Jules Crittenden:

After 1989, we were encouraged to believe that war was history. This illusion made the shock of 9/11 all the worse. Even then some people wanted to believe it was an aberration, something we had brought on ourselves and could fix with kind words and deeds. The ease of the Taliban’s ouster then created the false impression that we had managed to reinvent war in a more palatable form.

In fact, all we’ve managed to do as a nation over six-and-a-half years of war is confuse ourselves. This is not a simple war to understand, and it has been going on for decades. It has expressed itself with everything from low-grade terrorism to conventional war to nuclear threats, across multiple continents, and with many, seemingly unconnected, adversaries. Just the part of it we call the Iraq war has involved many different, and not always distinct, adversaries in numerous, overlapping conflicts. Faced with this kind of complexity, it isn’t so surprising that vague messages of “hope” and “change” resonate with the American public, and politicians vie for the right to own those terms.

The shallowness of the debate suggests our nation is in danger of failing the test of our time. The abstract circumstances of cause and consequence in this war have fostered an avoidance of reality in some quarters–and at some of the highest levels of our leadership, often quite nakedly for purposes of political gain. Would-be leaders would rather play to emotions than make the hard calculations that adulthood forces on us.

I don’t agree with everything he writes, and I don’t have time to detail where and why I differ. But read the whole thing and decide for yourself.

Here’s Em, blasting “White America”:

“White America”

America, hahaha, we love you, how many people are proud to be citizens of this beautiful
Country of ours, the stripes and the stars for the rights that men have died for to protect,
The women and men who have broke their neck’s for the freedom of speech the United States
Government has sworn to uphold, or
(Yo’, I want everybody to listen to the words of this song) so we’re told…

I never would’ve dreamed in a million years I’d see,
So many motherfuckin’ people who feel like me, who share the same views
And the same exact beliefs, it’s like a fuckin’ army marchin’ in back of me, so many lives I
Touch, so much anger aimed, in no particular direction, just sprays and sprays, and straight
Through your radio waves it plays and plays, ’till it stays stuck in your head for days and
Days, who would of thought, standing in this mirror bleachin’ my hair, with some peroxide,
Reaching for a t-shirt to wear, that I would catapult to the forefront of rap like this, how
Could I predict my words would have an impact like this, I must’ve struck a chord, with somebody
Up in the office, cause congress keeps telling me I ain’t causin’ nuthin’ but problems, and now
They’re sayin’ I’m in trouble with the government, I’m lovin’ it, I shoveled shit all my life,
And now I’m dumping it on…

[Chorus]
White America, I could be one of your kids, white America, little Eric looks just like this,
White America, Erica loves my shit, I go to TRL, look how many hugs I get, white America, I
Could be one of your kids, white America, little Eric looks just like this, white America, Erica
Loves my shit, I go to TRL, look how many hugs I get…

Look at these eyes, baby blue, baby just like yourself, if they were brown, Shady lose, Shady
Sits on the shelf, but Shady’s cute, Shady knew, Shady’s dimple’s would help, make ladies swoon
Baby, {ooh baby}, look at my sales, let’s do the math, if I was black, I would’ve sold half, I
Ain’t have to graduate from Lincoln high school to know that, but I could rap, so fuck school,
I’m too cool to go back, gimme the mic, show me where the fuckin’ studio’s at, when I was
Underground, no one gave a fuck I was white, no labels wanted to sign me, almost gave up, I was
Like, fuck it, until I met Dre, the only one to look past, gave me a chance, and I lit a fire up
Under his ass, helped him get back to the top, every fan black that I got, was probably his in
Exchange for every white fan that he’s got, like damn, we just swapped, sittin’ back lookin’ at
Shit, wow, I’m like my skin is it starting to work to my benefit now, it’s…

[Chorus]

See the problem is, I speak to suburban kids, who otherwise would of never knew these words
Exist, whose mom’s probably would of never gave two squirts of piss, ’till I created so much
Motherfuckin’ turbulence, straight out the tube, right into your living room I came, and kids
Flipped when they knew I was produced by Dre, that’s all it took, and they were instantly hooked
Right in, and they connected with me too because I looked like them, that’s why they put my
Lyrics up under this microscope, searchin’ with a fine tooth comb, its like this rope, waitin’
To choke, tightening around my throat, watching me while I write this, like I don’t like this,
Nope, all I hear is, lyrics, lyrics, constant controversy, sponsors working ’round the clock, to
Try to stop my concerts early, surely hip-hop was never a problem in Harlem, only in Boston,
After it bothered the fathers of daughters starting to blossom, so now I’m catchin’ the flack
From these activists when they raggin’, actin’ like I’m the first rapper to smack a bitch, or
Say faggot, shit, just look at me like I’m your closest pal, the posterchild, the motherfuckin’
Spokesman now for…

[Chorus]

So to the parents of America, I am the derringer aimed at little Erica, to attack her
Character, the ringleader of this circus of worthless pawns, sent to lead the march right up to
The steps of congress, and piss on the lawns of the White House, to burn the casket and replace
It with a parental advisory sticker, to spit liquor in the faces of in this democracy of
Hypocrisy, fuck you Ms. Cheney, fuck you Tipper Gore, fuck you with the freest of speech this
Divided states of embarrassment will allow me to have, fuck you, [vocal melody],
He, hahaha, I’m just playin’ America, you know I love you…

Ann Althouse analyzes a Rasmussen poll:

Poll results:

“How do you rate Obama’s speech? Excellent, good, fair, or poor?”

30% Excellent
21% Good
26% Fair
21% Poor
1% Not sure

Althouse [e.a.]:

The important break in the numbers is between “excellent” and the rest, and 70% said the speech fell short of “excellent.” This is, I think, disastrous for Obama. …

Asked whether the speech was “racially divisive, unifying, or neither,” only 30% — 30% again — thought the speech was “unifying,” which is what Obama intended it and his entire campaign to be.

Obama’s popularity has been built on unifying us and transcending race. If only 30% of us heard unification in that speech, then the speech and the connection to Wright have been massively destructive to what is the chief substance of his reputation.

 No kidding.

But Althouse gets the last word, because she’s got the best metaphor:

Obama told white people to feel guilty about race just when they’d been so happy thinking that loving him, just him, was the answer to racial problems. When we saw him consorting with someone who seemed to hate us, we needed reassurance that Obama loves us, and loving Obama was enough. But he didn’t say that, and now we’re confused. Our boyfriend was telling us he needs to see other people, and we don’t understand the relationship anymore.

I think we can safely declare that Obama-mania is over.

So just a while ago I was lamenting the civil war between the “old politics” Democrats and the “new politics” Democrats.

Joe Wilson’s takedown of Obama is the kind of damaging stuff will not soon be forgotten:

Claims of superior intuitive judgment by his campaign and by him are self-evidently disingenuous, especially in light of disclosures about his long associations with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko. But his assertions of advanced judgment are also ludicrous when the question of what Obama has accomplished in his four years in the Senate is considered.

As the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee on Europe, he has not chaired a single substantive oversight hearing, even though the breakdown in our relations with Europe and NATO is harming our operations in Afghanistan. Nor did he take a single official trip to Europe as chairman. This is the sum total of his actions in the most important responsibility he has had in the Senate.

Then he lays into Obama’s advisers for good measure:

Already, one of his chief foreign policy advisers, Samantha Power, has been compelled to resign for, among other indiscretions, honestly revealing on a British television program that Obama’s public position on withdrawal from Iraq is not really his true position, nor does it reflect what he would do. Her gaffe exposed a vein of cynicism on national security. How confident can we be in his judgment?

Ouch.

Lanny Davis also whacked Obama:

I am convinced that there isn’t a shred in Senator Obama’s being that shares these hateful or bigoted feelings. … But many people, including Obama supporters, may still have two questions that Senator Obama’s speech did not sufficiently answer, at least in my opinion. …

1. If a white minister preached sermons to his congregation and had used the “N” word and used rhetoric and words similar to members of the KKK, would you support a Democratic presidential candidate who decided to continue to be a member of that congregation?

2. Would you support that candidate if, after knowing of or hearing those sermons, he or she still appointed that minister to serve on his or her “Religious Advisory Committee” of his or her presidential campaign?

And then there’s Bill Clinton:

MSNBC is reporting that on the campaign trail today in Charlotte, North Carolina, the former president said a general election matchup between his wife, Sen. Clinton, and Sen. John McCain would be between “two people who love this country” without “all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.”

In today’s New York Times, Timothy Egan writes about the Democratic Donner party:

The Dems grew raggedy, worn, desperate. Whereas the first Donner Party was bogged down in the snow of the high Sierra, these Dems could not get out of the Rockies. One faction wanted to declare it over, based on greater popular support. The other one wanted simply to stick around long enough, waiting for the rival to self-destruct. …

At their lowest ebb, they looked back and again saw the straggler, McCain. He was stronger, walking with renewed vigor despite his age. …

His party was united. What had been hatred for McCain was now hatred for the other party’s preacher. They could direct all their historic resentments, their bound-up frustrations, against this preacher, the Rev. Wright. So long as they hissed and booed at his picture every night, they stayed together, saying the nastiest of things.

There’s only one problem with this theory that the Reverend Wright has united the Republicans. It has also divided the Democrats.

Yesterday, writing in TNR, Michael Crowley cited a poll that showed a large number of blacks who objected to Wright:

Bizarrely* Surprisingly, 56 percent of blacks said the speech made them less likely to vote for Obama. Not sure what to make of that. Maybe whereas some whites felt Obama didn’t sufficiently distance himself from Wright, many blacks felt he shouldn’t have to condemn him at all?

* Too strong

Some TNR commenters made mincemeat of Crowley and demolished his remarks as patronizing and harmful:

Well, there’s a perfect example of condescending Liberal racism, if ever I saw it. You are surprised, Mr. Crowley, that black people love their country? That black people would be outraged by Rev Wright? That black people would wonder why Obama continued to sit through these sermons for 20 years?

The Right has long contended that liberals, in their patronizing, paternalistic attitude towards blacks, were the real racists. This kind of commentary underlines it.

Another one observes the confusion that we’ve witnessed on cable TV in the last few days, and suggests the reason for it [e.a.]:

By embracing Wright, Obama has resurrected and re-immersed us in the harsh, angry, and defensive racial politics of the 1960s and the 1970s. Very few blacks or non-blacks want to go back to that era. But watch the commentators on television fight and get angry at each other over Wright and Obama’s speech. …

Obama has actually become retro on race rather than post-racial. His speech was the kind of stuff that people said years ago, and it actually does not reflect where black & non-black relationships are today. Basically, Obama put himself in the same cluster that includes Al Sharpton, who is approving but hiding in the shadows of Obama’s campaign. Contrast this with Charlie Rangel, a Clinton supporter, who recently said, speaking with intentional irony: “I’m angry. I keep looking for all these white people who are insulting me and I can’t find them.” That is a truly post-racial and novel stance in our discourse about race, but it reflects where things are at teh growing edge. But Obama goes in exactly the opposite direction. I think there are a lot of African-Americans who are not any more comfortable with Obama’s way of talking about race than are many non-blacks. Rangel’s sensibility is where things are at. And Obama and Wright ain’t there at all.

Lots of people, black and non-black, supported Obama when he was post-racial, but are less interested in supporting him as a version of Sharpton. But Obama’s allegiance to Wright and his speech have placed him squarely back in 1972. Not a good year for Democrats.

But the public political theater carried by the MSM (here in the NYT) tells a different story—a story of glorious unity among Democrats, the story of the future of the Democratic party:

Alex Brandon/Associated Press

 “It is now time for a new generation of leadership to lead America forward,” Mr. Richardson said, speaking to thousands of supporters at a rally here. “Barack Obama will be a historic and a great president, who can bring us the change we so desperately need by bringing us together as a nation here at home and with our allies abroad.”

Trampling over the obvious rifts, open wounds, dissident voices, and outrage on his own side of the aisle, Mr. Richardson blames the Clinton camp and urges everyone to coalesce behind Obama:

He said his endorsement was designed to signal party leaders and voters that the acrimonious primary race must end to unify Democrats for the general election campaign.

“Look, I’m not going to advise any other candidate when to get in and out of the race,” Mr. Richardson said. He added that Mrs. Clinton “has a right to stay in the race, but I think eventually we don’t want to go into the Democratic convention bloodied and negative.”

Really? Tell that to Marc Ambinder’s thin-skinned commenters, who considered it the height of betrayal that Ambinder revealed the stagecraft behind Bumbling Bill Richardson. Here’s a selection of the responses to that revelation:

 Petty. And beneath your blog.

…

I get that your posting is light today, but seriously Marc - this is beneath your blog. Of course there’s always a lighter side to laugh about, but this is just stupid.

And one from High Dudgeon:

In this post, Ambinder, you kind of remind me of Eliot Spitzer. Like him, you had an idea to do something that wasn’t necessary but might be fun; like him, you ignored that little voice in your head that said, “nah, that’d be stupid. I should just stick to my job.”

This sort of writing is what gives blogs, and really all political journalism, and beyond that, all politics, a bad name.

James Carville has a different view of politics—namely, that it is war. Regarding Richardson’s defection to Obama:

“An act of betrayal,” said James Carville, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton and a friend of Mr. Clinton.

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

The Democrats’ un-civil war continues.

It’s not a bad idea, and Ross Douthat gets that part:

[N]early every pronouncement from Osama bin Laden or his imitators contains something that might be laughable, if it weren’t in deadly earnest.

There’s the incessant nostalgia for the Crusades, heavy-handed enough to embarrass Sir Walter Scott, and the Risk-board view of geopolitics, epitomized by the oft-cited aspiration to reconquer “Al-Andalus” (known to most of us as “Spain”) for Islam. There’s the blinkered understanding of American politics, as when Bin Laden criticized George H.W. Bush for “installing” his sons as governors of Texas and Florida, and seemed to suggest (depending on the translation) that he might make a separate peace with any American state that didn’t vote for George W. Bush. And of course, there’s the consistency with which Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers greet perceived insults to Islam with threats and actions that seem designed to, well, vindicate the offending parties.

When a Danish newspaper published cartoons portraying Muhammad as an assassin and a terrorist, Islamists responded to these outrageous insinuations by inciting their co-believers to … assassination and terrorism. When the Pope stirred up controversy by suggesting that Islam might be less compatible with reason and philosophy than Christianity, he was answered with a burst of (no doubt rigorously reasoned) acts of violence committed on behalf of the faith he had insulted. Now, just in time with Easter, he’s been answered with al Qaeda’s idea of inter-religious dialogue as well.

But ridiculing this by ridiculing in-earnest and exquisitely effective Nazi propaganda, as Douthat does, seriously misses the mark:

If Hitler’s Germany hadn’t turned Europe into a charnel house, many of the elements of National Socialism — the clumsy anti-Semitic propaganda, the philosophical pretensions, the ranting speeches, even the uniforms — would seem almost deliberately comic, like bits and pieces from a Monty Python sketch.

This could only be written by someone who absorbed the evils of Nazism via pop culture, and who therefore has a limp response to it. He suggests that OBL should go ahead an make Pope Benedict’s day:

Here’s hoping that His Holiness enjoys a quiet chuckle while he puts the Swiss Guards on high alert. There’s nothing wrong with laughing at evil, so long as your bodyguards are packing heat.

Something tells me that the West will need to do a little more than “pack heat” against OBL and those he continues to inspire. But I do salute the effort to look for a handle on OBL that makes the threat he poses accessible to those he is intimidating through his demagoguery.

In other counterterrorism news, today the New York Times writes about the Dutch anti-Islamist provocateur Geert Wilders [e.a.]:

Of the Netherlands’ 16.5 million residents, a million are either Muslim or of Muslim descent. Many of them are so-called guest workers from Morocco, Turkey and other Islamic countries who came here decades ago to work in factories and stayed to raise families of their own.

Occasionally, conflicts arise between mainstream Dutch society — which supports gay marriage and legalized prostitution, for instance — and the often more conservative Muslim minority, and Mr. Wilders has successfully mined the unease between them.

This somehow leaves the impression that Wilders is someone acting for his own (political) benefit. And later on, the Times writer spells out [e.a.]:

Since no one has actually seen Mr. Wilders’s film, some here have started wondering if it is as fake as his hair color, a clever publicity stunt devised to prove his point that Islam and freedom of speech cannot coexist.

Mr. Wilders disabuses him of the notion:

“I get in so much trouble, both privately and politically, that if I would do it for publicity reasons, I would be a fool,” he said.

It’s pretty obvious to me that Wilders is doing it for publicity reasons—that is, to publicize the dangers of Islamist extremism to Western societies.

If that makes him a fool, let there be more such brave “fools.”