But here’s the problem for me. I had really liked President Carter. I had a lot of respect for him, in fact. I was young and naive when he was in office, but certainly the work he had done AFTER leaving the White House was commendable. For instance, the work he and his entire family did for Habitat for Humanity has helped numerous people, including in my home town. I have experienced firsthand seeing the joy and pride the new homeowner as she looked at her house, and talked about what it meant to her. And the group of university students with whom I was working, all female, becoming more empowered, more sure of themselves, because they were helping to build someone a HOUSE, and the sense of pride and accomplishment that gave them.

The work Carter has done in Africa, helping to eradicate a horrible disease of worms that infiltrate too many areas there, doing horrible damage to the people they infest. Or his work in monitoring elections. Heck, even his recent decision to leave his church of many years because they will not ordain women.

My partner and I have visited the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, GA, a beautiful place in a calming and serene environment. I walked through that buildung filled with a sense of awe, seeing what he gave up, and subsequently his wife, when he left his commission as a Naval officer behind to go back to Georgia and help out the family. As I saw photographs marking historic moments, actual papers from events I had read about, or seen on tv. I was in awe as I saw his actual Nobel Peace Prize. And with pride, we have supported the Carter Peace Center for years now with monthly contributions…

(Photo by rachydachy)

But, things have been changed now. It began with some of his statements about Israel. Then President Carter inserted himself into the Primary Campaign, making some unkind remarks about my hero, “>Hillary Clinton. And now this. Being called a racist because I oppose the way by which Obama became President, but even more, because I oppose his policies. When someone calls me a racist, I gotta say (as we do down here in the South, “Them’s fightin’ words.” And so, I have written this letter to send to the Carter Center when my next payment is due:

Dear Carter Center,

Sincerely,
The Rev. Amy

What a sad day, for me personally, but also for this nation, when a former president makes such a grievous, and unfounded, charge against over half of the population. Because we have the audacity to judge the president by his CHARACTER, rather than the color of his skin, as Martin Luther King, Jr., charged us to do, we are called a heinous name. How sad, and how infuriating.

President Carter, as respectfully as I can muster after being called a racist, I would suggest it is time for you to go into retirement, and leave off sharing your political opinions. You are not doing yourself or your legacy any good, to be sure. Even more, you are not doing this nation any good. Rather, you are fanning flames that divide us, not unite us, all to provide cover for a man who, had he been properly vetted in the first place, and had the DNC followed its own rules, would never have gotten this far. Speaking for me only, I am judging Obama on the merits, not the color of his skin. I suggest you do likewise.

UPDATE: I had the story below ready to publish since I need to leave, but ran across this video from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show last night. So I’m adding this video without accompanying text because Maddow does such a great job of explaining not only Obama’s failure to live up to his campaign promises but also another instance of Obama’s thwarting of legislation to end “don’t ask don’t tell”:

Amy has found that Obama’s failure to issue an executive order (“stop loss”) or direct Congress has led to 230 service members being kicked out of the military under the policy since Obama took office. Despite Obama’s aversion to “hot button” issues, action may be taken soon. Following Congress’s August recess, the Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing on “don’t ask don’t tell.” A member of the committee, Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, who was appointed to fill Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s seat, is the force behind the push for Congressional action and convinced Chair Carl Levin to hold the hearing.

“Morning Meeting” devoted a full-panel segment to getting rid of “don’t ask don’t tell” and joining all of our allies in permitting gays to serve openly in the military. During the “Meeting” segment, the most clear, “let’s cut to the chase” advocate for permitting gays to serve in the military was the reserved-looking, older Gen. Barry McCaffrey (retired), an analyst for NBC and MSNBC News. (See the MSNBC.com bio of Gen. McCaffrey. The photo is from Wikipedia’s bio.)

There’s no video of the segment so I transcribed what Gen. McCaffrey said: “Whether the military wants to do it or not is irrelevant. The question is: Is private consensual homosexual behavior legal or not? The Supreme Court seems to have said a decade ago that states couldn’t pass laws affecting private consensual homosexual behavior.”

Gen. McCaffrey stated firmly that Congress “ought to step up to it” and change the law. The rest of Morning Meeting panel also said that Obama shouldn’t bother with a “stop loss” order (a half-measure), and instead demand that Congress change the law.

Of course, as Reverend Amy has told us, Obama is ducking the issue despite his campaign promises, and has taken no action of any kind.

Why Obama is so wary of the issue is unclear (unless it’s to appease his ultra-religious, vociferously anti-gay constituencies, including his old Chicago minister pals like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Rev. Otis Moss, and Rev. James Meeks). Obama’s reticence can’t be due to voters’ attitudes since “Morning Meeting” noted that a recent poll found that two-thirds of Americans approve of allowing gays to serve freely in the military.

Included early in the segment was Dr. Nathaniel Franken, author of “Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America” (Kindle edition). Dr. Franken pointed out that, under the current “don’t ask don’t tell” policy, over 13,000 service members have been discharged, including 1,000 “mission critical specialists,” 300 linguists and 60 Arab linguists.

“This is a national security emergency. It’s not just a gay rights issue. And President Obama does have the power to issue an executive order,” Dr. Franken continued. (Read more about Dr. Franken’s views in Amy’s June post.)

The “Morning Meeting” panelists concurred that if Obama is going to “take a hit” for issuing a stop-loss executive order, he might as well go all the way and compel Congress to enact a law to do away with discrimination against gays. But Obama hasn’t done a thing so far and shows no signs of taking actions.

In Rabble Rouser Reverend Amy’s story, “Stop Making Excuses For This Guy!!,” she takes on the gays who are still backing Obama:

Repeal the law – it cannot POSSIBLY take that long. Like I said, look how fast Obama got some other things done he wanted done. If he wanted this law repealed already, he would have. Rather, Obama chose to not even weigh in on this to the Supreme Court. LOOK AT THE FACTS, not the rhetoric!

Here’s the bottom line to the LGBT community: STOP MAKING EXCUSES FOR THIS GUY. Stop humiliating yourselves hoping, crossing your fingers, and wishing that Obama is going to do right by you because he said he would, or because you think he’s “dreamy.” Had you opened your eyes and paid attention to his actions (or lack thereof) over the course of his political career, or the people with whom he chooses to surround himself, you wouldn’t have picked the guy you thought was “cool.” You would have supported the person who has stood with YOU for years. But you didn’t. And here we are, no farther along for it.

Aren’t you TIRED of begging for the crumbs to drop from the table?? Aren’t you ready to be a guest at the table, where you belong?? All the excuses in the world for Obama do nothing but let him off the hook, and diminish YOU. Seriously, you, we, deserve better. Deep down inside, you must know that is true. At least I HOPE you do…

U.S. allies openly permit gays to serve in their armed forces. Via AOL News:

Check out more of Amy’s posts:

• “Soldiers and WORMS” [WORM stands for "What Obama Really Meant."]

• “And The Hits Just Keep On Coming” (which links to even more posts)

• “Passing the Buck“

This section from “Passing the Buck,” exposes the real Obama:

Once again, Obama has found a way to NOT let the buck stop with him – he is proving to be quite adept at finding a way to not take a stand on stands he has previously taken. I know – it makes my head hurt, too, but that’s the reality of it. The title of this article really says it all: Obama Avoids Test on Gays in Military. Uh, yeah. You may recall that I wrote just recently about the Army Arabic linguist, Lt. Dan Choi, and his plea to Obama to not fire him from the Army (“Freedom’s Just Another Word…”).

Well, get this:

The Obama administration has decided to accept an appeals-court ruling that could undermine the military’s ban on service members found to be gay.

A federal appeals court in San Francisco last year ruled that the government must justify the expulsion of a decorated officer solely because she is a lesbian. The court rejected government arguments that the law banning gays in the military should have a blanket application, and that officials shouldn’t be required to argue the merits in her individual case.

The administration let pass a May 3 deadline to appeal to the Supreme Court. That means the case will be returned to the district court, and administration officials said they will continue to defend the law there.

The move comes as President Barack Obama attempts a balancing act on gay rights. He was elected with strong support from the gay community and promised action on a number of issues. But mindful of the complex politics, the White House has moved slowly.

Um, no – a glacier moves slowly. Obama hasn’t moved at all: … (Read all.)

Um, no – a glacier moves slowly. Obama hasn’t moved at all:

Amy, you crack me up even while you’re talking about a truly serious story that affects national security because the military is dismissing desperately needed Arab linguists and other “mission critical specialists.”

Since 2/3rds of the American people back the open inclusion of gays in the military, this action is not hazardous politically and should be taken care of right away. Get with the program, President Obama.

Camp David. I’m not kidding. The chapel at Camp David. Now he has an excuse to leave DC every weekend, if he wants. So he can go to church. Now, this may come as a shock to some of you, but Washington, DC, actually HAS some churches there. Heck, they even have a big, ol’ cathedral – perhaps you’ve heard of it, the NATIONAL Cathedral? Ahem.

But you know that’s not it. To paraphrase Michael Jackson, “sometimes (he) feels like somebody’s watching (him)…”:

Now, in an unexpected move, Obama has told White House aides that instead of joining a congregation in Washington, D.C., he will follow in George W. Bush’s footsteps and make his primary place of worship Evergreen Chapel, the nondenominational church at Camp David.

A number of factors drove the decision — financial, political, personal — but chief among them was the desire to worship without being on display. Obama was reportedly taken aback by the circus stirred up by his visit to 19th Street Baptist in January. Lines started forming three hours before the morning service, and many longtime members were literally left out in the cold as the church filled with outsiders eager to see the new President. Even at St. John’s, which is so accustomed to presidential visitors that it is known as the “Church of the Presidents,” worshippers couldn’t help themselves from snapping photos of Obama on their camera phones as they walked down the aisle past him to take communion.

And how about that – right there in Time magazine – making the comparison between Bush and Obama! Teehee!

Seriously?? He was taken aback? David Axelrove has done NOTHING but MAKE a circus around Obama. Has he already forgotten his Greek columns in Denver? His plying people with food and drink to come to rallies (which the media conveniently failed to mention – except in Germany), so he could have HUGE gatherings to fawn all over him? C’mon, give me a break. I have never seen a man who wanted sycophants around him at every second – unless they are uncomfortably close. And then we see him getting irritable (“I just want to eat my waffles, okay??” Or whatever it was he said exactly…).

Now, I’ll grant you that it is inappropriate for people to be snapping photos of the Obamas while in church. A sense of decorum and decency would be nice, but sadly, we seem to be far from those days. Still, I have no doubt other presidents have had to endure people staring at them or what have you:

The challenge of not only being part of a church community but also praying in peace has long been a problem for Presidents, according to historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony. “McKinley hated having people staring at him while he read Psalms, sang hymns, put money in the collection plate or took communion,” he writes in America’s First Families. “By the 1920s, getting a presidential family in and out of church was a production. Secret Service agents had to cordon off a clear path from the curb to the church entrance before the Coolidges arrived … [and] they were swiftly escorted to their third-row pew.”

The Clintons attended Foundry United Methodist Church on 16th Street, and were particularly active during the years before Chelsea left for college. But White House aides say that security measures required by the Secret Service have become stricter since 9/11 and would cause significant delays for parishioners — and at significant cost to taxpayers — on Sunday mornings. Given Obama’s popularity within the African-American community, the President also worried that if he chose a local black congregation, church members would find themselves competing with sightseers for space in the pews.

Oh, isn’t that SO thoughty of the president?!? He’s always worried about the little people as he has demonstrated time and time again… Hahahahaha!! I could barely even write that out…Anyway, the Obamas won’t have to deal with the hoi poloi at Camp David:

The First Family won’t have that problem at Camp David, where the 150-seat Evergreen Chapel attracts a congregation of between 50 and 70 people most Sundays. The rustic stone-and-glass octagonal structure was built nearly two decades ago through private funds; President George H.W. Bush dedicated it in 1991. At the ceremony, Christian singer Sandi Patti sang and the late Cardinal James Hickey of Washington delivered a sermon calling the chapel a “witness to our common belief that we need to seek divine guidance in the conduct of our national affairs.”

Each week, regardless of whether the President is on-site, Evergreen Chapel holds nondenominational Christian services open to the nearly 400 military personnel and staff at Camp David, as well as their families. A music director from nearby Hood College coordinates adult and children’s choirs (Clinton sang occasionally with the choir when he visited). In December, the kids in the congregation put on a Christmas pageant and the chapel holds a candlelight service on Christmas Eve. The Bush family enjoyed Christmas at Evergreen Chapel so much that they celebrated the holiday there for all eight years of Bush’s Administration.

Well, you know, poor old Obama has lost his pastor, The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, over those little kerflufles at his church. You know the ones – when Wright was preaching his vitriolic, hate mongering sermons? Thus leaving Obama wandering in the desert without his former minister. But he is making do:

(snip)But Barack Obama found himself spiritually isolated upon entering the Oval Office. He famously broke ties last year with Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor, and resigned his membership at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. So, just as he followed Bush’s lead in choosing Evergreen as a church home, the President is taking a page from Clinton’s playbook on this front: Obama has a small group of pastors he contacts for prayer and spiritual support (including two men who played the same role at times for Bush).

Those two, Kirbyjon Caldwell and T.D. Jakes, are both African-American ministers from Texas. Caldwell offered a prayer at Bush’s first inauguration and in 2008 he officiated at Jenna Bush’s wedding. By that point, he was an Obama supporter, even launching the website JamesDobsonDoesntSpeakForMe.com last summer when the Focus on the Family leader accused Obama of “deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview.” Obama chose Jakes to preach the sermon at a private prayer service the morning of his inauguration and reached out to him to pray by phone on other occasions.

While the other three leaders Obama turns to are all members of his Faith Advisory Council, when he contacts them it is to talk not on a policy level but a personal one. Otis Moss Jr. is a retired Baptist pastor who once served with Martin Luther King Sr. at Ebeneezer Church. His son is the new pastor — following Jeremiah Wright — at Trinity in Chicago, but Moss is the model of a proper old-school preacher and is the father figure of Obama’s group. His fellow council member, Joel Hunter, is a white evangelical and pastor of a Florida megachurch. And Vashti McKenzie is the first female elected as a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

McKenzie isn’t surprised that Obama has reached out for prayer and guidance. “This President has not shown himself to be a person in isolation — going out on dates, spending time in the community,” she says. “You wouldn’t expect him to isolate himself spiritually. This is a man with a faith center, we’ve heard him give his testimony.” Her advice for how to build a life of faith within the White House? “Everybody needs to just back off and settle down. Let him choose where he’s comfortable, choose where he and his family are going to be spiritually fed, and then let it be his choice.” Amen. (With reporting by Elizabeth Dias)

Hold the phone – didn’t Wright say recently that Obama was like a son to him? Oh, I am pretty sure he did, as American Girl in Italy reported recently in “Reverend Wright Complicit In Murder At Holocaust Museum?“:

“Of course I voted for him; he’s my son. I’m proud of him,” Wright said. “I’ve got five biological kids. They all make mistakes and bad choices. I haven’t stopped loving any of them.

“He made mistakes. He made bad choices. I’ve got kids who listen to their friends. He listened to those around him. I did not disown him.”

Uh huh. I’ll say. But wouldn’t you LOVE to know what Reverend Wright means by that?? Anyhoo, I digress…

As for McKenzie’s claims, you have got to be kidding me. Because Obama takes his wife out on a date to New York on OUR dime, I might add, McKenzie extrapolates Obama likes to be among the people? Hogwash. He likes to be on stage, he likes the sycophants, but I (and others) have reported the numerous times Obama has gotten testy with people. Heck, I’ve never seen Hillary get testy even when men were screaming sat her, “Iron my shirt! Iron my shirt!” But Obama? Please. There was a post I saw the other day about Obama’s glares at world leaders who weren’t following the script, something his own aides pointed out. Here’s a little video of the Primaries to remind you:

Bit I digress again. The point is I think the Right Rev. McKenzie gives Obama way too much credit for wanting to be “sociable” and out with the people. Her statement is contradictory to the whole point of the article – Obama does NOT want to be around a lot of people, hence his desire to go to Camp David for church. And to get out of Washington AWAY from all of those people.

And isn’t it ironic that he has taken yet another page from the Bush playbook? Though this one won’t be destroying a bunch of lives like, say, “prolonged detention.” Perhaps Obama can pray about that while he is at Camp David…

(1) “Barack, Get Your Facts Right,” published on June 12, 2008

(2) “An Update on the Michelle Obama Rant, on June 7, 2008

(1) “Barack, Get Your Facts Right,” published on June 12, 2008

If Barack’s first foray into setting the record straight is a sign of how he would handle the weightier matters of the presidential office, boy are we screwed. Here’s what Obama considers a “lie”:

Lie:
Blogger Larry Johnson wrote on May 31st that he would add „New and dramatic developments. This is a heads up. I‚ll post the news Monday morning by 0900 hours. Now I know why people who have seen the videotape say it is stunning. Barack‚s headaches are only starting.‰

Read the post

Truth:
Johnson posted no such update.

Barack? DUDE. Open your eyes brother. Here’s what I posted on Monday morning (17 minutes earlier than promised) on 2 June:

Michelle Obama and Louis Farrakhan Take On Whitey
By Larry Johnson on June 2, 2008 at 8:43 edt AM in Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Minister Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., Whitey Tape | Edit
I learned over the weekend why the Republicans who have seen the tape of Michelle Obama ranting about “whitey” describe it as “STUNNING.” I have not seen it but I have heard from five separate sources who have spoken directly with people who have seen the tape. It features Michelle Obama and Louis Farrakhan. They are sitting on a panel at Jeremiah Wright’s Church when Michelle makes her intemperate remarks. Whoops!! When that image comes out it will enter the politcal ads hall of fame. It will be right up there with the little girl plucking daisy petals in the famous 1964 ad LBJ used against Barry Goldwater.

That ain’t a “lie” Barky. It is a fact. Of course, most Barack supporters have trouble grasping this concept. Maybe that’s why they support Barack–does not require much intellectual effort. Simply close eyes and hold your nose.

(2) “An Update on the Michelle Obama Rant, on June 7, 2008

The recording that shows Michelle Obama saying disparaging things about white folks is for real. It is not part of some elaborate dirty trick. The people who have seen her comments describe it as “stunning” or “devastating.” I have not spoken directly with the people who have seen the tape, but I have spoken to two of my friends who are friends with those who watched the tape/dvd.

Are they playing me? No, but it is a valid question to ask. Two of my sources, who have recounted the reactions of their friends who have seen the Michelle “performance,” live on opposite sides of the United States geographically and politically. They do not know each other and had no way of knowing that each of them was talking to me. This is one reason I believe the report of the “tape” is true.

I also have learned that Obama campaign knew about this “tape” at least two weeks prior to my first blog item on the matter. And they are not laughing it off as a joke. (Note to Barack: There are leaks in your campaign.) Ben Smith’s report on the matter only tells part of the story.
The woman from McClatchy who dared ask the question was verbally assaulted by Obama aides. She was treated as if she had made a death threat.

Then there is the matter of the email/disinformation campaign the Obama folks are trying. First they sent some of their bloggers an email claiming that Michelle said “WHY DID HE” rather than use the pejorative, “WHITEY.” And now the excuse is being circulated that somehow I, or someone else, is cribbing from some silly book I have never heard of until now. A campaign does not react this way to a fabrication.

I apologize for any confusion generated from our effort to get on top of this. We made the mistake of putting up the claims from Hillbuzz, but have no way of verifying Hillbuzz’s claim that it is a recording that features Michelle Obama with the wife of Louis Farrakhan. That is not what the sources who have seen the “tape” have reported to me.

The sources who have seen the tape report that Michelle says disparaging things about “whites” and that Louis Farrakhan is visible. There is no identifying information on the segment they have seen to identify the location or time when this was recorded.

Why does this “tape” of Michelle Obama matter? The folks who have it are working to elect John McCain. They are using it now to raise money for a 527 effort that will attack Barack Obama. I am told that they fully intend to keep this “off-the-market” until after the Democratic Convention. The Republicans involved with this believe that Barack Obama is a more beatable candidate than Hillary Clinton and see the tape as reinforcing an image of racial division that will hurt Obama.

I support Hillary Clinton for President. I believe she will be a stronger candidate. And if I had the tape I would put it out in a heartbeat. Getting the tape out now does one of two things–either it persuades Super Delegates that Barack is not electable or it gives the Obama campaign time to repair the damage.

I now appreciate somewhat how Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center, must have felt as he tried to warn Condaleeza Rice and the Bush White House about a brewing terrorist attack in the days leading up to September 11th. And please, I am not equating the Michelle tape with the attacks of 9-11. Rather I am focused on the point of what happens when someone has incomplete information, which warns about a future event, and tries to raise the alert. Just because Cofer Black could not say in late July 2001 that the coming attack would be carried out by 19 hijackers on four commercial airliners did not mean his intelligence was wrong.

Those who want to vilify me for having the audacity to raise this warning can have at it. I ran up against similar attacks and skeptics in May of 2003 when I warned that the Bush Administration had cooked the intelligence on Iraq. It is only now that we get a Senate Intelligence Committee Report and a book from Scott McClellan confirming what I said five years ago.

I caught more heat in October of 2003 when I defended Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA officer. Again, we had to wait until the trial of Scooter Libby to learn that the claims she was just a glorified secretary were lies. And once again Scott McClellan, Bush’s former Press Secretary, confirms that he was lied to as well about Valerie’s status and who was involved in spreading her name around town.

My efforts on those two issues earned me the enmity of many on the political right. On at least two separate occasions the Wall Street Journal editorial page attacked me by name and accused me of being part of a CIA effort to sabotage the policies of President Bush. Those charges were repeated and amplified in a subsequent book by Kenneth Timmerman,

Shadow Warriors

.

Now it is some on the left who are attacking me and behaving in the same manner as those who rejected my reports on Iraq and Valerie Plame. Now I am a Republican tool. Here’s a small, but representative sample of the “love” letters coming my way:

From: KC Broberg
Sent: Jun 6, 2008 7:17 PM
To: Larry Johnson
Subject: WHERE IS THE VIDEO BIG SHOT?

more lies from mr. johnson it appears. no video on whitey? shocker
keep up the good work – swift boating is really going to work well this time…..

or this

On 6/6/08 9:57 AM, “Ben Bulloch” wrote:

Crawl in a hole and bury yourself. You fucking toolbag.

and finally:

On 6/6/08 12:49 PM, “Alejandro Queral” wrote:

On May 26, you wrote in your blog: “I know for a fact that Barack and Michelle Obama would like the tape of her blasting “whitey” during a rant at Jeremiah Wright’s church to never see the light of day.”

Really? If that’s the case, where’s the video? You and I know that if such a video exists it would have appeared on YouTube by now. But the truth seems to be there’s no such tape not because it hasn’t appeared on the web but because you can’t even keep your story straight. If you knew anything for a fact, your story would at least be consistent. I especially love how your sources are “all Republicans with access to knowledge but who do not know each other.” How convenient. But you and I also know that most insiders with access tend to know, or know of, each other. I suspect you made this up to cover your ass: since you name no names and you say the Republican insiders don’t know each other, there’s no way for anyone to disprove you. How clever. I’m also amazed at the bold face lie you tell your readers: that Michelle Obama was at Trinity Church when she made the speech, only to recant later and admit that you “do not know where this [the alleged panel discussion] occurred.”

Please stop using your blog to spread lies and rumors. It is not making this country any better.

Alejandro Queral

Now for the shocker. If the election comes down to a choice between John McCain and Barack Obama I will vote for Bob Barr. I live in Maryland and my state is very likely to vote overwhelmingly for Barack. I continue to believe that Barack is not qualified by experience or temperament to be President. I will be happy to be proved wrong on that count. But, if elected, he is likely to revive memories of the failed Presidency of Jimmy Carter. How apropos that Jimmy endorsed Barack.

And I cannot support John McCain, who is staffing his national security team with many of the bozos who were instrumental in bringing us the debacle in Iraq. Of particular concern is Randy Scheunemann. A confidant of Douglas Feith, Scheunemann represents a continuation of the disastrous Bush policies in the Middle East. I’ll devote more time later to these issues.

Let me conclude with this–I think there is at least one tape/recording that will be released sometime after the August convention and is likely to be very damaging to the Barack Obama presidential campaign. While I hope that Super Delegates wake up and realize that Hillary is their best shot for victory in the fall, I realize I am swimming upstream. So word to Barrack and team–the tape is coming at some point and you folks better be ready to deal with it because, unlike the situations with Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger, you cannot divorce your wife in the middle of a campaign.

A US Cardinal and several Bishops denounce the University of Notre Dame for inviting Barack Obama to deliver a speech at their commencement ceremonies. They are also pissed off about the Honorary Law Degree to be given to Barack “God Damn AmeriKKKa” Obama. A lot of Catholics are pissed of too, and over 210,000 of them signed a petition denouncing University of Notre Dame. For the Bishops, Cardinals and many Catholics the problem is Obama’s stance on LIFE:

US Cardinal DiNardo, Archbishop of Galveston-Houston:

“Though I can understand the desire by a university to have the prestige of a commencement address by the President of the United States, the fundamental moral issue of the inestimable worth of the human person from conception to natural death is a principle that soaks all our lives as Catholics, and all our efforts at formation, especially education at Catholic places of higher learning.”

Texas Bishop Gregory Aymond of Austin:

“it is very clear that in this case the University of Notre Dame does not live up to its Catholic identity in giving this award and their leadership needs our prayerful support.”

Indiana Bishop John D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend:

This will be the 25th Notre Dame graduation during my time as bishop. After much prayer, I have decided not to attend the graduation. I wish no disrespect to our president, I pray for him and wish him well. I have always revered the Office of the Presidency. But a bishop must teach the Catholic faith “in season and out of season,” and he teaches not only by his words — but by his actions.

My decision is not an attack on anyone, but is in defense of the truth about human life.

Arizona Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix:

“I am saddened and heavy of heart about your decision to invite President Obama to speak at Notre Dame University and even to receive an honorary degree,” began Bishop Olmsted.

But the prelate went further, charging that Fr. John Jenkins, the university’s president, has committed “a public act of disobedience to the Bishops of the United States” by inviting Obama to the May 17 Commencement.

These are fighting words. But the Cardinal and the Bishops miss the point. It’s not just life that is the issue here. It is also about fake Catholic Father Pfleger. Allowing Obama to speak at Notre Dame grants this trash credibility:

Cardinal DiNardo needs to reread his statement.

Particularly troubling is the Honorary Law Degree since it recognizes that the person is a ‘Teacher,’ in this case of the Law. I think that this decision requires charitable but vigorous critique.

Obama’s more than a teacher of law and of abortion. Friends with Father Pfleger, who Obama called a friend and an advisor, Obama is a teacher of hate.

The 2004 Sun-Times article noted that “friends and advisers” such as Pfleger, “who has known Obama for the better part of 20 years, help him keep his (moral) compass, he (Obama) says.” Based on Pfleger’s remarks, either he or Obama, or both, have, uh, lost their bearings.

Pfleger has had a working relationship with Obama since the late 1980s. As noted, he was one of Obama’s spiritual mentors. Between 1995 and 2001, Pfleger contributed a total of $1,500 to Obama’s various political campaigns.

Giving Obama a free degree and letting him speak is to accept the hate of Father Pfleger, who mentored Barack Obama. I am sure all those rich white Irish, Italian, Polish and Lithuanian kids from the suburbs of Chicago who work hard to pay money to attend the Catholic college mommy and daddy attended will want to sit and listen to a guy whose mentor said all white people are responsible for slavery and racism. I am sure all those rich white Catholics who will get a job in daddy’s business or with daddy’s friends from the old parish want to hear a man whose mentor said all of them are responsible for white privilege. I don’t think people go to a Notre Dame graduation to be told they are all white people who feel entitled.

That is what Notre Dame wants. Not just God Damn AmeriKKKa but also BLAME WHITEY and HATE WHITEY. Inviting Barack Obama to speak is inviting Father Pfleger and Reverend Wright to Notre Dame. Not a good move.

This is more about life. This is about ignorance and hate. The Cardinals and Bishops need to wrap their heads around that. If they don’t say anything about Obama and Pfleger, we’ll just assume the Cardinals and Bishops and the whole Catholic Church agrees with Pfleger and Obama and the God Damn AmeriKKKa Church both of them went to. That’s not the direction I think Catholics and Notre Dame want to go.

For the record, let me state I will not forgive Michelle Obama for her comments about Hillary during the primary. When asked if she would support Hillary Clinton were she to be the nominee, Michelle said “she’d have to think about it – it would “depend on her policies, her approach, her tone.” Her tone?! Mrs. Obama’s notorious statement that for the first time in her adult life she was proud of her country was, at the very least, ill-conceived. Finally, her diss to Hillary, the “if you can’t take care of your own house…” statement was likewise shortsighted.

However, it seems Mrs. Obama’s husband is having a little trouble taking care of his own house at the moment…Perhaps the first lady is learning these kinds of thoughts would be better kept to oneself. But this brings me to my point…

No matter how I may feel about Michelle Obama’s past statements or actions, she is not the President and cannot be used as a shield, a distraction or a whipping post for his faulty actions. By that very logic, if she is that all-powerful, she should have run for President, not he.

And if this woman is that strong, obviously, Hillary Clinton, with her experience and incredible smarts must be even stronger. Why is she not president today? Possibly because women are still subjected to this same idiotic double standard and a ‘blame game’ that defies all reason.

The UK article refers to Mrs. Obama’s 1985 Princeton thesis, “Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” guarded from publication prior to the election, in which she stated:

“I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances underwhich I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”

Mr. Delingpole’s theory is that this separate attitude is to blame for her wish for revenge over past British hegemony, and thus, she instructed her husband to deliver a slight to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, although he cites no evidence to that effect. Delingpole states:

At the moment in Britain, we’re still in the “Doesn’t she look fabulous in a designer frock” stage of understanding of Michelle Obama. Gradually, though, we’ll begin to realise that she is every bit the terrifying executive’s wife that Hillary Clinton was. Or, shudder, Cherie Blair.

We may just LURVE Michelle’s fashion sense. But Michelle doesn’t reciprocate our affection, one bit. Her broad-brush view of history associates Brits with the wicked white global hegemony responsible for the slave trade. Never mind that a white, Tory Englishman – William Wilberforce – brought the slave trade to an end. Judging by her record, Michelle does not make room for such subtle nuance.

The article refers to Michelle Obama as Lady Macbeth – the same disrespectful, evil name they coined to describe Hillary Clinton years before. By labeling Michelle Obama with the moniker of the overly-ambitious, evil wife, this article is intimating the Barack Obama is not capable of thinking for himself. So the beat goes on. Blame the wife. Blame the woman. It must be her fault. She is pulling the strings and telling her “weak husband” what to do.

But what does her 1985 thesis have to do with President Obama claiming he is overwhelmed and tired a mere seven weeks after taking office? Or that he cannot be bothered to find a more thoughtful gift than a boxed set of DVDs (in the wrong format) for a man who is going blind? For that matter, what would any of her actions have to do with the fact that Obama made a tax cheat Treasury Secretary, or any of his other missteps?

This is merely a milder version of the same sexist claptrap that Hillary has been subjected to for years. While I am not comparing these two ladies, it is a pattern that must be discussed. Frankly, I am sick and damned tired of this ‘blame the woman’ meme that is so popular here. The British obviously seem to suffer from a good dose of this nonsense as well.

This is not unlike our (awful) Chris Matthews and their (awful) Chris Hitchens, who, when the stink about Rev. Wright was discovered, tried to say that it was due to “Michelle’s influence” that President Obama sat in that church for 20 years.

I will repeat now what I wrote then – If the 47 year old (then) frontrunner for the Dem. nomination, millionaire, successful author, Senator, husband and father of two cannot figure out how to pick up his round behind out of a place he does not belong, regardless of what his wife is doing, then he had no business running to be President.

Whatever Michelle Obama’s thesis said in 1985, she is not the President of the United States. If President Obama cannot figure out the proper protocol or be classy or politically savvy enough to have a team help to figure it out for him, I am not going to blame her for that. He is to blame first and foremost. Surely there is a White House Social Secretary. There are people in charge of protocol instructing the President and First Lady as to the proper treatment of foreign dignitaries. They know better than to get last minute trinkets at the White House gift shop. Yes, Michelle should have known better, too – this was callous and thoughtless in my view. But the bigger responsibility must rest with the President. The buck stops with him – the man with his feet up behind the desk.

Barack Obama does not get a pass on any of his errors in judgment on account of his wife. And if this was a deliberate political slight to the PM, it is coming from Obama and his administration – he must take responsibility for it and bear the consequences, should there be any. And if it was mere carelessness or thoughtlessness, he may pay the price for that, too, down the line.

Again, I am not making a case for the first lady. I am simply pointing out that it is a very familiar pattern to say “oh, he seems nice, but that wife of his!!”

Speaking as a woman with a strong personality, I know all too well what it is like for a husband with an easygoing manner to be the guy doing all the glad handing, while refusing to be the disciplinarian, so guess what – that role falls to the wife by default. She winds up looking like the harridan by comparison. This is all, conscious or unconscious, image management on the part of the man and the woman gets stuck with the dirty work.

Clichéd as it is, how many times have you been at some function over the years and heard a husband describe his wife as “the old ball and chain” or some modern version of the same. It is another nail in the coffin of marital respect. Many men, even those who love their wives dearly, love to play this game. Oh “she’s got me whipped,” I just say “yes, dear.” More poppycock. Little boys trying to make their wives “mommy.” It is a bad habit and just as bad for the wife to engage in it by making their husbands the Peter Pans in the equation. And many do.

We all laugh it off but I wonder, if, at its heart, there is something more dangerous going on here – a need for the man to make less of his need for the woman by somehow dissing her.

Almost a year ago, when the writing was on the wall that the DNC was going to award the nomination to Obama no matter what, I predicted that if they did make it to the White House, the day would come when the press honeymoon would end, and Michelle, outspoken personality that she is, would finally see what it is like to be on the receiving end of some of the treatment Hillary knows all too well. Even if she receives one tenth of that foul treatment, Michelle Obama may yet rue the day she made her earlier statements. Mrs. Obama may yet understand what it means to take care of her own house – ‘cause right now it’s not looking so good.

Some I know who did not vote for Obama, Democrats all, by the way, find her even more hateful than him and miss no opportunity to tell me so. I find his egregious flip-flops, behavior and statements far worse, however. As much as I was avoiding the drooling media covering their every step, I made it my business to watch the Inauguration, their Sixty Minutes interview post-election, and also Mrs. Obama appearing before women in the military to coincide with Women’s History Month. On those occasions, I observed someone self-conscious, uncomfortable in her own person, awkward in the new role she has been given, working very hard to belong. This might be true of anyone in her position. In that Sixty Minutes interview, she was constantly casting sidewise glances at her husband, always checking him, seemingly worried he was going to make a mistake. I can see why. We will see what kind of First Lady she turns out to be – and no, I don’t much care whether or not she goes sleeveless.

But I do care that the President of the United States professed to be not only “ready on day one” but “right on day one” – apparently he is neither ready nor right.

While I may have reason to protest her behavior on certain fronts, I will always be aware to credit or blame her with what is hers, and not pretend that she wields all the power here.

If Michelle Obama winds up on the receiving end of sexist abuse, I wonder if she’ll speak our against the self-same behavior used against both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, being that she was so complicit in it, by virtue of her silence. How many other women out there were complicit in allowing Hillary, the stronger candidate, to be excoriated, yet said nothing in the face of this endless misogyinist assault?

Mr. Delingpole would not be the first person to try to project all the negative traits of the male onto the female. Perhaps the reason he and other sexists like him choose to blame Michelle Obama, and, to a greater degree, Hillary Clinton before her, is more out of fear of a powerful woman than anything else.

This irrational fear or envy, in part, explains why we do not have a woman president as we speak.

Ironic that on Inauguration Day, when President Barack Obama told Americans it was time to take personal responsibility and “grow up” as a country, some of his supporters behaved like spoiled children in booing George W. Bush.

And, sadly, neither Obama nor any leader in the public spotlight that day seized the moment to admonish the boorish behavior.

It would have been nice had Obama had the presence of mind in his inaugural speech to not only allude to scripture in saying it’s time to put away “childish things” but to also have told the boo-birds that their behavior was inappropriate and the embodiment of those “childish things.”

He might have said: “Isn’t it enough to be just happy for me? When you boo the former president, you fail to understand what this solemn event is all about — the peaceful transition of power. This is not a football game. Nor is it a Third World bloodless coup. This is American democracy at work. If you can’t respect that, then leave. Now.”

Like I said, why the hell would Obama start now? He hasn’t bothered to say anything to any one of his minions at any point during the entire primary or election season, so why would he speak out for Mr. Bush?

And here is another little problem I have – him saying Obama should have said, “Isn’t it enough to be just happy for me?” Um, what? Yes, we should all be happy for The Boy Who Would Be Dictator because this has nothing to do with our actual country. Wowie.

Mr. Frederick’s shock continues:

But no one mustered the courage to say that. While I thought Obama’s speech was otherwise thought-provoking and worthy, he missed an opportunity to call out these boors and chastise their behavior. By not doing so, I am afraid that Obama essentially condoned this kind of mob intolerance. There is already a hateful mean streak among some Obamamaniacs. Left unchecked, it can fester into something quite un-American and un-democratic.

In case you missed it, when President George W. Bush was announced to the crowd, some booed loudly, shocking even the commentators on the official Obama network, MSNBC. One section of onlookers sang, “Nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, goodbye.” And, finally, as Bush left the White House, one deep thinker took the opportunity to give the “one-finger salute,” thus saying more about himself than anything else.

This from a movement that fancies itself all about peace, love and global karma.

Where in the HELL Has this man been? Clearly, he cannot distinguish between the mantras of the Obama Party and the REALITY of the Obama Party. How many, many times have we written about this, the cruel, aggressive, demeaning, sexist, even misogynistic behavior of Obama’s followers, and that is just toward Secretary of State Hillary Clinton!! It would seem Mr. Frederick’s blindfold and earplugs served him well if he was unaware of these, um, “shenanigans.” The “one-finger salute? Like the one Obama gave to Clinton detailed in THIS article?

He continues:

Now look, it would be a mistake to paint all Democrats and Obama supporters with the actions of these few on Inauguration Day. And, according to news reports, some in the crowd tried hard to shush the boo-birds. That is a hopeful sign.

But let’s also not ignore the obvious. There is a growing faction of the American left that seeks revenge more than righteousness.

Intolerant of dissenting views, this faction thinks as comedian Janeane Garofalo does that some members of the opposing political party should be “jailed.” Terrorist acts (such as mailing envelopes of white power to Mormon temples because the gay marriage vote in California went the church’s way) are seen by this faction as understandable and acts of legitimate political expression.

But of course. Target the Mormons, thus the Senate Majority Leader (why does everyone always forget that Harry Reid is a MORMON, and ANTI-Choice? I just don’t get that.) So, yes, Janeane, let us completely deny that even before the election, the NY Times was predicting that it would be OBAMA’S supporters that would vote IN Prop. 8. That, in fact, was the reality. It was the African American community coming out in droves that tipped the scales, as detailed HERE and HERE.

Mr. Frederick does touch on the issue of race, too:

There is also an ugly racial component to it. We first saw it with Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who said, among other things, that white America had deliberately inflicted black Africa with AIDS.

When the Rev. Wright first hit the national stage, we hardly knew what to make of his irrational and separatist statements. Consequently, we pretty much ignored the substance of Wright’s racially divisive rhetoric and focused on it as a day-to-day political story. It made us more comfortable, I think.

But in light of the things we saw at the inauguration, it may be time to revisit the dangers of intolerance and hate — no matter the color of the person who makes them — and nip this ugly mean streak in the bud.

As our president said, it is time to grow up. (Sherman Frederick (sfrederick@reviewjournal.com) is publisher of the Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media.

Well, that is just laughable – to expect the most juvenile, petulant, arrogant, immature, empty-suit to tell his minions to grow up. HAHAHAHAHA!! Yeah, maybe when he does.

Beside that, though, is the convenient amnesia of Mr. Frederick regarding what the Rev. Lowery said at the inauguration (h/t to LisaB), highlighted in Pat Racimora’s article, “A Profound Prayer Until..>Wrong Turn!.” To recap, he said this:

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around … when yellow will be mellow … when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right.

Holy cow. Yeah, I think that qualifies as having a racial component.

But it also begs the question WHY Rev. Wright’s incendiary, separatist comments were not addressed more fully? And why his connection, as well as Louis Farrakhan’s, to Obama was continually glossed over by the majority of those in the MSM? Because they were afraid of being called racists? Or because they knew it would be real trouble for Obama if they actually did their job and exposed the belief system in which Obama was a willing participant? Some of us were paying attention, though. Do a “search at: NoQuarter on Rev. Wright, and you will get page after page after page of articles that at least have some mention of him, if not dealing with him directly (far too many to link to here), beginning with this one in March.

Same goes for the “boorish” behavior of Obama’s supporters. The Palin (and Clinton) t-shirts? The intimidation/bullying at the caucuses? “Iron My Shirt” buffoons? Obama turning away from Clinton without greeting her at the SOTU? Obviously, I could go on and on with examples, all of which have been well documented at NQ and other sites. Which raises this question: where in the hell has this guy been, expecting Obama to change his stripes NOW? Just because it was Bush being booed? Because at no time has Obama acted like a “grown up” when his crowds have gone off on his competition – not once. He has been their role model for boorish behavior from debates to rallies. So for anyone to expect anything different now just because he was sworn in a few times is nothing short of delusional.

So to recap, it is way past time to take off the blindfold and take out the earplugs. The booing? Typical. Comments like Garofalo’s? Typical. Intimidation of dissenters? Typical. (Don’t believe me? Just ask the Justice Department since they are suing the Black Panthers.) Racial division by clergy? Typical.

This is who Obama is. To expect him to challenge behavior in which he himself engages is nuts.

Wow, the memories this story brings back! Do any of the rest of you remember the utterly insane General Tony McPeak who Obama, straight-faced, introduced as his chief military adviser? (Which made us all gasp with genuine fear?)

I wonder where Gen. McPeak is these days? Have any of you seen him anywhere recently? Is he maybe 7,000 miles away under that bus in American-Samoa along with Howard Dean?

[See: "Notable Absence of Howard Dean, January 9, 2009."]

Gen. Tony McPeak, Obama’s top military adviser, was interviewed by a newspaper about the Israeli/Palestinian peace process:

The interviewer asked McPeak: “So where’s the problem? State? White House?”

McPeak replied: “New York City. Miami. We have a large vote — vote, here in favor of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it.”

Translation (as if it’s needed): Jews — who put Israel over every American interest — control America’s policy on the Middle East. And McPeak has the audacity to accuse Bill Clinton of McCarthyism.

For more on Gen. McPeak, read Larry Johnson’s post, “Senator Obama, Have You No Decency?” [The photo above comes from Saturday's rally in Medford, Oregon. Larry quotes from their speeches at that rally.]

Below, “Obama church published Hamas terror manifesto: Compares charter calling for murder of Jews to Declaration of Independence,” along with the PDF of the actual Obama church bulletin:

More:

Sen. Barack Obama’s Chicago church reprinted a manifesto by Hamas that defended terrorism as legitimate resistance, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist and compared the terror group’s official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America’s Declaration of Independence.

Yet more:

The revelation follows a recent WND article quoting Israeli security officials who expressed “concern” about Robert Malley, an adviser to Obama who has advocated negotiations with Hamas and providing international assistance to the terrorist group.

In his July 22, 2007, church bulletin, Wright reprinted an article by Mousa Abu Marzook, identified in the newsletter as a “deputy of the political bureau of Hamas.” A photo image of the newsletter was captured and posted today by the business blog BizzyBlog. The Hamas piece was first published by the Los Angeles Times, garnering the newspaper much criticism.

According to senior Israeli security officials, Marzook, who resides in Syria alongside Hamas chieftain Khaled Meshaal, is considered the “brains” behind Hamas, designing much of the terror group’s policies and ideology. Israel possesses what it says is a large volume of specific evidence that Marzook has been directly involved in calling for or planning scores of Hamas terrorist offensives, including deadly suicide bombings. He was also accused of attempting to set up a Hamas network in the U.S. …

He tried to set up a Hamas network in the U.S. Yet, Obama’s pastor for 20 years thinks so highly of him that he posts his writings in the CHURCH BULLETIN? I hardly know what to say.

NOTE: I have uploaded the actual church bulletin: tuccbulletin_july22.pdf

The “Pastor’s Page” (Jeremiah Wright’s page) features this: “A FRESH VIEW OF THE PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE,” written by Mousa Abu Marzook.

Richard Cohen’s sister is canceling her inauguration party because of President-elect Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to bless Mr. Obama’s taking the office of the Presidency of the United State.

According to her brother’s column in the Washington Post, what made her do this is the way in which Mr. Obama’s choice to pick this pastor for this occasion serves as a special sort of condoning of Mr. Warren’s views about gays and lesbians.

I agree with Richard Cohen, and apparently his sister, that these views should be regarded as totally unacceptable by anybody who has any sense of the importance of civil rights and indeed of human rights. I also agree with Richard Cohen’s view that as a somebody running for the office of President and who was at the time a U.S. Senator, Mr. Obama had a particular responsibility for denouncing his then-pastor’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ, for giving the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan a special award during the primary season.

I find it troubling that neither Mr. Cohen nor apparently his sister have not been, as far as I can tell, overly concerned by President-Elect Obama’s equally eloquent silence and inaction regarding the sexism and misogyny directed at Senator Clinton and her supporters, particularly the sophomoric expression of these attitudes by Jon Favreau, the man writing President-elect Obama’s inaugural address. (I shudder to think what the reaction of the Cohen family would have been if Favreau had been found on YouTube horsing around calling somebody a “homo” – maybe then Richard Cohen’s sister would join us in our demand that the President-Elect fire this sophomoric bigot as his chief speech-writer. Whether a bigot is slick (Warren) or juvenile (Favreau), he is still a bigot.)

It is tempting to forget in this sort of dynamic who the real problem is. As is clear from what I have written so far, I wish Richard Cohen and his sister would be, respectively, writing about and canceling inauguration parties as much over Mr. Obama’s inaction in the face of sexism and misogyny as they are in the face of anti-Semitism and gay-bashing. And yes, I wish that Richard Cohen’s sister had paid attention to and given greater weight to the fact that she had the option to work to elect somebody who, both as a Senator and as a Presidential candidate, repeatedly marched in Pride parades and met with editors of gay newspapers across the country rather than working for somebody who would not even have his photograph taken with Gavin Newsome.

But I am not falling into the trap that lies that way. Just because people got it wrong before does not mean they cannot help matters now. People can learn. So despite the bit of complaining above, I am not going to point a finger at Richard Cohen’s sister (or, for that matter, at Katha Pollitt for decrying the misogyny involved in the Warren choice when Pollitt, like Richard Cohen’s sister, opted to support Mr. Obama for the presidency when it was already obvious that he was complacent, to say the least, about sexism and misogyny). I am just pleased that they are starting to pay attention now and apparently coming to understand better who they voted for. To quote Richard Cohen: “The real problem has nothing to do with ministers and everything to do with Obama’s inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader. Sooner or later, he just might have to stand for something.”

Aye, there’s the rub. During the primary season and the general election a friend of mine who spent some considerable amount of time listening to me lament the Democratic Party’s poor judgment in making then-Senator Obama their poster-child, kept saying to me that the real problem with Mr. Obama is that he is an “empty suit”.

That term seemed to me too tepid back then. But I have come to see it as the essential problem behind the problem of Mr. Obama’s inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader, and possibly any kind of leader. To be a moral leader, to stand for something means that you have to fill out your suit, your office, your position. To be an “empty suit” is to be a person who cannot draw a line in the sand, precisely because you do not have an arm and hand within that suit to use to reach out and draw that line. To be an “empty suit” is to be devoid of the weightiness that real leadership requires, including the gravitas to admit to a mistake and change one’s position (drop the bigoted minister and lose the bigoted speechwriter; say you have been wrong to dig in your heels rather than listen to the concerns of so many of the people who worked so hard to elect you). To be an “empty suit” is to be a moral vacuum.

I refused to vote for John McCain for a number of reasons but among them was the fact that while I knew he had the capacity for moral leadership, I did not care for the directions toward which his moral commitments would lead my country. I refused to vote for Barack Obama because I knew he came up empty on the capacity for moral leadership.

In some ways, moral emptiness, especially in a President, is worse than moral wrong-headedness. The morally wrong-headed leader takes a stand, e.g. George W. Bush’s legitimization of torture, and one can rally people against the stand she or he takes. The morally empty leader takes no stand. Under these circumstances, her or his silences often allow people to forget that the blank that exists in lieu of a leader is the appropriate target of criticism. After all, it seems easier to go after people who actually do take stands (Rick Warren, for example) rather than the person who silently enables wrong-headed person to gain in stature. But this is sleight of hand. The real problem is the enabler, the person who allows the sophomoric sexist to put words in his mouth, the person who lets bigoted clerics and their churches affiliate with him.

So, to Richard Cohen’s sister and to Katha Pollitt, I say welcome to my party – the one that got lost in 2008, the one that expected moral leadership of a certain kind from a Democratic president. Now that you are here, I hope you can help me figure out what we are going to do with the empty suit about to occupy the Oval Office. If that empty suit thinks he can pick up sufficient evangelical money and votes in 2012, he is not going to listen to bloggers and op-ed columnists whose votes and followers he thinks he can replace with the support of the evangelicals, regardless of the detestable content of many of their views and some of their conduct. Personally, I do not think we can give the empty suit the sort of backbone necessary to resist the lure of that support. If we cannot give this empty suit some backbone, we need, as I have written before, to start figuring out how we can have a better candidate on offer in 2012. So to the people who are canceling their celebrations, may I suggest that they use the time and effort saved to start solving that problem. We need to coalesce now around somebody who can fight for a nomination by a major Party – probably the the Party formerly recognizable as the Democratic one – who is what Obama’s supporters hoped he would be and what I fear he is not.

Obama is clearly losing goodwill points every day that Blago-gate drags on. Now it appears that indeed Rahm Emanuel was in touch with Blago and aide Harris about the senate seat though no evidence yet of malfeasance on Emanuel’s part.

The stench of Chicago machine politics now clings to Obama like a cheap cologne.

It did not have to be this way.

Obama started out his career firmly in the reform anti-Daley machine wing of the Chicago Democratic Party. That’s what it meant to be an Alinsky-ite Community Organizer in black south side poor and working class neighborhoods in the 80s (where, by the way, he first got to know the powerful Balanoff family of Tom Balanoff aka “SEIU Official” – the flag pole contact in the Feds affidavit against Blagojevich).

That’s what it meant to fight the Mayor’s office and the powerful school board and the teachers union simultaneously in the push for a school reform bill in 1988 which Obama did alongside his pal Bill Ayers. And Obama did that in opposition to mainstream black organizations like Operation PUSH and The Woodlawn Organization.

That’s what it meant to join again with Ayers in securing and then spending $160 million on education reform AGAINST the desires of Mayor Daley in what were called the Chicago School Wars. That’s what it meant to hold his initial campaign event in the home of his “family friends” Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. That’s what it meant to step into the shoes of outgoing state rep. and fellow traveler Alice Palmer.

In fact, that’s what it meant if your aspiration in political life, as it was for Obama, was to depose Richard Daley Jr. inspired by Obama’s hero, Harold Washington, the first black mayor of the city who died in office while Obama was a community organizer.

But at some point in the late 90s or so, Obama realized he had higher ambitions and perhaps becoming Chicago Mayor was not enough. At that point he began to establish relationships with the Chicago mainstream, including key business figures like Penny Pritzker and he even began cozying up to the Daley machine itself. These would prove critical in his rise to national prominence

And now he is stuck with them. Instead of taking advantage of his new national ties to the Kennedy family or VP-elect Joe Biden he immediately fell back on the Chicago crowd for his earliest appointments – Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett, for example – while only leaving behind Jeremiah Wright and, hopefully, Billy Ayers.

For whatever reason Democratic Presidents seem too heavily dependent on the home team. Carter had his Georgia buddies as Clinton had his Arkansas cronies. Usually, however, it takes a few years for their inadequacies to shine through. Obama hasn’t even moved to Washington yet!

From my blog, Global Labor and Politics.

Confusing. Perhaps you can help me to clarify the butter here.

It is tough enough to fathom how a nation with grievous economic difficulties at home and two wars abroad can elect a man with no governing experience, no executive experience and very little legislative experience. Perhaps George Bush so lowered the bar, people figure – ‘hey, how bad can this guy do? At least he gives a good speech.’

Let’s hold that thought for the moment.

Read the rest ->

No matter how unhappy I am with his election or how he got here, I have been pleased with at least some of his cabinet picks. Hmmm. Perhaps he is exhibiting some of that ‘good judgment’ that his supporters keep touting after all.

Surely it is excellent judgment to nominate Senator Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State (no matter how he lied about her ‘lack of experience’ during the campaign). Probably a good idea to keep Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary to insure a smooth transition given our situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Appointing Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, not my favorite pick, but a Hillary fan and a solid enforcer who knows how to get things done and knows where the bodies are buried (which, as it turns out, could be good or bad for him with Chicago festering and ready to explode). Also, his appointing 80% Clintonistas tells me that the self-described “delegator,” P.E. Obama, is smart enough to know what he doesn’t know and hire some adults to mind the store. So far, so good.

So here’s my problem with him in the judgment department. How can a man with the political savvy the media and his followers keep trumpeting be goofy enough to surround himself for twenty years with the likes of Rev. Wright, Rev. Pfleger, Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers (now practicing revisionist history on every talk show and newspaper who will have him), Emil Jones, Gov. Blagojevich, Mayor Daley, Jim Johnson, Penny Pritzker, et al….I could go on singing!

According to Politico:

During [Blagojevich’s] reelection campaign in 2006 – with press reports swirling about a grand jury investigation into Blagojevich’s alleged jobs-for-contributions scheme – Obama praised the governor as a leader “who has delivered consistently on behalf of the people of Illinois.”

Yep. He sure exhibited some good judgment there. And didn’t he endorse someone else who got arrested recently? Kwame Kilpatrick, I believe.

Never mind ‘surrounding’ himself with these people, and praising them, surely not the work of someone with good judgment, but when questioned on their negative influence, their crooked actions, questionable ethics or downright criminal behavior, his answer is invariably one of the following:

I didn’t know.
I thought he was reformed.
We never spoke.
Oops, that was a boneheaded move.
He doesn’t work for me.
This is not the man I knew.
I am sobered and saddened.
Come one fellas, can’t I just eat my waffle?

As far as hearing Rev. Wright’s incendiary and racist America-bashing sermons, P.E. Obama contradicted himself on mainstream news six times in one week: ‘I knew. I didn’t know. I knew. I didn’t know.’

My sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter…
She’s my sister AND my daughter!

(Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown…)

It’s downright exhausting keeping track of so many fibs. It is even harder to do this because the press won’t do their jobs and keep track of them for us. Articles getting scrubbed, altered history left and right. What’s a girl to do?

I know Rev. Wright is considered old news to Obama’s more virulent supporters and the media, who keep insisting there is ‘nothing to see here.” They say this even though Wright just came out this weekend to declare the TUCC is responsible for giving us our first black President. But riddle me this, Batman: if a man sits in a church for 20 years where this vile stuff is expounded regularly and gets married by this man and baptizes his children there – he does so for one of two reasons – either he believes this stuff – or he just sat there for TWENTY years for political street cred. Or he slept in church for TWENTY years.

Unfortunately, there is no good way to spin that. Just as there is no good way to spin so many of his other actions and policy reversals. Gee, he hasn’t even been inaugurated yet. What a supreme mess.

So I guess my question is, how much can Mr. Supercalifragilistic-Expialidocously Triple-Coated Teflon Man get away with before the American people start to wonder about a leader who doesn’t ever seem to notice stuff that is happening right under his own nose? Assuming for the moment that it is mere ignorance and not complicity.

I have made mention of this in the past, but I want a President who is going to protect us, not one we have to protect. Everyone in the media is dancing circles around themselves to make sure we know how honorable he is. Do they protest too much? Why is this even necessary?

I guess media talking heads need to protect their investment, since they have so touted Obama, any revelation denting the armor of their ‘chosen one’ would irreparably tarnish their reputations. Well, I hate to tell you, MSM, but that ship already sailed.

I thought the whole reason he was able to get some mileage over the more qualified candidate, Senator Hillary Clinton, was that he was supposed to be the “new kind of politics” – a fresh way of doing business in Washington – yet he was and is surrounded by very unsavory influences indeed, and seems very much at home with them all.

And after the fact, he behaves as though he knew nothing, saw nothing, said nothing, heard nothing.

Without even accusing President Elect Obama of wrongdoing, I am terrified at having our leader be someone who constantly acts like he is walking around with his head in a fart, with no knowledge of anything that is happening around him. And that is giving him the benefit of the doubt.

But anyone who has been caught dissembling as much as President-Elect Obama has, stopped getting the benefit of the doubt a long time ago.

Right now, it looks as though we have two choices: he is ignorant of all of this or is being dishonest about his involvement. Which is worse? I can certainly understand his voters aching to believe him when he says this stuff, because they voted for a romantic idea and would hate to see their hopes come crashing down. I worry about a crash too, albeit for very different reasons.

What are you hearing out there? Any buyer’s remorse? Is anyone else concerned?

Listen to the video in its entirety because Matthews describes further how VERY near he was to where that bomb went off. And Ayers (of course, this was not discussed today) is a free man solely because his attorneys managed to prove the FBI improperly conducted wiretaps. (I have MUCH MORE TO SAY about this below, and ask you to read along and then share YOUR reactions and add your own knowledge and your own impressions of what occurred, shamefully, on MSNBC.)

I can only imagine what Concerned Mother would have to say about this travesty.

It is unconscionable to me that we and the MSM constantly RAGE about O.J. Simpson, who murdered two people, but not reject Barack Obama, a presidential candidate, now president-elect, who has associated freely and over a long time with a man who could have killed dozens and dozens of people.

On his remarkable radio show a few weeks ago, Nocturnal Warrior made a brilliant point about PEBO’s selection of numerous former Clinton White House and cabinet members. Warrior said that PEBO has to select such people because he has almost no FRIENDS or LONGTIME ASSOCIATES to appoint to any serious jobs in his administration. This is a situation that has NEVER occurred in the history of the presidency of the United States. Heretofore, every U.S. president has had a rich collection of friends, associates, and allies from whom he could select many qualified for high-ranking administration positions. But not Barack Obama. You faithful readers of No Quarter know of many of Obama’s real longtime associates: Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Father Michael Pfleger, William Ayers, Allison and Cullen Davis, Penny Pritzker, Bernardine Dohrn, and on and on, only a very, very few of them suited for any respectable position at any level in an administration. (I’ve clicked several Categories to provide you with a list.) And now, this week, we learn more about other Obama longtime associates like Rod Bagojevich and his wife.

William Ayers’ Crimes, and Additional Perspective History

The SOLE reason no one died is because Ayers et al. were piss-poor bomb makers. What is the sentence range these days for an attempt to commit murder? And don’t forget all the other bombs that nearly killed many others. Including the judge, his wife, and his children — while they slept — simply because that judge was doing his job: Handling the trial of a Black Panther. I’m not generally in favor of the death penalty, but Ayers’ and the Weather Underground’s attempts, repeatedly, to kill as many people as possible in the Capitol, the Pentagon, police stations, and a judge’s home are the works of people so dangerous that those people should never be freed, and may be eligible to be charged with a capital offense.

Ayers has famously said, “Free as a bird, guilty as hell, ain’t America great.” (From Larry Johnson’s must-read article, “A Statement by a Retired FBI Agent Re William Ayers.”)

Dear readers, please understand this: All that, to Matthews, is just some history. It has some import to Matthews, given that he might have been blown up himself, but apparently not much since the conversation flows easily and reasonably amicably, and Matthews, at the end of the interview, gladly flogs Ayers’ book. THEN, after this interview, Matthews has his panel on. Matthews asks Joan Walsh, Salon’s editor, why Ayers — who appeared today to be “confessional” in his tone — didn’t do that during the campaign. Ms. Walsh LAUGHS with a SMIRK on her face, and says, “I think he wanted to stay out of it entirely, and not dignify what the McCain campaign and others were doing.”

Thank you, Ms. Walsh. We now know who the real criminals are. Shame on you, John McCain. Shame on you, Sarah Palin.

Ms. Walsh, please share your opinions with John Murtagh. Well, of course. That’s unfair. You don’t know who John Murtagh is.

Uppity Woman can tell you, in her story, “When This Man Was 9 Years Old, Ayers Bombed His Home.”

If I may, I will contrast the actions of William Ayers and the rest of the sociopathic members of the Weather Underground to the actions of a man who — unless you’re my age and you closely followed anti-war activities during the Vietnam War — you’ve probably NEVER heard of, and will not hear of in the MSM.

After all, he didn’t make bombs. He didn’t befriend a future president and excite the easily excitable rightwing. He simply did the hard work of truly changing history and he paid the price that true, albeit boring, heroes do, in anonymity.

His name is David Harris.

He was the resident counselor in the boys’ dormitory across the street from my girls’ dorm. Many of us sat at his feet as he modestly told us his stories about traveling to the South in summers past to try to help black people get the right to vote. He also shared with us the music he’d learned about in the South — the blues. He told us about Muddy Waters and more. We were entranced. With him, with his stories and the very REAL danger he was in during those summers when white racists wanted to kill him and every white college kid who dared to fight for blacks’ right to vote.

He ran for student body president and I worked on his campaign. He ran on the sole condition that, if elected, he would not serve. He won in a landslide. And did not serve.

Then his draft number came up. (My memory is vague these days, but I believe he tried all the normal routes available back then, such as conscientious objector status, and so on. All of those routes failed.)

So he went to prison. Leavenworth. About seven years ago, I did a search on him, curious what his life had been like. I discovered that he had written a book about his time in Leavenworth, along with his then-wife Joan Baez. I bought the book, and read it. It was a heart-wrenching account. I had no idea that being an inmate in Leavenworth was such a horrific, maddening, insane experience.

It is a simple story, really.

He refused to fight for a war he did not believe was right.

The U.S. government tried him and sentenced him to prison.

He served roughly three years, as I recall.

You may disagree with his decision, but he decided to take the punishment like a man.

He had a father who, as I remember it, was an attorney in Fresno, California. His father surely had some means, but not enough to prevent his son from going to prison.

Bill Ayers had a father who was Chairman of Commonwealth Edison and a mover/shaker in Chicago politics, the arts and education. His father had the means to hire a cadre of attorneys who successfully prevented his son from spending a single day in prison.

David Harris did not build bombs.

He tried to help blacks in the South get to vote, at great risk to his own life.

He helped educate and watched over younger students attending the university, which was often a tedious task, listening to those 18-year-olds’ angst and fear and uncertainty and their various problems with and anxieties about their classes.

He helped the students with the difficult reading for the required freshman class, The History of Western Civilization, because he had read all of those works, including all of Plato, Socrates, and more, and he could — and did — explain those works to those anxious students. He spoke with them patiently and kindly and always very softly.

He was a hulk of a man with broad thick shoulders and a large angular head and a blond mustache but he was, as they say, a gentle giant.

He did not teach the younger students to build bombs or burn down buildings.

He taught the students about giving black people the right to vote and about the blues and about philosophy and about literature and about political thinking and about peaceful protest and about Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

He marched and sang folk songs with his wife, who bore their son.

What a dull man.

Doubtless, Chris Matthews will never invite David Harris for a feature interview.

If only he’d built bombs and then buddied up with a future president, he’d be a sought-after guest.

At least he has an entry in Wikipedia.

:::::::::::

Via Google News results:

Matthews to Ayers: ‘I Agitate My Way, You Agitate Your Way‘ – NewsBusters

Chris Matthews invited on Bill Ayers on Wednesday night’s “Hardball,” and actually confronted him about his bombing of Capitol Hill during his days as a member of the ’60s terrorist group Weather Underground, as the former Capitol Hill police officer emotionally observed: “I was a Capitol policeman at the time, so I was one of the guys that could have been killed obviously at the time you put that, your guys put that bomb in there. So I have a little personal interest. It wasn’t just vandalism. To me it was life-threatening to the guys I worked with. And there were some pretty good guys working there.”

However Matthews, who paradoxically may not even be alive to conduct this interview today if the Weather Underground’s bombs were more devastating, devoted most of the interview tossing softballs Ayers’ way, as the two often agreed with each other on Barack Obama and Iraq policy as the “Hardball” host pointed out they only really differed on how to spread their points of view: “Well, Mr. Ayers, with all due respect, you agitate your way, I agitate my way.

Matthews, who back in October dismissed Sarah Palin’s mention of Ayers, as “the politics of distraction,” began the interview by setting up Ayers to play down any association he had with Obama: …

READ ALL: Matthews to Ayers: ‘I Agitate My Way, You Agitate Your Way‘ — NewsBusters

AND READ MORE of NoQuarter’s treasure trove of materials on the bombings conducted by William Ayers.

Wright’s Fiery Sermon:

• mirrors reflecting his glory (e.g., Obama’s acolytes, his captive media), and/or as
• suppliers (who may be willing accomplices, or unwilling dependents and underlings) feeding his emptiness, ambition, and entitlement (e.g., Chicago machine, Rezko, DNC leaders, MoveOn/Soros, pledged delegates, superdelegates).

From his community organizing days onward, Obama has routinely claimed credit (often sole credit) for the work of others. To give Obama the appearance of a record, Emil Jones, President of the Illinois Senate, put his name on dozens of bills for which colleagues had fought for years (prior to the Democrats’ becoming a majority). Obama’s comment when questioned, “They couldn’t have done it without me.” His DNC suppliers refer to his phoney record as if it were real. Although Obama rewarded Jones’ district with huge earmarks, he apparently left a trail of anger and resentment among the other senators.

Having never stood for any principle or signature issue, led no fights, passed no bills to speak of, written no articles, avoided votes that would leave controversial footprints, and, in contrast to Hillary Clinton and John McCain, demonstrated no capacity to work with colleagues—let alone on both sides of the aisle—Obama speaks deceptively about his record.

Obama lies with abandon about positions he took. He inflates his role, if any, in achieving an outcome. He refers to what “my committee” has done when he isn’t even on the committee. He has claimed that his ideas formed the basis for the economic stimulus package passed by the Congress.

He proposed as his own another Hillary plank (three-month moratorium on mortgages) that he had criticized when she made it long before the crisis. Missing in action during the financial meltdown, he caved to transferring the remaining wealth of American citizens to his Wall Street and ACORN buddies.

Not a peep about alternative strategies that would put the work-out burden on Wall Street, or let its chaos creatively self-structure (isn’t that supposed to be capitalism’s glory?). Is any of this self-aggrandizing deception the behavior of a leader? of a uniter?

The narcissist appropriates not only the work of others but also parts of his mirrors as if they were his for the taking. Admiration, applause, and mirroring should not, in his mind, have to be earned; they are not conditional, but “belong” to him. Although the Grandiose Self of an NPD is always marked by entitlement and arrogance, he often draws people toward him by his charm, charisma, and his intimation that they can be part of his magical world. Bedazzled, they are drawn into a “grandiose fusion”; which, psychiatrists say, feeds their own narcissistic deficits—at least as long as they keep the applause going and don’t break the spell.

When those mirrors or suppliers whose goodies were needed to get him where he was going next are no longer needed, the NPD drops them with a thud. Being expelled from the fusion feel like betrayal—exactly as some of Obama’s suppliers began feeling this summer. Having pocketed NARAL’s endorsement, he contradicted Roe and belied his own empathic deficits and ignorance of women by rejecting late-term abortions for women who were “just feeling blue”; Having used MoveOn and the anti-war movement to be his megaphone, raise money, and provide manpower to intimidate caucus attendees and steal caucuses (see Part 2, and a professional statistical analysis at www.caucusanalysis.org), he broke his promise and supported the FISA bill. Why? He apparently needed to woo moretelecom money, and thinks he can take the Left and feminists for granted. After all, where else can they go? Does he care about their outrage? No. They served a purpose: to move him closer to securing ultimate power, and now he’s moved on.

He’s already distanced from the Democratic leadership as well. After they selected the unqualified, unvetted guy—because, in part, they thought he would be an ATM for the Party—they, too, have been left in the cold. Cash-flush Obama turned down Harry Reid’s appeal for money to help grow the Senate majority. Neither could their selectee find any pre-election time to do joint fund-raisers with Senate or House Democrats. This is unsettling not just because it echoes his refusal to help Hillary Clinton pay down her campaign debt (while still expecting her to win it for him without giving her credit for doing so), but also because what POTUS doesn’t want the strongest possible majority to move his agenda?

In calling this slipperiness the “new Obama” the NYTimes’ editorial writers revealed just how deluded and uniformed they are. This is the old, always, and forever Obama. What NARAL, MoveOn, the Times, and DNC leaders have been stunned to experience is that you can be switched from “good object” to “bad object” in a flash. Change of status is triggered by not giving unconditional admiration, by raising uncomfortable questions, or simply having served your purpose.

These typical NPD behaviors are disturbing in a president. Certainly we should all have learned that by now from observing Bush. Unfortunately, many critics have been blinded by the content of cheneybush thinking rather than seeing more deeply into how their mental structures operate. When we do, many of us observe disturbing similarities between their behaviors and Obama’s. Barack’s propensity for hiding the truth, locking out inquiry, suppressing dissent, threatening legal action against TV stations that run truthful ads that don’t flatter him, and, as announced through a statement by Governor Blunt of Missouri, enlisting elected officials and law enforcement into "truth squads" to go after detractors—what does this remind you of?

Abusive Self. When people fail to mirror the NPD’s grandiosity, his “narcissistic rage” is ignited. Narcissistic rage is not like the temporary upsurge of anger we usually associate with “rage.” It can be chillingly cold and enduring. Apart from the tell-tale coldness, this rage is often well concealed, even from the narcissist himself. This cold rage drives the abusiveness of the other half of the faulty self. That half, which I call the Abusive Self, is the deadly partner of the Grandiose Self—the hidden “bad cop”; to its ostensibly “good cop.”

The narcissist carefully manages his inglorious, non-transcendent side which consists largely of disowned feelings and aspects of himself. According to psychiatrists, these include an underlying coldness, even ruthlessness, limited capacity for emotional empathy, vengefulness, lack of remorse for hurting others, and retaliatory behavior towards anyone who inflicts “narcissistic wounds”—i.e., who speaks the truth to or about him, or simply stops applauding.

Rather than experiencing these qualities and behaviors as part of himself, the narcissist disowns them. Unconsciously, of course. It’s as if he were cut in half at the waist, and his head and upper torso had no connection with, or awareness, of having a lower body.

Although the arrogance and entitlement of the Grandiose Self is alarming (especially when it reaches messianic proportions), and its feeding off others is inherently exploitative as well as destined to disappoint them, it is the convoluted way in which the NPD manages his “bad stuff”; that becomes so disturbingly lethal.

How does he get rid of the “not-me” stuff? He projects it onto others. What allows him to do this? His mislocated boundary which enables even more destructive, “stealth”; processes to take place in the lower, disowned part of his self-system than in the upper half. Like the Grandiose Self, the Abusive Self conflates self and other, but in different ways:

Whereas the Grandiose Self imports good parts of the other into his entitlement, the Abusive Self exports his unattractive qualities and relocates them in the other(s).

Whereas the Grandiose Self appropriates people as mirrors, suppliers, and accomplices, his Abusive Self dissociates his own ugly qualities, feelings, and actions onto:

• targets for his projections (e.g., HRC, her supporters, Palin, McCain), and into
• surrogates who speak or act for him without his being held accountable (e.g. his paid and unpaid bloggers, Michelle, Wright, Pfleger, captive media)

This faulty structuration of self in relation to others allows these export/import flows to take place outside of the conscious awareness of the NPD—I say “allows,” but Alinsky organizers are acutely conscious of what they are doing (and also, I have discovered, use the word “target” very much as I have in my NPD work). Conscious or not, the two halves of the faulty self are in fact deeply connected because when the Grandiose Self experiences a narcissistic wound, the Abusive Self does the dirty work.

Working together, the two sides of the faulty self escalate the damage and divisiveness. By locating his disowned qualities and behaviors in the other, the NPD gives himself license to judge and abuse the other while maintaining intact his view of his Grandiose Self as good, even perfect, and often, as the victim of his “abuser”—i.e., the projective target. I take this up in Part 2.

NPD Divisiveness. The bitter chasm between those who are inside or outside of the Obama fusion is vast, real, divisive, destructive, and unprecedented. It has nothing to do with racism (but much to do with Obama’s aggressive and escalating race-baiting). It cross-cuts the usual policy alliances. It does not align with traditional conservative-liberal constellations. It is permeated by the “Hillary factor”; that cuts a million ways. The “Sarah factor”; then blew the top off the volcano. Many Hillary supporters who had signed on—however reluctantly—with the Democratic candidate are exploded with emotion, attacking a female candidate, and reading the riot act to any woman who doesn’t jump on their train. This is not business-as-usual.

Let me conclude the first part of my interpretation by drawing out key implications of the structural NPD issues for polarizing the electorate:

1)Obama himself is divided. He does not come from his center because he has no center from which to come. That’s why he flip-flops. We can’t depend today on what he said yesterday. Divisiveness is standard for any NPD, but typically it affects only a limited set of people, not an entire nation.

2) As is also the case with virtually any NPD, people tend to see either the public presentation of Obama’s divided self and be drawn into it, or, having seen the abusive side, cannot trust the good-guy presentation. That pits admirers and skeptics/critics against each other.

Those who treat words and policy positions as real, and as the correct basis on which to evaluate a candidate tend to see in Obama their best hopes for a desired change from cheneybush. They range from swooners to pragmatists, but share some degree of belief in, if not fusion with, his surface presentation and his words. Most accept his official narrative at face value, and resist information that would doesn’t fit. They do not see another side of him, or they deny its existence, or dismiss its relevance because policy trumps all. Yet they often don’t know what his policies are—because they haven’t done the research or his obfuscations have made it difficult to pin down his positions. When discordant information is provided or uncomfortable questions are asked, these supporters often attack and try to discredit the source or the messenger.

By contrast, those for whom behavior trumps words may point to any of the behaviors touched on in Part 1 of this article, to other behaviors that place big question marks over “who is Barack Obama?”; or to the sexism, race-card playing, and the gross intimidation that has marked his campaign, his bloggers, the caucuses, and the convention. To reward those behaviors would be, for them (and for myself), to condone sexism, misogyny, and caucus fraud. It would mean condoning the destruction of democratic process by the Democratic Party, as well as condoning the DNC’s utter silence on the sexism and misogyny directed at its best candidate in 75 years. In taking this principled stand for women, transparency, and democratic principles, we encounter disbelief, outrage, lack of comprehension, and disrespect.

An NPD pits people against each other not only because they see and focus on different sides of his divided self, but also more insidiously by raising questions, doubts, and negative assessments in their minds about each other. When I observe therapists who jumped on the Obama bandwagon or tell me that they feel a kindred spirit in him, I wonder what kind of therapist can’t see through him; involuntarily, my respect for them as professionals is suspended and I draw back, feeling estranged. When Hillary cannot meet the perfection standards of so-called feminists who can’t seem to find any flaws in Barack, I know these”feminists” are perpetrating the same old, male-identified, double standard, and that they are not people with whom I would ever want to share a foxhole. When a Hillary-hating husband intervenes in my emails to his wife, I wonder what happened to the feminist I used to know who now allows this.

3) A third source of divisiveness inherent in Obama’s NPD structure is use of surrogates for his disowned behaviors which they project onto his targets. While some degree of this behavior is par for the course in politics, the extremes to which Obamanation has taken destruction of the political enemy has generated bitter schisms in our social fabric. The fact that Obama mirrors dismiss this behavior (as non-existent or of no account) only widens and deepens the chasm and non-comprehension between those on both sides of the divide.

4) Turning opponents into targets to be destroyed (not just defeated) may be part of the Alinsky method and of Chicago politics, but it is also consistent with NPD dynamics. The immaturity of NPDs is indicated by their inability to accept responsibility for the consequences of their own behavior or deficiencies; they project blame onto others. We have just watched cheneybush do this for eight years. Now their liberal critics and their selected candidate are doing exactly the same thing, with no insight into their own behavior.

What is unusual and disturbing here is both the expanding concentric rings of Obama’s projective targets, and the nature and destructiveness of the charges being projected by Obama and his surrogates. Even during the general election, Hillary Clinton was still their primary projective target. If he had lost, she would have been blamed. Many of her supporters refused to get on board, expanding the projective target to white women of a certain age; we, too, would have been blamed for his loss and accused of racism. As the race tightened, his mirrors, suppliers, and surrogates chose the incendiary path of expanding the target to the American people with the dangerous narrative that they may not be “ready” for a black president.

Nothing has been more destructive and divisive than turning this election into a referendum on race. When I concluded this piece prior to the election, I wrote: If he loses, blaming the American people instead of his own shortcomings will inflict even more grievous wounds on an already divided and weakened nation. With his win, the self-congratulatory smugness of white liberals and black racists will fail to examine—at our collective peril—and thus fail to remediate, the systemic fraud, thuggery, misogyny, and race-baiting that, along with an economic meltdown, turned the trick. A presidency based on lies, deceit, intimidation, and suppression of dissent is doomed to fail—as the last eight years should have taught us. Now that he is president-elect, the ugly underside of his campaign is swept away in the narrative of its “brilliance” and “discipline.’