From The NinthHouse.net:
It’s Okay To Like Dan Fogelberg

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while now. The holidays got in the way, but maybe that was for the best. It gave me time to really think about what I wanted to say.

And here it is.

It is okay to like Dan Fogelberg.

Go ahead. You can say it. Here, watch me:

I like Dan Fogelberg. Some of Dan Fogelberg’s music, I loved. And still do.

Dan Fogelberg died of prostate cancer on December 16th, 2007. He was 56. His most recent publicity photos show a good-looking guy, clean-shaven and smiling, the kind of guy who makes middle-aged moms blush and their daughters giggle.

Unfortunately, his reputation didn’t weather the years as well as he. For some folks of a certain age, Fogelberg’s name has become the go-to punch line for jokes about 1970s-era granola-munching, Chukka boot-wearing Sensitive Guys. Many critics loathed him. Rolling Stone’s review of 1979’s Phoenix is so contemptuous, you can damn near picture the author spitting on the album cover.

It’s less troublesome to dismiss Dan Fogelberg, as have most eulogists I’ve read, as that “1970’s soft rock singer-songwriter” who scored a few hits than it is to set aside that fashionable prejudice and honestly consider his work. Or, more telling, his work’s popularity.

The fact that so many people evidently aren’t willing to do that – and worse, are dismissing Fogelberg as little more than a footnote to 1970s and early 80s pop – is really getting under my skin.

Fogelberg wasn’t a footnote. From his first album release, 1972’s Home Free, through 1981’s double album The Innocent Age, Fogelberg was regarded as an artist on par with the best of his peers. With Joe Walsh, he was one of the first acts signed by Irving Azoff, who soon went on to manage The Eagles, and he was considered for the spot in that band’s lineup that ultimately went to Walsh.

Reading the liner notes of Dan Fogelberg’s essential discography is like reading a who’s who of mellow 1970’s album rock. He attracted the best session players in the business. The Innocent Age features guest vocals from Emmylou Harris, Joni Mitchell, Richie Furay, Don Henley, Glenn Frey and Chris Hillman. If you had any of them in your album collection, you invariably owned at least one Dan Fogelberg album. Probably Souvenirs.

I played Souvenirs and other Fogelberg albums on the air as a rock radio DJ. It wasn’t at all unusual back in the day to hear him played alongside The Eagles, Poco, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, CSNY, Jimmy Buffett, Boz Scaggs, Neil Young and dozens more 1970s album rock radio core artists. You wouldn’t hear “Longer,” but definitely “Part of the Plan,” “As the Raven Flies” and “There’s a Place in the World for a Gambler” from Souvenirs, maybe “Crow” from the underrated Captured Angel, definitely “The Power of Gold” from his Tim Weisberg collaboration Twin Sons of Different Mothers.

I liked to slide The Innocent Age out of its cover right around midnight. I was a college student in the early 80s, paying my way through school as the late-night jock on the town’s sole rock station, a pitiful low-wattage AM that nonetheless had a cult following. By midnight, I knew the hard partiers had already switched to the big regional FM; those who remained with me were studying or stoned, or both. That was my cue to take it way down: Robin Trower’s “Bridge of Sighs,” The Police’s “Walking on the Moon” next, “Hypnotized” from Fleetwood Mac after that, CSN’s “Dark Star” – you get the vibe. When I needed to stay mellow but bring in a little light, I’d inevitably reach for Dan.

The Innocent Age features Fogelberg’s biggest hits, “Same Old Lang Syne” and “Leader of the Band,” but one of my favorite tracks to play late at night was “Only the Heart May Know,” his tender duet with Emmylou Harris, sweet as a lullaby sent into the night. Not that I never played anything from Phoenix, “Longer” aside. When I did, it was usually my favorite track from that album, the final one, “Along the Road.” Sometimes I made that the final song I played before unplugging my headphones for the night, a final tired smile good-night wish for my peeps to sleep on.

“Along the Road” may be my favorite Dan Fogelberg song of all time. Definitely top three. Two. It’s pretty high up there.

*****

Of the ten albums Dan Fogelberg recorded and released between 1972 and 1985, two are RIAA-certified gold, three are platinum, four are double platinum and one is triple platinum. That’s 15 million units sold, most of them back when they were still called LPs and you had to actually make the trip to a record store to buy one.

Clearly, somebody other than me liked Dan Fogelberg.

Okay, so maybe you particularly didn’t like him. Maybe you agree with the chorus of critics who labeled his lyrics mawkish, overwrought, treacly and clichéd.

Well, yeah. A lot of his lyrics were. I don’t think an objective listener can deny it, no matter how great a fan they may be.

I’ve always thought Dan Fogelberg on balance was a far better melodist than lyricist. His best melodies from those first seven albums are gems of craftsmanship, made more impressive by the sheer number of just damned catchy, stick-in-your-brain songs he cranked out. “Part of the Plan” and “Crow” would sound right at home in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s oeuvre, and the hook to “Wishing on the Moon” from Phoenix is every bit as vital as, say, that of The Eagles’ “Already Gone.” Gritty up the lyrics a little, put Glenn Frey on lead with Dan singing the high harmony (Jesus, that voice) and it could be the B-side hit the Eagles never recorded.

But pair those melodies with Dan’s sentimental pen…

I can’t listen to the title track of 1977’s Nether Lands without the word “gushing” coming to mind. Dan’s standing on a mountaintop, beholding all that is below and before him, his heart and soul singing with the joy of the vista and the moment over a bed of woodwinds, strings and French horns, lush as the soundtrack to Sunrise over The Majestic Rockies, in Technicolor.

It’s just so damn over the top. Like Julie Andrews with a flannel shirt and a beard.

But here’s the thing. Not two years before I first heard “Nether Lands,” I’d been a raw-boned 16-year-old lad standing on the Mogollon Rim, southwest of Winslow, Arizona in the foothills of the Rockies. Sleeping under the stars, kneeling to drink from icy-cold Christopher Creek, standing on a pine-framed ridge to behold thousands of square miles of God’s magnificent Earth spread below and before me.

And so when the good Mr. Fogelberg’s high sweet tenor sang over those soaring, shameless orchestral glissandos, my heart sang with him. Because I had been there, and so knew that he had gotten it exactly and absolutely right.

And there it is. The key to Dan Fogelberg’s popularity, and the source of his most frequent criticisms.

Maybe if he’d thrown in some irony, a little cynicism to go with the poignancy. Maybe if he’d invoked whiskey and cigarettes when his woman done left him, rather than cottonwood trees in autumn. Maybe if he’d taken his hand off his heart and grabbed his crotch a bit more. Or at all.

But that wasn’t his thing. It’s clearly not where lived, or what he believed. Not enough to want to write about it, at any rate.

The Dan Fogelberg who wrote and recorded those wonderful albums is a sweet guy, a gentle soul who recognized the transience of life and so chose to celebrate its moments of sweetness, chose sentiment over cynicism or resentment, even in life’s most heartrending moments. After you were done cursing and getting drunk and assigning blame, Dan’s the guy you’d eventually want sitting across the table from you over coffee or a beer. He’d listen and nod and smile, and you’d know he understood. He’d put it all into perspective for you. He wouldn’t try to make you feel better, but you’d come away knowing you weren’t alone, and that would make you feel better. It made the ache more tolerable, and enabled you to look forward once more.

Short of sitting across that table, his music on the stereo and a good bottle of wine isn’t a bad substitute. Many times, when my heart and soul ached, for many reasons, it’s what helped me.

*****

I left Dan Fogelberg behind. I never developed a taste for his post-Innocent Age work, and my own pop and rock tastes changed as life changed me, carrying me on passing years from Dan and his peers to my current favorites. But I still carry a big torch for those days, and with the advent of iTunes, Rhapsody and the rest have found myself seeking out the music of my youth, reveling in sentimental fondness as I rediscover those songs, and the memories they awaken.

And so, I shouldn’t be surprised that I find myself sentimental over Dan Fogelberg’s death. And so irritated that it has gone so largely unremarked.

Maybe it’s because I’m older now, at that age when so many of those who composed and played the soundtrack to my youth are leaving us, making memories of that time more poignant. Maybe its that, because his music meant something to me, seeing his music dismissed makes me feel as if my youth and feelings are likewise being dismissed.

I imagine it’s all of that.

But also, I’m just plain pissed off at the critical pretentiousness that continues to dismiss him even in death, and the ease with which so many people mock him, for no other reason than that. Because it’s easy.

You don’t like his music? That’s fine. If you’ve given his best stuff a sincere listen and it’s not your cup of tea, then thanks for stopping by.

But if you haven’t? Listen to the clips I’ve included here. If you’re intrigued, spend a few bucks and download some tracks online. Or ask a friend, or maybe their Granola-munching parents, if they’ve got some Dan Fogelberg you can borrow.

But be warned. You’ve got to kick the furniture out of the way and invite Dan in, if you’re going to appreciate him at all. You’ve got to be willing to let him nail you right smack-dab in your squishy place.

And if you find you like him – well, of course it’s okay. It’s always been okay. You don’t need my permission, or anyone’s. With anything in life, it’s never about what others say. It’s always about what you feel.

A few days after his death, longtime friend Jackson Browne called Dan Fogelberg “an angel.” Writing about him now, listening to him now, having rediscovered him now after all these years, I don’t feel inclined to disagree.

Rest in peace, Dan. And thanks.

TNH

From the Los Angeles Times
Chess' pride and sorrow
In the end, Bobby Fischer's genius lost out to his madness.
By TIM RUTTEN

January 19, 2008

Bobby Fischer, who died a melancholy exile's death Friday at age 64, was that most perplexing of human characters -- a protean genius and a repellent man. He was to American chess what Ezra Pound was to American poetry.

Nearly four decades ago, in the summer of 1972, Fischer was something more -- a participant in what then seemed to be the ultimate contest between American individualism and Soviet collectivism. When he went to Reykjavik, Iceland, to play Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky for the world championship, the 29-year-old Fischer was everything an American hero was supposed to be: the son of a hardworking single mother, a self-made grandmaster who had taught himself the game from the instructions that came with a chess set purchased in the candy store downstairs from his Brooklyn apartment.

Spassky was a quintessential representative of the vast Soviet chess establishment, which included institutes devoted to the study of the game and that treated its successful players as national heroes. He arrived in Iceland as the reigning world champion, accompanied by physical therapists, chefs, a tennis partner and dozens of coaches and grandmasters to help him analyze Fischer's every move.

The notoriously eccentric Fischer -- whose antipathy toward the Soviets was storied -- skipped the opening ceremony and had to be coaxed back into playing at all by a phone call from Henry Kissinger, who appealed to his patriotism. Fischer lost the first two games, then went on to crush Spassky in a match that ushered in a new global enthusiasm for chess.

It was a high-water mark for both Fischer and the illusion that sports could somehow become a nonviolent venue into which the competition between the world's political systems could be channeled. Shortly afterward, Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and killed Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and that illusion was dead forever.

Fischer gave up his title without ever defending it. Most of his remaining years were given over to crank religiosity and paranoid bigotry. Despite the fact that his mother and, probably, his biological father were Jews, Fischer became a Holocaust denier and an ever more virulent anti-Semite. He lived for many years in a series of increasingly shabby Pasadena apartments and hotel rooms near his church's headquarters. In 1981, he was arrested there because he matched a bank robber's description and refused to give police his name.

In 1992, Fischer became a fugitive from U.S. justice when he violated the embargo against Serbia to play his only post-Reykjavik match -- a shabby rematch with the has-been Spassky. On the run, he made more viciously anti-Semitic and anti-American radio broadcasts, ended up under arrest in Japan and finally was granted citizenship and refuge back in Iceland, where he died.

In his great meditation on genius, Yeats wrote: The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work.

Putting aside the question of whether the mad ever really act of their own accord, let's assume for one moment that Fischer chose perfection of his work, and let us consider him accordingly.

The British grandmaster Raymond Keene said Friday that Fischer "was the pride and sorrow of chess. It's tragic that such a great man descended into madness and anti-Semitism." Yet even within that unquestionable greatness, there is a strange, sad solitude.

Most great chess players have an encyclopedic knowledge of their sport's historic matches. Over the years, several of the accomplished players who worked with Fischer expressed surprise that he had a precise memory only of the matches he'd played himself. His 1969 book is considered one of the true classics in the vast literature of chess. Its title? "My 60 Memorable Games."

Fischer's contributions to chess theory are original and numerous. Oddly, though, those remarkable innovations almost all involve openings. Though he was a player so consumed with winning that his disdain for even a strategic draw was legendary, only a single endgame bears Fischer's name.

Although his sixth game against Spassky in 1972 has been compared to a Mozart symphony, many analysts believe that his greatest game was in 1956, when the then-13-year-old prodigy defeated Donald Byrne, a leading U.S. chess player, with a breathtakingly audacious queen sacrifice.

Fischer would go on to sacrifice nearly everything that makes life -- however imperfect -- worth living: family, friends, faith, country, a decent regard for other people and, finally, reason itself. Idiosyncrasy became eccentricity, and eccentricity became ordinary madness. In the end, as the darkness gathered, there was no one left around him willing or able to strike a consoling light.

When you willfully set the board like that, the outcome seems preordained. The 20th century's great anti-heroic bard, Samuel Beckett, wrote Bobby Fischer's epitaph:

"There is no endgame between a man and his fate."

timothy.rutten@latimes.com

Chaos or Creative Destruction?
By Patrick J. Buchanan

Friday, January 18, 2008

With Mike Huckabee winning Iowa, John McCain winning New Hampshire and Mitt Romney winning Michigan, all in 12 days, pundits are saying the GOP is in chaos. That prognosis is premature.

Undoubtedly, with the nation in the fifth year of an unpopular war and the economy tanking along with President Bush's poll numbers, GOP prospects for holding the White House are poor.

But what is taking place in the Republican primaries is healthy. A new party is taking shape, or rather being hammered into shape. GOP leaders are being introduced, sometimes rudely, to the reality that the national party has lost touch both with the country and its own base. And the would-be future leaders are either listening, or they are losing.

Refusing to hide his Christian beliefs, Mike Huckabee put them on public display in Iowa. After a second-place finish in the August straw poll, thanks to evangelical support, he rose steadily until he routed all four front-runners to win the caucuses on Jan. 3. Fred Thompson, a state's rights man on right-to-life, and Rudy, who is pro-choice, are almost out of the running. Traditional values are still a trump card in the GOP

Before the race began, Giuliani was a sanctuary city mayor, McCain an amnesty man and Huckabee favored letting illegal aliens compete for state scholarships. Now, after being battered at a thousand town meetings and on a thousand talk shows, all of them sound like Tom Tancredo.

A year ago, the GOP was a free-trade NAFTA-GATT party, no one more so than McCain. After his New Hampshire win, straight-talking John went to depressed Michigan and told Michiganders their jobs in the auto industry were not coming back. And Michigan Republicans told straight-talking John to get lost and not come back.

In the early debates, Ron Paul was booed for calling the Iraq war a blunder and saying the terrorists of 9-11 were over here because we were over there. Rudy got a roaring ovation for denouncing him. The Michigan GOP chairman demanded that Paul be excluded from all future debates. But whenever Fox News ran a post-debate poll, Paul came out on top. And in Michigan, he paid back the GOP chair by thumping Fred Thompson and America's mayor.

What is taking place inside the GOP is not decay, but creative destruction.

As in the Goldwater era, voices are being raised to tell an arrogant (Huckabee had the right word) establishment its policies are no longer producing and that if the party does not reconnect with the country, it is headed for the dumpster.

After his defeat in 1960, Richard Nixon, observing Barry Goldwater's rise and the energy his campaign generated, realized the center of gravity in the party had shifted away from the establishment he had courted with his Pact of Fifth Avenue with Nelson Rockefeller. The center of gravity had moved South and West, and sharply to the right.

No ideologue, Nixon moved with it.

To win the 1968 nomination, he ignored the establishment and courted Goldwater, Strom Thurmond and the conservatives. After his victory in 1968, Nixon created a new center-right coalition that would win four of the next five presidential elections, two with 49-state, 60 percent landslides.

It is not Reaganism that is being repudiated in the GOP primaries, it is Bushism and its fruits: an unpopular war, a deindustrialized nation, a Third World invasion. Ronald Reagan's principles and philosophy remain the bedrock upon which any conservative and Republican majority must be built. But the policies of that era, on immigration, trade and jobs, must change. And as the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union are history, U.S. strategic interests are no longer at risk in every quarrel or on every continent, as in the 1980s. As our situation is new, said Abraham Lincoln, let us think and act anew.

Nor was Reagan an inflexible ideologue. Though a free-trader, he did not hesitate to put free-trade absolutism on the shelf if national interests commanded it. Thus he imposed quotas to halt the dumping of steel, autos, computer chips and motorbikes into the United States. Saving Harley-Davidson meant more to the Gipper than fealty to Manchester School economists, none of whom had ever built or run a great nation.

For Republicans, issues that yet unite the coalition and remain majority views nationally are family values, low taxes, conservative judges and Second Amendment rights.

But to win the election, the GOP has to be competitive in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania. It will thus have to come up with credible ideas not only to secure the border and roll back the invasion from the Third World, but to stop the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs and reindustrialize the country, and to extricate us from Iraq, as Ike got us out of Korea and Nixon pledged to end the war in Vietnam.

What the voters are saying to both parties is that yesterday's men and yesterday's ideas will no longer do.

Pat Buchanan is a founding editor of The American Conservative magazine, and the author of many books including State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America .

From Chronicles.org:
Political Preachers
by Clyde N. Wilson

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” —Matthew 7:15

We like to think that our gallant little independent-minded State of South Carolina always has more influence than our size allows. That certainly seems to be true in the present presidential primary season. If you believe their advertisements, we have converted every single one of the Republican “front-runners” into intrepid Horatios at the Bridge, defending our borders against the onslaught of illegal aliens. Indeed, they are boasting mightily as to who is the staunchest “conservative.” Huckabee from the rotten borough of Arkansas has even become so excited by the scent of the slops in the presidential trough that he has sent out minions to claim that, unlike his opponents, he is proud to respect our oppressed Southern flag. (Of course, he is making sure that he has personal deniability on the question and will not have to blatantly lie in the future as McCain did the last time around.)

The flourishing of the Reverend Mr. Huckabee marks the reductio ad absurdum of the latest American manifestation of religion in politics. Remember how this started. Back during the moral breakdown of the 1960s, it seemed to be a good idea to get the churches involved and get some moral input into the political process. That has been a total unmitigated failure—unless you consider bringing power and pelf to a few “religious leaders” to be a sign of success.

It was child’s play for the politicians to bribe and flatter the “leaders” into delivering the votes in exchange for a few bromides about “family values” and “right to life.” The role of Protestant minister, in the less structured denominations, is accompanied by a great deal of temptation for the ego (which perhaps effects Catholics only further up the hierarchy). Their status being somewhat infra dig and, like most Americans, lusting most of all for “respectability,” the “evangelical” and “fundamentalist” leaders were easily seduced by a few nods from Power.

This is an old, old story in American history. It was the fanatical Puritan preachers of New England who created Jefferson’s distaste for clergy in politics. (Any way, Jefferson’s “wall of separation” was meant more to protect the faith from the contamination of politicians than to exclude the faith from the public sphere.) A fundamental cause of the War between the States was Northern preachers screaming hatred and violence against their Southern fellow citizens. (Look into the career of the Rev. Mr. Henry Ward Beecher, a sort of Anglo-Saxon Martin Luther King, Jr., whose moral crusade against slavery was marked by egomania, lying, and sexual predation.)

Such ecclesiastical politicians for decades after the War kept up the Republican demagoguery of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” They glorified World War I as a noble crusade and foisted on the country the corruption of Prohibition, in defiance of all common sense and State’s rights. So corrupted by politics were the 1960s representatives of the faith that we endured such abominations as “freedom-riding” nuns and the murder of the unborn reduced to a “civil rights” issue. In our own time, the political preachers have served only to lend a facade of piety and morality to a ruling elite without any sense of right and wrong but only manipulative techniques and a self-serving agenda. They bear a disproportionate share of guilt as enablers of the malignant regime of Bush.

From The Washington Post:
Black Dreams, White Liberals
By Charles Krauthammer

Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... It took a president to get it done. -- Hillary Clinton, Jan. 7

WASHINGTON -- So she said. And then a fight broke out. That remarkable eruption of racial sensitivities and racial charges lacked coherence, however, because the public argument was about history rather than what was truly offensive -- the implied analogy to today.

The principal objection was that Clinton appeared to be disrespecting Martin Luther King Jr., relegating him to mere enabler for Lyndon Johnson. But it is certainly true that Johnson was the great emancipator, second only to Abraham Lincoln in that respect. This was a function of the times. King was fighting for black enfranchisement. Until that could be achieved, civil rights legislation could only be enacted by a white president (and a white Congress).

That does not denigrate King. It makes his achievement all the more miraculous -- winning a permanent stake in the system for a previously disenfranchised people, having begun with no political cards to play.

In my view, the real problem with Clinton's statement was the implied historical analogy -- that the subordinate position King held in relation to Johnson, a function of the discrimination and disenfranchisement of the time, somehow needs recapitulation today when none of those conditions apply.

The analogy Clinton was implying was obvious: I'm Lyndon Johnson, unlovely doer; he's Martin Luther King, charismatic dreamer. Vote for me if you want results.

Forty years ago, that arrangement -- white president enacting African-American dreams -- was necessary because discrimination denied blacks their own autonomous political options. Today, that arrangement -- white liberals acting as tribune for blacks in return for their political loyalty -- is a demeaning anachronism. That's what the fury at Hillary was all about, although no one was willing to say so explicitly.

The King-Johnson analogy is dead because the times are radically different. Today an African-American can be in a position to wield the emancipation pen -- and everything else that goes along with the presidency: from making foreign policy to renting out the Lincoln Bedroom (if one is so inclined). Why should African-American dreams still have to go through white liberals?

Clinton is no doubt shocked that a simple argument about experience versus inspiration becomes the basis for a charge of racial insensitivity. She is surprised that the very use of "fairy tale" in reference to Obama's position on Iraq is taken as a sign of insensitivity, or that any reference to his self-confessed teenage drug use is immediately given racial overtones.

But where, I ask you, do such studied and/or sincere expressions of racial offense come from? From a decades-long campaign of enforced political correctness by an alliance of white liberals and the black civil rights establishment intended to delegitimize and marginalize as racist any criticism of their post-civil rights-era agenda.

Anyone who has ever made a principled argument against affirmative action only to be accused of racism knows exactly how these tactics work. Or anyone who has merely opposed a more recent agenda item -- hate crimes legislation -- on the grounds that murder is murder and that the laws against it are both venerable and severe. Remember that scurrilous pre-election ad run by the NAACP in 2000 implying that George Bush was indifferent to a dragging death of a black man at the hands of white racists in Texas because he did not support hate crime legislation?

The nation has become inured to the playing of the race card, but "our first black president" (Toni Morrison on Bill Clinton) and his consort are not used to having it played against them.

Bill is annoyed with Obama. As Bill inadvertently let on to Charlie Rose, it has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with entitlement. He had contemplated running in 1988, he confided to Charlie, but decided to wait. Too young, not ready. (A tall tale, highly Clintonian; but that's another matter.) Now it is Hillary's turn. The presidency is her due -- the ultimate in alimony -- and this young upstart refuses to give way.

But telling Obama to wait his turn is a tricky proposition. It sounds patronizing and condescending, awakening the kinds of racial grievances white liberals have spent half a century fanning -- only to find themselves now singed in the blowback, much to their public chagrin.

Who says there's no justice in this world?

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

From The Wall Street Journal:
The Perils of Identity Politics
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

January 18, 2008

Let us give hearty thanks and credit to Rudy Giuliani, who has never by word or gesture implied that we would fracture any kind of "ceiling" if we elected as chief executive a man whose surname ends in a vowel.

Yet actually, it would be unprecedented if someone of Italian descent became the president of the United States and there was a time -- not long ago at that -- when the very idea would have aroused considerable passion. Now that it doesn't, is it not possible to think that that very indifference is the real "change"?

I recall thinking, when Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman on a major-party ticket in 1984, that she would also, if elected, be the first vowel-ending Veep. Indeed, in San Francisco for the Democratic convention that year, I listened to the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti muse over drinks on the possibility of a future Cuomo-Ferraro "all wop" ticket.

The fact that these were now joking words and not fighting words struck me as happily suggestive. (I also thought that a President Walter Mondale would be a very high price to pay for having the first female vice president, and that President Mario Cuomo would be an even higher price to pay to prove that we no longer held any rooted prejudice against the descendants of Mediterranean immigrants.)

People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of "race" or "gender" alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason. Yet see how this obvious question makes fairly intelligent people say the most alarmingly stupid things.

Madeleine Albright has said that there is "a special place in hell for women who don't help each other." What are the implications of this statement? Would it be an argument in favor of the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton? Would this mean that Elizabeth Edwards and Michelle Obama don't deserve the help of fellow females? If the Republicans nominated a woman would Ms. Albright instantly switch parties out of sheer sisterhood? Of course not. (And this wearisome tripe from someone who was once our secretary of state . . .)

Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think "first woman president." We think -- for example -- "first ex-co-president" or "first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent" or "first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband's perjury rap."

One might come up with other and kinder distinctions (I shall not be doing so) but the plain fact about the senator from New York is surely that she is a known quantity who has already been in the White House purely as the result of a relationship with a man, and not at all a quixotic outsider who represents the aspirations of an "out" group, let alone a whole sex or gender.

Mrs. Clinton, speaking to a black church audience on Martin Luther King Day last year, did describe President George W. Bush as treating the Congress of the United States like "a plantation," adding in a significant tone of voice that "you know what I mean . . ."

She did not repeat this trope, for some reason, when addressing the electors of Iowa or New Hampshire. She's willing to ring the other bell, though, if it suits her. But when an actual African-American challenger comes along, she rather tends to pout and wince at his presumption (or did until recently).

Here again, the problem is that Sen. Obama wants us to transcend something at the same time he implicitly asks us to give that same something as a reason to vote for him. I must say that the lyricism with which he does this has double and triple the charm of Mrs. Clinton's heavily-scripted trudge through the landscape, but the irony is still the same.

What are we trying to "get over" here? We are trying to get over the hideous legacy of slavery and segregation. But Mr. Obama is not a part of this legacy. His father was a citizen of Kenya, an independent African country, and his mother was a "white" American. He is as distant from the real "plantation" as I am. How -- unless one thinks obsessively about color while affecting not to do so -- does this make him "black"?

Far from taking us forward, this sort of discussion actually keeps us anchored in the past. The enormous advances in genome studies have effectively discredited the whole idea of "race" as a means of categorizing humans. And however ethnicity may be defined or subdivided, it is utterly unscientific and retrograde to confuse it with color. The number of subjective definitions of "racist" is almost infinite but the only objective definition of the word is "one who believes that there are human races."

For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my "race," unless I was permitted to put "human." The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put "white," which is not even a color let alone a "race," and I sternly declined to put "Caucasian," which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you "black."

I remember going to several of the mass events generated by Colin Powell's memoirs a few years ago, and being very touched by the eagerness with which young and old "white" people hoped he would give them the chance to elect (what would in fact have been) our first West Indian president. It was all book-tour hype as it turned out -- I could have told you that then -- but now it has resurfaced in a similarly naïve way.

Not to dampen any parade, but if one asks if there is a single thing about Mr. Obama's Senate record, or state legislature record, or current program, that could possibly justify his claim to the presidency one gets . . . what? Not much. Similarly lightweight unqualified "white" candidates have overcome this objection, to be sure, but what kind of standard is that?

I shall not vote for Sen. Obama and it will not be because he -- like me and like all of us -- carries African genes. And I shall not be voting for Mrs. Clinton, who has the gall to inform me after a career of overweening entitlement that there is "a double standard" at work for women in politics; and I assure you now that this decision of mine has only to do with the content of her character. We will know that we have put this behind us when -- as with the vowel -- we have outgrown and forgotten the original prejudice.

Mr. Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of "No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton" (Verso, 2000).

Milos Vukadinovic/Associated Press
Bobby Fischer during a game in Sveti Stefan, Yugoslavia, in 1992.

From The New York Times: An amazing player. The book "Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess" remains one of the best works to teach someone how to think like a chess player.
Bobby Fischer, Chess Master, Dies at 64
By BRUCE WEBER

Bobby Fischer, the iconoclastic genius who was one of the greatest chess players the world has ever seen, has died, The Associated Press reported Friday.

He died on Thursday in a hospital in Reykjavík, Iceland, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson, said. He was 64. No cause of death was given.

Mr. Fischer, the most powerful American player in history, had moved to Iceland in 2005. He had emerged briefly in 1992 from a mysterious seclusion that had lasted two decades and defied an American ban on conducting business in wartorn Yugoslavia to play a $5 million match against his old nemesis, the Russian-born grandmaster Boris Spassky.

After he won handily, he dropped out of sight again, living alone, and avoiding arrest on United States charges over his appearance in the former Yugoslavia, and staying in touch with his few friends in the United States by telephone, compelling them to keep his secrets or risk his rejection.

He lived in Budapest -- and possibly the Philippines and Switzerland -- and emerged now and then on radio stations in Iceland, Hungary and the Philippines to rant in increasingly belligerent terms against the United States and against Jews.

Mr. Fischer’s 1992 victory against Mr. Spassky was a sad reprise of his most glorious triumph. It was in summer 1972, in a match played in Reykjavik, that Mr. Fischer wrested the world championship from Mr. Spassky, becoming the first — and as yet only — American to win the title, which Russian-born players had held for more than four decades.

Mr. Fischer won with such brilliance and dramatic flair that he became an icon, an unassailable representative of greatness in the world of competitive games, much as Babe Ruth had been and Michael Jordan would become.

”It was Bobby Fischer who had, single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as esthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity,” wrote Harold C. Schonberg, who reported on the Reykjavik match for The New York Times, in his 1973 book, “Grandmasters of Chess.”

In July 2004, he was seized by the Japanese authorities when he tried to board a plane from Japan to Manila and was accused of trying to leave the country on an invalid passport. He was detained in prison for nine months while the various governments, as well as a staunch group of supporters in the chess world, tried to resolve the issue.

In 1999, in a series of telephone interviews he gave to a radio station in the Philippines, he rambled angrily and profanely about an international Jewish conspiracy, which he said was bent on destroying him personally and the world generally.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio talk-show host in Baguio, the Philippines, that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were ”wonderful news,” adding he was wishing for a scenario “where the country will be taken over by the military, they’ll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews and secure hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.”

The world championship match against the elegant Spassky was an unforgettable spectacle, the cold war fought with chess pieces in an out-of-the-way place. Mr. Fischer’s characteristic petulance, loutishness and sense of outrage were the stuff of front page headlines all over the globe. Incensed by the conditions under which the match was to be played — he was particularly offended by the whirr of television cameras in the hall — he lost the first game, then forfeited the second and insisted the remaining games be played in an isolated room the size of a janitor’s closet. There, he roared back from what, in chess, is a sizable deficit, trouncing Mr. Spassky, 12 ½to 8 ½. (In championship chess, a victory is worth one point, a draw a half-point for each player.) In all, Mr. Fischer won 7 games, lost 3 (including the forfeit) and drew 11.

Through July and most of August, the attention of the world was riveted on the Spassky-Fischer match. Americans who didn’t know a Ruy Lopez from a Poisoned Pawn watched a hitherto unknown commentator named Shelby Lyman explain each game on public television. All this was Mr. Fischer’s doing. Bobby Fischer the rebel, the enfant-terrible, the tantrum-thrower, the uncompromising savage of the chess board, had captured the imagination of the world. Because of him, for the first time in the United States the game, with all its arcana and intimations of nerdiness, was cool. And when it was over, he walked away with a winner’s purse of $250,000, a sum that staggered anyone ever associated with chess. When Mr. Spassky won the world championship, his prize was $1,400.

Mr. Fischer’s victory was widely seen as a symbolic triumph for Democracy over Communism, and it turned the new champion into an unlikely American hero. He was invited to the White House by President Richard M. Nixon, interviewed on television, hounded by journalists, wooed unsuccessfully by commercial interests. Sales of chess sets skyrocketed; so did fees for chess lessons, as scores of poverty-stricken chess players benefited from the cachet that Mr. Fischer had conferred on them.

“That’s really how chess teaching began,” recalled Bruce Pandolfini, whose career as a teacher and writer was launched after he appeared with Mr. Lyman on public television. “Chess teachers didn’t really exist before 1972, not in any real numbers, but people started calling in to PBS, and they gave me a list of names, about 300 people. I charged $15 an hour and I encouraged others to do the same. I went from shelving books at the Strand bookstore to being a well-paid chess teacher.”

But Mr. Fischer was incapable of sustaining himself in the limelight, and by the beginning of 1973, he had withdrawn into the weird, contrarian solitude he more or less maintained for the remainder of his life. Over the years, he turned down huge financial offers to play, among them a bid of $1.4 million from the Hilton Corporation to defend his title in Las Vegas and even larger sums from dictators like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and the Shah of Iran to compete in their countries. He said the money wasn’t enough.

At the same time, he tithed the Worldwide Church of God, a fringe church he had become involved with beginning in the early 1960’s. The church, now defunct, followed Hebrew dietary laws and Sabbath proscriptions and believed in the imminent return of Jesus Christ. For a time, Mr. Fischer lived in Pasadena, Calif., the church’s home base, or nearby Los Angeles, where he was said to spend his time replaying chess games and reading Nazi literature. There were reports that he was destitute, though the state of Mr. Fischer’s finances was never very clear.

In chess circles, rumors surfaced intermittently that he was playing, that he was training, that he was about to make a comeback. He invented a new kind of chess clock, which automatically rewarded players for moving quickly toward the end of the game, restoring time each time a move is made. He began railing to other chess players that computers, with their ability to analyze deeply into a position, had ruined the mystery of chess, making it knowable. He advocated a variation on the game in which the pieces on the back rank, at the start, are lined up randomly rather than in their prescribed formation. But he did not emerge publicly until 1992, when he accepted the offer to play against Mr. Spassky again on an island in the Adriatic.

A man of narrow interests but great intellectual gifts — he reportedly had an I.Q. of 181 — Mr. Fischer was a hugely demanding personality (some said charismatic, some merely infuriating) who felt his prowess as a chess player entitled him to exorbitant privilege. For much of his life, he fought imperiously on behalf of that entitlement, demanding uncompromising loyalty from his supporters, concessions from his opponents, special treatment from tournament organizers and unalloyed respect from the world at large. It was an outlook that became ever more skewed as his life went on. In the end his self-involvement was his undoing, isolating him from all but the most obsequious chess-world worshipers.

Robert James Fischer was born in Chicago on March 9, 1943. His father, a German-born physicist named Gerard, Gerhard or Gerhardt Fischer — his name appears variously spelled — and his mother, the former Regina Wender, divorced when Bobby was 2. Shortly thereafter, the elder Fischer left the United States and his family for good, and Bobby and his older sister, Joan, were reared by their mother, a Swiss-born registered nurse and schoolteacher.

Regina Fischer moved her young family first to California and then to Arizona before settling in a Brooklyn walkup, where Bobby grew up. The strong-willed Mrs. Fischer, who would later study medicine and become a political activist on behalf of pacifist causes both in the United States and Europe, had an uneven influence on her willful son.

When he was a teenager, she tried to dissuade him from concentrating solely on chess. “She keeps in my hair and I don’t like people in my hair, so I had to get rid of her,” Mr. Fischer once told a reporter. But she also helped raise money for her son to compete in international tournaments and even picketed the White House in an appeal for aid to the American delegation at the 1960 Chess Olympics. Still, after the Spassky championship match, when her son spoke of his admiration for Mr. Nixon, she campaigned vigorously for Senator George S. McGovern, Mr. Nixon’s opponent in the 1972 Presidential election.

Mrs. Fischer was Jewish; her son developed a hatred against Jews that became more virulent as he grew older. Nonetheless, mother and son evidently kept in touch over the years, and when she died in 1997, Mr. Fischer was said to have been distraught. His sister died soon afterward, and acquaintances of Mr. Fischer speculated that the two losses further taxed his fragile hold on rationality. Having never married or had children, Bobby Fischer leaves no immediate survivors.

It was his sister Joan who bought Bobby, then age 6, his first chess set, and taught him the basic moves. By the age of 8 he was taking lessons at the Brooklyn Chess Club and by age 12 he was holding his own among America’s strongest players, who gathered at the Manhattan Chess Club and the Marshall Chess Club. His adult opponents called him “the Boy Robot” and, for his unwavering wardrobe and insatiable will to win, “the Corduroy Killer.”

Graham Bowley contributed reporting

From Performing Songwriter magazine: One of the very best tributes
to Fogelberg-honest and moving.

by Lydia Hutchinson

Dan Fogelberg is dead. There, I said it. But it still doesn’t make it seem real.

I shouldn’t be writing a sentence like that until I’m way past eligibility for my senior citizen’s discount. That would put Dan in that “handsome older man who’d lived a great life” category, like Cary Grant. Grant was 82 when he died. He wasn’t 56. That’s just too young, too close to home.

And cancer? How can we still be losing so many people to this insidious disease? Dan wasn’t a rocker who died in a plane crash mid-tour. He didn’t OD like so many of our dispirited and hopeless heroes. That would have been tragic. But cancer just makes me mad. And it makes me scared. It happens too often to too many who are too young. It’s cruel and lingering. It’s served a body blow to just about everyone we know as we either stare it down ourselves, or helplessly watch as those we love lace up their gloves and step into the ring for the fight of their lives. Not cancer. Not again.

I wasn’t a friend of Dan Fogelberg’s. I wasn’t even what you’d call an industry acquaintance. I was a fan. It was that simple, and it was that pure. I loved him. He was a part of my life for over 25 years. He made me want to fall in love when I was in high school. I (and my understanding roommate) lived with his poster on the dorm wall and photo on my desk throughout college. He was the first and only concert I ever camped out to get tickets for, lined up outside the student union on campus with a blanket, deck of cards and hundreds of strangers with whom I shared something in common. Dan put fear in my mother’s heart when I was in my 20s as she had to endure any boy I brought home who resembled him—which basically meant they sported long hair, a beard and a propensity for getting high. After I left home Dan provided a touchstone that my friends and I could reconnect over as the years passed, recalling his songs and all the memories that came with them.

I’ve always said that I only started this magazine because I was trying to figure out a way to meet Dan Fogelberg. It was meant to be a funny comment and usually gets a laugh, but it’s not entirely untrue. Dan was one of the people who made me love music. He made me want to learn to play guitar. And just like any fan, I needed to tell him that. I was a stranger to him. But he wasn’t one to me.

I did get to meet him. And I don’t mean the time my high-school friend and I drove to the airport to meet his plane (I glimpsed him walking by). Or the time I stalked him through the Baton Rouge Hilton in 1981 when he was on tour, and I stood there staring while my friend walked up and got his autograph for me. I still have it, on a torn corner of yellow legal-pad paper with a thumbtack hole in it. It’s another little scrap of my life.

The time I actually met him, though, was in 1999 backstage at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre. I’d interviewed him by phone a few years earlier, and he’d indulgently signed the cover of the issue “To Lydia (with all my love), Dan” after reading my editor’s letter, which detailed how I’d signed the framed photo of him in college with those words. So there I was, face to face with my idol, and he lived up to all of my dreams in the two minutes I spent trying to form sentences without verbs. He asked me how I liked living in Colorado and how my dogs were, which he said he knew about because he still read my editor’s letters. He said hi to my friend who also stood there speechless, and then put his arm around me so we could have our picture taken. When I look at that picture now I’m so happy for the girl whose face looks like it’s about to explode from smiling.

As a fan, it’s hard to explain this very real grief over someone we had a one-sided relationship with. But I think it goes deeper. It’s almost like we’re grieving the loss of a certain time in our lives the person represented. The time when things were so much more innocent or easy or hopeful. When every day felt like summer and your options were wide open. When you could lie in your room and stare at a poster or a record cover while the phonograph needle rode up and down across the vinyl. Those were the things that were real and we could touch. And our musical idols gave it a place and time, and the ability to recall it with a few notes or a lyric or the sound of their voice. And it’s just so powerfully sad when the person tied to it leaves us.

My friend Julie Gold was the person who told me about Dan, 12 hours after he left the earth. I’m glad it was her, because I knew she understood exactly what it felt like. I still see the grief on her face whenever Laura Nyro’s name is mentioned. Or John Lennon’s. It’s that overwhelming sense of loss that all of us have felt when one of our idols dies, and we know we have to face letting go of some of our past.

I realize now that writing this was more of an indulgence than a tribute. But it’s the only thing I could pull out, and it felt the most real. Dan’s songs tell the rest of the story and have their own connections with each of you. They certainly don’t need my help or explanation to accomplish that. The miracle of music is that those songs end up connecting all of us. And that’s just cool and real and timeless.

The last thing Dan said to me during my interview with him was this: “I don’t think anyone should forget the magic involved with writing a song. One day there’s nothing, and the next day there’s something there. And it may change the world for all you know.

Obama's Church
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted Tuesday, January 15, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election 2008: Since we first drew attention to Barack Obama's Afrocentric church a full 12 months ago, other media have weighed in. And additional disturbing information has come to light.

At the core of the Democratic front-runner's faith — whether lapsed Muslim, new Christian or some mixture of the two — is African nativism, which raises political issues of its own.

The Rev. Wright in the pulpit at Trinity:
'True to the mother continent.'

In 1991, when Obama joined the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, he pledged allegiance to something called the Black Value System, which is a code of non-Biblical ethics written by blacks, for blacks.

It encourages blacks to group together and separate from the larger American society by pooling their money, patronizing black-only businesses and backing black leaders. Such racial separatism is strangely at odds with the media's portrayal of Obama as a uniter who reaches across races.

The code also warns blacks to avoid the white "entrapment of black middle-classness," suggesting that settling for that kind of "competitive" success will rob blacks of their African identity and keep them "captive" to white culture.

In short, Obama's "unashamedly black" church preaches the politics of black nationalism. And its dashiki-wearing preacher — who married Obama and his wife and now acts as his personal spiritual adviser — is militantly Afrocentric. "We are an African people," the Rev. Jeremiah Wright reminds his flock, "and remain true to our native land, the mother continent."

Wright once traveled to Libya with black supremacist Louis Farrakhan to meet with terrorist leader Muammar Qaddafi. Last year at a Chicago gala, Wright honored his old pal Farrakhan, who's fond of calling whites "blue-eyed devils," for lifetime achievement.

It comes as little surprise then that Wright would think Israel a "racist" occupier of Palestinians, while describing the 9/11 attacks as a "wake-up call" to "white America" for ignoring the concerns of "people of color."

Wright makes the Rev. Jesse Jackson look almost moderate and patriotic. Yet this is whom Obama picked to baptize his daughters, plus to act as his "sounding board" during his presidential run.

The candidate already has heeded his church's "nonnegotiable commitment to Africa," spending an inordinate amount of his campaign time on the Kenyan crisis, for one. Obama has close family ties to Kenya, and even founded a school in his ancestral village — the Senator Obama School.

In the bloody conflict there, which already has claimed some 700 lives, Obama appears to have sided with opposition leader Raila Odinga, head of the same Luo tribe to which Obama's late Muslim father belonged.

Obama's older brother still lives there. Abongo "Roy" Obama is a Luo activist and a militant Muslim who argues that the black man must "liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture." He urges his younger brother to embrace his African heritage.

Beyond family politics, these ties have potential foreign policy, even national security, implications.

Odinga is a Marxist who reportedly has made a pact with a hard-line Islamic group in Kenya to establish Shariah courts throughout the country. He has also vowed to ban booze and pork and impose Muslim dress codes on women — moves favored by Obama's brother.

With al-Qaida strengthening its beachheads in Africa — from Algeria to Sudan to Somalia — the last thing the West needs is for pro-Western Kenya to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists.

Yet Obama interrupted his New Hampshire campaigning to speak by phone with Odinga, who claims to be his cousin. He did not speak with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki.

Would Obama put African tribal or family interests ahead of U.S. interests?

It's a valid question, and one voters deserve to have debated regardless of the racial and religious sensitivities. Thanks to a media blackout of these issues, the electorate has yet to benefit from a thorough vetting of Obama.

We have to wonder how much of the national agenda Africa would consume under an Obama administration. Of the six "world threats" Obama lists in stump speeches, at least half of them concern that chronically troubled Third World continent.

Yes, some of his African priorities are noble, such as fighting AIDS and genocide. But how much U.S. aid, resources and presidential time would he devote to them? How much is enough? If Bill Clinton was America's "first black president," would Barack Hussein Obama be our first president for Africa?

Then there is the issue of his Muslim past. Obama, 47, was raised by two Muslim fathers and attended Islamic classes in Indonesia.

He denies being Muslim, however, and says he "embraced Christ" while answering the altar call 20 years ago at Trinity. (Contrary to anonymous e-mail rumors circulating, Obama never took the oath of office on the Quran. He used a Bible, and Vice President Dick Cheney swore him in during his Senate ceremony.)

This merely raises another concern, beyond that of the controversial church he chose to baptize him. If Obama were ever Muslim, even as a youth, he would now be viewed as an apostate, which in radical Islam is punishable by death. As Mideast expert Daniel Pipes has noted, a President Obama could be the target of a fatwah.

Still, his Muslim heritage is not the signal issue before the electorate. It's his Afrocentric church, which preaches black socialism and black nativism, and his family ties to an African tribe that's fanning the flames of Marxism and militant Islam in a country once considered strongly democratic and a friend of the U.S.

"I believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change," Obama has asserted. He also says his faith has led him to question "the idolatry of the free market."

If a President Obama's foreign and domestic policies are anything like the Afrocentric doctrine he's pledged to uphold, Americans will pay a hefty price, including those among the growing black middle class.

From The Wall Street Journal:
Hillary and MLK
By JOHN MCWHORTER

January 16, 2008

There are many people in our great land aggrieved over the idea that Hillary Clinton thinks Martin Luther King Jr. was not the hero of the civil rights movement.

This idea seems so illogical that the only way to understand it is to approach it as a puzzle. After all, why would a white person running for president in 2008 dismiss the legacy of King near his birthday, which is celebrated as a national holiday, and right before a primary in a state with a large black vote?

To do such a thing would suggest inability to tie one's shoes. Let's imagine that in private Sen. Clinton thought little of King, which is vastly unlikely for someone of her background. Still, the puzzle remains: Why would she, an intelligent person, say it in public?

Yet there she was on "Meet the Press" Sunday, having to defend herself for simply saying that while King laid the groundwork (which she acknowledged), another part of the civil rights revolution was Lyndon B. Johnson's masterful stewardship of the relevant legislation through Congress. She was arguing that she is more experienced in getting laws passed in Washington than is Barack Obama -- which is true.

Why do people like op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn and countless black bloggers hear a grievous insult in her simple observation? The outcry is so disproportionate to the stimulus that one can barely help suspecting something outright irregular.

I think of a study published last year in the Journal of Black Psychology. It documented that the extent to which black Americans perceive their lives to be affected by racism correlates with symptoms of general paranoia disconnected from racial issues.

To be able to hold in one's mind the notion that Mrs. Clinton would attack King suggests a bone-deep hypersensitivity that overrides sequential reasoning. "We have to be very, very careful how we speak about that era," Rep. Clyburn explains.

But why so very, very careful? What effect does it have on anyone's life if that era is occasionally discussed in less than perfectly genuflective phraseology? Is the Klan waiting behind a hill? Will a black man working at an insurance company in Cleveland have a breakdown because someone didn't give King precisely enough credit in a quick statement?

There is a willful frailty, a lack of self-confidence, in this kind of thinking. It suggests someone almost searching for things to claim injury about, donning the mantle of the noble victim in order to assuage a bruised ego.

Of course, there is a less depressing interpretation of the current uproar: Mrs. Clinton's critics are playing political hardball. You know, let's get blacks to vote for Mr. Obama by playing the race card to pretend Mrs. Clinton is dumping on King. John Edwards, for example, is obviously not mouthing agreement with these people out of insecurity about his blackness.

Well, politics is rarely pretty, but in this case the price is too high. For one, misinterpretation of statements in this vein makes black people look disinclined to process detail and context -- in other words, dim. It only gives that much more fodder to views on black intelligence like those uttered by James Watson.

Think, for example, how utterly unreal the notion is that Bill Clinton, our "first black president," would call Mr. Obama's whole candidacy a "fairytale" rather than referring, specifically, to perceptions of his record on the Iraq war. It's as if the outraged crowd is only capable of processing seven words at a time.

In an election that is supposed to focus on larger issues such as America's role in a violent world, playing the race card in this fashion distracts us from real problems. When most new AIDS cases are black and the murder rate among young black males is sky high, what kind of black representative throws tantrums over extremely unlikely implications of something someone said?

In the name of speaking for Mr. Obama, the people throwing these tantrums are presenting a parochial, cynical face, rather than the thoughtful, cosmopolitan one that the candidate himself is trying to show.

Overall, Mr. Obama has not run a "black" campaign. The past few days suggest that if he did, many would consider it a favor to him to churn up 10 more months of dustups over phrases carefully lifted out of context and held up as evidence of racism. Hopefully Mr. Obama is too smart, and too much a man of the world, to succumb to this twisted rendition of black identity.

Mr. McWhorter is a weekly columnist for the New York Sun and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Subprime Nation
By Patrick Buchanan

Since it began to give credit ratings to nations in 1917, Moody's has rated the United Statesw triple-A. U.S. Treasury bonds have been seen as the most secure investment on earth. When crises erupt, nervous money seeks out the world's great safe harbor, the United States. That reputation is now in peril.

Last week, Moody's warned that if the United States fails to rein in the soaring cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the nation's credit rating will be down-graded within a decade.

Our political parties seem oblivious. Republicans, save Ron Paul, are all promising to expand the U.S. military and maintain all of our worldwide commitments to defend and subsidize scores of nations.

Democrats, with entitlement costs drowning the federal budget in red ink, are proposing a new entitlement -- universal health coverage for the near 50 million who do not have it -- another magnet for illegal aliens. Moody's is telling America it needs a time of austerity, while the U.S. government is behaving like the governments we used to bail out.

California has already hit the wall. With an economy as large as a G-8 nation, the Golden State is looking at a $14 billion deficit in 2009 and a $3 billion shortfall in 2008. Gov. Schwarzenegger has called for slashing prison staff by 6,000, including 2,000 guards, early release of 22,000 inmates, closing four dozen state parks and a 10 percent across-the-board cut in all state agencies. The Democratic legislature is demanding tax hikes, which would drive more taxpayers back over the mountains whence their fathers came.

Meanwhile, Washington drifts mindlessly toward the maelstrom. With the dollar sinking, oil surging to $100 a barrel, the Dow having its worst January in memory, foreclosures mounting, credit card debt going rotten, and consumers and businesses unable or unwilling to borrow, we appear headed into recession.

If so, tax revenue will fall and spending on unemployment will surge. The price of the stimulus packages both parties are preparing will further add to the deficit and further imperil the U.S. credit rating. This all comes in the year that the first of the baby boomers, born in 1946, reach early retirement and eligibility for Social Security.

To stave off recession, the Fed appears anxious to slash interest rates another half-point, if not more. That will further weaken the dollar and raise the costs of the imports to which we have become addicted. While all this is bad news for the Republicans, it is worse news for the republic. As we save nothing, we must borrow both to pay for the imported oil and foreign manufactures upon which we have become dependent.

We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy.

We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called "isolationism."

And the chickens of globalism are coming home to roost.

We let Europe to get away with imposing value-added taxes averaging 15 percent on our exports to them, while they rebate that value-added tax on their exports to us. Thus, the euro has almost doubled in value against the dollar in the Bush years, as NATO Europe begins to bail out on Iraq and Afghanistan.

We sat still as Japan protected her markets and dumped high quality goods into ours and China undervalued its currency to suck jobs, technology and factories out of the United States. Now, China and Japan have $2 trillion in cash reserves. The Arabs have an equal amount of petrodollars. Both are headed here to spend their depreciating dollars snapping up U.S. assets -- banks, ports, highways, defense contractors.

America, to pay her bills, has begun to sell herself to the world.

Its balance sheet gutted by the subprime mortgage crisis, Citicorp got a $7.5 billion injection from Abu Dhabi and is now fishing for $1 billion from Kuwait and $9 billion from China. Beijing has put $5 billion into Morgan Stanley and bought heavily into Barclays Bank.

Merrill-Lynch, ravaged by subprime mortgage losses, sold part of itself to Singapore for $7.5 billion and is seeking another $3 billion to $4 billion from the Arabs. Swiss-based UBS, taking a near $15 billion write-down in subprime mortgages, has gotten an infusion of $10 billion from Singapore.

Bain Capital is partnering with China's Huawei Technologies in a buyout of 3Com, the U.S. company that provides the technology that protects Pentagon computers from Chinese hackers.

This self-indulgent generation has borrowed itself into unpayable debt. Now the folks from whom we borrowed to buy all that oil and all those cars, electronics and clothes are coming to buy the country we inherited. We are prodigal sons, and the day of reckoning approaches.

From The Chicago Sun-Times:
We don't appreciate Brady enough
BY JAY MARIOTTI

January 13, 2008

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Shame on us. We pay more attention to Tony Romo's dalliances with Jessica Simpson than we do on the unfailing greatness of Tom Brady. A Saturday night in New England reminded us of a truth that somehow is underplayed in this quirky land of ours: Brady is the hottest thing going in team sports, mainly because he's also the coolest thing going in team sports.

The Patriots weren't perfect. Their defense was far from perfect against the Jacksonville Jaguars, who moved the ball easily enough to feed perceptions of vulnerability. But if not for two catchable balls that weren't caught, Brady would have been as perfect as his team's 17-0 record. In the most airtight passing performance you'll ever see, he completed 26 of 28 attempts for 262 yards and three touchdowns, maintaining his legendary poise when Planet Perfection briefly was coming undone.

And afterward, he maintained his flawlessness by refusing to be impressed by himself. ``When they're open like that, it's my job to hit them. They're open every time,'' a man named Brady said after the 31-20 win in the AFC divisional round. ``It's easy to play quarterback when your receivers are wide open and your linemen are blocking for you. It makes it fun to play.''

Fun to watch, too. Without hiccups by Benjamin Watson and Wes Welker, we'd have seen football's version of a perfect game instead of, well, a no-hitter. The only person not blown away by Brady's dart-throwing exhibition -- it established the all-time record for completion percentage, postseason and regular season -- was Jaguars rookie cornerback Reggie Nelson. Becoming the latest dummy to take shots at New England, Nelson said, ``Anyone can go 26 of 28 in a dropdown game.''

Dropdown meaning, dink and dunk.

``It wasn't impressive? When you lose, I guess you're gonna say things that are inappropriate,'' said Randy Moss, who was limited to one catch by double- and triple-teaming, allowing Brady's other weapons to get open. ``You're talking about the MVP, Tom Brady. I'm not even going to respond to that.''

They call it The Razor, this far-flung stadium sponsored by Gillette, and for quite a while, The Razor was dull -- and quiet. Usually shaking from Guns N' Roses riffs and energized by a neon-flashing lighthouse, Planet Perfection instead was producing unusual scenes. The strangest was Brady, normally all gee-whizzy when it comes to his teammates, cursing on the sideline after Stephen Gostkowski missed a field goal. When you see Brady flinch, much less throw a mini-fit, you know it's a rare shaky moment for a team seeking the NFL's first 19-0 season. Not only did the Jaguars easily march for a touchdown on their opening drive, they kept answering Brady's counterpunches by slashing through the Patsies via the air and ground.

But amid the tension, everybody should have noticed what the Greatest Quarterback Ever -- that's what I said, Joe Montana -- was doing on the field. Brady completed his first 16 passes, and, after Watson missed one, launched another streak of nine straight before Welker's drop. Almost inevitably, there was Brady rushing toward the end zone, leaping in the air with Favreian glee, helmet-butting his linemen, hugging Watson after his second touchdown catch and restoring the usual noise and joy to football's happiest place.

``There's a few execution plays I wish we could have executed better,'' Brady said.

He's kidding, right?

Belichick's mantra is to emphasize the team and the system and downplay individual glory. But it was impossible to downplay Brady's brilliance in his latest big-game masterpiece, just as it has been through the most dominant quarterbacking season ever. There was Brady, pulling off trickery better than any magician, lining up beside Kevin Faulk, taking the snap, jumping, hiding the ball expertly at his hip, then flipping a 6-yard scoring pass to Welker. ``I'm looking for my Academy Award on that play," he said. There was Brady later, looking left, finding no one, then instantly shifting his gaze down the right sideline and finding Donte Stallworth in stride for 53 yards.

But satisfied, he is not. If the Patriots lose the AFC title game next Sunday, he knows it's all a colossal waste. ``None of it matters,'' Brady said. ``It all comes down to this. We were here last year. I hope we perform better.''

Sure, Bill Belichick's system and the Patriot Way have been very good to Brady. But make no mistake: He is the one firing the ball with extraordinary precision and flair. He's the one who triggered the records: 589 points, 75 touchdowns, 50 touchdown passes, 22 touchdown catches by Moss. Don't tell me Dan Marino had a better season in 1984, not when he didn't win the Super Bowl. Don't tell me Peyton Manning or anyone else had a better season. In a parity-driven league that isn't set up for full-blown domination, Brady is treating us to one of the most dynamic individual seasons in sports history, right up there with Tiger Woods and Babe Ruth. The only person I have to convince, apparently, is a writer named Frank Cooney, the only voter who didn't name Brady as MVP. He picked Brett Favre, who is quite the folk hero but still not as unlikely a story as Brady, the sixth-round draft choice who took Drew Bledsoe's job in 2001 and hasn't looked back.

Said Belichick, never quick with individual praise: ``I have thought for a long time that there is no past or present quarterback I'd rather coach than Tom Brady, and I am more certain of that every year he plays."

So the Patriots carry on as an American fascination, if not a love affair. The '85 Bears were a shuffling and woofing spectacle, a weekly ass-kicking on parade, a national house party oozing of characters and arrogance and clashing egos and way too much fun. The Cowboys of yore were the original America's Team, with players who wore stars on their helmets and cheerleaders who wore nothing. The Packers have charmed us with their small town, frozen tundra and folk hero.

American treasures, all.

Seems the Patriots don't come close to evoking the same feel. Even if they wear red, white and blue and own a patriotic nickname, they're as well known for being the ``Hate-riots'' as they are for their extraordinary, season-long perfection quest. Maybe it's because they're videotape cheaters when we're sick of steroids and deceit. Maybe it's because Belichick buries himself in a hoodie and looks constipated when grunting public comments. Maybe it's because they're a machine. Whatever the reason, the Patriots are much more polarizing than popular in a nation that generally adores a winner.

The one exception is Tom Brady. He is likeable. He is amazing. And he is real, the most real deal in sports.

LIBERTAS Review: Sweeney Todd

After a fairly disappointing decade, Tim Burton reunites with his muse Johnny Depp and strikes cinematic gold with a blood-soaked musical about a revenge-seeking barber driven to insanity. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street reintroduces us to the Tim Burton we all once knew and loved; the stunning visualist whose quality of story matches his production design.

We meet Benjamin Barker (Depp) when his ship docks in London. He’s returned home after fifteen-years spent in prison for a crime he didn’t commit; a crime trumped up by Judge Turpin to steal away Todd’s family for himself. Depending on how you might see it, Barker has ill-spent those years poisoning his own soul forging a determination for vengeance at any price and today he’s nothing close to the gentle husband and father he was. He’s transformed both physically and spiritually into Sweeney Todd, a man on the precipice of complete madness, more consumed with revenge than any desire to reunite with his family.

Todd’s plan is to set up shop in his former trade as a barber and lure Judge Turpin into the chair. He finds Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) running her meat pie business out of the building where he once worked and they form a partnership of sorts where she agrees to adore him if he’ll let her. That she’s slighly mad doesn’t hurt and her influence on him is far from healthy.

Being unfamiliar with the play and source material, both the amount of music and blood surprised me. The music’s terrific and Burton wisely makes the choice to find actors who can sing fairly well as opposed to singers who can act fairly well. No one here is Michael Crawford but that’s not a drawback. In fact, it grounds the musical numbers making them more accessible. The songs, all written by broadway legend Stephen Sondheim, have a conversational quality that works in much the same way as Rex Harrison made his role work as Henry Higgins in the film version of My Fair Lady.

Be prepared, however, for as much gore as song. Filmed in dark, foggy grays and blacks, the only real color comes from red blood of which there is aplenty. Todd is as gory as any R-rated horror film never shying away from the effects of a straight-razor across a vulnerable, unsuspecting human throat.

Depp’s wonderful as the Demon Barber, but Helena Bonham Carter (the director’s wife) steals the show as the hygiene-challenged meat pie baker who appears to have been waiting her whole life for someone to come along with whom she might go mad with. Her scenes and songs are the highlights, especially a song with Depp where they look out over the street and choose their victims.

Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Borat) makes the most of his showy supporting role as a rival barber, and as the devious, pathetic Judge Turpin, Alan Rickman has his best role in years.

The script is lean and cruises along wasting little time on words or lyrics which don’t move the story. Todd’s backstory is important enough to demand flashbacks, but these are handled perfectly in quick bursts which tell us all we need to know without bogging down the main story. Depp is such a powerful and effective actor we need not spend a lot of time seeing him with his lost wife to feel Todd’s loss. The pain is all etched on Depp’s face and there in the eyes.

Critical of both class and religion, Sweeney Todd has a lot to say about society and presents Todd and Mrs. Lovett to us as products of poverty and injustice. They’re warnings of how we might be destroyed by what we create through our own indifference to the suffering of the impoverished. There are no innocents in Sweeney Todd. We’re all guilty for being a Judge Turpin or for tolerating him. But what one might interpret as an allegory for the poor in our own inner-cities isn’t handled clumsily or politically, it’s handled artistically.

This isn’t a pro-welfare movie with some heavy-handed hack telling us our taxes are too low. What Burton does is present a universal truth about what can breed as a by-product of neglect in a gorgeous and deliciously entertaining film. And for all of its great stars, music, production design, and exploration of revenge as a self-destructive poison, it was this I appreciated most. Sweeney Todd is definitely not for the kids or squeamish, but it’s not to missed by the rest of us.

Capitalism is the real 'agent of change'
By MARK STEYN

This past week's issue of the Economist has a heart-rending vignette from one of the most ruthlessly capitalist industries on the planet:

"In 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free."

"That was the moment we realized the game was completely up," an EMI exec told the magazine. In the United States, album sales in 2007 were down 19 percent from 2006. Don't blame me. I still buy plenty of CDs. But that's because I like Doris Day, and every time I try to insert one of these newfangled MP3s into my fax machine it doesn't seem to play. But if you're not Mister Squaresville, and you dig whatever caterwauling beat combo those London hep cats are digging on their iPods, chances are you find the local record store about as groovy as the Elks Lodge.

Now there are generally two reactions to the above story. If you're like me, you're reminded yet again why you love capitalism. It's dynamic. And the more capitalist your economy, the more dynamic it is. Every great success story is vulnerable to the next great success story – which is why teenagers aren't picking their CDs from the Sears-Roebuck catalog. There's a word for this. Now let me see. What was it again?

Oh, yeah: "change." Innovation drives change, the market drives change. Government "change" just drives things away: You could ask many of the New Hampshire primary voters who formerly resided in Massachusetts.

Nevertheless, between Iowa and New Hampshire, almost every presidential contender found himself lapsing into boilerplate assertions that he was the "candidate of change" – or even, as both McCain and Hillary put it, an "agent of change," which sounds far more exotic, as if they're James Bond and Pussy Galore covertly driving the Aston Martin across some international frontier, pressing the ejector button and dropping a ton of government regulation on some hapless foreigners.

But it's capitalism that's the real "agent of change." Politicians, on the whole, prefer stasis, at least on everything for which they already have responsibility. That's the lesson King Canute was trying to teach his courtiers when he took them down to the beach and let the tide roll in: Government has its limits. In most of the Western world, the tide is rolling in on demographically and economically unsustainable entitlements, but that doesn't stop politicians getting out their beach chairs and promising to create even more. That's government "change".

What's the second reaction to that EMI story? Perhaps even now John Edwards is rallying the crowd at the last CD mill in America's declining rap belt, comforting the 9-year-old coatless daughter of a laid-off mill worker who started there in 1904 making wax cylinders of the Columbia Male Quartet singing "Sweet Adeline," and later pressed million of 78's of Ukulele Ike singing "Who Takes Care of the Caretaker's Daughter While the Caretaker's Busy Taking Care?," and millions of 45's of the Swinging Blue Jeans singing "The Hippy Hippy Shake," and millions of CDs of Three 6 Mafia ]singing "Hit A Motherf-----," only to be cut down in his prime and thrown on the scrapheap because Americans have outsourced their record collection to the computer.

"I will never stop fighting for you," Edwards will be telling them. "No matter how they try to stop me. I feel the spirit of Al Jolson speaking through me. He's saying, climb upon my knee, Sonny Boy, though you're 53, Sonny Boy, I'll never stop condescending to you."

Heigh-ho. "They" can try to stop Edwards, and if by "they" you mean primary voters in New Hampshire, they're doing a pretty good job of it. But what's going on over on the Republican side? John McCain demonizes Big Pharma – i.e., the private pharmaceutical companies that create, develop and manufacture the drugs that all these socialized health care systems in every corner of the planet are utterly dependent on. He voted for Sarbanes-Oxley, a quintessential congressional overreaction (to Enron) that buries American companies in wasteful paperwork and hands huge advantages to stock exchanges in London, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

But why stop there? McCain is also gung ho for all the most economically disruptive Big Government solutions to "climate change." Apparently, that's the only change these candidates aren't in favor of. When it comes to the climate, McCain and Hillary are agents of nonchange. McCain has an almost Edwardian contempt for capitalism, for the people whose wit and innovation generate the revenue that pay for your average small-state senator's retinue of staffers worthy of a Persian Gulf emir.

As for Mike Huckabee, last seen comparing his success in Iowa to the miracle of the loaves and fishes (New Hampshire, alas, was loaves-and-fishes in reverse: he took his Iowa catch and turned it into one rotting fish head in Lake Winnipesaukee), in Thursday night's debate he was attacked for raising taxes in Arkansas. "What I raised," riposted the Huckster, "was hope."

Terrific. In a Huckabee administration, nothing is certain but hope and taxes. Did he poll-test the line? Was it originally "What I didn't raise was tobacco"? Or did he misread the line? Did he mean to say "hogs"? Is there any correlation between taxes and hope? If you cut taxes by 20 percent, does hope nosedive off the cliff? Not for those of us who were hoping for a tax cut. And is there any evidence that he "raised hope"? Hope of what? Huck's line is a degradation of FDR: We have nothing to hope for but hope itself.

Barack Obama, of course, called it "the audacity of hope." I'll say. Those London music-biz execs must look at our primary election season and marvel. In what other industry can you clean up with such insipid bromides?

"So what you selling today?"

"Well, we got two products. Over here, on this bare shelf, we've got 'Hope.' And over here, in this entirely empty display cabinet, we've got 'Change.' Or you could go for one of our two-for-one packages, 'The Hope of Change' or 'A Change of Hope.'"

In the midst of the world's lousiest Presidents Day sale, let us give thanks to the Democratic voters of New Hampshire, who took a cooler look at Barack Obama and decided that the audacity of hope was perhaps less audacious than shameless. Sen. Obama seems a perfectly pleasant fellow, if somewhat cravenly in thrall to every cobwebbed Democratic piety. However, his platform is platitude piled upon platitude.

As Barack floats off to the gaseous uplands of soft-focus abstract buzzwords, it would be nice if Republicans could have their feet planted on something firmer than Huckabee's big-government mush. Like those teenagers surveying the table of EMI CDs, grown-up voters should look at the display of anachronistic freebies peddled by politicians singing the same old songs, and coolly walk on by.