Michael Steele's Outburst

Here's a YouTube video in which, if you turn up the volume, you can hear the passage in which GOP Committee Chairman Michael Steele contended that Wonderboy should have learned from history and never pushed the Afghanistan war.



Honestly, I wonder what the hell Steele was thinking.

Doesn't he realize that George W. Bush put us into Afghanistan, and for good reason? That this may have been our First Rookie's attempt to show he could think about military issues, but never made any real sense in terms of prioritizing one country over another?

I had high hopes for Steele initially. But with each passing month or so, he seems to pull another rock. If I thought another person could capable replace him at this late date, prior to the November elections, I'd say they should.

As it is, though, replacing Steele at this juncture would give Democrats a red herring issue with which to divert attention from their awful performance.

I say leave the idiot in until year's end, then get a new broom to sweep the GOP organization clean for 2012.

Shelby Steele On Wonderboy

Distinguished scholar Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institute wrote an insightful piece on Wonderboy's presidency in an editorial on March 31st of this year.

Perhaps the most descriptive passages Steele wrote were these,

"Well, suppose you were the first black president of the United States and, therefore, also the first black head-of-state in the entire history of Western Civilization.....If anything, you may literally experience yourself as a myth in the making...A historic figure making history, this is emerging as an over-arching theme- if not obsession- in the Obama presidency.

Of the two great societal goals- freedom and "the good"- freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today's liberalism is focused on "the good" more than on freedom. And ideas of "the good" are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering.....This is an old formula for power, last used effectively on the presidential level by Lyndon Johnson.

There has always been a narcissistic charge around Mr. Obama, the sense that in embracing him one was embracing something special in oneself- and possibly even a larger idea of human perfectibility.

Many presidents have been historically significant in retrospect, but Mr. Obama had historic significance on his inauguration day. His inauguration told a transcendent American story. Other presidents work forward into their legacy. Mr. Obama is working backward into his."

Steele noted, in passing, why Wonderboy hasn't focused on taking what governmental actions would facilitate US economic recovery. Simply stated, it's non-transformational, not noteworthy and poor fare for standing out as a modern legend.

Steele's perspectives seem to perfectly capture and explain so much of our First Rookie's behaviors and actions, don't they?

He's constantly looking at himself in the mirror, as it were. Listening to himself deliver endless numbers of self-referential, self-aggrandizing speeches.

He really is seeking to justify his instant legacy of the day of his inauguration. We will all pay for this- one way, or another.

Shelby Steele and Geraldine Ferraro on Obama's Dilemma

This week has seen some unbelievable developments in the US political sphere.

On Tuesday, Obama delivered a speech calculated to extinguish the fire which has ignited over his minister's now-very-public anti-white and anti-American statements. I wrote a post about the speech here.

Geraldine Ferraro, one-time Vice-Presidential candidate for the Democratic party, offered this view of Obama's actions and speech, on John Gibson's Fox News show, as seen here on YouTube.

Shelby Steele wrote this editorial in the Wall Street Journal on the day of Obama's speech. In it, he opined,

"Geraldine Ferraro may have had sinister motives when she said that Barack Obama would not be "in his position" as a frontrunner but for his race. Possibly she was acting as Hillary Clinton's surrogate. Or maybe she was simply befuddled by this new reality -- in which blackness could constitute a political advantage.

But whatever her motives, she was right: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." Barack Obama is, of course, a very talented politician with a first-rate political organization at his back. But it does not detract from his merit to say that his race is also a large part of his prominence. And it is undeniable that something extremely powerful in the body politic, a force quite apart from the man himself, has pulled Obama forward. This force is about race and nothing else."

Ferraro was and is being excoriated by the press and Democrats for her remarks, while Steele, a distinguished black historian now at the Hoover Institute, has received absolutely no reaction to his editorial of which I am aware.

In an attempt to fend off charges that he called his own grandmother a racist, Obama made these remarks later in the week on a radio talk show. The YouTube video has take the audio track and used it as the centerpiece of a very judgmental video, but the audio is, nonetheless, real.

I have heard this unedited comment by Obama about four times on Fox News in the last two days, and I believe he also said something to the effect that the reaction he attributes to his white grandmother is 'bred into' whites. I may be wrong on this, but I don't think so.

Never the less, as the video notes, he clearly stereotypes whites with the phrase "typical white person."

Does anyone believe that a white candidate for President of the US who used the phrase "typical black person" would still be in the running?

It's my guess that this entire issue has spun in a manner totally unforeseen and unwanted by Obama and many blacks unrelated to him. Just when race was fading as an issue for mainstream America, Obama has brought radical blacks like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright, whose positions depend upon continued exploitation of imagined racism in America, (back, in Jackson's case) into the limelight.

As Shelby Steele noted in his editorial, Obama doesn't really offer America much beyond a vote to assuage guilt over prior generations' involvement in slavery.

As a Caucasian American, I must say that I feel absolutely no guilt over prior generations' actions. What happened, happened. I cannot change it, and I did not partake in it.

If I, and many other millions of Americans feel likewise, and would prefer to vote for any minority on their qualifications, rather than their being a member of a minority, where does that leave Obama?

Nowhere.