Word to your mother – it’s racist to blame Democrats, Doodad Pro’s donation, polling methods, Ayers’ airs and mortgage discrimination – the legal kind
By LisaB on October 7, 2008 at 1:10 PM in Current Affairs
1) Well, it was only a matter of time. Get a good race blame theme going and, sure enough, white people will glom on. According to HotAir, who read Barney Frank’s reactions to charges he played a role in the economic meltdown, it’s a race thing.
Let’s keep score. Criticizing Obama means we’re racists. Criticizing Congress means we’re racists. Getting angry at Congress for pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into buying bad loans and infecting the entire financial system with essentially fraudulent paper — at a cost of up to $700 billion in taxpayer money and potentially trillions in lost investments — means we’re racists.
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Congress — and specifically Frank himself — had plenty of warning that this would happen. The anger generated from that information has nothing to do with racism, and everything to do with the breach of trust between Congress and its constituents. Frank, Chris Dodd, and others like Lacy Clay and Maxine Waters tried the racist meme out on regulators who tried to warn Congress of the pending collapse. They have to smear their critics. They certainly can’t admit that Congress failed spectacularly. Racism is the last refuge of scoundrels in 2008, and not surprisingly, we find most of those scoundrels in the Democratic Party.
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The Boston Herald has the original story.
“The bizarre notion that the Community Reinvestment Act . . . somehow is the cause of the whole problem, (conservatives) don’t mind that,” the lawmaker [Frank]said. “They’re aware that the affordable-housing goals of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and) the Community Reinvestment Act (aim to help) poor people. And let’s be honest, the fact that some poor people are black doesn’t hurt either from their standpoint.”
Now, when even privileged white people get to draw the race card, it’s pretty much played, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t it the death knell of “hip” and “edgy” when some old white guy says it? I guess I’m down with that.
2) CBSNews finds more bogus Obama donors.
CBS News has learned that two donors to the Obama campaign that gave a total of $7,722 appear to have made their contributions under fake names that look like they were written by a mouse running across a keyboard: Dahsudhu Hdusahfd of Df, Hawaii with the following employer CZXVC/ZXVZXV and Uadhshgu Hduadh listed as living in Dhff, Florida listed their employer as DASADA/SAFASF.
CBS News did not find any records of these last names, towns or employers anywhere else. Newsweek reported two questionable Obama donors over the weekend named “Doodad Pro” and “Good Will”.
I hope Doodad Pro got a receipt.
3) At CNN, Campbell Brown is really, really, really upset about negative campaigning. No, don’t bother. I put the link here merely as a courtesy. The usual media dance of publicizing every dirty trick and then decrying it continues apace. . . . Yawn. There’s always investigative reporting, but that might upset the “narrative.”
4) Over at strata-sphere.com is an interesting observation about polling. Using a graphic from a WSJ piece, the author says that polling done on the basis of party affiliation is misleading. He points to the fact that policy preferences don’t always track with party affiliation. According to WSJ, voters identify themselves as liberal (23%) moderate (36%) and conservative (37%). They identify themselves as Dem (43%) ind (20%) and Rep (36%).
So, if a pollster gathers participants based on party affiliation, likely Obama voters will likely outnumber likely McCain voters, with independents a small group in between. However, if a pollster gathers participants based on policy preferences, that would certainly widen the middle group, lessen the likely Obama voters and do almost nothing to likely McCain voters.
Interesting. Still, I’m guessing pollsters use party affiliation because its less slippery than policy preferences. But the author thinks the polls are skewed, making Obama’s lead look much bigger.
Maybe some pollster readers here at NQ can weigh in.
5) City Journal has a piece on Ayers and Obama dated yesterday.
Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation,” and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: “Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!”
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As I have shown in previous articles in City Journal, Ayers’s school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for “social justice” in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive.
The author finishes with this:
Is it too much to hope that one of the moderators of the two remaining debates will press Obama for a fuller accounting of his work with Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and also ask Obama what he thinks of Ayers’s views on school reform? If the mainstream media deem it important that voters know which newspapers one of the vice presidential candidates reads, they certainly ought to be demanding more information from a presidential candidate about whom he collaborated with in distributing $160 million to the public schools. How about it, Tom Brokaw?
What do NQ readers think the odds are for Brokaw asking such a question tonight?
6) Now this is fun. At the Atlantic (of all places), is a piece about Obama and Ayers that does a really good job of calling out the hypocrisy of that relationship in a way those people will understand, with literary references, chianti and gentle language. The author (Ross Douthat) is responding to a post by another person (Richard Stern) who describes the Ayers / Dorn pair.
Douthat quotes Stern’s piece in TNR:
I’ve been to three or four small dinner parties with Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, once hailed as the Weathermen’s Dolores Ibarruri (“La Passionaria”), a fiery, beautiful muse. (Incidentally, I never heard the word “Weatherwoman.”) Dohrn is still attractive, while Ayers maintains an adolescent fizzle in his sexagenarian bones. Dohrn is more subdued than Ayers, uninterested in fame. She told me that her husband wanted to pursue movie interest in their story, but that she wasn’t interested. “They only care about the sex and violence.” Once, Ayers was about to tell the four other people at dinner how they’d gotten Eldridge Cleaver from a California prison to a Moroccan haven, but Dohrn skillfully buttoned his lip.
“La Passionaria” a “fiery, beautiful muse?” “An adolescent fizzle in his sexagenarian bones?” High flown language for a couple of aging hippies who put bombs together to kill and maim, but that’s just me.
Incidentally, isn’t it interesting that Ayers would like to “sell out” and have his story made into a movie? Who does he think should play him? I’ll bet money on Sean Penn.
Douthat responds:
. . . Obama’s obfuscation regarding Ayers is, in a sense, the homage that vice pays to virtue – a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that the political culture of Chicago, and especially of Hyde Park, is more accommodating than perhaps it should be to a morally dubious figure like Ayers, and that having accommodated himself to those accommodations Obama now recognizes the need to behave as if he didn’t.
Whereas bragging about what a “splendid, rather intimate community” Hyde Park is, where you can brush shoulders with the Ayerses at a lovely dinner party, maunder on about Chekhov and old enemies embracing, and gently forgive them for their “criminally violent past,” seems to me considerably grosser. What offences did the Weathermen commit against Richard Stern, besides calling him a dirty name, that he should have the honor of bestowing forgiveness for their crimes? And when, for that matter, did Bill Ayers ever ask to be forgiven?
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But really, really, I never thought I’d see the day when TNR would find itself publishing florid odes to the “adolescent fizzle” in Bill Ayers’ sixtysomething bones, and the charms of sharing a fine chianti with his “fiery, beautiful muse.” Change we can believe in, indeed.
Now, I thought that was very fun. Douthat skewers Stern’s language in describing the bombing twins and the notion that Stern can “forgive” them. It’s subtle, but very effective. Kind of reminds me of a guy who likes his liver with “a nice chianti.”
Jennifer Rubin, at Commentary, responds to Douthat:
But more than hypocrisy is at work here. It is not just far Left, American-hating radicals he now disowns. You get the sense that he believes everyone can be played. Rashid Khalidi can believe that Obama finds no one suffers more than the Palestinians. Jews can buy that he was moved by the Holocaust from a summer camp experience. Voters in his Congressional race in 1990 can be told that there is no difference ideologically between him and 100% ADA-rated Bobby Rush, but the rest of the state in 2004 (and eventually the country) can buy that he’s a post-partisan reformer. Terrorists come to believe he shares their scorn for America, but Iowa voters hear him talk about his appreciation that only in America could his story have happened. Primary voters in Ohio are coddled with protectionist promises – and then privately scorned while he is talking to San Fransciso liberal donors.
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But one thing has been consistent. He has never, ever attacked political corruption, whether in Chicago or Washington. To the contrary, at the Woods Fund, the Annenberg Challenge and the U.S. Senate he’s laddled out earmarks and goodies to a long list of friends and associates — Wright, Pfleger, Will County ( home of FBI target Larry Walsh), Allison S. Davis, ACORN, etc. The one consistency has been his fidelity to political supporters. Everyone else and every political position were disposable.
You’d think not attacking corruption would be a problem for a “change” candidate, but this election year is nothing if not deeply weird.
7) IBD has an editorial about Barney Frank’s disavowal of any Democratic responsibility for the economic meltdown. Franks says “Did not!” IBD says, “Did too.” Of course, IBD also blames the Clinton administration, but there are some very interesting points here.
When former Treasury Secretary John Snow pleaded for Frank to support Fannie and Freddie reform, Frank responded: “These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”
Democrats believe in affordable housing even if it’s at the expense of the vast majority who watch their credit, work hard and pay their mortgages on time. But for the deadbeats, particularly Democratic constituencies, they have ways to make affordable the housing you couldn’t afford. So first, they forced them into housing they couldn’t afford, and now they give them a financial mulligan.
In the vice presidential debate, Sen. Joe Biden said that “what we should be doing now — and Barack Obama and I support it — we should be allowing bankruptcy courts to be able to re-adjust not just the interest rate you’re paying on your mortgage to be able to stay in your home, but be able to adjust the principal that you owe, the principal you owe.”
To get this bill passed, Obama made a lot of phone calls — particularly to members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including caucus chief Rep. James Clyburn — assuring this would happen.
Those paying their mortgages on time don’t get that break.
Rep. Elijah Cummings said Obama told him that, if elected president, he would direct a Treasury Department official to work with homeowners in foreclosure to restructure their loans. Cummings said Obama also told him he’d seek changes in bankruptcy laws allowing judges to reduce what borrowers owe on their home loans.
I’d LOVE to have the principal on my home reduced!!! Of course, I try to overpay my principal when making mortgage payments. But I guess that just proves I’m a total sucker.
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