The "Bomshell" Video

So we're now reduced to this, recycling old video and calling it "shocking." Here, from Politico, is the previously unknown bit from the Obama 2007 Katrina speech tape that Drudge was pumping yesterday as huge:

Other parts are newly unearthed. Poor people “need help with basic skills, how to shop, how to show up for work on time, how to wear the right clothes, how to act appropriately in an office,” Obama said in what Drudge teased for hours as a particularly explosive line.

“We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs. We should be investing in minority-owned businesses, in our neighborhoods,” Obama also said, in another line that hadn’t been quoted until Tuesday.

Ooo my.

Joan Walsh does a nice job picking apart some particulars here, talking about things on the tape and context that the right is ignoring. As she notes, if a black politicians isn't allowed even to talk about racism and slavery without it being called racist, that's a pretty insane standard. So, Sean Hannity, let's also bar Irish politicians from ever talking about the British in any negative way.

Put plainly, this is racial panic. An attempt to scare white people all over again about what the black guy really thinks and "really' wants to do. These people have been dying to get Jeremiah Wright back in the picture, but I suspect that to most folks he's pretty old news. We'll see.

It's all part of the same right-wing dynamic. They "discover" something "shocking" about Obama. This, finally, will turn things! Then it doesn't. Then they have to figure out why. The answer always has to be that it's part of some conspiracy.

In reality, the answer is that to normal non right-wing people, their "discovery" simply isn't "shocking." But they can't accept that, so it has to be the media, Journolist, the pollsters, what have you. It never ends.

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Michael TomaskySpecial Correspondent

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