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POPSBarack is a survivalist
A few months ago, when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright first came to national attention, Obama was nearly demure when he said: “I can no more disown (Wright) than I can disown my white grandmother.” He may not have disowned his white grandmother, but Obama didn’t exactly paint a sympathetic — or loving — portrait of her either. He essentially threw her under the bus, saying that she had made racist remarks while he was growing up, a statement that served only to highlight Obama’s own remarkable transcendence. After several weeks of balancing his professed love for Wright with the controversial statements of his chosen father figure and spiritual mentor, Obama eventually left his church of 20 years. But why then, after all those years, did Obama finally find the door? What changed was the degree of his self-interest. As long as Wright was helping Obama burnish his bona fides within the African-American community, it didn’t matter that the minister’s rhetorical flights of fancy border
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POPSBush breaks from the past? On the domestic front, Bush broadly expanded federal spending on education, signed campaign finance reform and orchestrated a huge expansion of health-care entitlements with his prescription drug benefit. Whatever the merits of those policies, it’s unlikely historians will see them as a radical, right-wing break from the Clinton years. much as Obama’s own foreign policy advisors have for a while — that his foreign policy promises will not survive contact with post-election reality. Already, Obama is changing his tune from his old, irresponsibly heated rhetoric about “immediate” withdrawal to talking about the need for policies that would adapt to the improving conditions in Iraq. Given Obama’s ideological leanings and inexperience, there’s clearly plenty of potential for him to make costly mistakes. But odds are he, too, would come to realize that America needs to win the war on terror and succeed in Iraq. Hence the greatest irony. A successful Obama presidency would have the u
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POPSIraqi oil The no-bid contracts are a stopgap until an oil law passes and more extensive contracts can be bid for Iraq’s undeveloped fields. Iraq’s oil ministry is hardly a model of efficiency. The contracts to which Schumer so objects are still hung up in negotiations. But Iraq is headed in the right direction. One could be forgiven for getting the sense sometimes that it is that progress that bothers Democrats most.
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POPSKennedy's shame The vaporous slogan posing as a standard is the spoon full of sugar that helps the Court’s enlightened medicine go down. The handiwork that results is not a reflection of our evolved values; it is five lawyers dragging the benighted masses kicking and screaming toward its Utopia — where brutalized eight-year-old girls, like murdered innocents and terrorized cities, are not flesh-and-blood but the props by which we measure how “maturely” we indulge their tormentors. And now, it turns out, so brazen was Kennedy’s power grab that the usual veneer — cloaking judicial tyranny in a self-celebration of societal “progress” — couldn’t even make it through two weeks. The evolving standards Justice Kennedy purported to find stemmed from what he took to be a national “consensus” against capital punishment for child rape. The furious public outcry after the ruling was a pretty good sign that something was amiss in the majority’s survey. Nevertheless, the Court observed that of the 36 states t
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