House of Eratosthenes

3. Rev. Wright is like “an old uncle” and his church “not particularly controversial.” Those who insist otherwise are using “snippets” and “loops” out of context for cheap political advantage. But should the Rev. repeat his serial lunacies at the National Press Club on national television, and insult the sympathetic liberal DC press corps, then he is suddenly expendable and inexplicably not the same pastor that Barack Obama knew for 20 years — and so now to be freely derided as a “spoiler.”

4. It is assumed that Barack Obama’s exotic middle name Hussein can provide authentic multicultural fides and hope of projecting a new, more globally sympathetic American image abroad, but to voice ‘Hussein’ aloud is assumed to be nefarious.
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6. John McCain can be written off as “losing his bearings” and wanting U.S. troops in Iraq for “100 years.” But to repeat the fact that a Hamas advisor has praised Obama, or that one of his own foreign policy advisors has met with officials of that terrorist organization, is “divisive,” “a distraction,” and the “old politics as usual.” McCain’s fuzzy references to Shiite/Sunni terrorist cooperation are signs of his senility. Obama’s repeated confusion over how many states there are in the Union (48? or is it 58?) is proof of exhaustion and lack of sleep.

Quite a list. And there’s more.

Rich Lowry, on the same subject — the bossiness that seems to be inherent to Sen. Obama and his followers, specifically with regard to the word “distract”:

IF Barack Obama gets his way, the Oxford English Dictionary will update its definition of “distraction” by the end of the campaign: “Diversion of the mind, attention, etc., from any object or course that tends to advance the political interests of Barack Obama.”

After his blowout win in North Carolina last week, Obama turned to framing the rules of the general election ahead, warning in his victory speech of “efforts to distract us.” The chief distracter happens to be the man standing between Obama and the White House, John McCain, who will “use the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election.”

Pat Buchanan, on the same subject yet again — and he cuts straight to the quick of the matter:

Here are the words that sent [Geraldine Ferraro] to the scaffold.

“If Obama was a white man he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up with the concept.”
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The attack on Ferraro comes out of a conscious strategy of the Obama campaign — to seek immunity from attack by smearing any and all attackers as having racist motives. When Bill Clinton dismissed Obama’s claim to have been consistently antiwar as a “fairy tale,” and twinned Obama’s victory in South Carolina with Jesse Jackson’s, his statements were described as tinged with racism.

Early this week, Harvard Professor Orlando Patterson’s sensitive nostrils sniffed out racism in Hillary’s Red Phone ad, as there were no blacks in it. Patterson said it reminded him of D.W. Griffith’s pro-KKK “Birth of a Nation,” a 1915 film.

What Barack’s allies seem to be demanding is immunity, a special exemption from political attack, because he is African-American. And those who go after him are to be brought up on charges of racism, as has Bill Clinton, Ed Rendell and now Geraldine Ferraro.

But we aren’t done yet. You really must run, not walk, to the nearest acquaintance of yours with a Rush 24/7 membership and get hold of the podcast from Friday, May 16, first hour, time index 31:09.7 (without commercials) and forward from there by a minute or two.

There, you’ll find an impressively complete list of things…about which we cannot talk…concerning Senator Barack Obama. As Rush Limbaugh points out, it all started with his ears. Barack was sensitive to comments made about his ears. And now…it’s up to…well, you just have to listen. It’s a lot more stuff than you might think.

Like Buchanan pointed out, it seems what they really seek is immunity. From, I guess, “distractions.”

Mark Steyn has another observation to make:

President Bush was in Israel the other day and gave a speech to the Knesset…Sen. Obama was not mentioned in the text. No Democrat was mentioned, save for President Truman, in the context of his recognition of the new state of Israel when it was a mere 11 minutes old.

Nonetheless, Barack Obama decided that the president’s speech was really about him, and he didn’t care for it…And, taking their cue from the soon-to-be nominee’s weirdly petty narcissism, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Co. piled on to deplore Bush’s outrageous, unacceptable, unpresidential, outrageously unacceptable and unacceptably unpresidential behavior.

Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. Here’s what the president said:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

It says something for Democrat touchiness that the minute a guy makes a generalized observation about folks who appease terrorists and dictators the Dems assume: Hey, they’re talking about me. Actually, he wasn’t – or, to be more precise, he wasn’t talking only about you.

New York Sun’s editorial on that…

The speed with which Democrats recognized themselves in that particular paragraph is telling. The president later said he wasn’t talking about them, but they insisted he was. “It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack,” Senator Obama said. “George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the president’s extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel.”

In fact Senator Obama has promised to meet with the leaders of Iran, who are terrorists, and with the leader of North Korea, which is on the State Department’s terrorist list and which provided nuclear assistance to the terror-sponsoring state of Syria. If Mr. Obama doesn’t think the leaders of Iran are terrorists, he’s really not ready to answer that 3 a.m. phone call in the White House. To his credit Mr. Obama has said he won’t meet with Hamas, but his promise to meet with Hamas’s masters in Tehran undermines that position, as both Senator McCain and Senator Clinton have pointed out.

Or as The Anchoress put it…

[President Bush has] never deviated from his message – the press just hasn’t been letting you hear it. Now that it got out, today, unfiltered, it sure has infuriated the left and the press. What is very interesting to me is how quickly the headlines and stories have moved away from Bush and any full-text, contextual display of the speech to making it all about Obama. Yes…it really is all about the O!

Completely escaping the attention of both the Dems and the press is the fact that Bush mentioned appeasement and they all jumped up and said, “hey, Obama resembles that remark.” Badly, badly played, Dems. McCain, are you watching?

She continues the next day, with a money quote…

If I were a journalist, I’d be embarrassed. I’d also worry a little about backing a candidate with such a crystalline jaw that even when a jab is not directly meant for him, he still hits the mat. Obama’s tendency to carry and play the worlds tiniest violin – boohoo everybody is so mean to me and I’m so good – is getting old real fast. Did he not realize how much he sounds like whining Hillary?

So to recap, democrats instructed us, or rather journalists instructed us…does it really matter which one it is, at this point. Anyway, they instructed us to be really outraged at President Bush’s remarks which did not call out Barack Obama by name, or even indicate him, or target him, or focus on him — instead, the remarks were focused on the failed policy of appeasement.

“Obama resembles that remark” is exactly right. We were supposed to become outraged, unhinged and offended on behalf of the Obamessiah. Who made a point of also being outraged, unhinged and offended should anyone claim that he’s an appeaser. Well, which is it? Is he not an appeaser, and we should be outraged, unhinged and offended should anyone imply that he is? Or he is one, and we should be outraged, unhinged and offended on his behalf should anyone challenge the Obamaniacal wisdom of appeasing?

The timeless adage from law schools around the country, helps to explain exactly how our liberals managed to bite themselves square in the ass last week:

If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.

The trouble with pounding tables, is that it disclaims structure. You are forsaking the law, and in so doing you are rejecting the implied contract of quid pro quo by which we live among each other. You are forsaking facts, and in so doing rejecting truth, the study of it, and principled thinking that is derived from it.

I remember getting my first taste of the wonders of collective bargaining, the very symbol and germinating seed of twentieth-century liberalism, in my childhood in Bellingham. The “workers” at a small thrift store were on strike, and my parents told us we “weren’t supposed to” shop there.

Does that mean it’s against the law?

Absolutely not, you just aren’t supposed to cross a picket line. Well, why? Because the workers are on strike. Why are they on strike? Because they don’t think their wages, or salary, or something, are enough. Huh. Well, what are their wages and salaries? That’s none of our concern, it’s a private dispute between labor and management. In all likelihood, due to ongoing negotiations, neither party would be authorized to tell us that if they wanted to.

Therein is the logical folly of liberalism. And of pounding on tables. If it’s none of our concern, how are we supposed to conclude that there’s something sacred about this picket line we shouldn’t be crossing?

Sen. Obama represents liberalism in what, I hope, is it’s twilight: After truth, logic and common sense have been utterly and permanently forsaken. With their roots in this Faustian exchange known as “collective bargaining,” liberals are supposed to decide on behalf of everybody else what is odious and offensive, versus what is to be enshrined and adored, without handing out any facts anybody could use to decide such proclamations on their own.

It’s been awhile by now since any liberals have actually pounded facts or the law. Oh yes, every now and then you get to see them go through the motions of doing it…this many zillion scientists signed our report on global warming or the theory of evolution being taught in schools…or abortion is the law of the land. But it’s all a sham. They’d have you believe once the Supreme Court decides something, by golly, you have no right to form your opinion, or even to speak freely against it. Heh. Bring up something called Bush v. Gore 2000 and see if they really believe that.

Nope, it’s all table pounding. Tables beware!

They’ve passed the critical horizon of the black hole of table pounding. That’s really all they can do anymore, is express their horror, angst and righteous indignation at…whatever the latest damn thing is. And they end up tearing apart whatever structural skeleton there was, upon which their argument was supposed to have been built in the first place. They end up contradicting themselves, sooner more likely than later. They have no navigational gear in the sea of ideas. They threw it all overboard.

They pound tables, and that is all they do now.

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Tables BewareSunday, May 18th, 2008

Tables Beware
Sunday, May 18th, 2008