Lipstick and Towers

“…What worries me more about Barack Obama is not his use of hoary old sayings, but his judgment; he’s running for the position of commander-in-chief, after all.

In his acclaimed bestseller, Dreams from My Father, he wrote, “I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder—alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware—is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.”

That worries me, and not because I am without compassion for hardship. There is humiliation and fury on Chicago’s South Side. And there is humiliation and fury among Muslims and Catholics alike in Pakistan. But Hamas’s hatred for the Jews in Israel is a specific and evil thing that does not need to be understood as much as it needs to be condemned and stopped. And the men who murdered 3,000 of us on September 11, 2001, hate those who live on Chicago’s South Side as much as they hate the wealthy folks who work on Wall Street.

Seven years after the attacks on my city and our country, no lipstick can gloss over the truth: There is a war on. And I’m not sure the Democratic party — the party that ostracized Joe Lieberman simply for daring to support our effort in Iraq — gets it.”

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.