How is Rev. Jeremiah Wright like Hillary R. Clinton? Hint:
According to sources within Trinity, Wright, 66, who began the process of retirement two years ago, is resisting fully relinquishing his duties as senior pastor, hanging on to power in the church he helped build.
Answer: Neither can let go.
ALCOHOL REDUCES ARTHRITIS RISK: “People who drink alcohol are less prone to the sometimes crippling disease called rheumatoid arthritis compared with non-drinkers, according to a Scandinavian study published on Wednesday.
People who had a moderate alcohol consumption were 40 and 45 percent less likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis compared with people who did not drink or drank only occasionally, it found. Among those who had a high consumption, the risk was reduced by 50 and 55 percent respectively.”
Thanks to Instapundit, a law professor with an eye for the good life.
Prosit!
This could be the first presidential campaign dedicated to a candidate’s finding himself. Obama dreamed of his lost father and wrote a book about it, and thereby hangs the narrative. In it he exposed himself more mercilessly and more literately, indeed literarily, than any other candidate. His book has become a gold mine for non-M.D. analysts and may yet be for M.D.’s if he loses and his supporters go into tailspin.
There is none better of the former than Shelby Steele, whose A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win draws forth from Dreams the stuff of personal travail. For instance, the young Obama, faced with being either black or white, chose black. His white girl friend in New York, after Harvard Law, had it out with him in the matter of racial identity, feeling bad that she couldn’t share his. He admits he treated her badly. They broke up after a year.
Earlier, at Harvard, he had mildly hit on a mixed-race coed, asking if she was going to the black students meeting. Not on your life, she said, giving him an earful about being both white and black and in no way about to downgrade her “sweet” Italian father by buying into black power.
In Chicago Obama chose his church as conferring on him or initiating him into Afro-centeredness. Street credentials (“street cred”) were not as much the issue, Steele implies, as the need to belong to one race. Steele knows about that, having been a sort of Obama character himself as a young man with white mother and black father.
We read and hear of the choice as motivated by the need to succeed as an organizer. Steele ignores that.
As for the coming campaign and a search for identity, it seems that Obama has more to lose than an election. At stake also is his blackness, which Steele persuasively analyzes as a social construct with its own rules. These include black superiority and white perfidy.
So there’s the candidate with his need to be black and his need to be the man of the hour for us all. The father matters, but so does getting elected.
Blithe Spirit 