Consistency: The Hobgoblin of Little Minds

Pete Wehner at the contentions site has these questions about Barack Obama:

1. If Obama’s fundamental identity is that he is unconnected with the tired old fights of the past and so in tune with our new era and the problems we confront, why is his record so seemingly out of sync with his core?

2. How is it that a man who promises to transcend old divisions and champion civility found himself attending a church and developing an intimate relationship with a pastor who spews anti-American and anti-white hatred on a regular basis and never once confronted him?

3. How is it that a man who promises the end the “culture wars” could not find it within himself to support a bill against infanticide–and then attempted to mislead the public when his record is revealed?

4. How can a person who promises to be a post-partisan unifier vote against two outstanding and exceptionally well-qualified Supreme Court Justices, John Roberts and Samuel Alito?

5. How is it that a man who promises to elevate our politics asserts, with absolutely no evidence, that John McCain is basing his campaign against Obama on ugly racial appeals?

6. How does a man who promised to be a principled figure who wouldn’t bend with the political breeze jettison his past views at a speed that is vertigo-inducing?

7. How did a man who insists he is anti-ideological and driven by evidence continue to deny the success of the surge when it was clear to every serious observer it was working?

8. And why does Obama still insist, even to this day, that he was right in opposing the surge?

Obama apparently still thinks his soaring rhetoric and field of dreams fantasizing allow him to leave the logical reasoning to the little minds for whom such details matter, and, with old Ralph Waldo Emerson, reify his status as Over Soul and skip any felt obligation to sew up those pesky loose ends.

Wherein he is sadly mistaken.