Keith Burgess-Jackson

My friend Carlos, who is an Obama supporter, is getting nervous.

Addendum: I’ve been watching MSNBC most of the evening. Hillary Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary with 55% of the vote. The Obama campaign is in trouble. He looks unelectable. The only question is whether enough superdelegates come to that conclusion to throw the nomination to Clinton. Suppose Clinton pulls it out. Won’t there be cries from Obama supporters that she stole the nomination? Will Democrats come together to support her? There’s an edge to this race that I haven’t seen before. Old-timers such as Ted Kennedy and John Kerry will probably be able to support Clinton, but what about the young people who’ve been supporting Obama? What about the Daily Kos kids, the MoveOn.org moonbats, and the Democratic Underground thugs? They’ll stay home on election day, sure as hell.

Here is a scene from today’s stage of the Tour of Georgia. (What idiot named it “Tour de Georgia”?)

Here.

To the Editor:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton claims that Senator Barack Obama isn’t tough because he was “complaining about hard questions.” This is a subtle but deliberate misrepresentation: Mr. Obama objected to the questions in the Philadelphia debate not because they were hard, but because they were irrelevant.

All three campaigns are guilty of such mischaracterizations of opponents’ remarks, and they have especially been a hallmark of Mrs. Clinton’s. All too often, the press has been loath to call them out—or has even swallowed them wholesale, letting campaign press releases steer their reporting.

Thanks, then, for saying, albeit in the ninth paragraph, “Mr. Obama did not say that the questions had been too difficult.”

I hope that more reporters will actively examine the unstated assumptions buried in all the candidates’ remarks.

Paul Cantrell
Minneapolis, April 19, 2008

Note from KBJ: Two comments. First, it’s not for Barack Obama (or any other candidate for public office) to determine whether a question is relevant. He’s asking for people’s votes. They determine what’s relevant. Second, if he really thought the questions were irrelevant, why did he answer them? He should have said, “That’s irrelevant,” and remained silent.

Here is your entertainment for this Tuesday evening.

My natural disposition to exculpate Islam from responsibility for the failings of its adherents has given way to doubts: doubts about whether there is something intrinsic to the theological structure of Islam that is inimical to the delicate membrane of moral law and rational order, deriving ultimately from the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers, that lies at the core of Western civilization. Islam is often spoken of as one of the three Abrahamic religions, and Mohammed himself in the earlier, less belligerent phase of his life, used to speak of Jews and Christians as “peoples of the book.”

Unlike Jews and Christians, however, who despite their orthodoxies were always open to every possible external influence, Muslims have been moving steadily in the opposite direction for nearly a thousand years, turning their backs on the modern world and indeed seeking to reverse the verdict of history on the medieval empires of the Arabs and Turks. After centuries of domination, they found themselves poorer, less educated and hence less powerful than the infidels they despised. Muslims had become the people of the closed book.

(Daniel Johnson, “The Conservative Response to Islam,” The New Criterion 26 [January 2008]: 13-8, at 15)