Charles Krauthammer is typically held in the highest regard by some media personalities on the right.\u00a0 The same can be said for George Will.<\/p>\n
Yet very recently, while promoting his latest book, Krauthammer revealed to Brett Baier of Fox News <\/i>that neither he nor Will knew a thing about \u201cthe real\u201d Barack Obama back in 2008 prior to the latter\u2019s election to the presidency.<\/p>\n
Will seconded this thought.<\/p>\n
Let this sink in: Krauthammer and Will, veteran media commentators\u2014self-avowed \u201cconservative<\/i>\u201d commentators\u2014admit, and think nothing of admitting, that up until his election, they just couldn\u2019t figure out what kind of president Obama promised to be.<\/p>\n
This is amazing.<\/p>\n
Among those amazed by Krauthammer\u2019s and Will\u2019s professed ignorance was Rush Limbaugh.<\/p>\n
On his nationally syndicated radio show, on October 28, Limbaugh remarked: \u201cI am convinced that all conservatives know a statist and a big-government redistributionist when they see one, especially people like Krauthammer and Will.\u201d In disbelief, he added: \u201cIt doesn\u2019t compute with me that they didn\u2019t know [who Obama really was].\u201d<\/p>\n
Krauthammer accused Limbaugh of misconstruing his position.\u00a0 What the former actually said, Krauthammer insisted, is that \u201cwhen Obama was elected, it was not clear whether he was a centrist Democrat who would throw a bone to the left; or if he was a man of the left who would occasionally throw a bone to the center.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hopefully it is clear to the reader that Krauthammer\u2019s \u201cdefense\u201d of his earlier remarks simply reinforces the painful fact that Limbaugh understood him all too well.<\/p>\n
At the time of the election of 2008, there was no conceivable justification for anyone, much less seasoned right-leaning commentators, to have had any doubts whatsoever about Obama.<\/p>\n
Long before Election night, everyone who wanted to know who Obama was had that information available to them in spades.\u00a0 After all, it wasn\u2019t as if the man was a nameless drifter.\u00a0 Obama was a United States Senator and, before that, a state Senator from Illinois. His relationships with an array of radicals from the political cesspool of Chicago, radicals like convicted terrorist Bill Ayers, were well established. For God\u2019s sake, the man had published not one, but two <\/i>memoirs.\u00a0 The subtitle of the first\u2014\u201cA Story of Race<\/i> and Inheritance\u201d\u2014revealed for all with eyes to realize it that Obama\u2019s had been a lifelong preoccupation with racial identity\u2014and racial politics.<\/p>\n
We knew then that not only had Obama resisted efforts to provide legal protection for those infants who had survived botched abortions, he also was on record for lamenting the fact that the United States Constitution makes no allowances for wealth redistribution\u2014or what Obama and his ilk call \u201cpositive liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most tellingly of all, though, is that months before Obama was elected to the Oval Office, the name of Jeremiah Wright became known to the nation.\u00a0 Wright is an impassioned advocate of \u201cBlack Liberation Theology\u201d and a close friend of Louis Farrakhan and the late Muammar Gaddafi.<\/p>\n
He was also Obama\u2019s pastor and, as the President described him, his \u201cspiritual mentor,\u201d the man who \u201cbrought him to Christ.\u201d For over 20 years <\/i>Obama sat in the pews of Wright\u2019s church, a church in which the congregation was routinely subjected to sermons chock full of racially-charged diatribes.\u00a0 Such was Obama\u2019s spiritual and intellectual indebtedness to Wright that the title of the former\u2019s second memoir, The Audacity of Hope, <\/i>was first the title of one of Wright\u2019s sermons, the sermon in which he memorably remarks that \u201cwhite folks\u2019 greed runs a world in need\u201d\u2014a line that Obama would approvingly draw upon himself.<\/p>\n
And yet, we are expected to believe, Wright had no influence over the development of Obama\u2019s worldview.<\/p>\n
Apparently, Krauthammer and Will did <\/i>believe this.<\/p>\n
Or at least they wanted <\/i>to believe it.<\/p>\n
We can bet anything that if Obama had been white and had a track record of allying himself with neo-Nazis or Klansmen, or even had he been a little too close to \u201cisolationists\u201d like, say, Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul, Krauthammer and Will would\u2019ve wasted no time to judge him for what he was .<\/p>\n
Like legions of (mostly white) Americans, though, they wanted to believe that Obama, America\u2019s first black president, <\/i>was different.<\/p>\n
Krauthammer, Will, and every other self-professed \u201cconservative\u201d who failed to expose the real Obama were either na\u00efve or dishonest.\u00a0 Their blindness was either genuine or contrived.<\/p>\n
Whatever the case may be, they threw their own credibility into question.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Charles Krauthammer is typically held in the highest regard by some media personalities on the right.\u00a0 The same can be said for George Will. Yet very recently, while promoting his latest book, Krauthammer revealed to Brett Baier of Fox News that neither he nor Will knew a thing about \u201cthe real\u201d Barack Obama back in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n