However tentative, progress is being made on the oft-stalled Obama-Wright front. According to the NY Times' politics blog, The Caucus, "Voices around the blogosphere say they’re tired of the media kerfuffle surrounding" the issue; but more hopeful than that, I found, was that "they also say they’re sick of the expression 'thrown under the bus.'"
The bad news, on both counts, is that "they certainly keep writing about it," and, even worse, "they keep using" the expression.
Every political crisis seems to bring with it a phrase that won't die. I recall that during the untidy unpleasantness of President Clinton's impeachment, every network pundit, every bloody night, would either confirm or deny that the president's sins had "risen to the level" of Congressional correction. Once the phrase poked its banal nose under the tent, it moved in whole hog and soon became the only way that virtual armies of commentators were able to frame the debate. Only the U.S. Senate's vote of acquittal finally, mercifully put it to rest.
As for being "thrown under the bus," I don't recall its first application to the Obama-Wright "kerfuffle," but with astounding immediacy it stalked us with the same insidious persistence of last decade's dreadful verbal obsession. Its usage came early and in swarms: I do recall that.
Obama, to the delight of some and sorrow of others, had not thrown Wright under a bus in Philadelphia. Days of debate ensued as to whether he should have. Weeks later, Wright got off the bus and Obama promptly commenced heaving him under it, and no one was happier about that than all the network commentators, and not a few in print, who just as promptly redeployed the tired old phrase ad nauseam, ad infinitum, and with gleeful argumentum ad populum.
Its closest but rather pale competitor has been whether Obama would "roll up his sleeves" in executing the act of throwing Wright under the bus. It seems that's all that was required, all along. Obama simply needed to roll up said sleeves and do what a man needs to do. As long as he stood stubbornly unfurled, all was lost. He just didn't "get it": that no political or national progress is possible until one bares one's forearms.
Well, he did. And after weeks of telling Obama that this was the only way out, conservative voices are now taking him to task. Wrote one online scribbler from the right, via the Caucus: "Now that his campaign is getting hurt he throws his mentor under the bus as he did his grandma. What other way can you see it other then [sic] that?"
Let's see, other than that, one would first have to correct all that "mentor" business, and then conclude that Obama indeed rebuffed Wright, or dismissed him, or disowned him, or distanced himself from him -- but, for heaven's sake and the sake of our overtaxed ears and eyes, no hurling near public transportation was executed or witnessed. If that's as original as one's writing can be, there's legitimate question about the usefulness of the views behind it.
And then we have the lovable Michelle Malkin, who rather breathlessly if not cluelessly demanded: "Why the change in tone between now and yesterday?" She then answered herself: "It wasn’t the fact that Wright has been spewing this same recycled crap for years that finally got Obama mad. It was that he finally realized it was hurting his campaign. And he was personally miffed by Wright’s insults against him."
Uh, yeah? And? Your point being? It appears that it was Obama's job for 20 twenty long years to monitor the every utterance of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. and regularly cast public judgment and profound indignation on them. (John McCain has received a right-wing exemption with respect to his Rev. Hagee duties.) Having failed to do this, Obama was then to silently suffer "insults against him," which of course the right, and others, had labeled as a sure sign of his "pansiness" -- of a man who refuses to roll up his sleeves and throw Wright under the bus, as any real man would.
But so much for the conservative bloggers, as quoted by the Times' Caucus. Let us move on with haste to the too-hasty words of a "liberal" pen:
First is Obama’s statement that he guesses he didn’t know Wright as well as he thought he did. "The person that I saw yesterday was not the person that I had come to know over 20 years." That’s a big problem for someone running on judgment.
Secondly, yesterday Obama pointed to Wright’s off-message press tour as proof that the his [sic] campaign was not managing or coordinating with Wright, I suppose to distance himself from Wright prove to people [sic] that he is indeed Obama’s former pastor. What is [sic] does for me is call into question his fitness to run a general.
It seems to me there are problems, and there are big problems, and then even bigger problems in the course of someone's "running on judgment." And the reevaluation of one's pastor is not among them -- or, to put it more appropriately, should most decidedly not be.
May I suggest to this liberal gentleman, however, a truly authentic problem or two when it comes to making a good show of exercising sound judgment. One might be, say, voting for an unprovoked war; another might be the dishonest recall of peaceful battlefield conditions. Now those are more than mere problems; they are big, indeed downright mammoth ones.
When pondering the Obama-Wright flap, perhaps the reacquisition of a little perspective is in order.
I will give the apostate liberal some credit, though, for at least not accusing Barack Obama of having thrown Jeremiah Wright under the bus. But now that he has, could we please just roll up our sleeves on get on with some other earthshattering amusement?
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