So, it might seem that writing a diary about something stupid published by the NRO might be a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. But this is just too good to pass by with out comment.
Apparently Obama's speech last week. The one that was widely called a historical moment and one of the best political speeches of the last 30 years in fact has Obama crashing and burning. So says NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson. The logic for this claim, as well as his criticism of Obama's speech are just so absurdly laughable that they really deserve a wider airing.
Hanson lambastes intellectual obtuseness. He makes intellectually obtuse proclamations. He makes bizzare claims of fact. He makes facts up
And just for fun, he ends by playing concern troll giving out advance laughably bad, but made more comical by the fact he so clearly believes it's good stuff. So, here we go...
The latest polls reflecting Obama’s near-collapse should serve as a morality tale of John Edwards’s two Americas — the political obtuseness of the intellectual elite juxtaposed to the common sense of the working classes.
Just what polls would those be Victor? The RCP average that showed Obama having his best week in a long time after his speech?
For some bizarre reason, Obama aimed his speech at winning praise from National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Harvard, and solidifying an already 90-percent solid African-American base — while apparently insulting the intelligence of everyone else.
Huh...?
As you may guess, it's all down hill from here...
The speech and Obama’s subsequent interviews neither explained his disastrous association with Wright, nor dared open up a true discussion of race — which by needs would have to include, in addition to white racism, taboo subjects ranging from disproportionate illegitimacy and drug usage to higher-than-average criminality to disturbing values espoused in rap music and unaddressed anti-Semitism.
Really, higher than average rates of drug use and criminality among African Americans is a taboo subject? I hadn't heard. Most people concerned with racial equality (which quite clearly Hanson could give a damn about) are quite happy to talk about the conditions of socioeconomic deprivation and racial inequality that put members of such disadvantaged groups at elevated risk of such social ills. We might even be able to get into a conversation on such taboo subjects as sentencing disparities along racial lines and the de jure racism of mandatory minimums. But I'm guessing that's a taboo Hanson isn't quite ready to break.
And as for that last line... I'm sure no white musicians have ever espoused values that are "disturbing."
I'm also sure there's no unaddressed anti-Semitism left in the white community either.
We learn now that Obama is the last person who wants to end the establishment notion that a few elite African Americans negotiate with liberal white America over the terms of grievance and entitlement — without which all of us really would be transracial persons, in which happiness and gloom hinge, and are seen to do so, on one’s own individual success or failure.
For someone who opened his piece decrying intellectual obtuseness and praising the common sense of working folk (and being a condescending ass to both groups at the same time), this is a remarkable feat of intellectually gobbledygook. I don't even know what the first part of that paragraph means. I'm not sure Hanson does either. I think he might have heard William Kristof say it once and thought it sounded good.
As for the last part, I don't know what world Hanson's living on in which all people need to do well is just pretend race doesn't exist and suddenly 200 years of systematic discrimination and suppression, the effects of which are still felt to this day, albeit not usually any longer under the color of law (with exceptions, see mandatory minimums), but it sure isn't the real world.
But then, Hanson isn't really concerned about what's real and what's fiction. It's all pretty interchangeable.
The more the pundits gushed about the speech, the more the average Americans thought, "Wait a minute — did he just say what I thought he said?" It’s not lost on Joe Q. Public that Obama justified Wright’s racism by offering us a "landmark" speech on race
Yes, Mr. Hanson, I'm sure you as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author, most recently, of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, are the best judge of what the average American person thinks about this issue. I'm sure you, as a respected academic and not someone to just make shit up got some hard data to back your assertion up with...
Over the past four days, I asked seven or eight random (Asian, Mexican-American, and working-class white) Americans in southern California what they thought of Obama’s candidacy — and framed the question with, "Don’t you think that was a good speech?" The answers, without exception, were essentially: "Forget the speech. I would never vote for Obama after listening to Wright."
Oh, okay. Eight random Asians, Mexican-Americans, and working class whites didn't like the speech, so therefore the vast majority of the American public didn't like it. What stunning quantitative analysis.
Oh, and how about this gem
The intelligentsia is well aware of how postmodern cultural equivalence, black liberation theory, and moral relativism seeped into Obama’s speech, and thus was not offended by an "everybody does it" and "who’s to judge?/eye of the beholder" defense.
Followed with this list of Obama's alleged sins
(1) Compared Wright’s felony to the misdemeanors of his grandmother, Geraldine Ferraro, the Reagan Coalition, corporate culture, and the kitchen sink.
(2) Established the precedent that context excuses everything, in the sense that what good a Wright did (or an Imus did) in the past outweighs any racist outburst of the present.
(3) Claimed that the voice of the oppressed is not to be judged by the same rules of censure as the dominant majority that has no similar claim on victim status.
Even assuming Obama's "sin" was as bad as Hanson makes it out to be, it takes a special kind of disconnect to claim what Wright said was worse than the frothing hatred Ferraro has been spewing to anyone who'll listen; Worse than the dog whistle racism of the Reagan years, which is too extensive for me to even begin to document here; worse than a corporate culture that gives us the wonderful inventions of the housing cirsis and muder by spreadsheet?
There's moral relativism, but it's not the flavor Hanson suggests. It's the kind that says "It's okay so long as you're white." Maybe Hanson telling black people to sit down and shut up wouldn't be so offensive if he applied the same standard to white people, and actually lived up to his expressed desire that we all become "transracial persons, in which happiness and gloom hinge, and are seen to do so, on one’s own individual success or failure." But given that he made it clear that can only happen when black people stop obsessing about racism (and not when, say, people actually stop being racist), I'm not real surprised he thinks white people are entitled to find Wright hateful, but black people don't have a right to get upset at Reagan and Ferraro (who says she's confused at being compared to Wright. Heh.).
So, if you've read this far, you're probably looking for some heavy to throw through your monitor. But in the second half of the piece, Hanson goes from the gloomy discussion of his white man's burden, and we find that he is in fact a gifted humorist.
Obama is crashing in all the polls, especially against McCain, against whom he doesn’t stack up well, given McCain’s heroic narrative, the upswing in Iraq, and the past distance between McCain and the Bush administration
I guess we shouldn't be surprised to see that "upswing in Iraq" nonsense here. We all know better and no more need be said. It's this crashing in the poll numbers that's really funny, mainly because he just made it up.
If we look at the Realclearpolitics poll average of the Democratic race, we find that after being damaged by Wright, the speech sent Obama back up to where he was before the Wright story broke. It's true that against McCain, Obama has polled better, as the average shows. However, his numbers are hardly "crashing." The race is a dead heat with Obama within the margin of air. And what Hanson also doesn't tell you is that Hillary's numbers are little better. In other words, Hanson's whole narrative of an Obama who's crashing and burning is nothing more than a fiction made up inside his fevered and delusional conservative head that wants Obama to fail so badly for daring to talk about race in American and suggestion white people might bare some responsibility for anything related to the topic he'll just make shit up that shows he's right -even when the real facts show he's wrong, and the speech was the successe it's been reported as.
Also, with regards to McCain, I don't think voters are going to care about his past distance with the Bush administration, so long as he keeps cosing up to it here and now.
So finally, we get to the truly comic moment of the whole farce. Hanson tells Obama what he should do next:
I would go buy about 10,000 American flags to blanket every Obama appearance, have a 4x4 lapel-button flag custom-made for the senator, have Michelle finish every appearance by leading a chorus of "God Bless America," draft every middle-of-the-road crusty drawling Democratic veteran (the knightly Harris Wofford doesn’t cut it) to criss-cross the country — and try to Trotskyize Rev. Wright from the campaign.
Wow. Just wow.
I have rarely seen a more tone deaf, absurd, badly thought-out, stupid piece of advice given to a candidate by a professional pendent, short of the time David Brooks said Obama should make Dick Cheney his VP. Obama's speech received praise just because it didn't come of as the sort of cheap pandering, backpeddling, waffling, duck and cover Hanson is suggesting Obama engage in.
He won praise because what he did was exactly the opposite of such a transparent and empty gesture. Had he taken the "America, fuck yea!" approach he would have been universally lambasted as an unprincipled panderer who would take the most expedient political rout out of a tight spot, and rightly so. Instead, Obama chose to take a gamble that by all factual measures has paid off for him.
What also funny is that I don't think it's concern trolling on Hanson's part. I think he actually thinks that would have been the politically smart move for Obama.
But I guess if you're convinced Obama's speech was a disaster and have a vested interest of avoiding an honest discussion of race in America, due to your absurdly one-sided and bigoted views on the subject, I could see that might look like a better option.