Yesterday I covered the first part of Frank Rich’s Saturday column. I thought I would try to take apart the rest of it today.

In the next paragraph, Rich attacks McCain for being wealthy. The idea is that McCain doesn’t understand the trials of the everyday man.

What should Obama do now? As premature panic floods through certain liberal precincts, there’s no shortage of advice: more meat to his economic plan, more passion in his stump delivery, less defensiveness in response to attacks and, as is now happening, sharper darts at a McCain lifestyle so extravagant that we are only beginning to learn where all the beer bullion is buried.

I don’t think Obama has a whole lot of room to talk on that front either. Obama owns a million dollar Hyde park mansion — the purchase of this mansion and some adjacent property involved a shady deal with convicted felon Tony Rezco. Does anyone really think that someone who made over $4 million in fiscal year 2007 can identify with the everyday man? I know that with their family pulling down that kind of green I sure can’t identify with them.

Here’s the deal though; I don’t begrudge the Obama’s or Senator McCain their extravagant lifestyles assuming they came about the money legally. That’s — in part — what America is about; giving your children more opportunities than you had, and making a better life for yourself in the process. Judging by the tone of Frank Rich’s column though, he does.

That story is there to be told, but it has to be a story that is more about America and the future and less about Obama and his past. After all these months, most Americans, for better or worse, know who Obama is…

I believe Rich was being unintentionally truthful here. With past relationships with such noted individuals as Fr. Phleger, Rev. Wright, Tony Rezco, Bill Ayers, and Bernadine Dohrn, as well as his support for infanticide, and his being named the most liberal Senator in the US Senate I wouldn’t want the discussion to be about my past either.

So much so that he seems to have fought off the relentless right-wing onslaught to demonize him as an elitist alien.

Well, we might call him an elitist, but the alien charge came from the Clinton camp. Notice how Rich accuses the right-wing of “demonizing” Obama (calling him an elitist) when earlier in this same article Rich did the same thing to McCain by criticising McCain’s extravagant lifestyle.

So while Obama can continue to try to reassure resistant Clinton loyalists in Appalachia that he’s not a bogeyman from Madrassaland, he must also move on to the bigger picture for everyone else. He must rekindle the “fierce urgency of now” — but not, as he did in the primaries, merely to evoke uplifting echoes of the civil-rights struggle or the need for withdrawal from Iraq…

Perhaps I’m misreading this paragraph, but — to me — it reeks of eastcoast elitism, and disdain for “those hicks in Appalachia”. After all, he must move on to the bigger picture for everyone else.

And most Americans have turned their backs on the Iraq war, no matter how much McCain keeps bellowing about “victory.” The Bush White House is now poised to alight with the Iraqi government on a withdrawal timetable far closer to Obama’s 16 months than McCain’s vague promise of a 2013 endgame. As Gen. David Petraeus returns home, McCain increasingly resembles those mad Japanese soldiers who remained at war on remote Pacific islands years after Hiroshima.

Actually, we haven’t turned our backs on the Iraq war. Most of us are very proud of the outstanding work that our troops have done. We have made incredible progress in Iraq, and if we pull out on a timetable that more closely resembles Obama’s, then it will be because our troops — under the leadership of Gen. David Petraeus — have secured victory and allowed the Iraqi’s to train up a military and police force capable of protecting their country.

Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?

Finally, Rich just can’t help but take some underhanded swipes at the Republican party and McCain. The “all white political party” line is a joke. The Republican party has more minorities in positions of power than the Democratic party does. Michelle Malkin covered this not to long ago.

As far as whether or not we need a bellicose Vietnam veteran leading the country; when you consider the alternative — a cut and run Democrat who seems to have his sights set on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory — I would say yes, that’s exactly what we need right now while in the  middle of a war with Islamofacism, and Russian aggression on the rise. The sheeple who have been persuaded that Obama is the one we’ve all been waiting for may have gone glassy eyed over his speeches, but I doubt that Putin or Osama will fall for his schtick.

1. 

   Jim, I give you tons of credit for wading thru that tripe. I tried on Sunday and just couldn’t stand it - and I only got thru the first paragraph.

   This whole flap about McCain’s wealth - it wasn’t such a problem when Kerry was running for president was it. His wife’s wealth rivals Cindy McCain’s, yet no one made a big deal about it.

   How quickly the Dems forget their own skeletons when it comes to their precious Messiah.

   Comment by Kris, in New England — 8/26/2008 @ 14:05

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2. 

   Tell me about it. There was so much in there to attack that it took me two days to get through it, and two posts to get through it.

   Jim C

   Comment by Jim — 8/26/2008 @ 17:38

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3. 

   I also found this about Biden, talk about “change”.

   Comment by Isaac — 8/28/2008 @ 01:12

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