The Democrats

It is going to be a long hard road to 2008. New Yorker is a magazine by and for the rich East Coast liberal elite. Until recently they were 100% behind their own Senator Clinton. But in their current issue they ran an article purporting to review some of the various books about Clinton now in bookstores. In fact it was a serious hatchet job of character assassination. Very surprising to see that in the New Yorker. Which suggests to me that there are some bitter divisions within the liberal wing of the party, probably about the war, that go well beyond the usual personalities-and-money issues. Politics, for all the publicity, is nevertheless largely done in semi-secret. One knows that something is going on but not what. It is like seeing two little boys wrestling inside a bag.

I was in Barnes & Noble last night and I saw a "book" which was a puff piece biography by the Obama campaign. It was short and mainly pictures so I skimmed through the whole thing right there in the store. It seems Obama as a young man rejected Martin Luther King and even W.E.B. DuBois as not assertive enough. His hero was Malcolm X. He does NOT go on to say how he later saw the light and rejected Malcolm X.

That is trebly disturbing. If you listen to old videos of Malcolm X speaking, he sounds pretty reasonable about the problems Black people suffer, until you get to the core of his message about who and what he thinks the problem is. Malcolm was an explicit antisemite and a racist demagogue. He popularized the expression "blue-eyed devils". The usual crap response when this is brought up is that he mellowed at the end of his life and became more tolerant. I, for one, do not find that a satisfactory answer. (If he advocated rape and murder most of his life but stopped advocating them at the end, does that make it alright?) He was the leader of the Black Muslims. For Obama to have EVER been of the same mind as Malcolm X makes him completely unacceptable. This is not some hit piece. This is his own campaign literature.