Obama's Lies [John Derbyshire]
Not so much lies as a sort of slippery sleight-of-mouth. I'm starting to really dislike Obama.
"Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation … came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land."
Segregation was not "the law of the land" in the 1950s. It was the law in a minority of states.
"For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger … occasionally … finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews."
If, as Obama seems to be claiming, those are the sentiments only of Wright's generation, how come those whooping and clapping their approval in those sermon clips include lots of young people?
"Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends."
Fear of crime is not a legitimate emotion? Or is it just not legitimate for politicians to appeal to it? If, oh, say, some liberal Democratic governor of some state gives weekend furloughs to the perpetrator of a hideously callous murder who then, while on furlough, commits armed robbery and rape, why should criticism of that governor for that act be out of bounds in a political contest? Or should it only be out of bounds if the murderer is black?
"But it also means binding our particular grievances … to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family."
Well, I'm an immigrant, and I try hard to feed my family. And yes, I have grievances. For instance, I think I pay far too much tax in support of far too many public sector workers, most of whom do nothing useful. So … how will you bind your "particular grievances" to mine, Senator? Or am I somehow unrepresentative of immigrants?
"This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care …"
The lines in the Emergency Room at far too many U.S. hospitals are filled with illegal immigrants, preventing citizens from getting timely emergency help. What's your line on illegal immigration, Senator? Oh, right — you're fine with it, as is the rest of your party.
"Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students."
What on earth does this mean? It's true that there is widespread school segregation today. In my state, 60 percent of black students attend schools that are at least 90-percent black. From what I can see, the main reason for this is the great reluctance of nonblack parents to send their kids to schools with too many black students, which they assume are beset by all the problems associated with poorly run public schools. Do you think that they — actually we, as my wife and I share this reluctance — are wrong to think like this? How will you persuade us to think otherwise? Or will you depend on judicially-imposed forced integration of the schools?
And so on. You can go through Obama's speech pulling out questionable points like that from nearly every paragraph. The speech is slippery, evasive, dishonest, and sometimes insulting.
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