A lot of people taking a closer look at Obama’s “race speech” today.
One thing I think is apparent is that this speech will not hold up as a “great” speech over time. Because it’s riddled with lies, pathetic attempts at moral equivalence, and — most importantly — it excuses just about everything that he pretends to condemn.
Charles Krauthammer writing in the Washington Post pretty much nails it. Go read the entire column. It’s the one thing that Obama’s speech wasn’t — straight to the point.
Krauthammer calls Obama’s speech A Brilliant Fraud:
Obama’s 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.
His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence and (b) white guilt.
[snip]
That’s why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.
Rich Lowry at Real Clear Politics gets it too:
Obama did rap Wright on the knuckles. He said Wright’s videotaped ravings “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.” Well, of course they did. Seeing racism as endemic and America as unredeemably corrupt is central to the Rev. Wright’s black liberation theology; indeed, it would be a passable definition of it.
And all Barack did was make excuses for it.
This phrase suggests making excuses?
“ a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.â€
Obviously there is nothing he could have said that would have satisfied you.
Left by Preston on March 21st, 2008 at 10:11 am