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Tagged: Peter Hitchens RSS

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  D 4:47 pm on November 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: obama (39), Peter Hitchens   

  Switching Sides? 

  Daniel Larison responds to Peter Hitchens’ analysis of an Obama presidency:

  I don’t know how many other people outside Chicago know these things, but I would be willing to bet that if all Obama voters knew his close ties to the Daley machine and his relationship with Tony Rezko they would not be very troubled. That may be more bothersome in its way than mass ignorance, but I think Mr. Hitchens here mistakes their lack of response to Obama’s cues for some cynical acknowledgement of the less glamorous details of the man’s career. It was, I suspect, silence kept out of deference to the President-elect combined with amazement that he had, in fact, won. Mr. Hitchens is falling into the trap of believing the hype about Obama, but interpreting it in a negative way. I suppose I might be inclined to the same interpretation, if I believed it, but I don’t. It is important to bear in mind that Obama’s election may be historic in certain respects, but it is not nearly as significant as his foes fear and his friends hope. As I have been stressing all year, the thing that disturbs me about Obama is not that he represents some dramatic change in American politics, but that he represents depressing, miserable continuity.

  I think I agree with Larison. Comments?

  F is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    F 6:11 pm on November 12, 2008 Permalink

    I’d like to disagree with Larison.

    While I may not necessarily agree with all of Mr Hitchens’ comments, I do think he understands American votes better than Larison. Because the Obama supporters I’ve heard speak and talk to around here (average Joes, city councilmen, etc.) all voted for Obama because he reminded them of JFK. Or because they were thrilled by his promise of hope and change: they sincerely believed that he would be a different kind of politician. And when names like Rezko, Axelrod, etc., were brought up, they didn’t ring any bells.

    Also, I don’t think that Peter Hitchens was believing the hype. The man lives in Great Britain and has lived through Tony Blair. He knows more about political crazes than we do. Yet.

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  D 11:54 am on November 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: obama (39), palin (15), Peter Hitchens   

  Peter Hitchens Miscellany 

  Great piece from Peter Hitchens’ blog on Obama, Palin, and the US media.

  Excerpt:

  How many of my critics have actually read David Freddoso’s measured, forensic ‘The Case Against Barack Obama’? Or, come to that, how many of them have opened David Mendell’s earlier but still telling critical study ‘Obama – from Promise to Power’? Or how many have read the Chicago Tribune’s interesting and revealing pursuit of the vague and partial stories in Mr Obama’s own interesting and engaging but not wholly candid memoir, ‘Dreams from my Father’? Anyone can do this. I do, admittedly, have the slight advantage of having spent some fascinating days in Chicago and elsewhere in Illinois, speaking to individuals (some of whom wished to remain anonymous) who had encountered Mr Obama early in his political career. But I didn’t keep it to myself. The results of this were published in the Mail on Sunday in February and can still be found on the web.

  So, for instance, my views have nothing to do with Sarah Palin, and her (deserved) evisceration by Katie Couric. It’s good to see that an inadequate and ill-prepared candidate can still get herself disembowelled by the US media, but shouldn’t people ask themselves if they’ve ever seen Mr Obama subjected to this sort of treatment? Most Americans don’t even known that Barack Obama smokes cigarettes, so how can they be expected to know what his grasp of foreign policy is like? How would he cope with foreign potentates in the hurly burly of real life? See Freddoso again, for some hints.

   
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  F 11:02 pm on November 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Idaho, Moscow (5), Peter Hitchens, US election (2)   

  An Outside View 

  For any who are interested, Peter Hitchens’ recent article about the US election (reported from and written in Moscow, ID) is available here. A fun and fair read.