Sunday, March 16, 2008

Bill Bradley's anger management   [Mark Steyn]

By the way, Jonah, Bradley's wrong: in today's political culture, it's not "easy to be angry" when a kook preacher tells his congregation "God damn America". Community spokespersons pop up on TV to assure you that "it's a black thing" that the other 90 per cent of Americans don't get, and never can, and thus it would be racist even to try. Meanwhile, sophisticated white liberals of the Bradley ilk pass off explicit, toxic anti-Americanism as a kind of harmless alternative lifestyle - no different from, say, vegetarianism - that only redneck boors would be so vulgar as to get steamed up about.

In tight spots in the colonies a century back, Cecil Rhodes used to buck up his men by telling them that each had been an Englishman and therefore had won first prize in the lottery of life. Today, to be born an American is to win first prize in the lottery of life. One understands why that might not seem obvious to black people of a certain age: Condi Rice, for example, has childhood memories of a segregated south and racial violence. But that's what makes Obama's association with Wright so significant. He's not from Alabama. He's a biracial middle-class Kenyan-Kansan Hawaiian-born Indonesian-raised Columbia and Harvard graduate who chose to immerse himself in the most corrosive and paranoid end of a racial-grievance ghetto mentality that is nothing to do with him, his family or his upbringing. He doesn't have the same excuse as a Jackson, Sharpton or Farrakhan. 

Why would he do such a thing? I wouldn't expose my kids to the four-letter ravings of Jeremiah Wright because I wouldn't want them to grow up loathing their country. I find it hard not to think less of a man who does.

03/16 12:10 PMShare