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I was having dinner with a very close friend a few hours ago when the nightly news informed us that Barack Obama had left his Church. As in, he quit, ripped up the membership card, walked out of Reverend Wright’s life for good. I listened to Obama explain that his pastor had said some things that do not belong in politics or the pulpit, and that was that. He was gone. Pardon me the cynicism, but I don’t believe for a second that Obama left out of principle. Reverend Wright is not a stranger to him, and even though he didn’t attend all of his sermons the very first one, which he writes about in his book, was controversial enough for him to have known what he was getting into at that church from the beginning. For anyone to suggest that Obama wasn’t aware of that church’s going-ons is disingenuous or naive.

I have heard some people suggest that Obama never really believed in the teachings of that church, that he was merely using that influential house of worship to advance himself politically in the city of Chicago, but I take him at his word when he says that his character was forged there, where he was married, where his children were baptized, where he found Jesus Christ and himself. If these things were not true and he were merely using that church and its people to start a political career for the last twenty years, then that would be absolutely repugnant and it is unthinkable that someone could be so cynical. Obama’s withdrawal from the Church is supposed to kill the story that his advisors rightly believe to be an albatross around his neck heading into the general election, and it is meant to separate him from Wright forever. It is a political decision, and it is indefensible. This is an awful way to treat a man who is better than a father to you, and Obama ought to be ashamed of himself.

My hero Harry Truman’s career was made by a political boss named Tom Pendergast in Missouri. This man was despised around the country and when Truman gained election to the Senate he was derided as “The Senator from Pendergast.” Truman’s own integrity was beyond reproach, but Pendergast was an embarrassing friend to have. In 1940, Pendergast was thrown into prison for racketeering and everyone whom he had helped gain power or money over the years turned on him once he had lost all of his influence. Shortly after he came out of prison in 1945 he died a lonely death, and no one except the family and Harry Truman attended the funeral. Truman did this knowing he’d be hammered by the press but for Truman that was never a problem: it was important to pay respects to this man, even if he was a convicted felon, and he never spoke a word against his old friend before or after his death. (This is only one of several great Truman-friend stories, along with his great quote that “friends don’t count in fair weather. It is when trouble comes that friends count.”)

This is not the sort of loyalty George W. Bush seems to insist upon, where even questioning your friends is disloyal. This is the sort of loyalty we should all insist upon with our friends. We all do things we regret, and we all make mistakes. If we can not count on our friends to be with us in those times, who can we count on? If we can not count on our friends to stand by their closest friends, how can we count on them to stand by us? If we can not be counted on to stand by our friends, how can we be counted on to stand by anyone? I have never had to renounce a friend and I hope that I never do, because I wouldn’t unless that friend were guilty of some great moral or legal crime. Wright is not a stranger to Barack Obama, someone he’s met once or twice, and so it is not right for Obama to treat him like he were some rich man who he met for twenty minutes at a fundraiser. It simply is not right to treat your friends that way.

I’m disturbed by the fact that Barack Obama would tell a man who is like a father to him to get out of his life because he holds ridiculous views. If he weren’t running for President, it wouldn’t even be an issue. Obama himself had said that he could not renounce Wright anymore than he could renounce his own grandmother and now here he is, leaving his church to avoid hard questions and criticism because it became too much for him. What sort of a man would do such a thing to the man who is like a father to him? Obama likes to pretend that he is different than most politicians but he is just another politician, and this shows it. I’m sorry to hear that because a part of me very much wants to believe in my Senator but I can’t put my trust into a man whose closest friends can’t trust him not to get out of the kitchen because he can’t stand the heat. That’s no good.

What is the Democratic Party going to do to defeat John McCain? According to Rasmussen polling data, the American public trusts McCain over Obama to deal with the economy, the war in Iraq, general national security and taxes. Convention holds that the numbers are going to close up in the coming months, as Obama focuses exclusively on the Senator from Arizona, but what if they don’t? What if the Republicans convince Americans that leaving Iraq is surrender — data says very few Americans want to withdraw “immediately,” so if Republicans can drive that home it might doom Obama — and stand strong on all other national security issues? What are we going to do when McCain argues that Obama is going to raise all our taxes to pay for his crazy socialist ideas, which will be a potent argument considering the lack of money Americans have now. “The Democrats want to take even more away.” Worst of all, I fear we have a candidate running who is not positioned to counter character attacks because superficially he is vulnerable in ways that McCain isn’t, and the newest controversy from his church is a great example of this. I believe that Hillary Clinton has stayed in this race (and might remain in this race) for two reasons: she wants to be President, like any of the other people in this race, and she believes that Obama is not going to win the election, so she wishes to spare the party a disaster. I’m willing to vote for Obama, but I am very concerned about the election. This will be one to watch and read about for a long time to come.

There is no lawyer I look up to more than Vincent Bugliosi. For years he has been an inspiration to me, but I must say I am thoroughly disappointed by his latest book about prosecuting George W. Bush for murder. Bugliosi is a genuine American hero, a fair-minded individual who is hyper-competent and brilliant (a rare combination). He’s written other political works that I enjoyed, including None Dare Call it Treason, but I can not get on board with this book. For anyone to go before the nation and argue that Bush is guilty of murdering our soldiers in Iraq and Iraqi citizens is in extremely poor taste and it reeks of demagogy, especially when they are not historians examining the matter in several years when everything has come to light but they are merely non-political observers with little to drawn on. I know it’s chic to rip President Bush and the War in Iraq, but I can’t get behind such a book. I was deeply disappointed to read about it, as Bugliosi should know better than to work on such a project.

Edit: I’ve read the excerpt, “Legal Framework for the Prosecution” and this is not worth the paper it’s printed on. Bugliosi has written fine books on a wide variety of subjects, and as a lawyer he has no rival, but this book is not worthy of him.

Second edit: I also read “George Bush’s Unseemly Response to the Suffering He Has Caused” and that is absolute garbage. Just like psychologists are entering murky waters if they diagnose people they’ve never met, Bugliosi is making a ridiculous argument about George W. Bush not feeling any pain from the War in Iraq because he sees him smile on the way to fundraisers. No one who works with the President has written anything to indicate he doesn’t care deeply about the dead, and Bugliosi is just being silly.

I was shocked to hear about Scott McClellan’s new book criticizing the Bush Administration for its “propaganda” leading up to the war and its general lack of candor. Not because I believe in the Administration’s honesty but because McClellan was, as has been noted, a faithful shill who has been around the President since before he was President. His criticisms about the “permanent campaign” mentality of the White House mean less to me than his other comments because every President since at least Carter has run their White House in such a manner, with Clinton especially receiving criticism for having his pollster ask voters where he should be go on vacation! On the other hand, I do think it is significant to criticize the Administration for putting more emphasis on politics over policy, but John John DiIulio Jr.’s comments on the subject are far more useful: he refers to the Administration as the reign of “the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

Most damaging to history might well be the argument that as one pundit put it: “Iraq was a Hail Mary Pass to Presidential greatness and Middle East stability to be justified in any way possible.” This appears to be a central argument put forth in McClellan’s book and the President is being hammered for it. I’m not sure how much significance I put into this book, as he is not saying anything that has not been said before except he is saying it as the first Texan to break with Bush, but it is interesting to watch him come under attack all the same. I don’t doubt his honesty, however, and I do not believe that anyone should. “Why not come out sooner?” some people ask, and I think the answer to that is obvious. (And no, it is not “because there’s money involved now.” He’ll never find work in the GOP again and he’s lost a lot of his friends with this book. Besides, it takes time to break with a close friend.)

So I’m sitting with my laptop working on a couple of things and Pat Buchanan comes on CNN to talk about his latest book about how Churchill is responsible for World War II and the Holocaust, and Hitler really didn’t mean any harm but Churchill’s cabal pushed him into a corner. I said, “Get that Nazi off of my television!” and you could see that Wolf Blitzer was as unenthusiastic about listening to his nonsense as I am. What might offend me more than his heinous refusal to acknowledge unequivocally that Hitler was an evil man responsible for some of the world’s worst atrocities because of his expansionist ambitions is his attempt to pawn the Cold War off on Winston Churchill, not in the way that far-leftists claim that we were too aggressive but in his more-alarming and equally-disingenuous assertion that Churchill was “blind” to Stalin’s “true ambitions.” Churchill was among the first leaders of the world to understand what Stalin and the USSR were, and what the relationship with them would be after the War. To blame him for coddling Stalin or loving Stalin or whatever spurious claims Buchanan makes of the Prime Minister is reprehensible, and I am disappointed that CNN would allow an apologist for Hitler valuable air-time. Wolf Blitzer is too.

Writing in the Chicago Tribune about this story, Julie Deardorff is critical of the teacher responsible for the bullying of a kindergarten student who has been revealed to be autistic, but she argues that we should wait to hear the teacher’s side of the story. Generally speaking, it is wise to wait for all details to emerge on any given subject but I wonder if there is anything that can be said in defense of this:

Barton and Port St. Lucie Police Department officials said teacher Wendy Portillo made Alex stand in front of the room while his classmates told him what bothered them about him. Because the class was studying tallies and vote-taking, Portillo then led a class vote as to whether Alex should be allowed to stay in the class. Alex was voted out, by a 14 to 2 margin. He spent the rest of the day in the nurse’s office and was upset when Barton picked him up after school. Alex hasn’t been back to the school since Wednesday, when the vote occurred.”He’s doing a little better,” said Barton on Tuesday.

Barton said Tuesday morning Alex was officially diagnosed with an autism-spectrum disorder and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. He is not in school, but he misses the one friend he made in the classroom since he moved to the school in January, she said. And the class vote didn’t just affect Alex. His friend and classmate Spencer Clawson has been upset by what happened, Spencer’s mother Stacie Clawson said. Clawson said she talked with her 6-year-old son after she heard about the incident. She said she asked him to close his eyes and imagine how he would feel if this happened to him. As he did, his face changed, Clawson said.

“He said, ‘That was mean,’” Clawson said.

This is beyond inappropriate for a kindergarten class and a kindergarten teacher. Apparently, the teacher did not know that the child was autistic but even if she was unaware of that there is still no reason for a teacher to hold a class vote to decide whether or not a child deserves to be kicked out of class. If the boy was behaving badly, which is certainly possible, then he should have been removed, but not so publicly and cruelly at the hands of his classmates. I don’t support ending her career in education unless she genuinely does not understand that she did wrong and ought to apologize for it. I do think she should be reprimanded, and should be trained to deal with young students with a greater understanding of children and their circumstances before she scars someone else for life.

I was reading Slate today and their double X section had a link to this article about “honor” killings in the Middle East. I’m not sure there’s anything that horrifies me more than reading about these atrocities against women. How people can be so cruel and have it justified by those around them is astonishing to me. I was also shocked by this article when it turned out on my news feed this morning:

A new report by Save the Children U.K. accuses some aid workers and peacekeepers of sexually exploiting children living in countries affected by conflict and natural disaster. As Tendai Maphosa reports from London, the report says the general silence surrounding the abuse is also shocking. Children as young as six are victims of the abuse, says the Save the Children report. It adds that the practice, though widespread, is chronically under-reported.

Save the Children’s Dominic Nutt says the children rarely speak out. He says while it is difficult for any child anywhere to come forward with information on being abused it is harder for children in difficult circumstances. “Imagine what it is like,” Nutt said. “Say you are a six-year-old child in a war zone, maybe you have lost your parents, maybe they are dead, you are being looked after by aid workers in a refugee camp. All is confusion, you have no security and the only people keeping you alive with food and shelter are aid workers. If those aid workers are also abusing you, how hard is it to go to them and complain? Because the children fear that their food, their aid help will be taken away.”

I just hope that someone in a position of power takes these claims seriously and investigates them because it is unacceptable and evil.

Okay, so it’s been a tongue-in-cheek kind of evening here. A few friends and I are watching the Cleveland Indians play the Chicago White Sox, and we’ve been celebrating Memorial Day. I’d like to wish you, dear reader, a great Memorial Day, and I hope that you take time to consider how much you owe to our men and women of the military. With that said, I can’t believe there’s a border patrol advertisement behind the hitters at Jacob’s Field in Cleveland. I love inappropriately-placed ads. At our newspaper, we usually have space for a Mason advertisement that talks about getting to know “the real” George Washington. These ads make you do a double-take and wonder if the heat is starting to have an affect on you. “Did I read that right?” But then you say “No, that’s not it. The heat has had an effect on them!” Bad marketing, you know?

Canadian Exhibit A:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper brushed off fresh security concerns about his foreign minister’s ex-girlfriend today, insisting he doesn’t take “seriously” questions about the woman with past ties to biker gangs. Amid new reports raising security concerns about Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier and his past relationship with Julie Couillard, Harper issued only a terse response. “I have no intention to comment on a minister’s former girlfriend,” he said at the conclusion of a joint news conference with visiting Ukraine President Victor Yushchenko. “I don’t take this subject seriously.” But Liberal Deputy Leader Michael Ignatieff, citing a report in Le Devoir, renewed calls for Bernier to be fired for compromising national security. Couillard — who had links to the criminal biker underworld as recently as 2005 — is the head of a high-tech firm that has been involved in security at airports, the French daily reported.

American Exhibit B:

US President George W. Bush donned a black leather biker jacket Sunday as he was given honorary membership in the Rolling Thunder motorcycle group which paraded through Washington to honor veterans on Memorial Day. Tens of thousands of members of the biker group joined the parade down the US capital’s main boulevards Sunday in the group’s annual “Ride for Freedom” event to celebrate US soldiers and sailors and press for greater benefits for veterans. Rolling Thunder leaders including National Executive Director Artie Muller met Bush at the White House, where they presented him with the vest in honor of their 21st Memorial Day ride.

Bush called the masses of motorcycles, which he observed from his helicopter just moments before, “a magnificent sight. We just choppered in, Artie, and saw your brothers and sisters cranking up their machines and driving through the nation’s capital — many of them have got the flag on the back,” Bush told them. “And I am just so honored to welcome you back. I want to thank you and all your comrades for being so patriotic and loving our country as much as you do. And our troops appreciate you, the veterans appreciate you and your president appreciates you,” Bush said.

Make up your own mind, dear reader.
(I would like to note that I made very small syntax changes to the article, but nothing significant and no changes to quotes or text. Just deleted spaces so that this post wouldn’t be twenty broken up paragraphs.)

I just opened Google news and was greeted by this terrible article: “Would George Patton vote for Barack Obama?” A better question is this: “Why does it matter what X historical figure would think of Y candidate in a hypothetical scenario?” And why would such an article be at the top of my Google news section?

Western “donors” have offered Myanmar one hundred million dollars if western aid is allowed to come in and help in the hardest-hit areas of that country. The junta agreed, but it is not clear how true to their word they will be or how much access workers will be given to how many of the truly hard-hit places. I think it’s incredible to offer them a hundred million dollars when we know that aid is difficult to disperse even under the best conditions and we therefore have reason to suspect that much of this money would simply go into the pockets of the ruling regime. The difficulty in this situation is in figuring out how to give as much aid to as many people as possible without giving credibility and power to the evil regime that rules this country. If it’s possible, we should insist that no money exchange hands, only aid in the form of workers personally entering the country, but what sort of incentive do these murderous hermits have then? What a moral trap this disaster has become for those who would do what is best and right in assisting those killed by a terrible event and those who would exploit it for their own privelege and gain.

I scoff when people say that “the Internet” is going to “revolutionize” the way campaigns work. Those candidates who cling to the Internet, like Ron Paul, are doomed to fail and those candidates who use it to effectively raise large sums of money, like Barack Obama or (to a lesser extent) Hillary Clinton, are going to succeed with or without the Internet (to some reasonable extent, obviously, as we do not know if Obama will be President, but he has succeeded and would have succeeded by many measures even if he’d lost out on the nomination). That the Internet is a great outlet for communications and contact is an understatement, but it is not a political revolution. Campaigns will always be won at the grassroots, by candidates shaking hands, giving speeches and, always, receiving assistance from those people who believe in them. But this article about the Senate race in Minnesota has caused me to re-evaluate my position, and I now believe that the Internet will be a greater tool for running races at the local level than the national level.

On a laptop at a kitchen table in this cheery Twin Cities suburb, headlines ripping into Al Franken, the satirist whose campaign for the United States Senate is seen as one of the most competitive in the nation, are written up day after day for Minnesota Democrats Exposed, a political blog created by a former Republican Party researcher. Michael B. Brodkorb, the blog’s creator, has worked on the campaigns of some of this state’s top Republicans. Mr. Brodkorb’s critics say the Web site’s claims, screamed in red uppercase letters, are often breathless, far-fetched and painfully partisan. But Minnesota Democrats Exposed has dealt several blows to Mr. Franken’s campaign lately: revelations that he owed $25,000 to the State of New York for failing to pay workers’ compensation insurance and that his corporation was in forfeiture in California.

With only weeks until the state Democratic Party’s convention, where Mr. Franken is expected to win the party’s endorsement to run against Senator Norm Coleman, the Republican incumbent, people here disagree about how much these financial questions will matter to voters in the fall. What Mr. Franken’s circumstance has proven, though, is that no Minnesota candidate this fall can afford to ignore Mr. Brodkorb, or the rest of the state’s universe of Web sites devoted to local politics. Experts here say the abundance of these blogs is a mirror onto this state, its partisan split in recent years and its long tradition of intense political activism (by some measures, voter turnout here was the highest in the nation in 2006). That said, they are anything but Minnesota Nice.

Eric Pusey’s liberal-leaning mnblue, for instance, tracks Mr. Coleman’s moves on a “Weasel Meter.” Some blog live from the smallest of political meetings and the forgotten campaign stops. Enough of these writers have cropped up here now to make a Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, better known here as the Mob. “We’ve kind of got a center of gravity going on up here,” said Mitch Berg, part of a group that started a True North Web site in 2007.

The Franken campaign has played down the significance of the revelations first raised on Mr. Brodkorb’s site, but there are signs the tax problems may be trouble for Mr. Franken, a former comedian who has worked hard to show voters that his campaign is serious. A recent poll of voters by The Minneapolis Star Tribune that showed Mr. Coleman leading Mr. Franken (though within the margin of error) also found that 42 percent of those polled were not satisfied with Mr. Franken’s explanations of his tax problems; 28 percent said the problems made them less likely to vote for him.

Then again, we see the conundrum of blogs in this article: does anyone truly doubt that these stories would not have been written about in the mainstream media, at least eventually? So what sort of effect do they have on the campaign beyond timing? The Internet, as a forum where people can post as they please, will eventually be a great source of political dirt, and will allow candidates to control the disclosure of embarrassing information at their leisure, because all they will have to do is post on their website or on an influential supporter’s website that something unethical or immoral or merely embarrassing is occurring or did occur, and therefore disrupt the timing of a candidate’s media cycle or of the direction of a campaign at the early stages. And candidates will be able to use money. But how, exactly, are these different than local donor fundraising and planting a story in a favorable newspaper? They aren’t. It’s a small evolution.

Not a revolution.

Who decided that it would be a good use of the LA Times’ resources to write an article about a poll that proves Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would beat John McCain in November? I know it is meant to show that “contrary to what Clinton argues, Obama wins this big state by a bigger margin than she does” but does that matter? Everybody knows that California is going for the Democrats. You want news? The Democrats will win New York, and Illinois. McCain will win in Texas. And otherwise wonderful news organizations will focus on not just polls that might mean something but polls like this one that doesn’t demonstrate a damn thing worth demonstrating.

In running for President, John McCain must feel like he is being pulled apart from all directions, and so must Barack Obama for that matter. Both candidates must seek and receive the support of people who they might find morally or politically wrong, and the campaign process often forces people to make claims they would not otherwise be willing to make. Now that McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee, he has had to find the support of leaders from the Religious Right, which he has forcefully criticized in the past but has now come home to. Today was an embarrassing one for McCain, as he had to distance himself from the pastor John Hagee after he said Hitler was doing God’s will and the Catholic Church is a “whore.” The irony is that there’s no way he’d be seeking Hagee’s support if he weren’t running for President, but now he is being humiliated by the process. I guess it is impossible to have a full campaign of this length without trivial arguments or the involvement of embarrassing “friends,” but can’t we at least have a shorter one so that we don’t have to deal with so much nonsense?

Dick Cheney gave a commencement address today. The good news is, he believes that the War on Terror will be won on this generation’s watch. The bad news is, he is still Vice President giving speeches to the Coast Guard.