I admit it: I was wrong to have supported Barack Obama
“Oh my” as they are inclined to say at Hot Air. The American Right’s favourite UK conservative Daniel Hannan slips into the Daily Telegraph confessional box and intones his mea culpa for supporting Barack Obama in 2008 – and Allahpundit’s heart sings.
Sweet music to Hannan’s many admirers in the US who swooned when he eviscerated Gordon Brown in the European Parliament and was subsequently officially enthroned on conservatism’s mount Olympus by Glenn Beck himself. However the rather sour reactions to Allahpundit’s celebratory post from the Hot Air hoi polloi appear to indicate a selective amnesia about the Beck/Hannan courtship (which post dated the 2008 election, folks…)
“You got what you wanted, Limey” seems to be the leitmotif running through the comments, a common reaction to other criticisms of the Cook County Presidency emanating from these sceptred isles as if Obama was some ermine robed viceroy imposed upon the fifty colonies by King George III himself rather than the candidate preferred by a clear majority of American voters in 2008.
So, bearing this in mind, I give you another offering of red meat from the abattoir of the Daily Telegraph, this time from Damian Thompson, Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a journalist specialising in religion who was once described by The Church Times as a “blood-crazed ferret” – I like him already!!
Barack Obama’s analogy between the Gulf oil spill and 9/11: dirty politics from the Chicago school
No Hannan type rapier thrust here – this is more the heavy cavalry sword made famous by Bernard Cornwell’s heroic Richard Sharpe who wields this relatively cumbersome weapon with ruthless efficiency.
Barack Obama is easily clever enough to understand the effect of his comparison between the environmental challenge facing America after the Gulf oil spill and the terrorist challenge it faced after 9/11: a subliminal equation of heartless British oil executives with homicidal Islamists. But he’s also unscrupulous enough not to care.
And then – to the jugular
But if there were any doubt about where Obama served his apprenticeship, then today’s little elision between a terrible accident and meticulously plotted mass murder clears it up.
Thompson suggests that if you want answers to the Obama enigma don’t expect to find them in David Remnick’s recent hagiography which he dismisses as an authorised puff piece penned by a servile magazine editor. Instead he would point you in the direction of John R. MacArthur and his lacerating review of Remnick’s book in the UK Spectator
Forget the conspiracy theories about Barack Obama. Who needs confected mysteries involving birth certificates when there’s a real one – namely, how did an expensively educated kid from Hawaii plunge into the filthy pool of Chicago machine politics and emerge smelling so sweet that America elected him president?
I kind of guessed that I wouldn’t find the answer in New Yorker editor David Remnick’s biography The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. And now I know I needn’t bother ploughing through it to find out, thanks to a savage review in the current Spectator by John R MacArthur – headed, rather daringly, “Under false colours”.
MacArthur believes that the true nature of Obama can only be comprehended by looking at the questions Remnick didn’t ask.
But nobody gets ahead in Chicago’s brutal, one-party political oligarchy without a sponsor — known in pre-PC days as a ‘Chinaman’ — and all the evidence suggests that Obama was spotted as talent by two important members of the Chicago establishment, a white lawyer named Newton Minow, and a key black aide to Mayor Richard M. Daley, Valerie Jarrett. Minow, a bien pensant liberal of the most hypocritical sort (he helped Rupert Murdoch buy the once enlightened Chicago Sun-Times), provides the white lakefront money and corporate connections, and Jarrett introduces Obama (as well as his future wife, Michelle, whom Jarrett hired) to her important friends at City Hall and around town.
But where were the AP Fact Checkers? Why wasn’t ace investigative reporter Joe McGinniss on the case? Why didn’t Arianna Huffington unleash her feral bloodhound Geoffrey Dunn onto the mean streets of The Windy City? Why wasn’t Sherlock Holmes contacted and asked to look into the strange case of Forrest Claypool and “The 2006 endorsement that never was”?
Aw – gee, that’s a tough question…
With the US broadsheets and networks MIA over Obama’s Chicago connections you can’t really blame Hannan and other Brits for buying into the myth of The Man Who Rose Without Trace when Americans themselves were mesmerised by the snake oil salesman’s spiel. Instead be glad that his histrionic posturing over the oil spill has drawn the scales from quite a few UK eyes and rejoice in any sinner who repenteth.
I’ll leave the last words to Thompson for a couple more savage hacks from that heavy cavalry sword.
Mayor Richard Daley – the father, not the son – would have been proud of Obama. It may be windy in Chicago, but if there’s one thing the boys from the Democratic machine learn it’s how to blow a dog whistle loud enough for the right people to hear.
And this, which, if you read it in the light of Sarah Palin’s Styrofoam columns remark and her Facebook broadsides, gives a fascinating insight into the flaws embedded deep in the core of Obama’s political DNA.
I don’t know whether there’s any personal animosity between MacArthur and Remnick; there will be once the latter has read this review, I guess. But it’s not attack on a servile magazine editor, except indirectly; it’s a piece aimed chiefly at Barack Obama, whom MacArthur describes as a “made man within the Chicago Democratic organisation”.
“Made man”, eh? What on earth can he mean by that?
cross posted from C4P
