Does Obama Have An Israel Problem?

If Obama doesn't have an Israel problem already because of Jeremiah Wright, undoubtedly Hillary would like to give him one.

This Trinity United Church of Christ newsletter (PDF link) from last June seems to be making the rounds in Jewish circles. I have now had it e-mailed to me three times in the last 24 hours from friends who all more or less seem to have gotten it through their synagogues.

Add that to the McPeak problem and his wife's big mouth and Obama can vacation all he wants. He can't be liking the headlines all that much.

Meanwhile, it seems to me the media is really attempting to balance the coverage and keep after Hillary on statements she's made, as well.

As I recently posted, ugliness all around. But with PA some weeks away, that's basically all there is for the campaigns and media to do right now - stir the pot with hit pieces as allies on both sides hurl grenades. Could it be that the Democrats self-destruct?

It wouldn't be the first time.

Comments

[seekeronos]

"--- Could it be that the Democrats self-destruct?

It wouldn't be the first time. ---"

Ah, the bittersweet smell of freshly fragged donkey carcasses littering the political moonscape. And it couldn't be happening to any two better candidates and their respective campaigns.

[IslamoLlama]

"-- Ah, the bittersweet smell of freshly fragged donkey carcasses littering the political moonscape. --"

I hope all this talk of hooker sex (by Democratic Governors, not Republican Senators) and angry Preachers makes everyone forget about the tanking economy and the failed Iraq War. Maybe if we throw up enough missing white women on cable news, no one will even notice they're unemployed, uninsured, and homeless. Then they can all run off and vote Republican again.

Yup. The Patriots have this one all locked up. No need to even count this vote this November.

[templar knight]

"...make everyone forget about the tanking economy and the failed Iraq War."

Probably from a Democratic perspective these are the two issues you would like to have out there on a daily basis. But this infighting between Hillary and Obama, along with the continued damage being done to Obama by his Pastor are driving the news cycle. Once the primary season and conventions are over, it will be up to the respective camps whether they desire to make up and cooperate. My take...if Hillary is not the nominee, her camp will be bitter. Whether that will effect the general election, I don't know, but the 2008 election has always been for the Democrats to lose, not for the Republicans to win.

[IslamoLlama]

"-- along with the continued damage being done to Obama by his Pastor are driving the news cycle. --"

Actually, they skipped passed that to talking about how Clinton is a giant liar. Something about Tuzla and non-existent sniper fire.

"-- if Hillary is not the nominee, her camp will be bitter. --"

I don't know any Dean supporter who refused to vote Kerry in '04. No Clintonista is going to pull the lever for a pro-war, anti-choice, big deficit, anti-education, Falwell-kissing GOP flag barer. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are still on the fence leading up to this Fall. But the die hard Clinton fans will fall in line.

[IslamoLlama]

At least as much as the Romney fans and the Huckabee-atics did.

[ET]

Poor dems have to choose between a candidate with no experience and one with no integrity. Both are all ambition and no substance.

Of course the dems assume that the American people are stupid. sorry libs...most folks understand that the dem congress made promises it never intended to keep regarding ending the Iraq war (lowest rated, do nothing congress in history)...the party shot itself in the foot by excluding Florida and Michigan delegates...the primariy will end in a contentious convention wrought with fraud and acrimony...the nominee will be selected by a decidedly un-democratic process through which "elite" superdelegates peddle their influence...

The American voters will ask themselves in November..."is this the party we want leading the most powerful nation in the free world in dangerous times? Answer: No way. these assholes can't manage a primary process and their candidates are deceitful and naive.

Get ready for four years of John McCain. Just like 2000 and 2004...I can hear the whining already.

[John Bircher]

Amen ET!

[John Bircher]

Amen ET!

[FYI]

LINDA CHAVEZ: The crisis Obama won’t confront

I expected more from Barack Obama. Like many Americans, I had hoped his candidacy might transcend the racial divide that has separated this country for too many generations. I disagree with Sen. Obama on virtually every important public-policy issue, yet I have watched every televised speech he’s made and every debate with a sense of admiration. I want him to succeed in his party’s presidential nomination battle, even when I fear, as a staunch Republican, that he might be the more difficult Democratic candidate to defeat in November. But he has profoundly disappointed me last week in his major address on race.

The speech, which tried to quell the furor surrounding his spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, presented an opportunity for Obama to tackle the real issue facing blacks today, which has little to do with race. Instead, Obama fell back on the tired formulas of the past.

He began with a stunningly inappropriate example of moral equivalence: “I can no more disown (Wright) than I can my white grandmother … a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.” Never mind that Obama didn’t choose his grandmother but did choose his church and spiritual mentor. Wright’s racist paranoia and repeated, vicious, public denunciations of America — for example, that our government created AIDS in a laboratory in a genocidal plot to infect blacks — are hardly the same as the occasional prejudiced remark voiced privately.

More fundamentally, Obama avoided dealing in any meaningful way with the single most important issue facing the black community: the breakdown of the family. This issue, and its consequences, explain far more about the failure of blacks to thrive today than racism or lack of social spending.

Seven in 10 black babies are born to single mothers today. These children will fail in school at higher rates than those born to two-parent families. They are more likely to become involved in criminal activity. Their poverty rates will be higher, and they are far more likely to repeat this pattern by giving birth to or fathering a child out of wedlock themselves.

Barack Obama could talk about this problem in a personal way. While his parents were married, his African father abandoned his mother in his infancy, and Obama was raised primarily by his white grandparents, including the grandmother whom he admits is “a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world.”

But instead of confronting the problem at the core of the black-white economic divide, he chose to repeat the litany of liberal explanations. Even while acknowledging the role of welfare policies in the erosion of black families, his main emphasis was on a “lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family. … The lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods — parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement — all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.”

Politicians in general — black, white and brown — have avoided talking about illegitimacy, even though it now threatens not just the black community but increasingly Hispanics and poor whites as well. Nearly half of Hispanic babies are being born to single mothers today, a big increase in just the last few years, and one in four white babies are born out of wedlock. And when you factor in high divorce rates, substantial numbers of American children will spend major portions of their childhoods in woman-headed households.

This crisis, far more than race, is the most important social issue of our time. Obama could use his bully pulpit to talk about it, but instead he chose to try to explain away black racism and rehash racial grievances, black and white.

Given Sen. Obama’s problems with his own church, hundreds of black churches and faith-based organizations around the country are involved in efforts to encourage marriage, including some in Chicago. Obama could have proved himself a genuinely courageous leader had he been involved in this effort.

Linda Chavez is a syndicated columnist.

[tally]

where was rev. wright easter sunday? seems he abandoned his flock for Puerto Rico. he was seen lounging in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, where rooms rates start at $399 a night. and obama was close by in the virgen islands, wow, do they think alike or not?