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Friday, March 21, 2008
Obama’s awakening comes too late, and it slights America
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Liberal apologists who grasp the devastating impact the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has on Barack Obama’s chances of being elected president of the United States this year join the candidate in explanation and excuses. Sorry. No cigar.
About some things most Americans have no sense of humor. The anti-American rhetoric of Obama’s preacher ranks high among them. Sure, no member of the congregation is responsible for the loopy, inflammatory or racist rhetoric of the man in the pulpit. But 20 years? You sit there for 20 years with your children, and just now, when the world sees documentary evidence of his extremism, do you condemn “the statements of Rev. Wright that have caused such controversy.”
But of course. Absolutely. Those particular words have probably killed his chances of being elected president of the United States this year. Condemning them now, while necessary, is a waterboarded declaration.
That’s not to say the sentiment’s not genuine. Public reaction may very well have informed him, for the first time, that the sort of recreational anti-Americanism that ordinarily goes unchallenged when it emanates from “this nation’s original sin of slavery” is deeply offensive to the Middle America that sees an entirely different America.
This has been a major sticking point with the left for decades now. It’s that pervasive view that America is evil, that its institutions are corrupt and that unless constrained by international laws, codes, treaties and mores, we will pillage and destroy under the guise of liberty and defile the world’s nest to satisfy our lust for oil and greed for consumables.
So it is that the Constitution becomes a reference document to be considered in the context of the laws of other nations. So it is that the Kyoto treaty becomes the document needed to keep us from contributing an “unfair” share of the world’s greenhouse gases. So it is that international opinion should define when and how America acts in its national security interests.
And when we don’t heel to the policies advocated by the left we, in their view, invite disaster — 9/11, for example. The American left in the black community adds the additional grievance of “this nation’s original sin” as moral justification for rhetoric such as that uttered by Wright, rhetoric said to be standard fare in the pulpits of some black churches.
If it is, it’s a corrosive invitation to see America as a vile and irredeemable society unworthy of engagement.
Obama cites his own journey as evidence that Wright’s view is wrong. “I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.” Wright’s “profound mistake” was to speak “as if our society was static, as if no progress has been made.” But, said Obama on Tuesday, “what we know — what we have seen — is that America can change.”
While that’s undeniably so, that optimism contrasts with the rhetoric most often heard where race and liberalism converge. Even his wife, Michelle, a woman who has enjoyed the richness and privilege accorded the elite in America, says now that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.” The first time? Stunning.
Obama asserted the obvious, too, that the world is not static; societies move. Yet his Tuesday speech was yesterday’s liberalism earnestly and eloquently presented as a call for a move beyond race. It was a rehash of arguments aired repeatedly and debated fully for decades in defense of programs to enact or preserve racial preferences in hiring, admissions and contracting, for example, and to pour more public money into failed approaches to education. And, of course, it comes with the requisite trashing of the greedy corporations that parade through neighborhoods whimsically shuttering mills and sending the jobs overseas “for nothing more than a profit.”
He sees a nation, too, that fills emergency rooms with the sick and unprotected because they “don’t have the power to overcome the special interests in Washington.”
Who could love that America?
But that is not the one most Americans see and know.
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Excuses, a new mom, troop tactics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
State Rep. Ron Sailor Jr. (D-Decatur) has the second-best excuse ever for missing 91 percent of recorded votes in this year’s legislative session. First best: “I was dead.” Second best: “I was engaged in a federal effort to catch other corrupt officials.” A minister, Sailor helped people he thought were drug dealers launder money through a phony church.
How does a conservative or Republican know he/she is on the wrong track? The wrong people love what you’re doing. U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings elicits this reaction from the president of the National Education Association teachers union to her proposal to relax No Child Left Behind provisions in some states, possibly including Georgia, so that fewer schools are designated as failing: “This is something good, something we’ve been advocating.” NCLB is toast anyway if Democrats control Congress and the White House next year.
Actress Halle Berry and male model Gabriel Aubry have a daughter, her first child. The two don’t plan to marry, but she wants you to know that they feel fully committed to each other. Semi-fully, anyway. Playing a mother in her latest movie helped convince her to be one.
Thank Georgia Supreme Court justices Harold Melton, Harris Hines, George H. Carley and Hugh P. Thompson for failing to cave in to candlelight-vigil justice in the case of Troy Anthony Davis, murderer of Savannah police officer Mark Allen MacPhail in 1989. Recanted testimony that is suspect or consists of “a carefully worded and vague account that can be represented as stating one thing when it might very well state the opposite” (a phrase from the majority opinion) is no reason to question his original conviction —- despite the PR effort to get him a new trial.
Headline: “Migrants fear changes in Georgia.” Would that be legal immigrants or illegal? —- ‘cause they’re different.
Some Decatur school board members are “threatening” to withdraw a request to become a charter school system if the General Assembly passes House Bill 881, which would set up a state alternative for granting charters and would establish that the money follows the child. What’s with these low-level board members making demands on the state? The Grady board did it, too, insisting that they’d hold their breath until the state agreed to a list of demands. If the Decatur board decides charter status is not the route to go, give it up. No hard feelings. Do it.
Gwinnett expands its tax-giveaway program to business. Giveaways ought to be illegal anywhere in metro Atlanta. Growth is coming. State and local governments should be giving business, and the rest of us, fair treatment, good service and a qualified work force. Incentivize development in the boondocks, where it otherwise won’t go.
Relocating the Georgia Department of Corrections to the old Tift College campus on I-75 in Forsyth is a smart move, even if the initial cost to prepare the campus is $50 million. It helps traffic congestion in Atlanta and it spreads growth around the state. Move one major department to Augusta, Macon, Savannah and Columbus, one small department to Albany, Rome, Valdosta and the Statesboro-Dublin area. Leave storefront operations near the Capitol, to be immediately available to the governor and General Assembly. A state department could save or grow lots of cities. No need, really, for them to be here.
DeKalb CEO Vernon Jones picked up serious primary opposition this week: former state Rep. Jim Martin of Atlanta. Good guy, but he starts off sounding just like national Democrats: “I believe we should respect our troops by using them more effectively and taking better care of them when they come home.” Democrats have decided a version of that line is the safe way to frame their opposition on Iraq.
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