Taken to the woodshed

• John McCain, by Peggy Noonan ("Get serious!" she says)
• Faithfulness and fidelity, by The New York Times (hey, you can trust The Grey Lady!)
• Senator Obama, by Shelby Steele ("What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking.")
• Brain-dead liberalism, by David Mamet (in The Village Voice of all places.)
• Rowan Williams, by the editors of The New Criterion ("And why should an archbishop of the Church of England reserve all his doubts for religious matters?")
• Black liberation theology, by Rod Dreher ("This is racist idolatry.")
• Black liberation theology (again!), by Spengler (It is "ethnocentric heresy".)
• Franky Schaeffer, by Christopher Blosser (he "dishonors his father [yet again] for Obama)
• Franky Schaeffer, this time by Os Guinness (this trip to the shed is devastating)
• Heterosexuality, by Michael Stipe of R.E.M. (First he loses his religion...)
• Bad NBA teams and players, by Basketbawful (A slam dunk!)
• Vantage Point, by the critics (bummer, I was hoping it was worth seeing.)

By the way, if you ever want to build a woodshed, this page will get you started.

Comments

[padraighh]

Well first of all...
I mean, to say ...
but, but, but to be fair...
Now lets not forget...
On the other hand...

aaah forget it.

[LJ]

Interesting that Peggy Noonan was impressed with Obama's speech. It has been routinely dissected and criticized by most of the right's commentators since he made it. The association with Jeremiah Wright seems to be the trump card that casts doubt on anything Obama has since said.
Obama's self-defence seems to be that everyone is imperfect, including Wright, and he(Obama) doesn't have to agree with the man in order to like him and be his friend.
This is perhaps a variation on what we as Catholics often use as an apologetic when confronted with stock condemnations of the Church. You know the ones; the Crusades, the Inquisition, etc. and most recently the sex abuse scandals.
Obama is rejecting guilt by association, and certainly we have to consider that defence. However, in the case of the Catholic Church, the teaching has never been the issue, only the practice of sinful men. That is our apologetic. That we will defend.
But in Wright's case it is the reverse. No one is claiming he is an evil doer necessarily, but it is his teaching, his doctrine, his dogma that is the issue. Therefore it is relevant that Obama has spent 20 years listening to that teaching because it clearly has the potential to influence how he would be president. That is the job he wants. He may say that it has not affected him but politically he has to say that.

[Carl Olson]

Good points, LJ. One thing about the Obama/Wright story that hasn't been mentioned (if at all), is that if Wright is really, truly angry at people who are trying to destroy blacks, he might want to take a long, hard look at Planned Parenthood, which does a hugely disproportionate amount of "business" in black communities. And, of course, Sen. Obama is an avowed, passionate supporter of PP and abortion in general. Does that upset Rev. Wright as much as, say, Don Imus making racist remarks?

[Stohn]

So, according to Ms. Noonan, if one uses 2 words that the average 'Merican doesn't understand, then...one must be right...and intelligent? Maybe it's because she had to go look up the word "endemic" in the Oxford English Dictionary, and had to wikipedia William Faulkner, only to find out that he was not a former British Prime Minister, like she thought. First off, "endemic" is not some ultra-technical term that only the smartest of the smart know; and secondly, Faulkner isn't some obscure Silver Age Roman satirist, that only Ph.D. classicists have read.
"The speech assumed the audience was intelligent. This was a compliment, and I suspect was received as a gift. It also assumed many in the audience were educated. I was grateful for this, as the educated are not much addressed in American politics."
Seriously? If this characterizes educated, God help us!
I think that Ms. Noonan represents the American intellectual decadence, a word used by Ernest Hemingway. Wow, I should run for President!

[Carl Olson]

Stohn: I'll vote for you in fourteen years...