Jonah's latest. It's masterful. An excerpt:
[T]his is not a party weighed down by the ballast of facts. Indeed, you have to carry a light pack when racing against the clock. For more than a year, Democrats have been fueled by a violent, irrational hatred of George W. Bush. These feelings were almost never based upon facts, so much as on an almost glandular paranoia.
Librarians set fire to their records, lest Attorney General John Ashcroft's Gestapo find out who borrowed The Catcher in the Rye. They insisted that Bush was some sort of criminal mastermind and buffoon who could orchestrate a war for oil while not being smart enough to work as a spellchecker at an M&M factory. Countless anti-Bush canards contradicted each other, but consistency was a luxury the Democrats could not afford.
The problem for them is that not even the now decidedly anti-Bush press can conceal the fact that virtually none of these allegations were true. The Senate Intelligence Committee report, the British Butler Report and the 9/11 Commission report undermine every key allegation of the anti-Bush flat-earthers. The 9/11 Commission, which was being hailed as an oracular council of truth and light when it made Bush look bad, has essentially said the Patriot Act does not go far enough (and Ashcroft, by the way, never even poked his nose in a library); that Bush never lied and that several of Bush's more famous accusers did - including those who, knowing otherwise, insisted that Bush's "16 words" about Saddam Hussein's pursuit of uranium were lies.
He does a fine job in this piece of deconstructing the hypocrisies of both Clinton and Carter. It makes one eager for his critique of Teresa Heinz Kerry's speech last night which seemed like it was being delivered on valium.
It may seem picky, but I thought it just a little bit odd that the Democrats appealed last night to their African American base by touting two speakers who lay claim to the coveted identity but who are African-American in only the most technical sense. Obama Barak had a Kenyan father whom he never really knew, but he shares almost nothing else in common with the heritage of American blacks. Teresa Kerry immigrated from Mozambique, but very few blacks would regard this white multi-millionaire heiress as a racial "sister." It's a small point, but one can imagine the hooting that would ensue if the African-Americans featured at the Republican convention included a white South African and a man whose maternal ancestors were white and whose paternal ancestors were never enslaved, nor ever experienced Jim Crow or the civil rights movement.
I guess that for people who consider Bill Clinton to be the first black president, almost anybody counts as an African-American, except Clarence Thomas, Condaleeza Rice, Rod Paige, Colin Powell, and J.C. Watts.
