The Thomas Chronicles

*** Update Below ***

I just finished watching Obama’s live press conference where he responded to the Reverend Wrights’ speech yesterday. I won’t comment very much on Obama’s statements until I find the raw transcripts of what he said. As far as I can see, the harshest things he said was that he was “Outraged” at what the Reverend Wright said at the National Press Club, and he said that Wright’s speech will cause their relationship to change. I don’t think I heard him itemize any of Wright’s obscenities though. (I was wrong there. He did itemize a few of the more “controversial” Wright statements and responded to them.)

Also, upon reflection, when he said he was “outraged”, I don’t know if he said he was actually outraged at the content Wright’s speech or if he was outrage because Wright clearly lacked “concern” “for me”.

Obama also said the Reverend Wright we were treated to yesterday morning was not the Wright that he knows and remembers. Again he denied ever hearing these comments before. If I understand it correctly, didn’t Obama quote these statements or these kinds of statements from Wright in his books?

Clearly Obama is conducting damage control to stop the inevitable downward spiral of his campaign from this Wright circus. The question is: Did he succeed?

***Update 4/29/08***

Michelle Malkin’s got a few rough and ready quotes:

“I’m outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle. The person that I saw yesterday was not the person I met 20 years ago. His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate. I believe they do not accurately portray the perspective of the black church. They certainly don’t portray mine. If he considers this political posturing, then he doesn’t know me very well. And I don’t know him well either.”

If 20 years isn’t enough time to know someone well, then (shrug) how long does it take?

When responding to Wright comparing US Marines to terrorists, he said:

“They offend me. They rightly offend all Americans. They should be denounced. And that’s what I’m doing clearly and unequivocally here today.”

“It’s antithetical to our campaign. It’s antithetical to what I’m about. It’s not what America stands for. Rev. Wright does not speak for me. He doesn’t speak for our campaign. I can’t prevent him from making these outrageous remarks…When I say I find these statements appalling, I mean it…Makes me angry and saddens me.”

Isn’t it funny how he has never overtly said, “I denounce such and such.”? So far, it’s invariably, “I have already denounced…” or, like today’s, “They should be denounced.” I haven’t heard him say a simple subject-verb-object sentence construction along these lines yet.

As a side note, the crux of my frustrations at Obama is that I don’t know if I can believe what he’s saying. He’s lied on so many different things, or as he would say, he has “mischaracterized” himself on innumerable things.

Perhaps that just my cynicism talking, even if his “misstatements” and “mischaracterizations” are well-documented. Maybe I should give him more benefit of the doubt.

More on this later…

I just watched the Wright speech at the National Press Club. If anyone had any doubts about this man, those doubts should be swept aside by now.

America knows that Wright stands shoulder to shoulder with Louis Farrakan and the radical Nation of Islam. Indeed, the Nation of Islam is providing his personal security at the moment. We know that Farrakan is anti-Semitic. We know he has an extremist view of America and is not above inciting hatred with his speech.

So the question becomes simply this: What about the “Reverend” Wright don’t people get?

Perhaps Bill Moyers, the Black ministers cheering in the crowd and the journalists clapping at the National Press Club might re-read what Wright said this morning. His statements should have incited outrage, not standing ovations.

If anything, Wright confirmed the negative things said of him.

Agree or disagree with Miss Noonan, her articles are almost always worth reading. She has her finger on the pulse of the nation and her observations are usual timely and insightful, even though I sometimes think she’s reading the gauge incorrectly (see her articles on Barack Obama).

But when she’s at the height of her observational powers, she has me nodding my head, not in a EUREKA! moment, but in the way she ties together her observational strands toward a conclusion. She points out what Christopher Hitchens pointed out, about the indignity of going through our airports.

It almost makes you wonder if freedom is slipping away from us; if it is being leeched from us piecemeal by some authoritarian figure in the guise of a screaming TSA fellow.

Bowed heads, shoeless shuffling feet, stripped down to the essentials (though thankfully not down to your skivvies… at any rate, not anymore) and identification cards and papers held in order– It makes you feel de-humanized, and as time goes by, this peculiar institution is having incipient shadows of Orwell.

You’re processed, prodded and hopefully not sterilized by the time you reach your flight, and no one whimpers a protest, not even a raised voice for fear of the state’s swift retribution. Which is perhaps being arrested, handcuffed and carted away? Placed on a no-fly list? Perhaps your luggage would be confiscated for an indefinite amount of time. Who knows?

Thus, we bow our heads, go through this indignity and go along to get get along.

I’ve gone through this ordeal many times, at least once or twice a year, and I’ve never liked the taste of it. I too go along to get along.

Have any of us asked the question: What rights do we have once we cross into the airport terminal?

Not only are we prodded and poked and magnetically scanned, when we finally board the plane we effectively become prisoners for the duration of the flight. Should the airlines and the friendly TSA fellows decide, you can be deprived of water, toiletries, food– all the basic human necessities– for hours and hours on end without any recourse.

I suppose you could protest and demand to be let off and cause a scene. You probably would be let off the plane, but it might be in handcuffs.

To add insult to injury, we, the American people, know that our congressmen and senators, our diplomats and ex-Presidents don’t have to suffer what the rest of America suffers. They have private jets, loaned jets, a friend of a friend of a friend’s jet they could borrow for a weekend in Tahiti. Neither the Dean’s, the Bush’s, the Pelosi’s, the Graham’s nor the Reid’s of the world has to suffer these indignities. Coincidentally, however, they are also the people refusing to do anything about it on our behalf.

Frankly, I’m surprised we endured this hand-handedness for so long. With the General Election approaching in November, perhaps, it’s high time we fire our so-called “Representatives”. With our congressmen and women having a lower turnover rate that the former Soviet Politburo, maybe it’s time they got a real job. Clearly, many of them aren’t doing the job Americans have hired them for…

Perhaps this is just cynical talk. I think it happens to be the truth of the matter, and if that’s just cynical talk, I know I’m not alone in it.

America is in line at the airport. America has its shoes off, is carrying a rubberized bin, is going through a magnetometer. America is worried there is fungus on the floor after a million stockinged feet have walked on it. But America knows not to ask. America is guilty until proved innocent, and no one wants to draw undue attention. America left its ticket and passport in the jacket in the bin in the X-ray machine, and is admonished. America is embarrassed to have put one one-ounce moisturizer too many in the see-through bag. America is irritated that the TSA agent removed its mascara, opened it, put it to her nose, and smelled it. Why don’t you put it up your nose and see if it explodes? America thinks.

And, as always: Why do we do this when you know I am not a terrorist, and you know I know you know I am not a terrorist? Why this costly and harassing kabuki when we both know the facts, and would agree that all this harassment is the government’s way of showing “fairness,” of showing that it will equally humiliate anyone in order to show its high-mindedness and sense of justice? Our politicians congratulate themselves on this as we stand in line.

All the frisking, beeping and patting down is demoralizing to our society. It breeds resentment, encourages a sense that the normal are not in control, that common sense is yesterday. Another thing: It reduces the status of that ancestral arbiter and leader of society, the middle-aged woman. In the new fairness, she is treated like everyone, without respect, like the loud ruffian and the vulgar girl on the phone. The middle-aged woman is the one spread-eagled over there in the delicate shell beneath the removed jacket, praying nothing on her body goes beep and makes people look.

America makes it through security, gets to the gate, waits. The TV monitor is on. It is Wolf Blitzer. He is telling us with a voice of urgency of the Pennsylvania returns. But no one looks up. We are a nation of Willie Lomans, dragging our rollies through acres of airport, going through life with a suitcase and a slack jaw, trying to get home after a long day of meetings, of moving product.

No one in crowded gate 14 looks up to see what happened in Pennsylvania. No one. Wolf talks to the air. Gate 14 is small-town America, a mix, a group of people of all classes and races brought together and living in close proximity until the plane is called, and America knows what Samuel Johnson knew. “How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.”

Gate 14 doesn’t think any one of the candidates is going to make their lives better. Gate 14 will vote anyway, because they know they are the grownups of America and must play the role and do the job.

You can read the rest here.

We’ve been having a peculiar spasm of bizarre natural events lately, and I thought it would be interesting to recount just a few of them.

– We have the ongoing problem of the Mississippi River swelling to uncomfortable levels due to the rain and snowfall earlier this month.

– There was an unprecedented swarm of earthquakes off the coast of Oregon. The strange location of the earthquakes prompted one geologist, Robert Dziak, to note:

“In the 17 years we’ve been monitoring the ocean through hydrophone recordings, we’ve never seen a swarm of earthquakes in an area such as this,” Dziak said. “We’re not certain what it means. But we hope to have a ship divert to the site and take some water samples that may help us learn more.”

– Last week, Illinois was treated to a wake up call. A 5.2 earthquake rocked St. Louis and southern Illinois.

– Wild fires are raging in New Mexico around Mountainaire earlier this week. It’s still going on last I checked.

– Today, a 4.4 earthquake struck Reno.

With the exception of the ongoing flood and potential flood situation along the Mississippi, all these other events have happened around 10 days of each other. This is pretty astonishing when you stop and think about it. The sheer density of events is incredible.

In very short order, I wonder if the human psyche can cope with the pace of events. I’m willing to venture a guess that a sizable portion of the people in the United States and the world have already gone mad from the rate of change in our world.

And if you have doubts on this, imagine yourself as a Chinese peasant around thirty-five years old. Roughly twenty-five years ago, when you were ten, your nation was a predominately agrarian society. Now, it’s become a high-tech industrial society. Everything you’ve known in your whole life keeps changing every few years.

To bring the point on home, there are certain towns out in Arizona that only just five or six years ago only housed five hundred to one thousand people. Now, many of those small towns are suddenly called cities as the thousands poured in from outside the state from California and the Northeast. I know of one such town that was strangely dubbed the fastest growing city in America. From 500 to the expected 350,000 by 2025.

Even my hometown, Houston, Texas, has changed radically in the five years since I left. Roughly 800,000 people have poured into the city from California and New Orleans and the Northeast (Ain’t it funny how people are doing a mass exodus from California? The problem is, the newcomers usually maintain their adherence to the same mentality that created the dysfunctions of California.) On my visits home, I almost feel alien there.

I know this was a total segue from my initial topic of natural phenomenon but it felt relevant at the time.

Quite a lot of people are pressuring Senator Clinton to drop out from the race if she doesn’t win by double digits. Anything less than that and, according to the Democratic leadership and talking disembodied heads on the boobtube, means that Senator Clinton would have less justification to stay in the Primary. I’ve written before at length how in the sheer math of this election, unless something drastically changes in the rules, neither Senator Obama nor Senator Clinton can clench the nomination on superdelegates alone. The rest of the Democratic Primaries will decide that.

The constant irrational demand for her to drop out and preclude the voters from electing their own Democratic nominee strikes me as being singularly undemocratic and elitists. Last I checked, we have a Republic not an oligarchy of overlords. The way Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi insist on cutting short the primaries smacks of a master/ peasant relationship between them and the American people. The “do as you’re told” mentality among the Democratic leadership does not historically sit well with the American people no matter the political party. This is the same party that demanded Dennis Kucinich sign a “Loyalty Oath” in order to appear on the Texas ballot. This is obviously ludicrous and it flies in the face of 500 years of decency and culture on this American continent (this includes the colonial period); in fact, this leaves a particularly acrid smell of totalitarianism in my view. This high-handedness belongs somewhere else, not in America.

This hasn’t sat well with Americans throughout our history and it shouldn’t sit well with the Democrats today. If the Left entirely succeeds in taking over the Democratic Party and succeeds in elbowing out moderates like Zell Miller and Joe Liberman, I don’t see how the rest of America can countenance such extremism.

If the Democratic Party truly represents the interests of the people and not a party dedicated to fractionism and tribalism, then let the people they claim to represent vote.

I thought I’d write a post today to confess something obvious to anyone browsing this blog since January. I have a profound mistrust of Senator Obama, and I don’t much like him.

Early in the Primary season, I was actually taken with Obama. I looked at the political stage and found a man actively proposing to move beyond partisanship and race. What he was proposing was a national transcendence from mindless bickering and proposed that we return to the old patriotism of our fathers.

I was heartened to hear his message. And then, as the campaign wore on, it became increasingly obvious that there is a severe disconnect between Obama’s flowery words and his actions, between his high adjectives and appeal to idealism and the more disturbing implications of his words. It was not that he lacked substance. Quite the contrary. But it is his “substance”, the meat of what he says that makes him disturbing.

I won’t delineate all the shadowy parts of his character in this post. I’m sure, if you follow politics at all, you’re aware of a few of them. These are not simply “gaffes” as everyone is fond of calling them. “Gaffes” are the kinds of things that happen in high-end restaurants, like asking for the jelly rather than the Grey Poupon; these are mistakes that could garner embarrassment. For the definitionally challenged, I think the word “Gaffe” lends Obama’s statements a tongue-and-cheek quality that certaintly doesn’t describe it.

There is no question of Obama’s elitism. Ever since I saw him on the national stage running for President, he has used the language of academians, and he has wowed the media and our intelligensia with his vocabulary and his turn of phrase. He speaks the language of a Harvard Law School graduate and also a man who attended the same private school as the Hawaiian Royal Family in Hawaii.

Whatever he is, he is not a run-of-the-mill Joe off the street nor is he a commonplace politician.

I have so many concerns and fears regarding this man who would be President, not least of which is his govern-on-high mentality, that I have to be very careful about harshly judging him. Such a man should invoke my pity not my condemnation.

When he speaks, you can just hear how much he loves himself, and his notion of grandiosity is simply astonishing. He keeps saying that by the very act of voting for him, you are voting for “Change”; in fact, you will be changed and you will have transcendence by voting for him.

What can you say to such megalomania, that refuses to answer questions, that brooks no opposition?

I am writing this to remind myself that Obama is not only the slick, finely crafted public persona on TV. He is also an immortal being made in the Image of God no matter what he has decided to do with it. And he, like all of us, will stand or fall before Jesus Christ on His return.

Obama gives many people good causes for concern, and none of what I’ve written mitigates that. I just don’t want to lose my humanity by denying Obama his.

All I have is my vote, and I intend to discharge my duty as a citizen of our Republic this November.

I was at an ethnic Vietnamese store last week. Though I am by no means an expert chef– I tend to experiment quite a bit with various foods and flavors, and the disheveled kitchen left in the wake of one of my madcap schemes can attest to that– I consider my culinary skills close to that of an enthused dilettante.

As readers of my blog know, I am a Vietnamese immigrant, and I find that whenever I enter one of these ethnic “mom and pop” Vietnamese grocery stores, I have the peculiar sense of coming home. I don’t know if there is an equivalent for someone born and raise in the American mainstream, but I suppose the feeling is akin to childhood memories of your grandmother or grandfather fixing family recipes of spaghetti or barbeques that have been passed down one generation to the next like family heirlooms. There is that sense of familiarity, of home and tradition.

These kinds of thoughts usually scroll through my mind every time I enter the Vietnamese grocery store near my house in Southern California. More than any other of the five senses, my sense of smell is most strongly linked to these feelings, which hover just below my conscious mind, just high enough on the strata to evoke these strong emotions but not high enough to produce concrete thoughts and memories.

In any case, as I left the store with my plastic bags full of all kinds of weeds– not the kind cropping up to ruin your flowerbed out back but the edible kind, like spinach– I stopped the Indian clerk and pointed to a stack of puffy rectangular white bags lined against the glass wall facing the parking lot.

“Say, how much do those rice bags cost nowadays?”

He smiled ruefully, “Which ones?”

“I don’t know. How about the white one over there? The one with the Three Buddha’s?”

“That’s about twenty-five dollars, and you don’t even want to know how much the brown one costs.”

That’s twenty-five bucks. Twenty-five clams for a bag only slightly larger than my backpack.

“How much?”

“You’re not going to believe this. Forty-five dollars.” The young Indian man (from India) looked surprised as he said it; though I’m sure it wasn’t the first time he said it.

“You’re kidding me. Rice is a staple, right?”

“We’ve stopped importing rice,” he said. “What we’ve got is what we’ve got. Prices won’t be going down until August.”

I didn’t do any fact checking on what he said, but my conversations with my brother back home in Houston seemed to confirm the young man’s assertions. And then I encounter this article today fresh off the Drudge Report:

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

“Where’s the rice?” an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. “You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous.”

The bustling store in the heart of Silicon Valley usually sells four or five varieties of rice to a clientele largely of Asian immigrants, but only about half a pallet of Indian-grown Basmati rice was left in stock. A 20-pound bag was selling for $15.99.

“You can’t eat this every day. It’s too heavy,” a health care executive from Palo Alto, Sharad Patel, grumbled as his son loaded two sacks of the Basmati into a shopping cart. “We only need one bag but I’m getting two in case a neighbor or a friend needs it,” the elder man said.

The Patels seemed headed for disappointment, as most Costco members were being allowed to buy only one bag. Moments earlier, a clerk dropped two sacks back on the stack after taking them from another customer who tried to exceed the one-bag cap.

“Due to the limited availability of rice, we are limiting rice purchases based on your prior purchasing history,” a sign above the dwindling supply said.

It looks like we’re going to be in for some chop. I think I’m not alone when I say that Americans are beginning to experience a profound unease with the direction of the world, as though we are looking down a precipice.

Some pundits and commentators in hopes to alleviate worries suggest that we aren’t, by definition, in a recession and it’s not yet time to panic. Some have even suggested that this pervasive sense that we’re at the end of an epoch is but a manufactured propaganda by the liberals and the Democratic Party. That may be so, but I don’t think this explains how completely non-political people– and I know many– people who couldn’t care less about politics– why they share the very same unease.

Be that as it may, the material fact of our situation portends danger in the future. It is a very straightforward equation and it’s rightly raising red flags all over. The world has X amount of fuel for motive power, i.e. petroleum, in a world of increasing demand. The world has X amount of food to feed itself, and farms across Asia and elsewhere are turning into desert, while other fields are diverted from food production to the creation of biofuels. All this combined with a tenuous stability in transportation, which is made more uncertain with the rise of piracy and terrorism, makes people rightly concerned about the future.

Where will all this lead?

When I finally got in my car and turned on the engine, I thought, perhaps I should have bought a bag of rice after all.