Change we can expect

Big O. has himself a major-league fixer as a v.p.-candidate selector:

Eric Holder, recently appointed by Barack Obama to his vice presidential search committee, played a leading role in one of the most infamous events of a presidency filled with infamy: the pardon of billionaire fugitive Marc Rich.

So what if he’s got an important role for Obama?  Well, because

the mind reels as to why this person, who participated in a notorious Clinton scandal and himself seemed so oblivious to his own conflict of interest, would be selected to find and vet a VP for Obama. Is this the new politics? Or is it a throwback to the Clinton years, the very years Obama is attempting to turn the page on, to put behind us all?

And now a bit of context for other stuff that’s been hitting the fan in recent months:

Certainly “judgment” is a key consideration for voters in selecting their president. When one looks to the people Obama in turn has selected as mentors (e.g., Reverend Wright, Father Michael Pfleger), friends (e.g., Tony Rezko), and now key advisors (e.g., Eric Holder), voters may begin to question whether Obama possesses the judgment necessary to run an effective and scandal-free administration. If Holder is emblematic of Obama’s personnel decisions and an example of what is to come, the answer is “no.”

Unfortunately.

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Ex-Catholic finds a friend in Rome

Rome kicks butt in Europe, says ex-RC atheist.

What other religion is taking on calmly, intelligently and courageously the scourge of militant secularism afflicting modern Europe?

asks Ruth Dudley Edwards, who “abandoned” Catholicism at 16 “and disliked [it] intensely for decades because of old grievances, but for which [she now has] respect and gratitude.”

It’s happening this way.

in England — a country where the bulk of the established church is in a moral funk — I am thrilled to see Cardinal Murphy O’Connor and his Scottish counterpart, Keith O’Brien, taking on the British secular Establishment on such huge ethical issues as abortion, stem cell research and the right of children to have fathers.

“[T]he belt of a couple of croziers” (I love it)

caused three Catholic Cabinet ministers (Des Browne, Ruth Kelly and Paul Murphy) to put their religious scruples before their ambition and force Gordon Brown to allow a free vote on contentious clauses in the abhorrent Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

Read on in this amazingly sprightly account of Catholics actually in there pitching on moral issues, and as yourself on what meat these British Catholics feed that they should be so great at holding the line.

And get this breath of fresh air from the tight little isle:

As a nation, we’ve been morally dodgy about violent nationalism, but at least, so far, we’ve been protective of the unborn. Well done, Your Holiness. Keep up the good work. The religion-friendly atheists are marching alongside, cheering you on. And those who fear that the vacuum that is rootless secularism will cause Europe to cave into violent Islamism are keeping them company.

Hip, hip hooray.

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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.

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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?

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Stick it in your pipe and smoke it

Spike Lee, criticizing Clint Eastwood for not putting black soldiers on Iwo Jima for his “Flags of Our Fathers,” wants him to rewrite history, says Eastwood.  Neither should Lee

be demanding African-Americans in Eastwood’s next picture [reports UK Guardian in an interview]. “Changeling” is set in Los Angeles during the Depression, before the city’s make-up was changed by the large black influx.

“What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fuckin’ story about that?” he growls. “Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I’m not in that game. I’m playing it the way I read it historically, and that’s the way it is. When I do a picture and it’s 90% black, like “Bird,” I use 90% black people.”

He has “a last word of advice” for Lee:

“A guy like him should shut his face.”

Later:

Lee responds, denying he wanted a black Marine in the flag scene and claiming backup to his critique (UK Telegraph cites other sources) but not helping his cause by tossing “not on a plantation” chestnut and “angry old man” accusation.

Cripes, he’s only 78.

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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.

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God bless Scandinavia

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!

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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.

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