Bill Maher about Barack Obama: "I think he's a centrist the way he's a Christian... not really."

Via Instapundit:



And Cornel West says "being a Christian is not a political orientation for the President." Oh, thanks for putting it that way. An apt turn of words, Cornel. Because that's exactly what I think Obama's Christianity is: a political orientation.

My source? I said it before:

My source is "Dreams from My Father," chapter 14. While working as a community organizer, Obama was told that it would "help [his] mission if [he] had a church home" and that Jeremiah Wright "might be worth talking to" because "his message seemed to appeal to young people like [him]." Obama wrote that "not all of what these people [who went to Trinity] sought was strictly religious... it wasn't just Jesus they were coming home to." He was told that "if you joined the church you could help us start a community program," and he didn't want to "confess that [he] could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly." He was, he writes, "a reluctant skeptic." Thereafter, he attends a church service and hears Wright give a sermon titled "The Audacity of Hope" (which would, of course, be the title of Obama's second book). He describes how moved he was by the service, but what moves him is the others around him as they respond to a sermon about black culture and history. He never says he felt the presence of God or accepted Jesus as his savior or anything that suggests he let go of his skepticism. Obama's own book makes him look like an agnostic (or an atheist). He respects religion because he responds to the people who believe, and he seems oriented toward leveraging the religious beliefs of the people for worldly, political ends.

Let's compare 2 men and 2 women in the same situation — about to hang up the phone.

2 men (the subject is Israel):



2 women (talking about Obama's and Palin's books):



Discuss!

"The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle."

That sentence, written by Sarah Palin, is howlingly awful. Written by Barack Obama? Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Ha ha. That takes me back to last week... a very short snippet, forgive me:



(Click to continue if you want to hear me trash the liberal's self-love over nuance.)

AND: You know, I'll admit it: After I found out Obama wrote that sentence, it started looking better to me. I could feel this happening and I paid attention to the readjustment going on in my brain. Unlike some people, I am not inhibited about revealing it. It's what I'm interested in: how people think, how mental processes work, how opinions take shape. That, and not adhering to an ideology or supporting a party, is what I think about when I write about politics. I'm different from politicos like Goldberg, and I know that this difference can be very disturbing to them. I've got a hypothesis that when I've gotten into fights in the blogosphere and in the real world — like here — it's been because of this different orientation of mine. Oh, why won't liberals celebrate this difference? Just kidding. I know it drives them up a wall. It drives conservatives and libertarians up the wall too. It's disarmingly unpolitical.