Road Sassy

This and That.

First, not one of my best, but to introduce you to ‘my’ tree in the ravine, taken last December.

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Obama’s Bamboozling. I’m a fan of Peggy Noonan’s writing in the WSJ, but when I read her column on Obama’s speech I had cognitive dissonance, I couldn’t square what I knew of her writing, insightful, full of common sense, with what I’d read of the speech. It’s probably behind subscription but here is the beginning, you’ll get the idea.

I thought Barack Obama’s speech was strong, thoughtful and important. Rather beautifully, it was a speech to think to, not clap to. It was clear that’s what he wanted, and this is rare.

It seemed to me as honest a speech as one in his position could give within the limits imposed by politics. As such it was a contribution. We’ll see if it was a success. The blowhard guild, proud member since 2000, praised it, and, in the biggest compliment, cable news shows came out of the speech not with jokes or jaded insiderism, but with thought. They started talking, pundits left and right, black and white, about what they’d experienced of race in America. It was kind of wonderful. I thought, Go, America, go, go.

Time to come back to earth with Bruce Thornton who eviscerates [fisk doesn't do justice to it] the speech
A sample:

The next rationalization arises in the last sentence, and employs another trick Obama will use throughout the speech: specious moral equivalence served up with a false analogy. To imply that people attending churches and temples in this country regularly hear the sort of lunatic bigotry Wright preaches, is simply dishonest. I grew up in a rural, fundamentalist church whose members were mostly from the Jim Crow South, and I never once heard in church anything about blacks equivalent to the racism Wright indulges. Later I attended for a while a Congregationalist church — after Unitarians, the most wacky liberal denomination in America — and though I heard much political nonsense, nothing came close to Wright’s bile. Obama is trying to avoid the simple fact that Wright’s comments reflect the worst sort of irrational extremism, rather than, as Obama goes on to whitewash them, a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice, as though Wright’s sin was merely one of excessive zeal in a noble cause.

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Tom Stoppard, another of those superb Czech writers has a column in The Times on the student riots of ‘68. Do check it out.

Posted in: Lig Pics, Obama-debacle, This and That

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