Go ahead, knock off the battery

Those old enough might remember the commercial where Robert Conrad, noted for his portrayal of James T. West in the Wild, Wild, West, would dare people to knock the battery off his shoulder.

What does this have to with anything? Well, anyone paying attention knows the Democrat party is heading for a self-induced trainwreck at the moment. If Hillary and company are actually behind Obama's mentor meltdown--and one could speculate it all began with Geraldine Ferraro last week--then it certainly suggests they're setting the final plan for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat at the expense of the black guy.

But at the same time, throwing Obama under the same bus he just threw pastor Wright would be fraught with peril for the DNC. Feeling betrayed, blacks might stay home en mass in the general election or worse, it might set back racial relations in America for years, ultimately something that would be blamed on the Clintons and Deans and those running the party.

Obama still has the lead. He still has the delegates. He still has the charm, albeit tarnished. His camp is still in the position of figuratively saying "go ahead DNC, I dare you to knock this battery off our shoulder and take away this nomination, disenfranchising all those voters". Will they?

An aside, when factoring everything, including the Michigan and Florida disasters, why isn't Howard Dean getting more blame?

Maybe Dean has the final plan close to his vest. Surely it involves blaming the Republicans somehow but whatever the case it seems a super ingenious solution might be the only way to avoid the meltdown while still getting Hillary the crown. At this stage of the game Obama can't win a general election against a war hero holding the baggage he's holding.

MORE 3/15/08

A word on the letter Reverend Wright sent to the New York Times complaining about a 2007 article gleaned from a sit-down between himself and reporter Jodi Kantor about Obama's pastoral snub at the campaign announcement party (via JOM). A few excerpts:

I told you what a dreamer he was. I told you how idealistic he was. We talked about how refreshing it would be for someone who knew about Islam to be in the Oval Office. Your own question to me was, Didn’t I think it would be incredible to have somebody in the Oval Office who not only knew about Muslims, but had living and breathing Muslims in his own family? I told you how important it would be to have a man who not only knew the difference between Shiites and Sunnis prior to 9/11/01 in the Oval Office, but also how important it would be to have a man who knew what Sufism was

This comment seems juxtaposed to Bush, who was rumored to have not known about the divisions of Islam when elected, which is hard to buy based on his long relationship with Cheney, Baker, and his own dad, who all understood those divisions with crystal clarity.

Besides, how is Barack more capable of understanding the inner workings of Islam if he was born in Hawaii, sent to a madrassas (in name only) as a tot in Indonesia, then came directly to America? We've been told his grandmother wasn't Muslim then was, and that he didn't visit the old family in Africa until he was an adult. His supporters have bent over backwards to tell us Obama is not Muslim, so how would he understand Islam any better than say Hillary or McCain?

I talked about Barack as a person who did not draw doctrinal lines in the sand nor consign other people to hell if they did not believe what he believed.

Nice to see, although being a Christian usually requires a certain level of witnessing to non-believers. But it's clear he was referring to fundamentalists, probably of Christian stripe because he just talked highly of Barack's knowledge of Islam (some of whom delight in sending non-converts directly to their version of hell).

I have never been exposed to that kind of duplicitous behavior before

The Reverend shares a similar distaste for the Times with conservatives--maybe Barack really can unite America!

Forgive me for having a momentary lapse. I forgot that The New York Times was leading the bandwagon in trumpeting why it is we should have gone into an illegal war. The New York Times became George Bush and the Republican Party’s national “blog.” The New York Times played a role in the outing of Valerie Plame. I do not know why I thought The New York Times had actually repented and was going to exhibit a different kind of behavior.

Stark leftist boilerplate, coming from a preacher no less. Speaking of blogs, that could have been lifted off Kos. And it's interesting he mentions a Times connection to outing Valerie Plame, ie, Judy Miller. Does he have inside info? Because conventional wisdom says Miller never reported on the information she had about "Valery Flame" but that Times reporter Nic Kristoff did, allowing Joe Wilson's "Bush lied" charge to get legs. One more:

Maybe it was my faith in the Jewish Holy Day of Roshashana.

I'm going out on a limb and saying Ms Kantor might be Jewish. Based on Wright's tributes to Farrakhan, whose views on the Jews are legend, is it a stretch to wonder if this was softly antisemitic? Perhaps not, perhaps it was just an appeal to her religion, but when one lies down with the leader of a group espousing conspiratorial views of a zionist corporate media it's hard to tell.

As his supporters point out, Wright is not on the ballot so how does any of this affect Obama? It's a good point, but the answer was made clear by the way Obama addressed his former mentor. He told Fox's Major Garrett he would have quit the church had he known about the firebrand rhetoric, which is transparently disingenuous. Why not come out and say he was a member of Trinity to experience firsthand the needs/concerns of the black street while having the other foot in the white world of politics? It would fit his theme better, in other words, one can't bring together what one doesn't understand. Instead he acted rather like a politician of old, not a man of change.

MORE 3/15/08

While Mark Penn might be convinced Obama can't win, the memo has yet to reach Obama. With "former pastor" Wright safely ensconced under the Barack bus he was stumpin' in Indiana today and back on the bringing America together bandwagon. It's clear his strategy is to press on and hope the media hasn't the stones to continue pursuing the story now that he's disavowed Wright.

As pointed out frequently, Obama sounds good. He could make an IRS 1040 form sound inspiring. In speaking today about fixing America's divide he was right on target. He says people want to move forward and get to that place. Most do. But until we understand which way his head was nodding during Reverend Wright's "rough stuff" sermons--at least the ones he heard--we can't know for sure whether Barack himself wants to get to that place or is just saying what's necessary to garner the white vote.

It certainly would be much more convincing had he been a member of a mixed-race congregation church whose preacher spoke mainly of the soul rather than cussword-laced screeds against rich white people and Bush. Whether that's standard fare in some black churches I haven't a clue, but such rhetoric isn't standard in most churches I've ever attended.