Special Super Journamalism Barack-Atah-Adonai-Elohenu-Melech-Ha-Olam Shabbat Candle-Lighting Blogging!!

UPDATE: UPDATE: The Politico appears to have skimped on net infrastructure:

http://dyn.politico.com/comments_all.cfm?uuid=A7248F96-3048-5C12-007B35A127E27946&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Epolitico%2Ecom%2Fnews%2Fstories%2F0207%2F2694%2Ehtm: 500 Not enough storage is available to process this command. Not enough storage is available to process this command

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Friday at sundown is a fitting moment to take note of a particularly pathetic piece of Journamalism from Mike Allen at the Politico.

You see, Mike Allen begins his trashing of Barack Obama. Understand: Mike Allen isn't doing the trashing--oh no no no. Mike Allen is just saying what the critics of Obama will say.

Let's give Mike the mike, and watch him take his dive:

The Politico: Barack Obama’s free ride is ending.... Obama’s about to endure a going-over that would make a proctologist blush. Why has he sometimes said his first name is Arabic, and other times Swahili?... [T]he long knives will be out for Obama.... Officials at the top of both parties calculate that Obama has risen too fast... “vapid platitudes” that could produce a “soufflé effect.”... “With a couple of pinpricks here and there, the whole thing could fall apart.”...

Even his name offers fodder for the critics. When he was growing up, his family, friends and teachers called him “Barry.” Then as a young man, he started insisting on “Barack,” explaining in a memoir published in 1995 that his grandfather was a Muslim and that it means “blessed” in Arabic. His dad, who was Kenyan, had gone by “Barry” -- probably trying to fit in when he came to the States, his son figured. On the campaign trail during his 2004 Senate race, Obama told reporters that “Barack” was Swahili for “blessed by God.” Whatever its origins, the exotic, multicultural name...

Two minutes of Googling would have told Mike Allen that "barack" is both a Swahili word meaning "blessed by God" and an Arabic word meaning "blessed." There's been lots of trade between Swahili-speaking East Africa and the Arabic-speaking Middle East for millennia. That "barack" is a word in both languages is part of the same process by which the largest Swahili-speaking port in the world has a pure Arabic name--Dar es Salaam, meaning "House of Peace."

But Allen doesn't tell his readers any of this, does he?

And this "exotic, multicultural name" business... "Barack" is so exotic and multicultural that five million Americans are supposed to say it at sundown every Friday night... the same word b•r•k in a Hebrew rather than an Arabic accent: "baruch":

"Baruch atah Adonai Elohenu melech ha'olam, asher kideshanu bemitzvotav vetzivanu l'hadlik ner shel Shabbat." "Blessed are you, O Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who has made us holy by your commandments and told us to light the Sabbath lights."

Five minutes' acquaintance with Judaism would have taught Mike Allen that b•r•k is about as exotic as the synagogue down the street, wouldn't it? About as unusual in America as the last name of Bernard Baruch, advisor to Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.

But Allen doesn't tell his readers any of this, does he?

And, of course, the same prayer beginning b•r•k is at the heart of most Christian services:

Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread of offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life...

An hour's acquaintance with Christianity, and Mike Allen could have learned other things--for example, that Jesus Christ says b•r•k eight times in a row at the beginning of eight consecutive sentences at the start of the fifth chapter of Matthew when he begins his Sermon on the Mount.

So why doesn't Mike Allen tell any of this to his readers?

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

How much did they pay you, Mike? In what coin?

Comments

[jerry]

In fact at shul, most of the Barry's around you are known as "Baruch". So Barry Obama's dad wasn't doing anything all that strange.

[Gene O'Grady]

It's too bad Groucho Marx is no longer with us, or Mike Allen could have nailed as to whether his first name (Julius) was German or Latin.

[trotsky]

Funny, I spent almost a year of my wayward youth in Yeshiva, but it had never occured to me that Barack = Baruch.

But then, I never much cared about his first name. Now Obama -- that's a suspicious name.

[Porlock Junior]

"How much did they pay you, Mike? In what coin?"

That's not hard.

So King John calls the Abbot of Canterbury to answer three tough questions, losing his head if he gets any wrong. After a year in which to work them out, he goes to London and deals with the first one:

"And first, as thou seest me sitting here,
With my crown of gold on my head so fair,
Among my liegemen of noble birth,
Tell to one penny what I am worth."

"For thirty pence our Saviour was sold
Among the false Jews as I have been told;
And twenty-nine is the worth of thee;
For I think thou are one penny worse than he."

Sounds about right.

Sorry about the false Jews, but thisis an oldish English ballad after all and wouldn't sound authentic without a bit of anti-Semitism. Anyway it was the Abbot's jester in disguise:
http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/2030/kingjohn.htm

[Jon Fernquest]

I'm surprised you didn't give Mike Allen's failed attempt to defame Barack Obama an "utter stupidity" tag.

Names are tremendously malleable things for everyone including the most mainstream European ethnicities themselves.

My Swedish great-grandfather changed "Fernquist" to "Fernquest" supposedly to sound more English. If you look in Stockholm phonebooks, it's actually "Farnkvist" with two dots over the "a", with some "Fernquists" but absolutely no "Fernquests". Similarly, the seemingly Italian sociologist of warfare "Andreski" was actually born "Stanislaw Andrzejewski" i.e. Polish.

Working at a newspaper in Thailand, one is continually faced with name problems. Thai names that have been transliterated into Roman alphabet in two different ways. The necessity of shortening long Pali derived names into short nicknames so that people can remember who they are. The strange anomaly that the first and not the last name is often more uniquely identifying. In most cultures, the female does not change their name when they get married, so names do not uniquely identify families, but in America this can lead to all sorts of false implications....

Mike Allen should stop trying to be such a knee-jerk motor mouth and, instead, sit down for a moment and seriously study ***what names and naming actually is, not what he thinks it is.***

[rilkefan]

"Whatever its origins, the exotic, multicultural name..."

This is a plain simple fact.

[That b•r•k is the beginning of the prayer said with every lighting of the Friday Sabbath candles is also a plain simple fact. That b•r•k is the first word of each of the first eight sentences of Jesus Christ's Sermon on the Mount is also a plain simple fact. What determines that Allen reports some "plain, simple facts" but not others?]

Maybe it's a lamentable one, but if Obama's name was Michael Allen or David Johnson he'd have a better chance at becoming the nominee. "[W]hat names and naming actually is" isn't of much relevance here.

[ken melvin]

Speaking of schools, Mike sounds about fifth grade.

[John Emerson]

Rilkefan, Allen could have reported the story without helping the morons along. He didn't have to relay the scuttlebutt he was fed. He seems to have drawn the line at the antiChrist rumors, but maybe he's saving that for a later article.

"Is Barrack Obama, in fact really the Antichrist? There's obviously no way to know for sure, and he himself denies it. Nonetheless....."

[Ted]

Mike Allen could have simply written:

"I talked to some people who get paid to say bad things about Barack Obama, and the best they could come up with is 'He's got a funny name.'"

[Randolph Fritz]

Yes, Arabic and Hebrew are closely-related Semitic languages. O the embarassment!

"No battle so bitter As that between brothers."

[Dave in NYC]

Yeah, someone should also tell him about Baruch College, which is part of the City University of New York and has 16,500 students.

[pseudonymous in nc]

Barack = Baruch = Benedict, the name chosen by the Pope.

(Spinoza was called 'Benedict' by the Latin-speaking world.)

[infoshaman]

Or Mike Allen could have simply written:

"As a child Barack was taught,
Sticks and stones may break my bones may break my bones,
but words will never hurt me.
Don't you believe it.

(Signed) The Lost Boys"

[Kate G]

Great post, brad. This whole baruch/barak thing just cracks me the hell up and I was just thinking it when I lit the sabbath candles (yes, even atheists do it!) on friday night.

Kate G.

[Zeno]

So why doesn't Mike Allen tell any of this to his readers?

Because he doesn't know and can't be bothered to find out! (His mind is made up. Facts would only confuse him.)

[bob somerby]

I think Brad fumbles one key point here. He keeps asking why Allen didn't explain the details of the matter he was discussinging. The actual question must be different if we want to regain an intelligent discourse. Here is that question: Why is Allen discussing this nonsense at all? Allen uses bungled facts--in a discussion of total trivia. We have to take away the trivia, not insist that scribes discuss trivia in a more accurate way.

[BroD]

Gotta say that post was pretty damn good.

[Robert Waldmann]

Brade you meshugena, Swahili, like Yiddish, Urdu and various Creoles, is a hybrid language. From its origen it was a mix of Arabic and local African languages. It is the sort of language that develops when people with different native languages attempt to communicate, but aren't much worried about politeness (Dar es Salaam was a slaver port for centuries).

[Kate G]

Robert,
shouldn't that be "brad, you meschugena, Swahili, like Yiddish, Urdu and various creoles is a total tsimmis."

Kate G.

[Michael Bérubé]

Barack = Baruch!?!? OMG!!! Somebody tell Bill Donohue, quick: Baruch Obama controls Hollywood!

I look forward to hearing more about this next week from John Gibson at Fox News.

[divadab]

What Robert Waldman said, and a little more - Swahili is a patois, a trade language, a creole version of Arabic, with some African vocabulary and grammar. However, IMHO (not a linguist, just an amateur), Yiddish is more of a true dialect of German. Consider its name: Juden Deutche = Jewish German = Yiddish. The main difference is the large hebrew-derived vocabulary. Ask any German dialect speaker (arnold Shwarzenegger speaks an Austrian dialect, eg)- they can understand yiddish, in the main.

BTW - excellent post, kind sir.

[P O'Neill]

One service Allen is providing is that because The Politico is more focused just on the reporting of former political beat reporters at bigger publications, we get a clearer view of the same shite that was buried in the larger paper/magazine when they worked there.

[jri]

"So why doesn't Mike Allen tell any of this to his readers?"

Because Allen in probably totally ignorant of any kind of real sociological or theological facts.

[oudemia]

Well, Mr. Jesus from Nazareth might have been saying "baruch" at the start of those sentences, but of course in Matthew all you'll see is "makarioi" -- it's in Greek.

[John Emerson]

Swahili is a real Bantu language with about 800,000 native speakers, but is more widely spoken as a trade language. It is heavily influenced by Arabic, but isn't really a hybrid language. Yiddish is a dialect of German heavily influenced by Hebrew (and other neighboring languages). Urdu is like Hindi, but heavily influenced by Persian and Turkish.

The script used doesn't affect a language's classification, but Urdu and Swahili are written in Arabic script, and Yiddish in Hebrew script.

[Pudentilla]

The business about media coverage of Obama before the mighty Mike Allen being nothing but hagiography is also - what's the word - wrong:

On February 12, 1996, the Chicago Sun Times ran an article about Obama with the headline “Candidate not what he seems, foes insist” which included the following graph:

Adolph Reed jr., a progressive Northwestern University professor of political science, condemns obama as a politician with "impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics." Robert T. Starks, another academic-activist who serves as chairman of the task force for black political empowerment, says Obama is the tool of forces outside the black community.

oops. The idea that media coverage of any politician in Chicago (Chicago!) would ever be hagiographic is so self-evidently ludicrous that one pauses in admiration at the sheer laziness of Mike Allen. In other words, more evidence that not merely is the mighty Mike Allen lazy, he's a mendacious bag of excrement!

[Doctor Biobrain]

For anyone interested, I wrote more about why reporters do this at my blog:
http://biobrain.blogspot.com/2007/02/news-for-sale.html

[John Emerson]

Oops. Swahili is now written in roman script. Originally it was Arabic script.

[rilkefan]

'That b•r•k is the beginning of the prayer said with every lighting of the Friday Sabbath candles is also a plain simple fact. That b•r•k is the first word of each of the first eight sentences of Jesus Christ's Sermon on the Mount is also a plain simple fact. What determines that Allen reports some "plain, simple facts" but not others?'

Perhaps relevance to Obama's electability is worth mentioning? If in some pony-world the fact that his first name is related to a word that (I guess) the average Jew and all but the extraordinary Christian would fail to understand in the voting booth - repeating, related, as "Ivan" is related to "Evan", as "the lightning bug and the lightning" - what about his last name? What about his middle name, which Allen managed not to note? This isn't a good article, but it speaks to an important hurdle Obama faces in a country where 70 or 80% of voters don't have passports.

[Brad DeLong]

A correspondent writes:

"Something very weird happened to Mike after he left The Post.... Back when he was still here, The Post didn't much encourage reporters to go on TV, so for Mike that (and the ensuing recognition) became a much bigger factor when he arrived at Time.

"If I had to guess, I would say that the whole cable/TV nexus swiftly corrupted him. He realized that in that world, there was no margin in being reasoned, responsible, even sometimes explaining away political shibolleths. In fact, doing so would get you 1) mocked as a shill 2) potentially sneered at as a liberal and 3) not invited back....

"Now, at Politico, a place that is desperate to be loved, judged by the attention it gets, and whoring for pageviews, ---he has become a perfect conduit of the baseless snark that infests the political sewer-class, aimed almost exclusively at those who are sincerely trying to make a difference in this world..."

[Enoch Root]

The point here is not to smear Obama, though that's a nice side-effect. The point is to control the discourse, no matter how petty the controlling factor. The Right-Wing Noise Machine has to keep spitting out narratives for others to pick up on, or the system might start thinking its own thoughts, and that could be bad. That's the danger of a Noise Machine: It'll keep making noise even if you don't want it to. So you feed it stuff about Barak Obama, or Nancy Pelosi's plane, or whatever.

It's time to start out-noise-ifying the noise machine.

[Barkley Rosser]

Probably Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount in Aramaic, not Hebrew. I do not know what the equivalent word in that language is, but given its close relationship to both Hebrew and Arabic, it is probably also spelled b*r*k.

[John Emerson]

Rilkefan, Allen's piece was a faux-objective concern-troll piece in which various anonymous opponents of Obama are allowed to float lightweight speculation about his weakspots. He relays a worst-case treatment of the fluff problem with Barack/Barry's first name.

Brad wasn't really giving a reasoned critique of Allen's silly story, or assessing the actual electoral importance of the Barack/Barry question. He was just pushing back at an unfriendly, silly article. I thought he did great job.

I agree that Brad's post isn't going to win the election all by itself, but he succeeded in trumping Allen's inane sillines, so good for him.

[rilkefan]

"Brad wasn't really giving a reasoned critique of Allen's silly story"

Ok, fine, whatever then.

"He was just pushing back at an unfriendly, silly article. I thought he did great job."

I thought he could have made fun of Allen's inability to google without avoiding the real problem Allen's getting at. When I at least read something which critiques a silly article using largely irrelevant reasoning, I ask myself if the underlying issue could be more important than I thought it was.

Off to find the Jewish cognate of "Hussein" for the next go-round.

[Sam L.]

Among other stunningly stupid aspects of the article was Allen saying that Obama has an anemic policy record AND is much too liberal, both at the same time.

[Sam L.]

Among other stunningly stupid aspects of the article was Allen saying that Obama has an anemic policy record AND is much too liberal, both at the same time.

[PaulGBrown]

I think I agree with Enoch Root (or is it, Enoch the Red? Germany just isn't the same since that damnable french woman's commodities trading caused the collapse of the guilder! But I digress ...)

The point here is simply to pollute the public sphere and to poison the highly visible names of your enemies by associating them with negatives. By getting ahead of the story (which will, I bet you all, shortly turn into one where the meme is 'Boy. People are writing lots of bad things about Barack Obama; things like this, and this, and this, and that, and the other thing. Why can that be?") the Mike Allens and their paymasters can shape it.

Bob Somerby's idealism is all very well and good. In a perfect world substance would marginalize style. But given that we live in an imperfect world where the rules determing what 'ought' to happen are not our preferred rules, then at least we should demand that the rules we are told do exist (balance, accuracy, completeness) are actually applied.

[Bruce Webb]

"Well, Mr. Jesus from Nazareth might have been saying "baruch" at the start of those sentences, but of course in Matthew all you'll see is "makarioi" -- it's in Greek."

Did Jesus speak Hebrew? Or was the Sermon on the Mount delivered in Aramaic? Given that the languages are related there is a good chance that it was "baruch" or something close and I am sure someone out there knows but really this is just stupid.

People who insist on Biblical literalism and yet lack of total unawareness of the difficulties of a text which has gone through a bewildering series of translations and multiple attempts to reconcile the various versions and texts would be amusing if the results weren't so serious.

Once you start playing games with etymology then all sorts of mischief can result. According to this source 'blessing' derives from 'bloodmarked' and has no cognates:

O.E. bletsian, bledsian, Northumbrian bloedsian "to consecrate, make holy," from P.Gmc. *blothisojan "mark with blood," from *blotham "blood" (see blood). Originally a blood sprinkling on pagan altars. This word was chosen in O.E. bibles to translate L. benedicere and Gk. eulogein, both of which have a ground sense of "to speak well of, to praise," but were used in Scripture to translate Heb. brk "to bend (the knee), worship, praise, invoke blessings." Meaning shifted in late O.E. toward "to confer happiness, well-being," by resemblance to unrelated bliss. No cognates in other languages. Blessing is O.E. bledsung.

Okay, it seems odd that there is no relation with French "blesse" wounded, but either way "Blood marked/wounded are the meek" even with the roundabout notion of consecrated points up the danger of the untrained linguistic historian playing around in this minefield.

Just because language feels like air and comes natural doesn't mean everyone is qualified to be a blowhard.

[Polly]

Look at the Old Testament.

The Book of Baruch (modern spelling), right after Jeremiah and Lamentations.

When Yahweh was spelled Jehovah, Baruch could have been spelled Barack. Still can, transliteration is a tricky thing. Think of the many similarities between Arabic and Hebrew words.

[John Emerson]

Gee, Rilkefan, without you and Allen to tell me about it, I would have thought that there could be **no possible problem at all** with Obama's ethnic background. Instead of nitpicking, Brad and I should have been thanking the two of you for opening our eyes to THE TRUTH.

Oh, that's right. Mention of the common Semitism of Jews and Arabs always bothers you. I forgot that.

[Jonathan Goldberg]

For some strange reason this reminds me of a model developed back in about 1980 which successfully predicted that year's Miss America.

Name was one of the significant predictors (no physical characteristics were). The winner's name couldn't be either too bland or too exotic. Jane Smith was not going to win, and neither was Ikaterina Novistkia.

[anne]

"Off to find the Jewish cognate of 'Hussein' for the next go-round."

Though I do not understand such a comment (can anyone understand such madness?) I am deeply saddened at the meanness.

[tom f]

Does anyone have a link to Obama's announcement speech?

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/us/politics/11obama-text.html

February 10, 2007

Senator Obama’s Announcement

Let me begin by saying thanks to all you who've traveled, from far and wide, to brave the cold today.

We all made this journey for a reason. It's humbling, but in my heart I know you didn't come here just for me, you came here because you believe in what this country can be. In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope. In the face of a politics that's shut you out, that's told you to settle, that's divided us for too long, you believe we can be one people, reaching for what's possible, building that more perfect union.

That's the journey we're on today. But let me tell you how I came to be here. As most of you know, I am not a native of this great state. I moved to Illinois over two decades ago. I was a young man then, just a year out of college; I knew no one in Chicago, was without money or family connections. But a group of churches had offered me a job as a community organizer for $13,000 a year. And I accepted the job, sight unseen, motivated then by a single, simple, powerful idea – that I might play a small part in building a better America.

My work took me to some of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. I joined with pastors and lay-people to deal with communities that had been ravaged by plant closings. I saw that the problems people faced weren't simply local in nature – that the decision to close a steel mill was made by distant executives; that the lack of textbooks and computers in schools could be traced to the skewed priorities of politicians a thousand miles away; and that when a child turns to violence, there's a hole in his heart no government could ever fill.

It was in these neighborhoods that I received the best education I ever had, and where I learned the true meaning of my Christian faith.

After three years of this work, I went to law school, because I wanted to understand how the law should work for those in need. I became a civil rights lawyer, and taught constitutional law, and after a time, I came to understand that our cherished rights of liberty and equality depend on the active participation of an awakened electorate. It was with these ideas in mind that I arrived in this capital city as a state Senator.

It was here, in Springfield, where I saw all that is America converge – farmers and teachers, businessmen and laborers, all of them with a story to tell, all of them seeking a seat at the table, all of them clamoring to be heard. I made lasting friendships here – friends that I see in the audience today....

[anne]

http://www.feri.org/common/news/details.cfm?QID=2056&clientid=11005

April 7, 1932

The Forgotten Man
By Governor Franklin Roosevelt

Albany, N. Y

Although I understand that I am talking under the auspices of the Democratic National Committee, I do not want to limit myself to politics. I do not want to feel that I am addressing an audience of Democrats or that I speak merely as a Democrat myself. The present condition of our national affairs is too serious to be viewed through partisan eyes for partisan purposes.

Fifteen years ago my public duty called me to an active part in a great national emergency, the World War. Success then was due to a leadership whose vision carried beyond the timorous and futile gesture of sending a tiny army of 150,000 trained soldiers and the regular navy to the aid of our allies. The generalship of that moment conceived of a whole Nation mobilized for war, economic, industrial, social and military resources gathered into a vast unit capable of and actually in the process of throwing into the scales ten million men equipped with physical needs and sustained by the realization that behind them were the united efforts of 110,000,000 human beings. It was a great plan because it was built from bottom to top and not from top to bottom.

In my calm judgment, the Nation faces today a more grave emergency than in 1917.

It is said that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo because he forgot his infantry—he staked too much upon the more spectacular but less substantial cavalry. The present administration in Washington provides a close parallel. It has either forgotten or it does not want to remember the infantry of our economic army.

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid....

[anne]

Yes; I should have been polite, but if I do understand you are subverting what Brad DeLong is trying to teach though why is a saddening mystery.

[anne]

No; that will not do. What you are doing is both subverting what Brad DeLong is teaching and adding for whatever reason to the meanness of Mike Allen. That will not do.

[dale]

No it wouldn't be silly rilkefan. What we are doing here is pointing out that US culture is much more multicultural than it might appear when seen thru a white, euro-centric type lens.
I think we are also encouraging one another and our mainstream media to grow up and to model a more grown up outlook.

Bob Somerby's comment above is right on. (and I hope all here read the Daily Howler on a regular basis. Somerby is a national treasure) The mainstream media too often plays the fool, focuses their and thus our attention on trivia. Point out the factual errors. Point out the trivial diversion. And demand that folks grow up, act like adults and deal with the substantive issues that are of actual importance, instead of pretend importance.

[d]

Barack = Baruch = Benedict, the name chosen by the Pope.
(Spinoza was called 'Benedict' by the Latin-speaking world.)

I don't think this is correct. All translate as blessed but Benedict is a latin name which I wouldn't think would share the same word origin as Baruch and Barack (with their Hebrew/Arabic connection). I can't find any information to corroborate my suspicion though. Do you have a source on this?

[tom f]

rilkefan:

Yes, one can be astonished at the meanness of a comment, understand the comment perfectly, and yet not understand what inspires the meanness. One can also use contextual cues that reveal the emotional tone of the comment (meanness, in this instance) without revealing the meaning.

Secondly, DeLong's most direct critique was not that b r k = blessed but that Barak is both Swahilli and Arab, thus directly rendering Allen's pathetic critique unfounded. So in this case your own comment ducks the main critique that DeLong provides in order to make a secondary, and trivial, point.

Thanks for the speech Anne.

I'm going through an Obama crush right now.

[tom f]

God I hope we're not stuck with HRC.

[Colin Danby]

Just to underline the obvious.

What is the work done by the words "exotic, multicultural name" when, if you take the terms literally, almost all of us here have exotic, multicultural names? However if your name is exotic in the sense that it comes from Western Europe, and multicultural in that it incorporates roots from more than one European cultural source, the likes of Mike Allen will *never* use those two words to describe it. So there's deliberate ethnic line-drawing going on here.

The strategic ignorance that Brad describes so well links with this. The word "exotic" is being used to draw a deliberate limit of knowledge.

And look at the article! It contains nothing new about Obama, but its second sentence is the enthusiastic "Now, Obama’s about to endure a going-over that would make a proctologist blush." What animates this non-story apart from Allen's hostility?

[MQ]

Gore for President! Gore for President!

Obama is a natural VP, he's simply too inexperienced as yet for this job. Gee, he was a state senator two years ago. Only Gore or Edwards can save us from HRC.

[pseudonymous in nc]

"I can't find any information to corroborate my suspicion though. Do you have a source on this?"

Like I said, Baruch Spinoza was Benedictus to the Latin world of letters. Of course, it's more of a pure translation than an etymological cognate, yer Latin not being a Semitic language, but you'll still find Baruchs today who were listed in public birth records as 'Benedict', for well-known and regrettable reasons.

B'nai B'rith:

"You, Your Holiness, are named Benedict, blessed, Baruch in Hebrew. It is my prayer that we merit realizing the great aspiration that we truly serve as a blessing to one another."

http://bnaibrith.org/pubs/pr/12-18-2006_pope.cfm

That said, most scholars are skeptical that the Sermon on the Mount would have used the b*r*t / 'Blessed...' anaphora.

[anne]

"Off to find the Jewish cognate of 'Hussein' for the next go-round."

No; this was the comment and this comment is simply a meanness, a gratuitous meanness, and shows no understanding of what Brad DeLong was teaching.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/us/politics/11obama.html?ex=1328850000&en=1407f67c0cf863eb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

February 11, 2007

Obama Formally Enters Presidential Race
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, standing before the Old State Capitol where Abraham Lincoln began his political career, announced his candidacy for the White House on Saturday by presenting himself as an agent of generational change who could transform a government hobbled by cynicism, petty corruption and "a smallness of our politics."

"The time for that politics is over," Mr. Obama said. "It is through. It's time to turn the page."

Wearing an overcoat but gloveless on a frigid morning, Mr. Obama invoked a speech Lincoln gave here in 1858 condemning slavery — "a house divided against itself cannot stand" — as he started his campaign to become the nation's first black president.

Speaking smoothly and comfortably, Mr. Obama offered a generational call to arms, portraying his campaign less as a candidacy and more as a movement. "Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what's needed to be done," he said. "Today we are called once more, and it is time for our generation to answer that call."

It was the latest step in a journey rich with historic possibilities and symbolism. Thousands of people packed the town square to witness it, shivering in the single-digit frostiness until Mr. Obama appeared, trailed by his wife, Michelle, and two young daughters. ("I wasn't too cold," Mr. Obama said later, grinning as he acknowledged a heating device had been positioned at his feet, out of the audience's view.) ...

[anne]

http://www.nationalcenter.org/HouseDivided.html

June 16, 1858

A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand
By Abraham Lincoln

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Convention:

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifty year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting and end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crises shall have been reached and passed. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.

Have we no tendency to the latter condition? ...

[anne]

Lunacy is lunacy:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Australia-Obama-Iraq.html

February 11, 2007

Australian Premier Criticizes Obama on Iraq

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- Australia's conservative prime minister slammed Barack Obama on Sunday over his opposition to the Iraq war, a day after the first-term U.S. senator announced his intention to run for the White House in 2008.

Obama said Saturday at his campaign kickoff in Springfield, Ill., that one of the country's first priorities should be ending the war in Iraq. He has also introduced a bill in the Senate to prevent President Bush from increasing American troop levels in Iraq and to remove U.S. combat forces from the country by March 31, 2008.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a staunch Bush ally who has sent troops to Iraq and faces his own re-election bid later this year, said Obama's proposals would spell disaster for the Middle East.

''I think that will just encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory,'' Howard said on Nine Network television.

''If I were running al-Qaida in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory, not only for Obama but also for the Democrats.'' ...

[Kate G.]

I've been reading the comment thread and I really am astonished, perhaps foolishly, at Rilkefan's argument up above that if 70-80 percent of the country doesn't have a passport then they are also irredemably stupid and badly educated. Following on from that is an implied argument (since Mike Allen's article is held up as adequate for those 70-80 percent) that they don't need education and information rather they need to have their prejudices and their ignorance *reinforced* by an article that pretends to be just as stupid as they are.

I can't think of a more contemptous attitude to have towards the voting public than to assert that lack of a passport means people don't know that (with the exception of the indigenous population) all modern american citizens come from somewhere else, frequently had other names, and came in for a high level of discrimination on the basis of their names, ethnicity, religion, or race for some period of time. No Irish Need Apply? sound familiar?

But lets take rilkefan at his or her word and agree that most americans are not only terminally uneducated about the world they live in but are also without the slightest interest in learning more--man, those jerks don't even have passports!--what can we say about the journalist who takes it as his duty to add to their darkness rather than illuminate it? What can we say about a journalist who prefers to obscure facts rather than highlight them, to play to prejudices rather than remove them?

Brad's headline was laugh out loud funny and, like Bob Somerby's relentless rain of criticism, the only antidote to this kind of stupidity. We are all going to have to make ourselves into little daily howlers if we are to make any progress over the next few years because if Rilkefan's approving commentary is any indication there is always a market for the meretricious. Another way of putting it is: There's a sucker born every minute and several journalists to toady to him.

Kate G.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=7074&exhibition=7&ee_lang=eng&u=131209,0

Snowy Owl at Sunset
Amherst Island, Ontario, Canada.

Kate G. is our watchful wise owl.

[robert paehlke]

I am going to assert a wild idea here. I think that Barack Obama's name and ethnicity will help more than it will hurt his chance of being President. The idiots and racists are already almost all Republicans. Most minorities of every variety will see that his election means that their children have a better chance to succeed on their merits, funny names and all. The turnout of Black American voters will be unprecedented should he get the nomination. All the Mike Allen idiots of the world can't change any of that.

As a bonus, he is the one candidate that can alter in an instant the world's understanding of what America is all about. That could not be a more urgent need after 2000-2008.

[tom f]

I've been home sick and so was surfing over to CSPAN yesterday when who is on my tv screen but Mike Allen discussing Obama's entry into the race. He and the host we're taking calls from people who know/knew the candidate. Allen's questions were respectful but indicated a desire to dig dirt

http://inside.c-spanarchives.org:8080/cspan/cspan.csp?command=dprogram&record=198955744

[tom f]

robert paehlke,

that's much of how I see it too, but my expectations of my countrymen have been let down too many times before. I think what's in Obama's favor is that he sounds calm, intelligent, and authentic when speaking in public and he has outside-the-beltway-cred. The gathering pundit/right wing noise machine and the ineffectiveness of Congress w/r/t Iraq will only play into Obama's appeal.

But then again, I've been let down many times before.

[John Emerson]

Alas, I have known a fair number of strong Democrats with definite racist tendencies.

[MonkeyBoy]

Barry Goldwater's grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Poland and his father's name was "Baron".

[rilkefan]

For y'all's info, Prof. DeLong has censored some of my argument above, leaving a distorted record of my position. I keep forgetting that, while this is a fine blog, it's not always open to the free exchange of ideas that irk him.

[As I say, I'm trying--without time to moderate it properly--to run a discussion, rather than a food fight. For thoughts about comment policy, go to: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/03/dealing_with_tr.html]

[JRossi]

I like Obama, but for tens of millions of Americans like me, who know next to nothing of Islam and Judaism, Barack is an unusual, foreign-sounding name. Not a criticism, just an observation. That said, I enjoyed the etymology lesson.

[Barkley Rosser]

Just to confuse things further, there is a bit more of a difference between the Arabic "barack" and the Hebrew "baruch." One is b*r*k and the other is b*r*ch, with both of these being transliterations from different alphabets into the Latin alphabet. That Hebrew "ch" is more properly transliterated into "X," as it is in Greek and Cyrillic, and Spanish for that matter, the English "x" having lost its "ch" (or "kh")pronunciation. When the equivalent is transliterated from the Arabic it becomes "kh," which it also does when transliterated from the Cyrillic, with Khrushchev's name begins in Cyrillic with an "X," the "chhi" in Greek and Cyrillic, repeated later in his name. But they are still very close anyway.

So, who knows what it is in Aramaic, whether the old or the newer remnant, Syriac.

Of course Brad's original post is completely correct. In Swahili, "Barack" was strictly borrowed from the Arabic, loan words from which are all over that language, so Mike Allen was either being an ignorant moron or a deliberately racist propagandist.

[Barkley Rosser]

Ooops. The Cyrillic "x" does not appear later in Khrushchev's name.

Actually there are letters in Cyrillic that do not have single letter cognates in either the Greek or Latin alphabets, e.g. the "shch" in the middle of Khrushchev's name. Given that there are cognates for some of these in the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets, there has been some speculation that these letters were loaned from those alphabets.

[Ben Brumfield]

Just to confuse things further, there is a bit more of a difference between the Arabic "barack" and the Hebrew "baruch." One is b*r*k and the other is b*r*ch, with both of these being transliterations from different alphabets into the Latin alphabet.

You're right about them being transliterations from different alphabets, but wrong about the difference. Arabic and Hebrew not only are related languages, but also are written with closely related alphabets. The letter in question, proto-"k" is the same, but is transcribed "ch" in Hebrew because of the transcription system used.

It would be a mistake to confuse transcription systems with what they actually represent. In the Hebrew I was taught, quf was transliterated with a q, as is its cognate letter in the usual transcription system for Arabic and (perhaps more important) the standard in Semitic historical linguistics. Certainly ch is used for a dagesh-less k, but for the same reasons it's used for a chi -- the Romans thought a voiceless velar fricative sounded pretty close to a velar stop + aspiration.

I can't speak to Arabic or Swahili, but if you normalize transcriptions, Hebrew baruk(='ch') is the same as Ge'ez baraka and Akkadian burku, which all mean kneel, bless, or knee. Hebrew brq(='k') is the same as Ge'ez baraqa and Akkadian baraqu, meaning lightening or flash.

Interesting point about shch -- I'd never thought about its resemblance to shin before.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/opinion/11sun3.html?ex=1328850000&en=371d666cd5b954f2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

February 11, 2007

Decoding the Debate Over the Blackness of Barack Obama
By BRENT STAPLES

Those of us who were born black in the years just after World War II had front-row seats for the collapse of American apartheid. We started out confined to all-black communities and schools at a time when skin color was still destiny. But as segregation gave way, many of us were vaulted out of this sequestered world and into colleges, jobs and walks of life that had been closed to us pretty much since the nation's founding.

The rush of upward mobility produced the inevitable identity crisis, which led in turn to endless discussions about the meaning of blackness in a world where skin color was beginning to matter less and less.

At their best, these discussions, held in college dorm rooms at night, were probing, serious and heartfelt. At their worst, they turned into lectures by the race police — '60s-era ideologues who characterized blackness not as a matter of individual interpretation or choice, but as a narrow set of attitudes and experiences that were said to make up the authentic black identity.

Back then, black Americans who came from successful, suburban and upwardly mobile families were regularly dismissed as white or inauthentic. The authentic black experience, it was said at the time, was limited to the hard-core, impoverished upbringing that black people often chose to brag about, even when they had actually grown up with private prep schools in the lap of luxury.

The race police ran rampant in the black community itself, but were rarely heard in the white world. But they have been parading up and down Main Street since Senator Barack Obama of Illinois — the son of a black African father and a white American mother — made clear that he intended to seek the Democratic presidential nomination.

The arguments being raised about Mr. Obama's blackness — or his lack of blackness — seem positively antique at a time when Americans are moving away from the view of ancestry as a central demographic fact and toward a view that dispenses with those traditional boundaries. Even so, the complaints about Mr. Obama provide an interesting opportunity to examine the passing of the old and the rise of the new....

[anne]

From Brad DeLong remarkable post through the fine comments and Brent Staples important essay, I am left thinking beyond any nomination or election that we indeed have "an interesting opportunity to examine the passing of the old and the rise of the new." Something remarkable happened in Springfield, Illinois, calling to mind Abraham Lincoln as was intended but also calling to mind a legacy we all share from WEB Du Bois, and a century of the "color line," through Franklin Roosevelt, and the "forgotten man" and beyond.

Thank you, Dear Brad.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/opinion/11sun3.html?ex=1328850000&en=371d666cd5b954f2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

BRENT STAPLES:

The heritage of slavery is of course central to African-American life. But that is a fairly recent recognition for many of us who grew up black in the second half of the 20th century. Black families like mine dealt with the stigma and humiliation of slavery by simply suppressing it. My older uncles, for example, grew up in regular contact with relatives who had been born into slavery, but never mentioned it to me. Silence about slavery at home was matched by neglect of the topic at school. As a result, I was nearly 40 years old and writing a book about my family when I stumbled upon the news of my enslaved relatives in a newsletter from a small historical society....

His critics are at least right when they describe his journey as a departure from the customary stereotype. But they are fundamentally wrong when they try to argue that the journey described in his affecting 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father," is somehow incompatible with blackness.

At bottom, the hue and cry over Barack Obama's identity stems from a failure by black traditionalists to recognize multiracial versions of themselves. Soon enough, perhaps by year's end, however, the Obama story, which seems so exotic to so many people now, will have found its place among all the other stories of the sprawling black diaspora.

[anne]

http://www.bartleby.com/114/2.html

April 25, 1903

The Souls of Black Folk
By W.E.B. Du Bois

I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there in the King's Highway sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveller's footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries' thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

[Dave]

"And, of course, the same prayer beginning b•r•k is at the heart of most Christian services:

Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread of offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life..."

Is it true that this is "at the heart of most Christian services"? It is certainly at the heart of the Mass, but I would assume it's not used in most Protestant services, especially as you get further away from Catholicism.

[Lots and lots of Catholics and Anglicans and Lutherans and Greek and other Orthodox in the world...

[Kate G.]

Dave,
why would you "assume" its not used in protestant services? Sure, transubstantiation was (I think) largely dropped but "blessed are you, lord, god of all creation?" I can't think of any form of christian worship where that wouldn't be boilerplate.

Kate G.

[andres]

Heh. I'm late as always, but this is a true tempest in a teapot, though there's no denying that Allen deserved getting tossed around.

Obama choosing to remain Barack rather than Baruch is not only loyalty to his father's culture but also avoids a linguistic marketing misstep--imagine all the native Spanish-speakers in the US and elsewhere saying BarOOCH Obama in conversation. Yuk.

And rilkefan seems to be making too much of a fuzz: my gut feeling is that the type of people who are capable of being influenced or swayed in their opinion by something as symbolic as a name change either don't vote or don't vote Democratic if they do.

[dale]

Andres,
eletions hinge on such tempest in teapots unfortunatley. I thank Brad for hitting back and hitting hard.

[Stu Savory, Germany]

Tradition has it that he was paid 30 pieces of silver.

[Dave]

Someone commented that the name Obama was one to be 'suspicious' about. Contrary to what is now believed, the name Obama has nothing to do with any Islamic roots but is from the Luo tribe which Obama's father belonged to. In the Luo tribe, the children are named based on times of the day and current events when they are born. The fact that his name started with the letter 'O' just signified that is was a boy child and not a girl. If Obama's father had been a girl child, he would have been called 'Abama' and not 'Obama'. Senator Obama's sister was named 'Auma' and if the Senator had been given the same name, His name would be 'Barack Ouma'. I know this probably does make any difference to those who are ready to crucify the man for a name he did not give himself but I thought the lesson might do some good to some.