My regrets. At least some people won't die of an 'early age'....

I said that after reading my own X-ray-bone scan, yesterday.

I gotta go now to get a technician, more skilled than me.

He shot some nuke'a'head dye into me and pricked me.

boo huh.

sigh. Peace.

Immortality.

I turned it off when he said that the reason we attacked Iraq is because of Islamo-fascism.

Once I read a particular sentence in that speech, I knew that none of the rest of it mattered.

Once I read, "I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible," I knew that Barak Obama suffers from the same American exceptionalism, exclusion and tunnel-vision that has cut the country off at its knees for decades now.

What he thinks about race doesn't matter to me anymore now that I know that his rhetoric about re-engaging with the rest of the world is hollow. No, only in America - not Canada, Australia, Great Britain, France, Germany - could a multi-racial family come to be, from which a dark-skinned member could achieve success.

Only in America.

(PS Mr. Obama, please have one of your staff fact-check Michaelle Jean, just for starters. Oh, and she went to Canada as a refugee from one of the poorest countries on earth.)

Mr Obama's beliefs are his own. But are these the things we want our Presidents to sort-of excuse? Imagine if you will any other scenario where the President had an odd acquaintance, a mentor even and that person advocated revolution, literally, grab an M-16 and kill people revolution. Or racial separation, or burkhas, or any number of other things that go against what we generally conceive of as the American experience. It's wonderful that we live somewhere where people are permitted to espouse those ideas if we like. But that's not the same thing as seeking out the wildest most extremist views and embracing them because you believe that's the way to be inclusive.

Thanks to NPR, I'm now a well-informed citizen of the USA, and I'm confident that my military and Pakistan's military are completely cricket, and I'm thankful that honest liberals like Juan Williams have explained to me how Barack Obama is an empty suit.

I like it when you let your own thoughts and words stand out on occasion. More, sir!

Cheers,

One common frame about Barack Obama’s landmark speech today is that it was in response to the Reverend Wright controversy, but the depth of his examination of the discrimination issue and the way he interwove it with what had transpired in the year or so of his campaign and in his life experiences can only lead me to believe that Obama was going to make this speech anyway in some form and at some point in the campaign. And, make no mistake, this speech was more broadly about discrimination of all types, race being but one prominent form thereof and socio-economic status another.

The Wright matter was more a jumping-off point or teaching point than a motivator for this speech, a chance for Obama to lay the foundation of exposing the existing shallowness in our discourse, then beginning a process of drilling down to the core issues in our national, regional, local, social/ethnic, family and personal DNA that both affect discrimination and are affected by it, and, finally coming to realize how fundamentally this has affected and, in many instances, even determined our approach to the important issues of the day. This also happens to be dead-on consistent with his campaign to date based on the “politics of inclusion.” Many worried that this speech may be too nuanced, high-minded or whatever, but there are seven-plus months left in the campaign to build off this in much more politically-direct ways. It seems more like a starting-off point then the end.

If it was not Wright’s comments, it would have been someone else’s ten-second sound bites attached to Obama as if Obama himself made them, and I believe he understood the inevitability of this in today’s poisoned political atmosphere. DCLaw1 and other commentators here have perceptively thrown Joan Walsh’s tin ear comment back at her for totally missing Obama’s point that most, including those we love and who love us, have a little bit of prejudice and bias in them, but that we don’t reject their whole being for the small parts we may not agree with or like. The inference is that we likely will find some of this within ourselves if we our willing to look hard enough.

Joan Walsh was only reflecting the general shallowness with which the media treats our political discourse. Jay Rosen has a good take on this in his piece, Obama tells the Best Political Team on Television: You Have a Choice, @

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/

in which he suggests, correctly imo, that Obama’s speech was aimed as much at the “tin ear” Joan Walsh’s and the Wolf Blitzers as anyone. Some samples of Rosen’s piece, which he addressed directly to Wolf Blitzer:

… This is a style of analysis—and a level of thought—we have become utterly used to, especially from Blitzer but also many others on TV: everything is a move in the game of getting elected, and it’s our job in political television to explain to you, the slightly clueless viewer at home, what today’s tactics are, then to estimate whether they will work.

… In fact it was a speech aimed right at Blitzer, at the best political team on television, and the makers of our election year spectacle.

… Wolf, Obama had just said, “We have a choice in this country.” And your team at CNN has to make a choice, too. You should be asking yourselves, what’s our choice, as broadcasters and journalists…

… We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

You can do that. That’s one option. But I’m told you are the best political team on television. Surely you can think of something better to do between now and April 22.

We have been complaining forever here about how this and that Democrat ultimately would not stand up for Democratic Party principles to the point of even questioning - rightfully so in some instances - whether the Democrat in question truly believed in those principles. We have one here who not only is doing that, but is calling the media on their own role in the degradation of our political discourse and challenging all of us, as Bill Moyer once put it so well, “To look beyond our own back yards.” This is the direction Obama was headed, whether Reverend Wright or Billy Graham was his pastor.