Blithe Spirit, the Blog

Reporters swoon at Obama:

John Harris, editor of Politico.com, has said he was forced to put certain reporters sent to cover Mr. Obama through a rehab program after they returned to the office. Back in January, NBC News anchor Brian Williams noted that Lee Cowan, the reporter NBC had sent to cover Mr. Obama, had told him that “it is hard to stay objective covering this guy.”

Somehow, however:

Some media reevaluations of Mr. Obama are now taking place, fueled in part by revelations such as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that are hard to ignore. But the simple truth is that Mr. Obama has had a free media ride for so long that he effectively wrapped up the Democratic nomination before any of his political weaknesses were generally known.

John Fund delivering this, for the excellent Wall St. Journal Political Diary.

A little (not much) bold thinking to demonstrate that Obama has been delivering nonsense to gullible Dimmycrats:

In the form of a few penetrating questions:

1, On what unifying principle will he bring us together, as he has been saying from the start, besides general weariness at political squabbling?

2. How long will avoidance of squabbling last when interests are concerned, and they always are?  He means to achieve what’s wanted by some but not by others and in the process bring us together?  Bull.

3. Meanwhile, leaving that question unanswered, what are his inclinations?  What side will he argue spontaneously, as it were, of the hot questions, as in pacifism (rampant among Dimmycrats, to be sure) over security?  Gun rights vs. gun banning (hot potato that Dems leave alone)?  Freedom (of speech and market, to name two) vs. government control?

— He’s a blank slate in many respects, seeking to repair with his brash self-confidence his woeful lack of experience.  But those pesky inclinations are already surfacing —

more more more

John Fund quoting a Dem superdelegate skeptical about a joint Obama-Clinton ticket and the baleful Clinton Effect:

“If Hillary were the vice president you would have Bill rattling around the West Wing and Obama would need a food taster for four years. No way.”

And not checking for excessive calories either.

Father Pfleger may be a crusader, but he also knows what side his bread is buttered on:

Rev. Michael Pfleger, the politically active leader of St. Sabina Church . . .  gave Obama’s campaign $1,500 between 1995 and 2001, including $200 in April 2001, about three months after Obama announced $225,000 in grants to St. Sabina programs.

P. defends himself flimsily:

“At a time when less people vote than ever, I don’t think pastors should be silent on politics,” Pfleger said.

He wants to say fewer, not less.  I am shocked at that mis-usage more than at the money-passing, but am becoming inured to such violence to the king’s English. 

And to elementary logic.

Didn’t Obama the other day on the Meet Russert show condemn Hillary (remember her?) for promoting a summertime gas-tax moratorium, calling it “a political response . . . “ — pausing, searching, as he does, and me wondering in amazement, he’s going to say “economic” problem? (which it most surely is) — and finally completing his thought: “. . . that we have neglected for decades”!

Does he mean there’s no such thing as a political answer to a longstanding problem?  What does he think the 1965 voting rights law was? 

He’s a whippersnapper who should go back to Columbia or Harvard for remediation.

Rev. Thomas Doyle, O.P., the canon lawyer who left a great job in Washington years ago to pursue a life in opposition to clerical abusers, commends Pope Benedict XVI for his facing up to the problem:

It is well worth noting that Pope Benedict said more and did more relative to the worldwide plague of clergy sexual abuse in five days than his predecessor did in two decades.

His predecessor, John Paul II, kept his counsel on the matter for nine years after learning of it “in detail” in 1984.  From then to his death in 2005, he mentioned it publicly 11 times.  Requests for meetings with victims and victims’ groups were routinely ignored.

For all practical purposes, the victims of the worst scandal in church’s history since the dreadful days of the Spanish Inquisition were non-persons as far as the Vatican was concerned. Not so with Benedict XVI.

For that matter, Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican office for defending orthodoxy, “was interviewed and gave the usual party line” in 2002, when the Boston revelations surfaced, calling media coverage of abuse “a planned campaign . . . intentional, manipulated, [motivated by] a desire to discredit the Church.”

But by 2004, he was considerably more open, meeting for two hours with Judge Anne Burke of Chicago and two other members of the U.S. Bishops’ National Review Board who “by-passed” the bishops and came calling on him.  Three American lay people talked, and the cardinal listened, as Burke described the meeting at a Voice of the Faithful gathering in Indianapolis in 2005.

Most dramatically, in 2006 the Vatican put a lid on the infamous Marciel Maciel-Degollado, founder of the wealthy and powerful Legionaries of Christ.  Ratzinger had been blamed for putting one on the investigation of Maciel, but this had been John Paul’s doing.  When Maciel died last January in Houston, he was buried privately, significantly without comment by the Vatican.

For a compelling account of the sordid Maciel doings, see Jason Berry and Gerald Renner’s Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II (Free Press, 2003), in which Ratzinger makes a cameo appearance, by the way, in which he is not sympathetic to the former Legionaries complainers about Maciel’s abuse.

The pope’s pointed commentary during his visit, broken out by Doyle in 10 parts, including his admitting that the problem “sometimes was very badly handled” is

a long overdue indication that the pope and hopefully the Vatican bureaucracy, are beginning to comprehend the profound ramifications of the legacy of clergy sexual abuse and hierarchical duplicity in the ecclesial culture

It is not, however, as some have said, “a sign that the crisis is passed and the Church can now move on.”  To think so, Doyle said, is “a combination of wishful thinking and naiveté.”  Suspicion of official church statements about it “will not be turned around in a week.”

There’s more more more . . .

Marcial Froelke Coburn begins her August, 2001, Chicago Mag story this way:

At 55, Bill Ayers, the notorious sixties radical, still carries a whiff of that rock ‘n’ roll decade: the oversize wire-rim glasses that, in a certain light, reveal themselves as bifocals; a backpack over his shoulder—not some streamlined, chic job, but a funky backpack-of-the-people, complete with a photo button of abolitionist John Brown pinned to one strap.

Yet he is also a man of the moment. For example: There is his cell phone, laid casually on the tabletop of this neighborhood Taylor Street coffee shop, and his passion for double skim lattes. In conversation, he has an immediate, engaging presence; he may not have known you long but, his manner suggests, he’s already fascinated. Then there is his quick laugh and his tendency to punctuate his comments by a tap on your arm.

Ugh to the tap on arm.  Yuck.

Double yuck, however, to the pic of Ayers standing on the flag, which is what’s going to be run in lots of places and in fact was just run on Hannity’s show on Fox.

He’s a friend of O.?  Held one of his first fund-raisers in Hyde Park?  Someone he met at Aldi’s?  Questions, we got questions.

Obama’s exaggerations, doubletalk, and systematic deception are “unappealing,” but also “unexceptional” for the politico on the campaign trail, says City Journal’s Fred Siegel in The Australian, but he fingers O. as a special case, with reference to his Chicago base:

What makes it different is that there’s not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient.

Obama, far more than the others, is the “judge me by what I say and not what I do” candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.

Look to the Chicago Connection and his “conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics,” says Siegel, citing its “political and cultural tribalism,” where

racial reform has meant that the incumbent mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jackson, Jeremiah Wright and Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics.

Siegel cites John Kass’s “Chicago way” and says:

At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard law way, a product of it.

Why did Chi pols anoint him?  To make themselves look good.

Obama first played a perfuming role as a state senator. His mentor, Emil Jones, the machine-made president of the Senate, allowed him to sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty of pork to Jones’s district. When asked about pork-barrel spending, Jones famously replied: “Some call it pork; I call it steak.”

He’s Jones’s boy — word used not as in Deep South but as at City Hall.   Tony Allen-Mills in The Times of London:

Long before Barack Obama launched his campaign for the White House, when he was considering a run for the US Senate in 2003, he paid an intriguing visit to a former Chicago sewers inspector who had risen to become one of the most influential African-American politicians in Illinois.

“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”

According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.

The father-son motif arises:

Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”

Or, per Todd Spivak in the Houston Press, Jones became “Obama’s kingmaker”:

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.’”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

As a state senator, “he made a specialty of voting present,” says Siegel.  But in the U.S. senate, he was “such a down-the-line partisan that, according to Congressional Quarterly, in the past two years he has voted with the Democrats more often than did the party’s majority leader, Harry Reid.”

Likewise, for all his talk of post-racialism, Obama has played, with the contrivance of the press, traditional South Side Chicago racial politics.  . . . .   [W]hites who are at odds with, or who haven’t delivered for, Chicago politicians can be obliquely accused of racism on the flimsiest basis, but pillars of local black politics such as Wright, with his exclusivist racial theology, are beyond criticism.

More more more is at this site.

This blogger was wondering where he’d seen this item before:

[Oprah] Winfrey was a member of Trinity United from 1984 to 1986, and she continued to attend off and on into the early to the mid-1990s. But then she stopped. A major reason—but by no means the only reason—was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Even the published source looked familiar:

Oprah’s decision to distance herself came as a surprise to Wright, who told Christianity Today in 2002 that when he would “run into her socially … she would say, ‘Here’s my pastor!’ “

Then it clicked.  This piece on one my favorite blogs that ran in all its glory on March 17, seven short weeks ago, is where I read:

“She has broken with the [traditional faith],” [Rev. Wright] says. “She now has this sort of ‘God is everywhere, God is in me, I don’t need to go to church, I don’t need to be a part of a body of believers, I can meditate, I can do positive thinking’ spirituality. It’s a strange gospel. It has nothing to do with the church Jesus Christ founded.”

From Christianity Today of 4/1/02.  Yes. The item drew 585 “views,” or hits, since then, for roughly a dozen a day, by far the second-highest draw of my 1,385 posts.  (Highest is this, about Rev. Donald McGuire, the convicted molester, as retreat-giver, with 615 hits.)

Good catch, Newsweek!

Have liberal Catholics lost the fight?

He may not have been thinking about it at the time, but Pope Benedict, in the course of his recent U.S. visit may have dealt a knockout blow to the liberal American Catholicism that has challenged Rome since the early 1960s. He did so by speaking frankly and forcefully of his “deep shame” during his meeting with victims of the Church’s sex-abuse scandal. By demonstrating that he “gets” this most visceral of issues, the pontiff may have successfully mollified a good many alienated believers — and in the process, neutralized the last great rallying point for what was once a feisty and optimistic style of progressivism.

Vatican Council II had its “revolutionary impact,” but Pope John Paul II, “a charismatic conservative . . . refused to budge on the left’s demands.”  Liberal bishops were “swept away,” and “the heads at Call to Action grayed” as their movement faltered, writes David Van Biema in Time Mag.

Then came the “monstrous reprieve” provided by the clergy sex scandals.

[T]he old anger returned, crystallizing around the battle-cry “They just don’t get it.”

But then came Benedict to the U.S.  His visit “changed the dynamic” through his “forthright response” to the problem.  “It’s a new ball game,” said Peter Steinfels, the Commonweal Mag-NY Times editor and writer now with a Catholic think tank.

So goes this essay, which summarizes and simplifies and for some may lay the groundwork for further summarizing and simplifying in man’s never-satisfied zest for finding Answers to Everything.

Mark Steyn does Obama’s Philadelphia speech, refusing to accept comparisons with “the Gettysburg Address, or FDR’s First Inaugural, or JFK’s religion speech, or [per Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books] Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860.”

It was never a great speech. It was a simulacrum of a great speech written to flatter gullible pundits into hailing it as the real deal. It should be “required reading in classrooms,” said Bob Herbert in the New York Times; it was “extraordinary” and “rhetorical magic,” said Joe Klein in Time – which gets closer to the truth: As with most “magic,” it was merely a trick of redirection.

With it he seemed to make Jeremiah Wright “vanish into thin air,  Having “sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years,” he

looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes?

This is his rhetoric problem.

The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama’s adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the senator’s speechifying “magic” came from Jeremiah Wright himself. “He’s a politician,” said the reverend. “He says what he has to say as a politician. … He does what politicians do.”

It’s this comment that finally got O’s dander up:

“What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I’m about knows that – that I am about trying to bridge gaps and that I see the – the commonality in all people.”

Sure.  And he’s still sore, says the Mrs., who

told a rally in Durham, North Carolina, on Friday that only her husband’s desire to change US politics had helped him to control his feelings: “Barack is always thinking three steps ahead – what do we need to do to make change.”

Her husband was thinking “I can’t let my ego, my anger, my frustration get in the way of the ultimate goal,” she said.

She’s “a bizarre mix of condescension and grievance – like Teresa Heinz Kerry with a chip on her shoulder,” says Steyn.

But the common thread to her rhetoric is its antipathy to what she calls “corporate America.” Perhaps for his next Gettysburg Address the senator will be saying, “I could no more disown my wife than I could disown my own pastor. Oh, wait … .”