Legal Commentary

The Blogs On Barack

Mark Paul, an old friend (don?t hold that against him), has a fair and balanced survey of the blogosphere?s reaction to The Speech on his blog, Moonbats and Wingnuts, that, well, surveys blog reactions to various issues.

UPDATE

Some of you may be interested in some comments I just emailed to Mark. If not, don?t read what follows:

.... I feel like I?ve been blogging about nothing else for a week. That?s probably because I?ve been blogging about nothing else for a week.

As the glow of the rhetoric recedes I suspect most people will come down off whatever cloud they were lifted to not all that far from where they stood before, perhaps with some new thoughts but more likely with more arrows in their ideological quivers. I know I did.

After a week of constant reflection (or, some will no doubt think, after a week of writing based on little reflection), I still believe that the most likely implication and effect of The Speech is unfortunate: as InstaPunk argued (though with more in-your-face provocation than I like), Obama?s pre-speech prevarications arguing that Wright and his church are ?conventional,? ?typical? black churches are both seriously wrong and do a serious disservice to the black community, and hence to the nation at large. Standing in that hole when he gave The Speech, he compounded the damage by continuing to dig, arguing in clear effect that blacks of Wright?s generation (our generation, or at least mine!) can?t be expected to be free of vituperative paranoid delusions (inventing AIDS and introducing cocaine to commit genocide against blacks, etc.). This refusal to judge black discourse by the same standards applied to white discourse makes the double standards involved in racial preference admissions look quite mild. But if Wright?s ravings had been limited to racial animosity toward ?greedy whites,? etc., I think they could and would have been much more easily forgiven. It is Wright?s anti-Americanism that is toxic, and I suspect that?s why Obama tried to change the discussion to race.

But lest you think me entirely negative, I did have one constructive suggestion for O in a recent post. Since he tried mightily to equate ?white resentments? with Wright?s rage, why not come up with a new approach to affirmative action: ?Don?t End It; Expand It! (to all races)?

Finally, in another example of agreement across partisan lines, I do agree with your pro-Obama emailer who whined that the Wright business is ?a Swift Boating of Obama.? (On the other hand, I followed the Swift Boat charges and replies with some care and think that what the Swift Boaters said about Kerry was about 93% correct.)

Full post as published by Discriminations on March 25, 2008 (boomark / email).