This guy says he’s the pastor of Obama’s church! That means he’s going to try to kill me.

“The ministry of Christ speaks to those who have their backs against the wall. . .”

Praise Jesus!

Oh, wait. . . I thought he said, “The ministry of Christ speaks to those who have their Blacks against the wall.”

(From dailykos.com)

We need to figure out how to rescue this white lady who’s been forced to say nice things about Barack Obama’s church!

“It’s probably easiest if I tell you just a little quick bit about history. . .”

LOL, lady, thanks for the warning. . . closing my ear-flaps now. . .

(From dailykos.com)

Next reflection, courtesy good ol’ Richard Cohen:

In the following days, as the horror (of 9/11) started to be airbrushed — no more bodies plummeting to the sidewalk — the anthrax letters started to come, some to people I knew. And I thought, No, I’m not going to sit here passively and wait for it to happen. I wanted to go to “them,” whoever “they” were, grab them by the neck, and get them before they could get us. One of “them” was Saddam Hussein. . .

OK, this is obviously going to end well. . .

I was miserably wrong in my judgment and somewhat emotional, and whenever my resolve weakened, as it did over time, I steadied myself by downing belts of inane criticism from the likes of Michael Moore or “realists” like Brent Scowcroft, who had presided over the slaughter of the Shiites. I favored the war not for oil or empire (what silliness!) or Israel but for all the reasons that made me regret Bosnia, Rwanda, and every other time when innocents were being killed and nothing was done to stop it. I owe it to Tony Judt for giving me the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade, who, wrongheaded though he might have been, neatly sums it all up for me: “You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.”
(My emphasis.)

You know this whole line of argument, like, Well I was wrong on every significant point, and my poor judgment has led to the deaths of thousands of innocent people, but that very same poor judgment PROVES I’m a better person than you?

THAT DOESN’T DRIVE ME UP THE WALL AT ALL.

What? Wall? Me? Driving up it? Driving up what? The wall? Huh? No way, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

March 20 (Bloomberg) — Barack Obama is picking the University of North Carolina to win the national college basketball championship, John McCain was working on his tournament bracket last night in London and Hillary Clinton told reporters she needs to check with her sage, Bill Clinton.

The former president, perhaps cognizant of the voters’ passions for home-state teams — including politically important ones in North Carolina, Indiana and Pennsylvania — is taking a pass.

(My emphasis, because Duke sucks and Bill Clinton is a coward.)

After Obama wins the nomination, I hope hope hope he will do the “Tyler Hansbrough victory freakout stomp.”

America needs more unflappable motherfuckers who can take hits, keep their cool, drop fadeaway jumpers with .8 on the clock, and then go into buck-wild goofy dance mode.

First up: Jeffrey Goldberg.

If one of my mistakes was to trust men like August Hanning (German intelligence official who thought Saddam was three years away from an atomic bomb – ed.), another larger mistake was to put my trust in the Bush administration. . . . I will admit to a prejudice here: I believed — note the tense, please (Oh, just blow me, please – ed.) — that Republicans were by nature ruthless, unsentimental, efficient, and, most of all, preoccupied with winning. It simply never occurred to me that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would allow themselves to lose a war.

(My emphasis)

After all these years, my biggest question remains unanswered: Why did all these smart people think Bush would do anything other than fuck this up? Did they have access to secret files showing that Bush had actually run a successful baseball team, or business, or reconstruction of Afghanistan?

Oh well, at least we can look forward to years of hearing Jeffrey Goldberg eloquently express how disappointed he is.

Is he appearing at the next New Yorker Festival? I HOPE SO! I ALWAYS FEEL SO SMART WHEN I GO TO THOSE. (TIPPING POINT, REMEMBER?)

REFLECTIONS. . .

Photo credit: Fotosearch. AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE.

Slate.com has better reflections than the Times!

I’m switching to Slate.com’s reflections. Why? They’re just plain more reflective.

Slate is focusing on the reflections of liberal hawks (i.e. liberal arts majors who want to kill people: a.ka. New Yorker contributors who are embarrassed about their lack of upper-body development; a.ka. people who want to eat brie and talk about military valor; a.k.a. people who are self-conscious that they’ve never met anyone who signed up for the Army to pay for college; a.k.a. baby-boomers who realize they’re runnning out of time to wage a generation-defining battle against evil; a.k.a. balding men who want to be in a Ken Burns documentary about how great they are; a.k.a. people who want to google their name + “the next Orwell” and get 100,000 hits.)

GET READY FOR THE RE-UP!!!

(By the way: Price of the brick goin’ up.)

I may have found some better reflections! Just gotta check their quality. . . stay tuned. . .

In recognition of the five-year anniversary of the Iraq war, I am going to type the word “REFLECTIONS” in a large typeface:

REFLECTIONS.

What provides a truer reflection: A mirror, a calm pool of water, or a mirror that someone spilled water on?

Or a lake that’s filled with mirrors? (Like, if there was a barge that was transporting a pile of mirrors from one side of the lake to the other, and then it sunk/sank/got sunked?)

If you dove into that mirror-filled lake, what reflections would you see? Would you see your own face? Or would you see your ultimate fantsasy, reflected in your wildest dreams? What if your ultimate fantasy was to work in a mirror-supply warehouse located inside a reflecting pool?

REFLECTIONS. . .

(It doesn’t matter how many times I type it, I always laugh! WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?)

Is that even allowed?

Most politicians talk about religion from the perspective of having been raised in families that are somewhat more observant than they are as adults, so they are elevating religion from their childhood and their parents or grandparents. Others, like George W. Bush, found in religion a private salvation. Obama’s experience is unlike either one, and frankly unlike anyone’s I know: His work as an organizer led him to the church, the church was the heart of the community in which he was working, he became religious because of his commitment to social change. It was neither personal, nor familial, but part of his forming an identity, but not just as an individual, as a member of a community. And thus, race, his public life, and religion are intertwined in a way that they are not for most people, even people whose social values and work originates in their faith.

(Ed) Kilgore comments that this “won’t make a lot of sense to those Americans who view church membership as an expression of consumer choice, and ultimately, of the spiritual discrimination and good taste of the religious consumer.” Indeed, this was the viewpoint of my colleague this morning — if you don’t agree with what you hear in a church, go to another church. But Obama’s analogy to family answered that about as well as could be answered — the church wasn’t serving just a personal function for him, it was situating him in a community in which he had chosen to live and work — and work on behalf of.

(My emphasis.)

On the other hand: A BLACK MAN WAS YELLING!!! AND HE WAS WEARING ONE OF THOSE AFRICAN-CHURCH-TYPE ROBES!!!