Category: Blithe Spirit

Book editors have principles too, you know

Mainstreamers would rather not do this book on Iraq war planning by one who was there — Douglas Feith’s War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism — notes Christopher Hitchens.

As I write this on the first day of June, about a book that was published in the first week of April, the books pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe have not seen fit to give Feith a review.

Yes, they’re busy, not least of all with McClellan’s tell-all, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, which appeals them more.  Fits their narrative, you know.

Not only book pages and sections have been missing in action surrounding Feith’s book, but news pages too: NY Times spiked a James Risen story about it.

“This all might seem less questionable if it were not for the still-ballooning acreage awarded to Scott McClellan,” says Hitchens.

Reader M. heard Feith on Hugh Hewitt, says he sounded “very balanced for a major player,” comments:

The MSM is doing a complete black-out on his book, print, TV, radio. I surmise one will only find it buried behind a copy of “How to parse intransitive verbs” in Border’s, as well. Amazon gives it 3 1/2 stars; Scott McClellan’s book 4 stars. Go figure.

Tags: , ,

Like that real cold beer train that flies by . . .

This fellow read carefully where it says Obama “batted down rumors . . .  of a video of his wife using a derogatory term for white people” and picked out a key paragraph:

“We have seen this before. There is [sic] dirt and lies that are circulated in e-mails and they pump them out long enough until finally you, a mainstream reporter, asks [sic] me about it,” Obama said to the McClatchy reporter during a press conference aboard his campaign plane. “That gives legs to the story. If somebody has evidence that myself or Michelle or anybody [else] has said something inappropriate, let them do it.”

Asked whether he knew it not to be true, Obama said he had answered the question.

He did?

Tags: , ,

News that fits

Telling:

“The New York Times won the Pulitzer for revealing the fact of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. Now, with all due respect to being here in the National Press Club with a lot of my friends in the press, I thought the idea that The New York Times would win the Pulitzer Prize, one of the highest awards in journalism, for revealing one of the nation’s most important secrets and telling the enemy how it was we were intercepting their communications, frankly was less than honorable. It bothered me, greatly” — Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking Monday at the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize Luncheon.

It’s the narrative, you see: U.S. bad, we citizens of the world, comfy except when Spider Man climbs on our aerie roost.

Tags: , , ,

Finding the father while running for office

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.

Tags: , , ,

Pfleger, Wright tell people what they want to hear

It’s been a banner few months for preaching, something that’s not much discussed by daily newspapers but regularly performed for and imposed on worshipers.

What a teaching moment for homiletics professors it has been.  The word is academic for preaching and close to “homily,” which is a Scripture-based sermon of generally shorter length.

This is as opposed to stem-winders for which Fr. Michael Pfleger of Chicago’s St. Sabina — now on leave — has become more famous than ever, not to mention his big brother in the ministry, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United.  These are neither short nor Scripture-based, except in sound-bite snippets tossed off in entertaining fashion.

But that’s a fine point.  The essence of Pfleger’s and Wright’s better known preaching has been less Scripture-slicing-and-dicing and more bringing of coals to Newcastle.  Preaching against white racism to black people?  Really?  Bold fellows!

The preacher is supposed to do more than massage preconceptions.  When these two reverend gentlemen preach against marital infidelity or cheating in business transactions or telling lies, do their people rise up in joy and holy pandemonium?

Not hardly, to use a popular double negative.  Do they ever preach this way?  Probably not.  Few do.  Do they preach against black racism, except as a throwaway line, saving fervor for condemning whites?  Probably not.

Anyhow, the stuff we read about that makes the news is basically preaching to provide a feel-good experience for people who now and again entertain bitterness in their Christian hearts. 

For a few short hours on Sunday, they can hear their bitterness confirmed by the messenger from God.  It’s a sort of purgative, from which they emerge more convinced than ever that white folks just don’t get it.

Tags: , ,

By their friends you get a pretty good idea

Steve Rhodes in the matter of chickens coming home to roost in Big O’s back yard:

Barack Obama officially disowned Trinity Church on Saturday but remains associated with a far more sinister organization with a long record of divisive misdeeds and criminal behavior that is likely to become an issue in the general election: The Cook County Democratic Party.

Among other things, it’s the party of winning one for the Kennedy fellow in 1960.

Tags: ,

It’s Pfleger time — again

Father Pfleger couldn’t give it up, apparently, mocking the Clintons (and McCain) again last Sunday from his own pulpit at St. Sabina’s:

“Hillary and McCain would wish they had a preacher with the integrity of Jeremiah Wright. … They got some old weak preacher…some old Joel Osteen cotton candy preacher.”

The reference is to the preacher the Clintons heard on March 2 in Houston at Rev. Osteen’s Lakewood Church.

Now: Did he assure Cardinal George about no more political talk before or after last Sunday?  Or is he merely comparing preachers?

Tags: ,