With his opening echo of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, Barack Obama in his speech on Reverend Wright et al reminded me of another politico who tried to gloss over some distinctly disturbing doings by posing in the glow of Honest Abe. That would be Hillary Clinton.
Remember the Pretty in Pink press conference, back in 1994, when Hillary finally agreed to talk to the press about her 10,000% return on a $1,000 investment in the futures markets? The setting was the White House. To receive reporters, she put on a pink sweater and sat in an armchair under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. It worked. The real questions never got answered.
Now we have Obama, before that row of flags, riffing on the Gettysburg address — “Two hundred and twenty one years ago” — simultaneously trying to both reject and justify the venom of his spiritual leader, while outlining a vision of America that sounds like the rise of the empire of the clones, victims all, united and perfected in the pursuit of state subsidies.
The issue in both cases, Hillary and Barack, is not gender, or race, or any of those other categories in which we can debate endlessly who is the victim, and who is playing what card, and who is uniting and who is dividing. The issue here is integrity. And on the evidence so far, they really ought to leave Abraham Lincoln out of it.
One further note on Obama and Reverend Wright. We have been hearing a lot of discussion about what Obama might have known about Wright. When do we hear what Rev. Wright knows about Obama?
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