Barack Obama Leading a Mob of Clueless Naifs

Barack Obama's recent smokescreen speech about Jeremiah Wright's influence on his life and thought should have made any thoughtful and intelligent person exclaim, "who the hell does he think he's fooling?!" Instead, the media has led the chorus in proclaiming the brilliance of Obama's unique vision of race. No wonder the old media is dying. Who else fell for the excremental exercise in obscurantism? The usual suspects. White leftists, black leftists, and leftists of all colours and stripes. The common theme in Obama's life seems to be a leftist perspective on all things. Given the distinct minority status of leftist ideas among the American populace, a curious and intelligent person might be forgiven for wondering how Obama finds himself so close to being elected president of the entire United States?

It is painful to watch defenders of Barack Obama tying themselves into knots trying to evade the obvious.

Some are saying that Senator Obama cannot be held responsible for what his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said. In their version of events, Barack Obama just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time -- and a bunch of mean-spirited people are trying to make something out of it.

It makes a good story, but it won't stand up under scrutiny.

Barack Obama's own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far left fringe. In college, "I chose my friends carefully," he said in his first book, "Dreams From My Father."

These friends included "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets" -- in Obama's own words -- as well as the "more politically active black students." He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.

Obama didn't just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college -- members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.

In Shelby Steele's brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama -- "A Bound Man" -- it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were -- and, like many converts, he went overboard.

Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the U.S. Senate is the furthest left of any Senator. There is a remarkable consistency in what Barack Obama has done over the years, despite inconsistencies in what he says.__TomSowell

As Sowell so skillfully points out in his column, Obama's candidacy is one huge exercise in chameleon-like shading and shadowing of black, white, and brown ideation.

The ravings of Jeremiah Wright would be enough to make anyone with intact judgment turn away from Obama. The fact that so many people persist in defending the paranoid ranting of the privileged and powerful Wright suggests that judgment has gone away in a large part of the population. If that crew ever elects a US President, the entire world had best take cover.