What’s worrisome about the publicity finally being directed toward Obama’s spiritual advisor Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. for his long ties with Minister Louis Farrakhan is this:

Farrakhan is radioactive not because he hates whites in general (which he does), but because he hates Jews in particular (which he also does).

So, how can Obama wash off the taint of Farrakhanism-by-Association?

I bet that, as I write this, a lot of our neocon / neolib friends are busy thinking up ways for Obama to prove he’s not an anti-Semite … such as by hiring them as advisors and letting them take over his foreign policy. (All those Giuliani advisors who aren’t getting paid right now might well like another horse to ride at this point.)

Matt Welch of Reason Magazine has an “Open Letter” to the editorial writers of the country, whom he expects to endorse John McCain in great numbers, begging them to get their facts straight on the “Straight Talker:”

…I bring you all here on this Michigan primary day to make one last plea on behalf of the dwindling number of us who read or care about newspaper editorials. Before passing on your McEnthusiasms to the Copy Desk, please remember your canonical journalistic responsibility not to make shit up or pass along easily debunkable falsehoods. Particularly when the subject of your affection has provided copious evidence to the contrary of your claims.

Welch is pro-immigration himself, so immigration doesn’t get mentioned as a bad thing, even as an example of flip-flopping on McCain’s part, although McCain’s Confederate flag flip-flop is in there. Welch is much more worried about McCain’s “Invade The World” tendencies than his “Invite the World” tendencies, and gives details.Read the whole thing–it’s fun.

The New Republic magazine has just posted on its home page a second attack on Ron Paul, tremulously titled More Scandalous Selections From Ron Paul’s Newsletters.

Of course, all this is hysterical, hypocritical Political Correctness, as Steve Sailer has demonstrated. We’re posting some more thoughts by John Derbyshire later tonight.

But a quick observation - look at this:

A May 1990 issue of the Ron Paul Political Report cites Jared Taylor, who six months later would go onto found the eugenicist and white supremacist periodical American Renaissance.

The May 1991 issue of the Ron Paul Political Report cites American Renaissance and offers readers subscription information for it.

(Links in original).

American Renaissance is, of course, not “white supremacist” but White Nationalist, i.e dedicated to the interests of American whites, a position at least as legitimate as TNR’s Zionism. I’ve never seen AmRen write about eugenics other than to discuss the genetic basis of intelligence, which is at least a respectable scientific hypothesis, if not a fact. These distictions are lost on TNR.

The first reference appears to be a passage to Taylor’s 1992 book Paved With Good Intentions noting that black-on-white killings in the Bronx received virtually no publicity compared to white-on-black killings in Bensonhurst and Howard Beach. (Footnotes in book).

The second reference is to a spectacularly pessimistic quotation about race relations from Abraham Lincoln in 1862, when he was urging the settlement of freed slaves in Central America. AmRen dug it up and merely gets what is now called a “hat-tip”.

The Paul letter adds: “Should we follow Lincoln here, any more than his pro-paper money. pro-income tax views? Of course not.”

Somehow, TNR failed to note this disavowal.

The common thread here is that truth is not a defense to TNR types. They don’t think, they emote. Jared Taylor is evil, even if what he is saying is entirely factual. And the TNR types want to emote - hence the repression of the Paul letter’s disavowal of Lincoln.

There are profound psychological forces at work here. And they are poisoning America’s national debate.

Thanks to the wonders of C-SPAN, I watched the inauguration of Bobby Jindal as the Governor of Louisiana as it happened Monday morning. His parents are immigrants from India, and he is a Republican conservative. His politics and level of assimilation don’t sit too well with some homies in Mother India who believe they have a claim on him. (Indians are very interested in immigrants and descendants being successful: the online Times of India has a section of Indians Abroad.)

As a columnist from the widely read Times made clear, genuine assimilation to American values is not entirely acceptable to traditionalists, particularly to the degree achieved by Bobby Jindal.

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of Indian migrants in America: though no sociologist, i’ll call them the atavists and the assimilationists. The atavists hold on to their original identities as much as possible, especially outside the workplace; in speech, dress, food habits, cultural preferences, they are still much more Indian than American. The assimilationists, on the other hand, seek assiduously to merge into the American mainstream; they acquire a new accent along with their visa, and adopt the ways, clothes, diet and recreational preferences of the Americans they see around them. [...]

Born to relatively affluent professionals in Louisiana, he rejected his Indian name (Piyush) as a very young child, insisting that he be called Bobby, after a (white) character on the popular TV show ‘The Brady Bunch’. His desire to fit in to the majority-white society he saw around him soon manifested itself in another act of rejection: Bobby spurned the Hindusim into which he was born and, as a teenager, converted to Roman Catholicism, the faith of most white Louisianans.
["Should we be proud of Bobby Jindal?" Times of India, Oct 28, 2007]

The upshot is that a tiny bit of assimilation may be okay, but certainly becoming a conservative Republican is beyond the pale, according to the editorialist.

I’m just fascinated by the use of the word “atavist” regarding immigration, and will definitely use it, e.g. “Columnist Ruben Navarrette is a closet atavist.”

Steve Sailer has a blog about Obama’s Afroncentrist minister, Jeremiah Wright, who is finally getting some mainstream attention.[Obama's spiritual advisor gives Farrakhan his "lifetime achievement" award] Steve has a quote from Obama’s Audacity Of Hope, in which he listens to a sermon by Wright, (using the phrase “audacity of hope”) which leads to a semi-conversion experience:

To be crass about it, this strikes me not as a religious conversion but as the moment when Obama finally feels Black Enough.

Like his mentor Rev. Wright, Obama’s religion appears to be essentially racial and political rather than universal or spiritual or behavioral, although they appropriate traditional Biblical vocabulary for expressing it. The Old Testament expresses a primarily racial religion as well, so it’s better suited to Wright and Obama’s wants than the universalist New Testament. Similarly, the Afrikaaners’ Dutch Reformed Church found much inspiration in the Old Testament.

In summary, Reverend Wright went with Minister Farrakhan to visit Col. Gadaffi in 1984, three years before Obama decided to join his church out of all the churches he had visited as part of his ethnic organizing. And in November 2007, Reverend Wright gives Minister Farrakhan a lifetime achievement award named after himself. There seems to be a pattern here, one that somebody as astute as Sen. Obama would have noticed long before. The Farrakhan connection is not an anomaly, it’s a window into the now-historically important question of who Obama … well, not into who Obama is (that’s a complicated question), but into who he has long wanted to be.

Why would a minister of the Christian religion be giving awards to to Black Muslim? Because he’s a major “African-American leader,” and that trumps his religion.

Richard Cohen writes in the Washington Post that

Maybe for Wright and some others, Farrakhan “epitomized greatness.” For most Americans, though, Farrakhan epitomizes racism, particularly in the form of anti-Semitism.[Obama's Farrakhan Test, January 15, 2008]

Actually, not particularly. While Farrakhan is an anti-Semitic loon of the most fevered kind, he has a larger agenda–who Farrakhan hates is white people. And Americans. Oh, and Christians. One of his preachers, his former national assistant, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, once said that “The true meaning of Christmas is heathen, vain, ignorant, backward, white pagan worship and idolatry.” That’s standard Black Muslim rhetoric about Christianity.

Our criticisms over the years of Martin Luther King shouldn’t blind us to the fact that King was an actual Minister of the Christian church, who addressed himself to “all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, ” while Farrakhan doesn’t care about anybody but Black Muslims.

The anti-Semitism is part of the Nation of Islam’s copying of normative Islam, but it’s not what the Nation of Islam is about.

Daniel Pipes described the Nation of Islam and its founder, Elijah Muhammad, in an article in Commentary:

The NoI offered a folk religion with strong Christian overtones and hints of science fiction. It had little in common with standard Islam. In the intervening seven decades it has moved in that direction, but not by much. Muhammad hated the United States and loved its enemies, especially non-Caucasian ones. And so he rejoiced in the Japanese victory at Pearl Harbor in 1941, not only refusing to register for military service but instructing his followers to do likewise. Arrested for draft evasion in May 1942, he spent three years in jail on sedition charges, getting out in August 1946.[How Elijah Muhammad Won, June 2000]

That’s why Farrakhan is a problem, not only his specific mania about Jews, but his attacks on the rest of us, as well. As for the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, he doesn’t only hate whites, he hates middle-class blacks.

And Obama? He doesn’t hate anyone–he’s going to be a uniter, not a divider, like Bush was. And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.