One Old Preacher Excercises His Constitutional Rights: The Flag Is Falling

I could come no where near putting it better that P.M. has in this opinion piece.

God, I don't know what's wrong with me, but I was blown back by the outrage after Obama's speech. I guess I keep hoping that the conservatives will be conservatives and not the frightened, bigoted, ideological, authoritarians that has taken over the Republican Party over the last 40 years, that seems to have reached its peak with the BuCheney administration. Why, oh why do I keep hoping? Maybe it is guys like Andrew Sullivan who is a true conservative and a very thoughtful man. I may not agree with Mr Sullivan on everything, but he does make sense and doesn't have seemingly programed, robotic, knee-jerk reactions to all things to the left of Attila the Hun. He is also not from here, but from England.

I have already expressed what I felt about Obama's speech; a speech that he shouldn't even have to have given. But he, unlike many of the rest of us, was wise enough, because of his life experience, to know that not only did the speech have to be given, but that he knew that the speech was not the end of anything, but the beginning of something new; honesty about race (and quite a few other issues, I feel sure) in this country.

The fact that the news media was in a typical feeding frenzy about the preacher thing while the anniversary of shock and awe passes, with protests blacked out, as usual, with out president and vice president sounding more sick and delusional by the day and their man for the next president having to be told that he had misspoke about al Qaeda and extremists, correcting himself and then misspeaking again just blows ones mind. I did see some discussions about the McCain thing and it looks like Dan Abrams is going to start a feature about old Teflon John. I guess it was such a gaff that ever Cabal news couldn't completely ignore it.

On Olbermann, McCain was described exactly as Bush is described, smart in his own way, but not a detail man.

Sweet Jesus, that's just all we need!

The guy doesn't know jack about economics and whomever the next president is, he or she will have to deal with some major crooks in the financial industry who have been up to serious no good and the fallout from their criminal shenanigans. My God, does any one trust McCain to do that? Only a fool!

The right's peculiar notion of proportionality lies in one of those intellectual sand traps that one can whack away at for years and yet never come close to dislodging its smug, half-buried target. The notion just sits there, grinning back, confident that logical blows will do it no harm or budge it one bit. It's one of the more stubborn obscenities known to man.

While, for instance, right-wing scribblers were succumbing to the vapors because of one over-the-top preacher's exercising of all three guarantees of the First Amendment, we were "celebrating" the fifth anniversary of an illegal, anticonstitutional, wholly unAmerican foreign war. This, however, merited no similar reactionary dread.

The disproportionality was stunningly obscene, as were its objects of timid affection.

You want obscene? Our -- their -- president offered that yesterday in spades when he insisted once again that "removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision," without noting once again its dreadfully wrongful costs in human and fiscal treasure.

Obscene? How about the vice president's considered response to ABC News' observation that two-thirds of his citizenry believe the war was never worth waging: "So?"

Obscene? How about about John McCain's latest Baghdad-Bob like pronouncement that we're on the jolly good "precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism." Why, to hear you folks whine, one would think this marvelous little war against an amorphous ideology and its centuries-old tactics is dragging on with no end in sight.

Obscene? Pshaw. That -- wretched unAmericanism, presidential recalcitrance, vice-presidential debauchery and would-be presidential imbecility -- is but the stuff of negligible nothings.

Hence it gets a pass from our right-wing scribblers. They have bigger and far more ominous fish to fry; namely, that one, aforementioned preacher who once exercised his First Amendment guarantees in warning that God may indeed "damn" this country if it didn't stop acting more like Beelzebub than Jesus.

With tin foil molded properly on pate, with incense burning and adorned by a Cross, two Stars of David and several cloves of garlic, I journeyed yesterday to the Dark Side, just to take a confirmational peek at what the 15th-century minds of right-wing hysteria were likely saying. And sure enough, there it was, splattered all over the screen, in all its eerie irrelevance and screaming disproportionality.

One of this preacher's parishioners, you see -- I know, this is shocking, but be of strong heart, hale friend -- had heard the preacher's message in his parish and now seeks to convert its hate into love, its disunity into fellowship, its hopelessness into potential.

The Republic is doomed.

One of the distaff scribblers at Townhall, for example, wrote of the parishioner's speechifying: "Deflect, deflect, deflect.... He cannot disown Wright? Really? This rationale makes no sense to me." Thank you, dear lady, for affirming the clinically manifest.

But I quickly tired of Townhall's third-rate second-rateness so I scurried over to the more sophisticated banality of National Review -- where I found our good friend, the liberal-fascist-fighting Jonah Goldberg, sputtering in apoplectic regret that "Obamaniacs think conservatives just don't get it, that we're mired in the past, that we are motivated by old passions and bigotries." Like, uh, blindingly lily-white conservatism?

And there was Byron York, who perhaps you recall has made a living out of astonishingly proving that the liberal New York Times is liberal. Byron's latest insight was this: "What was surprising, for me, was the number of Obama supporters I spoke to afterward who not only thought the speech was great but also didn't see anything particularly wrong with the 'controversial' remarks of Rev. Jeremiah Wright." In other words, and quite unsurprising, disproportionality met proportionality and was utterly dumbfounded.

Yet let me be not too harsh, for there are thinking conservatives out there. And perhaps the most thoughtful is Andrew Sullivan, who wrote on his own site: "This searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply Christian speech is the most honest speech on race in America in my adult lifetime.... I have never felt more convinced that this man's candidacy ... is an historic opportunity.... I love this country. I don't remember loving it or hoping more from it than today."

So see? The conservative bug isn't lethal to the conservative mind in every way and with every conservative. And given Mr. Sullivan's brand of it, I don't remember loving it or hoping more from it than yesterday.

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THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

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