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The Mask Slips
New York Times ^ | 4/14/08 | William Kristol

Posted on 04/14/2008 1:26:06 AM PDT by MartinaMisc

I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s, when I taught political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, it didn’t take me long this weekend to find my copy of “The Marx-Engels Reader,” edited by Robert C. Tucker — a book that was assigned in thousands of college courses in the 1970s and 80s, and that now must lie, unopened and un-remarked upon, on an awful lot of rec-room bookshelves.

My occasion for spending a little time once again with the old Communist was Barack Obama’s now-famous comment at an April 6 San Francisco fund-raiser. Obama was explaining his trouble winning over small-town, working-class voters: “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

This sent me to Marx’s famous statement about religion in the introduction to his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”:

“Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.”

Or, more succinctly, and in the original German in which Marx somehow always sounds better: “Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes.”

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...


TOPICS: Editorial; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: 2008; billkristol; bitter; communism; elections; nobama; obama; obamafuscation; obamamarx; socialist; williamkristol
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To: wtc911; Roy Tucker; browneyedGAgirl

I’ve wondered about the number of “change agents” joining FR
seeking to “get feisty” over the critiquing of their favorite candidates. I laughed over Browneyed’s trumpeting of herself “as a BLACK WOMAN” in order to bolster her enlightened “experience” in cultural affairs as if being a “BLACK WOMAN” gives her extra moral clarity to judge the “typical” FREEPERS here. She sounds like she assumes that all Freepers are just “typical white people”...just like Obama’s grandma!


41 posted on 04/14/2008 5:24:04 AM PDT by mdmathis6
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To: prairiebreeze

place marker


42 posted on 04/14/2008 5:41:44 AM PDT by prairiebreeze (I am a proud supporter of Israel.)
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To: mdmathis6; Roy Tucker; browneyedGAgirl
“King Jaja” was another, did you catch his short-lived act? These quislings are so sure of their superiority that they are truly surprised to find that their game is so easily deconstructed.
43 posted on 04/14/2008 5:52:47 AM PDT by wtc911 ("How you gonna get back down that hill?")
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To: BufordP

“Another thing that gets me - what devout Christians would say people “cling to their religion” out of frustration?Seems more like something an atheist or agnostic would say.”

It does sound derogatory, like a child “clinging” to its security blanket. Like something that you grow out of when you mature. Since he is a professed christian, why does he have a problem with people turning to religion? Unless he sees it as a bad thing.


44 posted on 04/14/2008 6:03:06 AM PDT by Hacklehead (Crush the liberals, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the hippies.)
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To: Amos the Prophet

“The only justification for maintaining a black experience is cultural and Barry does not share a black cultural experience. He is a white man raised in a white culture by his own white family. That he chooses to align himself with black extremism says more about the man than it does about his genes.”

So by your ridiculous argument, in the movie “The Jerk” Steve Martin really was “a poor black child”.


45 posted on 04/14/2008 6:09:46 AM PDT by Hacklehead (Crush the liberals, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the hippies.)
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To: wtc911

The viking kitties are gonna be eating a lot of troll meat this election season!


46 posted on 04/14/2008 6:13:57 AM PDT by mdmathis6
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To: wtc911

No question. . .and we cannot forget the heritage that ‘political correctness’ shares as well, which facilitates the agenda of the Left; they simply take your ‘mind’. Makes their task so much easier.


47 posted on 04/14/2008 6:24:42 AM PDT by cricket (Damn Political Correctness; before it irretrievably, damns us all. . .)
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To: wtc911

I didn’t catch King Jaja....did the Viking kitties get him?


48 posted on 04/14/2008 6:34:41 AM PDT by mdmathis6
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To: Just mythoughts
But of course, have you seen WHO these people are that Obama was comfortable to make the fund raising comments to??? A group of rich white people at the Getty Mansion on Billionaire's Row in San Francisco

Sometimes I think the only problem with Jeremiah Wright's remarks about rich white people is that he criticized them for the wrong reason.

49 posted on 04/14/2008 6:55:24 AM PDT by murdoog (I)
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To: Beckwith

I think it would be more accurate to say that Obama converted to Black Theology rather than Christianity.


50 posted on 04/14/2008 6:55:33 AM PDT by ChocChipCookie (<----- Typical White Person)
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To: Amos the Prophet
He is a white man raised in a white culture by his own white family. That he chooses to align himself with black extremism says more about the man than it does about his genes.

YES! And what possible reasons could explain that choice?
51 posted on 04/14/2008 7:01:30 AM PDT by ChocChipCookie (<----- Typical White Person)
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To: Triple

“opium masks pain and does not cure”

True enough, but there were very few real cures of any sort in the 1840’s when Marx wrote. Most things either killed you outright or left you with chronic pain. That’s where opium had its value, not in curing anything, but in reducing pain enough to make an otherwise unbearable life worth living.


52 posted on 04/14/2008 7:27:14 AM PDT by Stirner
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To: browneyedGAgirl

I see, when you asked me to define the Black American experience and I did, then any answer would have been “preposterous.” Is it only allowed to be answered by Black Americans?

I will ignore your risible insults to my intelligence for the sake of enlightenment.

How would you define the Black American experience? Is there a shared one? If Black Americans are held down by race, why is it that second-generation Caribbean Americans have higher educational and income attainment than American whites as a whole? Is it fair to say that the experience for blacks in the last 40 years in America might be different than the experience of blacks growing up in America from 1900 to 1940? Better or worse?

There seems to be a lot of anger on your part which is somewhat hard to understand. I think the original question on this thread was why Barack Obama when he became a Christian did not take a Christian name? Others have at far greater cost as I have demonstrated in some of my posts.


53 posted on 04/14/2008 7:53:11 AM PDT by Roy Tucker ("You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."--Ayn Rand)
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To: MartinaMisc

I don’t normally have a lot of regard for this metrosexual, but Kristol is right on.


54 posted on 04/14/2008 8:00:54 AM PDT by gogeo (Democrats want to support the troops by accusing them of war crimes.)
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To: Hacklehead
So by your ridiculous argument, in the movie “The Jerk” Steve Martin really was “a poor black child”.

By your ridiculous example the Jerk had a deeper black experience than Barry.

Do I sense you are becoming testy?

As to your leeward island friends, those I have met from Barbados and Trinidad do not identify with the black culture in the US.

You may insist upon being a racist all you like. It is simply true, however, that skin color does not determine cultural experience.

55 posted on 04/14/2008 8:11:23 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell (here come I, gravitas in tow.)
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To: cricket
Truth needs it's speakers, if it is to prevail...

Great post.

We're a country divided by a common language...and opposing world views.

We on the right speak and assume a purpose in speaking. The left uses language in a different way and for a different purpose.

The left understands that. We ignore it at our peril.

56 posted on 04/14/2008 8:14:23 AM PDT by gogeo (Democrats want to support the troops by accusing them of war crimes.)
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To: browneyedGAgirl
Please enlighten this black woman on what exactly is the Black American experience and how you feel Obama didn't share it.

I would Please enlighten a black woman on what exactly the Black American Experience is and how Obama didn't share it exactly the same way I would enlighten anybody else.

But, frankly, I am happy to leave the whole matter obscure because I think all this posturing over the Black American Experience is nonsense, anyway.

57 posted on 04/14/2008 8:19:23 AM PDT by gridlock (Proud McCain Supporter since February 8, 2008.)
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To: ChocChipCookie
I think it would be more accurate to say that Obama converted to Black Theology rather than Christianity.

I have no problem with that view.
58 posted on 04/14/2008 8:59:23 AM PDT by Beckwith ('Typical White Person')
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To: Amos the Prophet

“You may insist upon being a racist all you like. It is simply true, however, that skin color does not determine cultural experience.”

First off, I made no comments regarding my leeward-island friends so you must have confused me with someone else. Perhaps that also accounts for your absurd attempt to label me a racist. In any case to say that a very dark skinned man has the same racial experience as a white man is absurd on its face. He may have different attitudes due to upbringing, but people’s reaction and attitudes towards him in school or society may be very different. For example, a black man and a white man walking through some inner city neighborhoods or hick towns may have very different experiences regardless of who raised them.


59 posted on 04/14/2008 9:10:05 AM PDT by Hacklehead (Crush the liberals, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the hippies.)
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To: Amos the Prophet
It is simply true, however, that skin color does not determine cultural experience.

I think it was Oprah who once said that if she were to get married, she'd have more in common with a white man from a middle-class upbringing than a black man from the rural south. It is all cultural.

FWIW, Obama has set back race relations decades as far as I'm concerned. My whole life I have looked at people as just people, all from one race -- the human race. I assumed they viewed me the same way. Now when I see black people, I wonder how they view me? Deep inside are they resentful of me in the way that Jeremiah Wright is of all white people? I never used to think that way until this whole Obama/Wright thing came up.
60 posted on 04/14/2008 9:35:50 AM PDT by ChocChipCookie (<----- Typical White Person)
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