Megapundit: And suddenly, Stockwell Day makes sense

By selley - Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 2:07 PM - 1 Comment

Must-reads: Don Macpherson on the Quebec election.

The day after the morning after
Audacity of hope, please meet the $455-billion deficit.

The Toronto Star’s Bob Hepburn elevates himself from the merely inimitable to the almost unbelievable by painting a portrait of an America that, despite having just elected its first black president, has achieved basically nothing in the field of race relations. A white Democratic candidate might well have done better, he suggests, and there will apparently be “55 million Americans who voted against [Barack] Obama … watching for him to stumble.” When he does, Hepburn predicts, many white people, such as an idiot friend of his who couldn’t decide on Tuesday whether she could bring herself to vote for a Muslim, “will be saying smugly to their friends: ‘I told you so!’” Now, we’re not saying Obama’s victory solved anything as far as day-to-day race relations. But Hepburn’s operating assumption here seems to be that every single American voted on the basis of race! It’s true, as he says, that nearly 90 per cent of white Mississippians voted for McCain and 98 per cent of black Mississippians voted for Obama, but the numbers in 2004 were 85 and 90, respectively, and John Kerry—last we checked, anyway—is quite fair-skinned. So the situation would seem to be rather more complex.

The Star’s Haroon Siddiqui, meanwhile, is well chuffed with Obama’s victory in a general sense, arguing he’s done nothing less than “make Americans rediscover the common weal.” But the president-elect needs improvements in the following areas: Afghanistan, where he “think[s] mostly in terms of a major military surge” instead of negotiations, and Pakistan, where he’s suggested “cross-border attacks” instead of a “Marshall Plan-like economic blueprint for the border region where [Taliban] militants are recruited.” Nevertheless, Siddiqui argues, Obama is already being well-received in the Muslim world, if only because he pronounces Taliban “taa-li-baan” rather than “tay-le-ban.” (Really? Who the hell says “tay-le-ban”?)

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Megapundit: Unscrambling the egg, vexedly

By selley - Monday, November 3, 2008 at 4:09 PM - 9 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Rex Murphy on the Martin memoirs; Haroon Siddiqui on Barack Obama; Gary Mason on Robert Dziekanski; Jeffrey Simpson on the Tories in Quebec; Chantal Hébert on Iggy’s chances; Robert Fulford on gambling; Randall Denley on frugality.

The fat lady, or the choir of angels?
Canadian pundits have apparently never heard of the jinx.

The Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson attempts to explain the historical significance of Barack Obama, who isn’t just black, but potentially the first “northern liberal” president since John F. Kennedy. “His victory would acknowledge an ongoing reformation of the republic: the halting, inconstant but unmistakable breaking down of barriers; the political debut of a new generation; the transformation of whole regions of the nation,” Ibbitson argues. It would embarrass “those skeptics who believe [the United States] is a failing giant.” Heck, he’s already “re-enfranchised African Americans” and “convinced Latinos to submerge racial suspicions toward African Americans and join them in common cause,” and he hasn’t even won!

The Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui recaps all the indignities Obama has faced from various Republicans determined to make his race and his purported Islamic faith defining issues among the rednecks. And he suggests it was Colin Powell’s powerful endorsement, during which he asked why a young Muslim shouldn’t (hypothetically) aspire to be President, that really highlighted the meaning of the campaign. “By just being who he is,” Siddiqui concludes, he “has put fellow Americans on an irreversible journey to national reconciliation.”

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