Posted by
Deadpan on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 11:26:44 PM
How does
Tim Rutten remain employed? His comparison of Obama's speech on race to Lincoln's "house divided" speech makes one wonder if we should expect another Civil War to come out of it.
The point of Lincoln's speech was to make it clear that the nation could not endure part slave and part free, but Obama seems to be saying that the kind of demagoguery being spewed by Jeremiah Wright isn't really anything to worry about and that white people concerned by affirmative action quotas and other forms of reverse discrimination are justified. By trying to sooth the fears of people who hear Wright's claim that we should ask God to damn America, that the nation deserved the 9/11 attacks, that government created the AIDS virus and crack cocaine in order to kill African Americans, etc. what is Obama really saying? I don't think that it means that he's prepared to go slow on more social spending to help blacks and other minorities or that he's any less liberal than he has always been. Behind his rhetoric, there's a kind of double-mindedness that he may not even recognize is a problem. He just wants everybody to be happy. The problem with government handouts is that they don't come with any sense of having earned anything. There's no sense of achievement, but there's a sense of entitlement because the government has made such handouts your
legal right.