[Dialogue] Beret Griffith sent you an article from startribune.com

[Charles or Doris Hahn]

Sorry Beret, in re-reading my quick note I see that I
made an error.  In reading between the lines it
appears to me that under cover of trying to bring to
light democratic slurs, this guy is really a Bushite
war pro who is afraid of any of the three being
elected. He cuts at all three of them too
hard---especially Edwards.  The Chavez comparison is
just a little too revealing.
Charles Hahn
--- Beret Griffith <beretgriffith at charter.net> wrote:


---------------------------------
Beret Griffith wrote these comments: I found this
editorial in the Minneapolis Star Trubune thought
provoking.

					This Article from StarTribune.com		has been sent
to you by BeretGriffith.
		*Please note, the sender's identity has not been
verified.
		
		 The full Article, with any associated images and
links can be viewed here.
				Charles Krauthammer: Are we through swooning?
Good. Let's scrutinize Obama
		Charles Krauthammer, Star Tribune

					
WASHINGTON - Was it the tears in the New Hampshire
coffee shop? Whenever there is a political upset,
everyone looks for the unscripted incident, the
I-paid-for-this-microphone moment that can account for
it. Hillary Clinton's improbable victory in New
Hampshire is being widely attributed to her rare
display of emotion when asked how she was holding up.
This "Hillary cried, Obama died" story line is
satisfying, but it overlooks an earlier moment played
to a national television audience of 9 million that
was even more revealing.

It showed a side of Barack Obama not seen before or
since. And it wasn't pretty. Asked in the Saturday
Democratic debate about her dearth of "likability,"
Clinton offered an answer both artful and sweet --
first, demurely saying her feelings were hurt and
mock-heroically adding that she would try to carry on
regardless, then generously conceding that Obama is
very likable and "I don't think I'm that bad."

At which point, Obama, yielding to some inexplicable
impulse, gave the other memorable unscripted moment of
the New Hampshire campaign -- the gratuitous
self-indicting aside: "You're likable enough,
Hillary." He said it looking down and with not a smile
but a smirk.

Rising rock star puts down struggling diva -- an
unkind cut, deeply ungracious, almost cruel, from a
candidate who had the country in a swoon over his
campaign of grace and uplift. The media gave that
moment little play, but millions saw it live, and I
could surely not have been the only one who found it
jarring.

It is fitting that New Hampshire should have turned on
a tear or an aside. The Democratic primary campaign
has been breathtakingly empty. What passes for
substance is an absurd contest of hopeful change
(Obama) vs. experienced change (Clinton) vs. angry
change (John Edwards playing Hugo Chavez in English).

One does not have to be sympathetic to the Clintons to
understand their bewilderment at Obama's pre-New
Hampshire canonization. The man comes from nowhere
with a track record as thin as Chauncey Gardiner's.
Yet, as Bill Clinton correctly, if clumsily,
complained, Obama gets a free pass from the press.

It's not just that NBC admitted that "it's hard to
stay objective covering this guy." Or that Newsweek
had a cover article so adoring that one wonders what
is left for coverage of the Second Coming. Or that
Obama's media acolytes wax poetic that his soaring
rhetoric and personal biography will abolish the
ideological divide of the 1960s -- as if the division
between left and right, between free markets and the
welfare state, between unilateralism and
internationalism, between social libertarianism and
moral traditionalism are residues of Sgt. Pepper and
the March on Washington. The baby boomers in their
endless solipsism now think they invented left and
right -- the post-Enlightenment contest of ideologies
that dates back to the seating arrangements of the
Estates-General in 1789.

The freest of all passes to Obama is the general
neglect of the obvious central contradiction of his
candidacy -- the bipartisan uniter who would bring us
together by transcending ideology is at every turn on
every policy an unwavering, down-the-line,
unreconstructed, uninteresting, liberal Democrat.

He doesn't even offer a modest deviation from
orthodoxy. When the Gang of 14, seven Republican and
seven Democratic senators, agreed to restore order and
a modicum of bipartisanship to the judicial selection
process, Obama refused to join lest he anger the
liberal base.

Special interests? Obama is a champion of the
Davis-Bacon Act, an egregious gift to Big Labor that
makes every federal public-works project more costly.
He not only vows to defend it, but proposes extending
it to artificially raise wages for any guest worker
program.


On Iraq, of course he denigrates the surge. That's
required of Democratic candidates. But he further
claims that the Sunnis turned against Al-Qaida and
joined us -- get this -- because of the Democratic
victory in the 2006 midterm elections.

Obama has yet to have it pointed out to him by a
mainstream interviewer that the Anbar Salvation
Council was founded by Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha
two months earlier. Obama has yet to be asked why any
Sunni would choose to join up with the American
invaders at precisely the time when Democrats would
have them leaving -- and be left like the pro-American
Vietnamese or the pro-French Algerians to be hunted
and killed when their patrons were gone. That's
suicide.

Even if you believe that a Clinton restoration would
be a disaster, you should still be grateful for New
Hampshire. National swoons, like national hysterias,
obliterate thought. The New Hampshire surprise has at
least temporarily broken the spell. Maybe now someone
will lift the curtain and subject our newest man from
hope to the scrutiny that every candidate deserves.

Charles Krauthammer's column is distributed by the
Washington Post Writers Group.

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