Jewlicious: If you're going to try to engage with what I wrote, have the decency of reading my name.  The folks at Ellis Island did an better job of anglicizing my name than they did with most Jews. 

Now to the meat: I'm just asking you to see a little depth in the situation.  You're sticking with the superficiality of a few clips that eager O'Reilly staffers found by parsing through decades of videotape.  And your gripe about the troubles of Jews in America (not nothing, but I maintain nearly nothing compared to blacks' troubles) betrays your inability to understand the root cause driving Wright and his congregation.  Obama asked you to walk a mile in their shoes.  You've failed here.  Not him.

I wasn't an early Obama supporter.  Let me tell you, as a young male at an overwhelmingly liberal law school last year, that was a very hard thing to be.  Not an Obama supporter.  Early on there didn't seem to be much more than that overwhelming personality.  When the substance started to fill in, perhaps slower than I would have liked, I allowed my head to follow my gut and told my friends who had up and quit Hilary's law school to work for Obama that I was on board.

 Once I was confident that I supported his policies, I allowed his message to seep in, and really it is something incredible.  The difference between personality cults and leadership is that it's not about him.  It's about what he wants the nation to be.  He's a medium for inclusion, for the healing of wounds that have wracked this country since the founding.  Gary Kamiya explained it with an eloquence light years beyond my own yesterday in Salon: http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/02/05/obama_race/

Now Chabon's point is simply that a part of Obama's message is to believe in the possibility of politics that transcend the internecine bickering of the 90s and the fear-mongering of the last six years.  Of course Obama's message for the country puts him in the drivers seat as both messenger and target of his message.  But you can't blame him for crafting a campaign that thrives on momentum.  Chabon asks for people to appeal to their own higher sensibilities.  That is certainly a message. 

It's also a whole lot better message than calling for "no-process" expedited removal for legally admitted immigrants convicted of minor crimes, defending a vote for the Iraq War, or a wave of visceral, personal attacks carried out by hatchet-men reminiscent of the Bush attack machines of 1992, 2000, and 2004.  Hillary Clinton would make a good president.  A fine president.  But we can do better.

PS - "Yes we can" dates back to the  United Farm Workers strike of 1972.  Don't debase yourself with useless digs.

It's somewhere in the diplomatic protocol of the UN, but I know it's codified in the statutes/regulations governing a C-2 class visa.

Still don't know if i passed the bar.

More work for you maybe, but perhaps in the spirit of Jewcy you could set up an area for "Off-Topic Topics" where people could see what gets posted and removed? Just slap a topic on it and put in in a folder? And if it generates its own separate debate, run a link to it from the Schvitz or something.

Basically, I think a lot of what the writers here have to say would be moved to "the netherworld" on some more "mainstream" sites. Best not to allow some animals to be more equal than others once we put the animals in charge...