Not exactly the dialog he had in mind, ya think?

Prefacing first with a cautionary old joke…

Two devout old Irish Catholic immigrant women had been feuding their entire lives. One Sunday morning Mary O’Shaunessey is just leaving St. Patrick’s after the Mass, still on the very steps, when she’s confronted by her nemesis Mary O’Haggerty, who promptly begins haranguing and reviling her.

Mary #1 draws herself up and indignantly replies, “Why, isn’t this just like you to be takin’ advantage o’ the situation, revilin’ me while I’m still in a state of grace!” Then her face clouds over and she begins wagging her finger as she advances on her foe; “But don’t you worry- I shan’t be in a state of grace for long, and then you’d best be watchin’ yer back!”

The humor comes from the recognition of how close that story comes to the feelings we’ve all had of being pulled back into the “same old same old” mundane reality, after having just left a transcendent worship experience feeling all blessed and blissed. It’s one reason I like to take off Bright Monday from work each year after Pascha, and why I enjoy and appreciate the tradition of observing Advent and the twelve days of Christmas- to revel in the joy of the feasts, the encounter with the true Reality, and postpone my return to the pseudo-reality.

It would be too depressing to think that I was returning to nothing more than the same level I had started from. As one hip poster from the hip era said, “The only Evidence of Life is Growth, and the only Evidence of Growth is Change”. I would hope that I not only end each year, or each feast, but even each day with at least some growth, that I never step into the same river twice, as they say.

Having said all that, I emerge from the most recent season of fast and feast, and look at the current state of the Presidential campaign. How can I not smile, unworthy man that I am?

This Washington Times article is titled, “Obama: ‘Voters tired of Wright issue’“. Oh, doesn’t he just wish they were! Having disowned the man he only recently and so nobly avowed that he could never disown, he obviously hopes that he has effectively disengaged himself from any future (and predictable) rants of Rev. Wright. Better late than never, but the question- totally valid- remains… why so late? Why only now? And isn’t it still valid to ponder how this reflects on your campaign theme of “Judgment to Lead”? Can we risk hoping, as one pundit wondered, whether you’ll be more attentive to your daily National Security Briefing than you were to your pastor’s preaching for 20 years?

Victor Davis Hanson on the subject, here, along with reflections on the paranoid element in the Obamas’ worldview. I recall the old Cold War era sci-fi movie “Them!“, particularly the title-derived scene where the little girl, traumatized into a near-catatonic silence by an attack of giant mutant ants, smells their scent and shreaks “Them!”. Now, substitute in Barrack or Michelle Obama for the little girl.

This is not simply the pleasure at seeing a normal, standard issue opponent publicly embarrassed and discomfited. It is a great sigh of relief and hope (audacious or otherwise) that the absurdly hyperinflated adulation of a mortal man, almost deified by his partisans, must (surely must) now come to it’s richly deserved end.

I missed Michelle Obama’s speech back in February about how her husband President Obama would fix our souls (see this column). Folks, this is profoundly disturbing stuff, and frightening that this was said back in February, and instead of being hooted off the national stage he went on to amass more and more millions in donations, more primary victories, more fawning media coverage. God help us.

In any event, things aren’t going quite as hoped for in the Obama campaign. Maybe the Rev. Wright’s rants, and those of his apologists, actually will succeed in sparking the great national dialog on race that Obama prescribed for us- but it certainly won’t be the kind of dialog he imagined! No indeed…

Here are the sobering numbers (lots and lots of them) from today’s Rasmussen Presidential Tracking Poll. Yikes, as they say.

G. Rodriguez, Hispanic columnist in the Los Angeles Times, wonders what kind of great national debate Obama had in mind if his reaction to hearing someone speak his mind is to disown him. Good question, but unfortunately… who cares? No one took it seriously anyhow. Just political manuevering and damage control.