www.darrellepp.com

Maybe it has something with the fact that he’s, you know, unpatriotic. It is a mystery. Why would someone who doesn’t feel comfortable wearing an American flag lap pin or putting his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance, whose long-time spiritual advisor admonishes his flock to sing ‘God d— America’ instead of ‘God bless America’ even want to BE America’s president? Wouldn’t someone like that be happier leading a symposium somewhere with Howard Zinn, Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky? This just in: ‘Reverend’ Wright just recently ‘outed’ Thomas Jefferson as a pedophile. Now, few lives have been examined by 2 centuries of historians as closely as that of the drafter of America’s Declaration of Independence, but this accusation is a new one. Footnotes please, ‘Reverend’? This is the man Obama has sought for wisdom from for decades, giving him $26000.00 US in 2007 alone.

Obama’s response to criticism of his relationship with an anti-Semitic, anti-American racist crackpot was astonishing. It was suggested to him that the seemly thing for a presidential candidate to do is to distance oneself from a tireless disseminator of racism and hate. Alas, in Obama’s morally grey universe, thing aren’t so simple. Sure, Wright’s views on ‘race’ might strike ‘some’ Americans’ as ‘controversial,’ but he could no more distance himself from Wright than he could from his own grandmother, who, like a ‘typical white person,’ harbours racist views. I’m no spin doctor, but if you want to convince the great unwashed that you’re a nice guy, publicly slandering the woman who raised you isn’t an idea I’d put at the top of the list. And isn’t this the same candidate who only a few short months ago was promising to lead us all into a post-racial Utopia, where nobody would talk about anybody’s skin colour? As soon as Obama faced legitimate questions about his beliefs, he quickly reverted to the nasty old ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mindset, and tacitly suggested that anybody who criticized him was doing so not because of a legitimate difference in values but because of an accident of the questioner’s ethnicity. Sad.

Michelle Obama hasn’t exactly been an asset to her husband’s campaign. In this far-too-long campaign season, the one public utterance that has had by far the longest media legs is Mrs. Obama’s remark that the recent success of her husband has caused her to feel proud of her country for the first time in her life. Hard not to chuckle at that one. During Michelle Obama’s lifetime, America has, just off the top of my head: invented the internet, invented the ipod, invented a host of life-saving drugs, built the Hubble telescope, played the decisive role in freeing eastern Europe from the horror of communism, given hundreds of billions of dollars (several times more than the rest of the world’s nations combined) in govt. foreign aid and private charitable donations to the poor around the world, and put men on the freaking Moon!!! All these things leave Michelle unmoved. A stirring of pride only came when Americans began to recognize her husband for the messiah she always knew he was. Odd also was her recent attempt to connect with that most-elusive of species: the ‘average’ American (even the jargon of liberal Democrats is condescending at every turn: I’ve never met an ‘average’ or ‘typical’ person in my life!). She claimed she knew what people out there were going through, because she was also having a hard time raising two children in Bush-Cheney’s brutal and ‘downright mean’ USA. And yet, the combined income of the Obama household tipped over $1000000 last year. You’d have to raise the bar pretty high to count that situation as suffering. Saying you’re having a hard time making ends meet on a million American dollars a year tells me nothing at all about the current state of America. It does, however, seem to suggest you’re a moron unable to balance a chequebook.

Look, if elected, McCain could turn out to be a lousy president. But he’s light years ahead in this three-way race because he’s the only candidate who seems to actually, you know, kinda sorta like America. The other two are both running on a message that says ‘America, and individual Americans, are diseased, and the only way to stop/slow the rot is to put your faith in me.’ Not a platform I’d feel confident running on myself, but hey.

A disgression on ‘optics’: isn’t there a Democratic strategist in all the land who is alert enough to point out that something doesn’t look right, there’s a glaring disconnect between word and deed, portrayal and reality? Enviro-guru Al Gore apparently believe everyone on Earth should reduce their ‘footprint’ except for him: the annual bill to heat and cool his home is several factors larger than most Americans’ annual income. The ‘carbon credits’ he ‘buys’ to neutralize his footprint are actually investments in a company he has a stake in—his sacrifice to save the planet essentially involves him taking money from his left pocket and putting it into his right pocket. Rev. Wright, the champion of the oppressed, recently moved into a 10000 square foot house in a rather exclusive neighbourhood, presumably paid for by the tithes of credulous parishoners left waiting for the fulfillment of his promise of ‘black liberation.’ The Democratic candidate who most loudly claimed to speak for ‘the poor,’ John Edwards, lives in a 30000 square foot home and spends 400 dollars on a single haircut. The Democrats’ previous presidential candidate, John Kerry, railed against the unbridled greed and selfishness of ruthless rich people, but he himself was a billionaire—thanks to a strategic marriage with the Heinz ketchup heiress—and exponentially wealthier than his Republican opponent. Michelle Obama counts herself among the poor victims of ‘corporate America’ because she has to scrape by on a million dollars a year, and among the oppressed because ‘the Man’ forced her to pay back the Harvard Law School student loan than enabled her to become wealthier than 96% of Americans. And Barack Obama promised to make questions of ‘race’ obsolete, yet he’s proven to be the most egregious race-baiter the American political scene has witnessed since the days of George Wallace. The contradictions are glaringly obvious to everyone but the Democratic Party’s own highly-paid experts.

The change in tone and strategy has been fascinating to watch. When voters could simply project their wildest dreams onto his blank slate since they knew nothing about him, Obama could afford to smile blandly and talk about the post-racial post-partisan future only he could provide. As time went by and people actually started to learn hard facts about him, he quickly turned nasty, petulant and polarizing. So much for ‘Change You Can Believe In.’ In February in Wisconsin, John McCain said “America is not deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history.” As the shine on Obamamania continues to fade, it looks more and more like McCain may be onto something.

http://www.nationalpost.com/most_popular/story.html?id=459951

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2008/04/25/the_distractions_of_obamas_character

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/story.html?id=445571

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/Story.html?id=387006

http://www.slate.com/id/2188414/

http://www.mcculloughsite.net/stingray/2008/03/26/michelle-obama-bashes-america-again.php

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjExNzMwYzMyMjk0MDY4YzlhOTIwM2YzYWYzNGIyNjU

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjExNzMwYzMyMjk0MDY4YzlhOTIwM2YzYWYzNGIyNjU

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/48659.html

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson042908.html

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/04/28/liveblogging-obama-at-the-national-press-club/

Bonus Feature: Chartres!

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080329.CHARTRES29/TPStory/specialTravel

Most extrasolar planet detection relies on measuring gravitational tugs. The SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) is different. These folks use two observatories, one in the Canary Islands (Queens University) and one in South Africa (Keele University) to search for the infinitesimally small dimming of a star’s light that occurs when a planet orbits in front of it. The SuperWASP factory has discovered 10 new planets in the last 6 months, bringing the total up to 270! Keep up the great work, SuperWASP! www.superwasp.org

http://www.superwasp.org/gallery/images/M31close.gif

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/world/middleeast/16iran.html?ex=1365998400&en=fdae3c6ec7e8dce1&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120752549042393619.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks#

Bonus Feature: Homer!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Winslow_Homer_004.jpg

Soon you will be the shield behind which marches the enduring message of our revolution. There is no greater duty, no greater honour…Hold that honour as dearly as your country holds you. Hold it as dearly as do those who have already been called to the battle. Hold it as if it were your greatest treasure. Because it is. It is. Whatever sacrifices you must bear, you will know a happiness far more sublime than pleasure…My warrior days were long ago, but not so long ago that I have forgotten their purpose and their reward.

And here he is paying tribute to Reagan: http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/dialogue/mccain.html

Bonus feature: Homer! http://www.wsu.edu:8080/%7edee/MINOA/HOMER.HTM

http://reason.com/news/show/125163.html

     It turns out Mark Steyn was right on target when he noted in his book America Alone that people always tend to worry about the wrong things. A generation was terrified by Paul Ehrlich’s ‘population bomb,’ and yet every single available model shows global population plateauing/declining by mid-century at the latest. Population stability requires each woman to bear an average of 2.1 children. The EU’s average is 1.5, and Japan’s is 1.3. This trend towards a lack of consumers/producers/teachers/leaders/etc. in the western world should rather inevitably trigger all sorts of economic and social upheaval.

     This article I’ve linked to rather delicately omits half of the tale: while a third of German, Swiss and Austrian women have zero children, the story is dramatically reversed in the more rowdier parts of the globe, like, say, Waziristan, where the fertility rate is over 6.5. This seems to point out a structural flaw in the arguments of the ‘save-the-earth’ folks. Humans are not profitably viewed as economic entities, or as mere carbon-footprint-generators, but as individuals with distinct personalities who make personal choices based on their personal values. Isn’t the question not simply ‘how many’ people there are, but what sort of people they are, and how they think and behave? The regions that are truly experiencing a population explosion demonstrate scant interest in ideas like sustainable growth and carbon sequestration (never mind the socio-political ideals I happen to cherish, pithy encapsulated by James Madison in the Bill Of Rights). How sensible a long-term strategy is it for the David Suzuki/Al Gore types to admonish us to protect ‘the future’ by remaining childless and minimizing our footprint as we timidly sit still waiting for the Reaper, when all this does is ensure that in half a century’s time, there won’t be any environmentalists around? By outsourcing the chore of childbirth, aren’t the enlightened ‘experts,’ in the long view, simply forfeiting the game to the other side?

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=476DB33C-C190-4E63-ADD8-271F6186C3A7

“The Constitution represented not a grant of power from rulers to the people ruled–as with King John’s grant of the Magna Charta at Runnymede in 1215–but a grant of power by the people to the government they had created. No other national government before that time was based upon such a concept. Until then, monarchs rules by divine right and their subjects had only those privileges which their rulers saw fit to bestow upon them. The work of those fifty-five men in at Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 marked the beginning of the end of the divine right of kings as well as many of the rigid class distinctions that went along with it.”

http://jco.usfca.edu/tragic.html  and http://jco.usfca.edu/karamazov.html I really enjoyed these two essays about The Possessed and Karmazov, but try to pick up a copy of Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead if you haven’t read it already. I’ve always loved that fictionalized memoir of his time in prison. I loved the way it captures the soul-crushing monotony of prison, its vivid characterizations and its gorgeous writing. Dostoyevsky had become involved in a revolutionary plot and was sentence to death after the plan was easily foiled. They put him before a firing squad, the men raised their rifles, aimed, and then announced they’d just been kidding (?!) and instead gave him a decade of hard labour in a Siberian prison camp. Needless to say this experience made quite an impression on the man the fine novelist Turgenev called ‘the nastiest Christian I ever met.” Turgenev was a less brilliant writer but led a more conventionally ’successful’ life. After many a gambling binge, Dostoyevsky would show up at his house, smelly and disheveled, to ask for a ‘loan.’ Ivan and Fyodor would end up acting out an awkward scene of patho and humiliation worthy of inclusion in a Dostoevsky novel…Joseph Conrad wasn’t as impressed by Karamazov as Joyce Carol Oates. He described it as “an impossible lump of valuable matter. It’s terrifically bad and impressive and exasperating. Moreover, I don’t know what Dostoevsky stands for or reveals, but I do know that he is too Russian for me. It sounds like some fierce mouthings of prehistoric ages.” Meanwhile Albert Einstein said “Dostovesky gives me more than any scientist.”

“You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.”

 ”If it were not for Christ’s Church, indeed there would be no restraint on the criminal in his evildoing, and no punishment for it later, real punishment, that is, not a mechanical one such as has just been mentioned, which only chafes the heart in most cases, but a real punishment, the only real, the only frightening and appeasing punishment, which lies in the acknowledgement of one’s own conscience.”

“Gentlemen, we’re all cruel, we’re all monsters, we all make men weep, and mothers, and babes at the breast, but of all, let it be settled here, now, of all that I am the lowest reptile! I’ve sworn to amend, and every day I’ve done the same filthy things. I understand now that such men as I need a blow, a blow of destiny to catch them as with a noose, and bind them by a force from without. Never, never should I have risen of myself! but the thunderbolt has fallen. I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame; I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified. Perhaps I shall be purified, gentlemen?”

“Is there suffering on this new earth? On our earth we can truly love only with suffering and through suffering! We know not how to love otherwise. We know no other love. I want suffering in order to love.”

“I am a f–king steamroller and I’ll roll over you or anybody else.”  –Eliot, Spitzer, in a 2007 conversation with assemblyman Jim Tedisco

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/eliot_spitzers_emperors_club.html

Meanwhile, Iraqi Christians are being martyred…

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=28805b73-fd9d-467b-98da-3d0772322a0f&k=9195&p=1

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They call them ‘books.’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/03/06/do0604.xml

And hey, here’s Jonathan Yardley talking about one of my favourite books, a weird masterpiece by Conrad called ‘Victory.’

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/08/AR2005050800989.html