Couldn’t Help But Notice (032008)

Humorous Headline Contrast, currently at Drudge:

_________________________________________________

An awesome IBD editorial on the racial divide cuts to the chase:

….. Obama is wrong to suggest that legalized discrimination still exists today. There is no conspiracy of racism in America.

The harsh truth is, much of the anger he speaks of is based on paranoia manifesting in urban legends about whites creating AIDS to kill blacks or crack cocaine to lock them up. Wright spreads these pernicious lies in Obama’s church, and Obama has rewarded him with $23,000 a year in donations, if not his own hallelujahs.

Intellectually honest blacks, such as Shelby Steele, will tell you that racism is such a distant memory that racial victimologists like Wright are now left with concocting wild-eyed conspiracy theories to maintain their power.

They see their power slipping, so “they rub racism in the face of whites,” said Steele, who like Wright and Obama hails from Chicago’s South Side.

It’s self-serving black leaders such as Wright who hold back blacks today. In fact, Steele says their victim-focused, racial-identity politics has stifled black advancement more than racism itself.

“The No. 1 black problem is not racism,” Steele says, it’s groupism and a desperate clinging to the black power movement of the ’60s.

Read the whole thing.

Taranto at Best of the Web chimed in similarly yesterday:

As for “the soul of our nation,” we have heard a lot of late about America’s need for racial reconciliation. Thanks to the Obama-Wright episode, we also have learned that racial antagonism and anti-Americanism are much more common than we would have guessed among predominantly black congregations in America.

Is this not an obstacle to reconciliation? In 21st-century America, does any greater obstacle remain?

….. here we have someone in a position of responsibility in the black community–no less than the spiritual mentor to a would-be president–who ….. made a career of promoting racial resentment. In response we hear a litany of excuses about understandable anger, a tradition of rebellion and so forth. The kindest thing that can be said about this is that it is a form of soft bigotry.

_________________________________________________

Al Gore, call your office:

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

HT to Instapundit, who, echoing Matt at Weapons of Mass Discussion, says “I blame the Bush Administration.”