a way, I prefer the old, overt affirmative action. While it was government-sanctioned discrimination, at least it was, in some measure, more honest than our cultural affirmative action. There is such a thing. It's when people in the market and media privilege others -- sometimes unconsciously -- based upon the latter's identification with a "victim group."

Probably a majority of Americans in some degree or other practice cultural affirmative action. They have the best of intentions, many feeling an obligation to right history's wrongs. And they point to continuing disparities disadvantaging blacks as a group. So they make an extra effort to be sensitive and maybe once in awhile the ones with power even let their thumb rest on the scale when it comes to redressing past grievances

This phenomenon is what Geraldine Ferraro referred to recently when she addressed Barack Obama's meteoric political rise and said, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." Pundits have condemned her for this unfashionable utterance, but it's no insight. It's a truth hiding in plain sight.

What do you think Bill Clinton was referring to when he said that he wanted his cabinet to "look like America," meritocracy or quota orthodoxy? Yet Clinton isn't alone; he merely gave voice to common practice. Would Joycelyn Elders (the poster girl for AA) have been Surgeon General if she weren't a black woman? Would Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sandra Day O'Connor have ascended to the Supreme Court and Janet Reno been Attorney General if they weren't female? And, as Ferraro noted herself, she would never have been the 1984 vice-presidential candidate but for her fairer-sex status.

Cultural affirmative action manifests itself in all arenas, not just politics. A perfect example is Michelle Wie, the female golfer who set her sights on tackling the men's tour. Based mainly on braggadocio and a fawning media bent on portraying her as an Amazon golfer who would teach the boys a lesson or two, she was granted entry into numerous PGA tournaments, even though untold numbers of male golfers were more deserving. Of course, some will point out that she is quite gifted. Others will say that the market spoke.

That is my point.

Sure, Wie is no duffer, just as the other folks I mentioned have their talents; Ginsberg, O'Connor and Reno know how to negotiate the law, Rice and Ferraro understand politics and Elders can provide comic relief. Yet ability wasn't the factor most relevant to their rise. As for the market, that is precisely the entity that effects cultural affirmative action. People glommed onto Wie at least partially because they believe that breaking down sex barriers is healthy and that her success would have represented another step forward in female/male equality. Cognizant of this "market," politicians, media outlets, and others know that if their hires and appointees don't "look like America," America -- or at least its squeakiest wheels -- will look at them with suspicion.

As for Obama, I personally know of a white man in Illinois who supports him because he " ... always wanted to see one [a black man or a woman] in the White House."

Taboo

This may or may not be a wise or just practice for voters. But as with most other aspects of cultural affirmative action, we are not allowed to notice it. It is taboo. The idea that Obama's race is an asset is so true that even the scoffers sometimes unwittingly affirm it. Writing at MercuryNews.com, Ruben Navarrette characterized Ferraro's comments as "bitter, envious and foolish" and wrote,

"As Republican strategist and CNN contributor Leslie Sanchez noted, it takes chutzpah for someone who herself benefited from the politics of gender to accuse someone else of benefiting from the politics of race."


Note that Sanchez did not say that Ferraro was wrong; she simply implied it was hypocritical for her to level such an accusation.

Yet denial of the obvious isn't uncommon. I heard both Bill O'Reilly and Dick Morris (whose predictions usually don't match the reliability of a weather forecast) both dismiss Ferraro's assertion. How can politics wonks be so blind? Or is it that they will not see?

It depends on the individual. Some people are so imbued with leftist orthodoxy that they interpret everything through the black=oppressed/white=privileged prism and divide their world into victims and victimizers. By their lights, the idea that a social phenomenon could benefit the former is too preposterous to consider.

They may be doing no favor to blacks with this attitude. Writing in the Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell notes a just-published book:

A very interesting book published this week shows why. In Racial Paranoia (Basic Books, $26/£15.99), the University of Pennsylvania anthropologist John L. Jackson Jr suggests that extravagant theories of white racism - from the widespread Aids rumour to Louis Farrakhan's allegation that the US actually blew up the levees to cause the deadly New Orleans floods during Hurricane Katrina - have their roots in the decorous language that mostly white leaders have invented for talking about race.

The US has not managed to eliminate racism, Mr Jackson thinks, but it has succeeded in eliminating racist talk. Remarks the slightest bit "insensitive" draw draconian punishment. White people, because they feel thoroughly oppressed by this regime, assume that it must be some kind of "gift" to minorities, especially blacks.

It is not. It is more like a torment. It renders the power structure more opaque to blacks than it has ever been, leaving what Mr Jackson calls a "scary disconnect between the specifics of what gets said and the hazy possibilities of what kinds of things are truly meant". If the historic enemies of your people suddenly began talking about you in what can fairly be called a secret code, how inclined would you be to trust in their protestations of generosity?


But then, to paraphrase George Orwell, in every age there is a big, uncomfortable truth that no one dares mention. In many cases, this simply means lying, paying homage to the dogma of the day so as to avoid becoming anathema. Yet in other cases the lie takes a more subtle form.

Discerning an unfashionable truth presents one with a dilemma. He either must profess it, which can mean career destruction and ostracism -- being loathed by others -- or he can refuse to do so, which, if he is sincere of heart, can mean he will loathe himself. In other words, if he withholds it, he may feel like a phony; worse still, if asked about it, he may feel compelled to lie. The latter especially makes it hard to like yourself.

So many choose a different route: They lie to themselves. It isn't difficult; all that is necessary is to deny the matter its day in your mind's court. If you simply refuse to examine all the relevant facts -- if you avoid searching for the truth -- there is little danger of finding it. It's that famous human ability known as rationalization.

Perhaps you thought affirmative action was in its death throes, with all the state referenda and court rulings against it. We have the cultural variety, and it will be with us a while longer. Maybe long enough for people to be able to talk about it.

5) The Audacity of Rhetoric
By Thomas Sowell

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?

While many whites may be annoyed by Jeremiah Wright's words, a year from now most of them will probably have forgotten about him. But many blacks who absorb his toxic message can still be paying for it, big-time, for decades to come.

Why should young blacks be expected to work to meet educational standards, or even behavioral standards, if they believe the message that all their problems are caused by whites, that the deck is stacked against them? That is ultimately a message of hopelessness, however much audacity it may have.