Old people, apparently, still want to be racial pugilists.
Victor Davis Hanson diggs in, hard, on race (along with some others), willing to call out, disavow, condemn, shame, and repudiate the entire black church, almost, as basically un-American, on his Conservative calculus.
Obama is right about one thing: We are losing yet another opportunity to talk honestly about race, to hold all Americans to the same standards of public ethics and morality, and to emphasize that no one gets a pass peddling vulgar racism, or enabling it by failing to disassociate himself from its source — not Rev. Wright, not even the eloquent, but now vapid, Barack Obama.
He cannot see how limited his view is, in context, breezily unaware of his limited
moral authority to preach, himself. Notable, isn't it, that he chooses "vulgar racism". Even Wright's supposed "racism" isn't decent enough for Victor. It is "vulgar".This from a man whose party's last national "racial event", arguably, was the nomination of Clarence Thomas, in which the candidate declared his confirmation hearing to be "a high tech lynching", rather than the post-racial "vetting of his views and character".
His vision of social change, or progress, is so bound up and self-referential that he sounds like those all-too-frequent paragraphs that begin by issuing those uninspiring words, "The Palestinians must be made to understand that ...". As if attitudes weren't changed by work, commitment, sacrifice, risk, embrace and outreach, but merely by the force of right reason alone and sore appeal to jingoism.
Old people for McCain.
This is why it often takes realignment politics to move forward in America; or, in other words, a lifetime of patience.
