Wieseltier

There really is no shortage of nonsense to take issue with in this anti-Obama TNR diarist by Leon Wieseltier. For instance:

One of the striking features of Obama's victory speeches is the absence from these exultations of any lasting allusion to the darker dimensions of our strategic predicament....The most repercussive fact of our time is surely the transformation of China. The "metrics" are all staggering. Quantities, quantities, quantities. China already has the power to wreck the American economy. However many tanks and fighters it has, its hoarding of American dollars is itself a kind of arsenal. And the bounty of wealth that it promises American business, the fantasy of greed-fulfillment that it represents, makes it almost impossible to conduct a serious discussion of the implications of this emerging world power for American principles and American interests--certainly not in Washington, where, when it comes to the art of dodging debate, Beijing is better than Bandar. What China wants, China gets.

And indeed it's true: Barack Obama rarely discusses China's holdings in American currency. Neither, it seems to me, do John McCain or Hillary Clinton. Moreover, if one's serious about decreasing the risk that China sells off its holdings in the American economy, and serious about severing ties to shady Chinese businessmen, then one ought not support either the candidate who plans to continue George Bush's tax-cutting high-spending program of currency devaluation, or the candidate who has long-standing ties to shady Chinese businessmen.

And then there's this howler: "Thanks to the Obama campaign, millions of Americans now hold that John Kennedy was a great president and that Lyndon Johnson was not responsible for making civil rights and voting rights into law." Sadly I think that the millions of Americans who now hold that Kennedy was a great president held that idea long before Barack Obama was of voting age. I'd also venture that, because of this campaign more Americans (though probably not millions more) know now that Johnson wheeled the civil rights and voting acts into law. That, though, has much more to do with Hillary Clinton's insistence on the importance of political maneuvering than it does with Barack Obama's campaign, but it's not like they were out there denying or obscuring this. Whatever. Details, details.