Folks...you are in for a real treat.
The National Review has been running a series of columns on Barack's book Dreams from my Father. I find Dreams to be such a stunning, wonderful book that I was pretty excited to see how the National Review was going to twist it into something ugly and have been following along ever since.
The first few columns were predictible enough...Jim Geraghty made many boilerplate assertions, that Obama's view of the United States (in his descriptions of how his grandparents grew up) was naive. Later, he writes that Obama was clearly "consumed by a quiet anger". He delves deeply into the incident where Barack's grandmother professes a fear of black men, valiantly defending her from any racial bias.
Somewhere along the way though, Geraghty started to soften up. By the time Barack was doing community organizing in Chicago, Geraghty was spending less time bullshitting and more time unabashedly praising Barack's writing, and quoting long passages of his accounts of inner city life, calling them "moving".
I thought.."Whoah! Dreams From my Father is some powerful stuff!! How will Geraghty reconcile his newfound compassion with the self-imposed narrative that Obama is unfit to be president??"
Well today's column, the very last one, has the answer. Behold, the mental gymnastics for Why Barack Obama Cannot Be president:
Geraghty starts off well:
...by the time Obama had encountered Wright as a young man, he had already seen several male elders in his life become... well, no irony intended, "bitter," and ruled them out as role models and mentors. By contrast, Wright is portrayed in the book as one of the few older men who had not been beaten by life, who rose to meet life's challenges in a cheerful and spirited manner.
In the end, Dreams From My Father left me somewhat sympathetic to Obama; had his father been around, had his grandfather, his mother's second husband, or other figures in his life been different men, he probably wouldn't have been such a lost soul when he encountered Wright.
This all sounds completely true to me. And it is exactly the same impression that I got from reading Dreams.
Geraghty contines:
When people ask how Obama could be blind to all of Wright's more outrageous and offensive statements, and how he couldn't see Wright for the kind of man he was, I think this helps explain it. In Wright, Obama saw what he wanted to see. He wanted a wise, shrewd, kind, funny, educated man who could show him the ways of the world (and Chicago politics), one who perhaps went a little too far every now and then, but who was overall a good person.
Again...we are doing good Geraghty! This column is remakably sensitive and yours is a valid and reasonable interpretation.
And then...The column end like this:
Instead, we see that Wright is a toxic figure, arguing that blacks and whites have different brain structures, that the American government created the AIDS virus for genocidal purposes...
Here's where the example of Wright is truly disturbing when contemplating an Obama presidency. If Barack Obama looked at Jeremiah Wright and saw only what he wanted to see... how sure can we be that he wouldn't look at say, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and see only what he wanted to see?
And that is the part where I burst out laughing....
BWAHAHAHA! Yes, Geraghty! You read that whole book, saw deep inside Barack's soul and found the truth. When Barack is negotiating with Iran...he will form a misguided friendship with Ahmadinejad, causing him to turn a blind eye to Iran's attempts to create nuclear weapons. Obama will be so deeply attached to Ahmadinejad that he won't realize the grave danger we are in...until...it's...too..late....