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"Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime."

By Ann Althouse

That's how Toni Morrison described Bill Clinton. But now, she's supporting Obama, and it's not necessarily a contradiction. He's definitely blacker than Hillary Clinton, and Morrison never said that the blackest candidate ought to win. Her standard is somewhere in here:

In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it.

Wisdom is a gift; you can't train for it, inherit it, learn it in a class, or earn it in the workplace - that access can foster the acquisition of knowledge, but not wisdom.

Translate that purple prose, please.

Finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it. I suspect that reflects a theory of government I'd object to if I could see through the incredibly annoying writing.

ADDED: If Frank J. wants to call Toni Morrison "a racist dumbass of monumental proportions" with any credibility, he ought to proofread his own writing. His headline ? "Just So Someone Says It Publically" ? has a gross misspelling. And whining about a class where he had to read "Beloved" and got a bad grade on his paper for "saying exactly what I thought of Toni Morrison," he tries this quip: "Man did I need a Tom Clancy novel as a pallet cleanser after that." Frank, a "pallet" is a narrow hard bed. Perhaps the pages of a pulpy novel are useful to soak up after an episode of bedwetting.

AND: Yes, yes, I know I typoed "necessary" for "necessarily" in the second sentence of the original post. (Now corrected.) If you want to criticize someone for bad spelling, you can never make a typo? I guess not. But Frank J. called Toni Morrison "a racist dumbass of monumental proportions," which was an incredible insult, and I thought he needed some push back.

Full post as published by Althouse on January 28, 2008 (boomark / email).