America's voters need to know why Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, praised Barack Obama at the annual Nation of Islam conference as "the hope of the entire world that America will change and be a better place" and Mrs. Obama's thesis suggests why.
John Derbyshire, in "The Corner" at National Review Online: "...Mrs Obama's senior sociology thesis, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community"....will... have on the presidential campaign....a moderate positive, offset by a slight negative."
If that's so, then Barack Obama will be the next President.
Mr. Derbyshire was impressed that the thesis was released, making the Obama campaign "look open and transparent" and highlighting Hillary's failure to release her tax returns.
I'm impressed with the way the media has ignored Michelle Obama's race-based favoritism.
Republicans did well with dealing with the race-based favoritism of David Duke.
Republicans better not give the Obamas a pass.
Mr. Derbyshire's attitude:" A candidate's wife's college term papers just aren't consequential."
That depends upon the relationship between candidate and wife and what is written in the papers.
Mr. Derbyshire did detect a problem with Mrs. Obama's thesis:
"...the thesis reveals a cast of mind that most voters find deeply unattractive. Plainly Mrs. Obama had that cast of mind in 1985. Recent remarks suggest she still has it. The fact that Barack Obama chose her as a wife and seems to get on well with her, indicates that he shares it. It's that deeply, unrelentingly critical way of thinking about the U.S.A., and about most of our citizens, that characterizes the 'victicrat' — the person who has been taught, or who has taught herself, that she is a pitiful figure buffeted by hostile forces, whose only hope for survival is to return the hostility, and to band together with others like herself ('the Black community') for mutual aid, all of them in a hostile posture to the out-group.
"Most Americans don't see our country like that, and have a low opinion of people who do. Millions of white — or, as Mrs. Obama writes, 'White' — Americans would love to have had the breaks Mrs. Obama had, and resent the fact that they didn't have them because they don't belong to a designated victim group. They resent the ease with which two beneficiaries of those breaks can parlay their victim status into two six-digit salaries and a seven-digit house, without ever doing any kind of work that adds to the nation's wealth or security. And they especially resent that people who have attained those heights of success, with the assistance of those breaks, seem to nurse nothing but hostile emotions towards the country that made it possible for them."
Mr. Derbyshire noted that Mrs. Obama capitalized "White." She capitalized "Black" too.
I have no problem with Mrs. Obama capitalizing both or neither.
What is significant is not that Mrs. Obama capitalized "Whites."
What IS very significant is that while giving "Whites" equal treatment when it came to capitalization, Mrs. Obama declared her intention to "utilize all of [her] present and future resources to benefit this community first and foremost."
Mr. Derbyshire: "Net-net, I doubt [Mrs. Obama's thesis] will make much difference, or should."
It certainly should.
There needs to be scutiny of the Obamas and their goals instead of blithe assumption that they are the solution to America's problems.
America's voters need to know why Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, praised Barack Obama at the annual Nation of Islam conference as "the hope of the entire world that America will change and be a better place" and Mrs. Obama's thesis suggests why.
Readers let Mr. Derbyshire know they did not concur with him and he offered this explanation:
"Readers are telling me I'm too darn nice. Well, that is a thing I hear a lot; but my gentle handling of Mrs Obama's thesis is colored by the facts that (a) she's a candidate's wife, so that what she thinks is, ah, 'peripheral' to real campaign issues; and (b) in my senior year at college, I was a socialist with dreams of raising the red flag over the ruins of Buckingham Palace."
That explains why Mr. Derbyshire did not appreciate the significance and potential of Mrs. Obama's thesis.
Time will tell whether Mr. Derbyshire was right that it won't make much difference.
Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.
Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.
The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.
Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.