Make Room for Baghdaddy
While Michelle Malkin can barely keep down her lunch after reading the aspic-coated coverage of the Obamas in People Magazine, I look forward to learning Mrs. O’s recipe for tripe, bitter greens, and canned responses:
So I picked up that issue of People magazine with the photo-ready Obama family on the cover over the weekend. You know–the cover featuring the young daughters whose privacy Barack and Michelle so sanctimoniously claim to want to protect.
I lost 15 IQ points reading the slavering profile: Michelle hula hoops with her daughters! They’re just like you and me! The kids have slumber parties! They’re just like you and me! Barack did laundry, but he didn’t fold! They’re just like you and me. The kids get small allowances. They’re just like you and me! The Obamas wear normal clothes doing normal things.
THEY’RE JUST LIKE YOU AND ME!
Michelle rightly wonders if this “exclusive”is the same sort of “exclusive” previously granted to Access Hollywood and 60 Minutes, or a different sort of “exclusive”.
Meanwhile, did you read how proud the other candidate’s wife is—of another country?
I have recently returned from Rwanda. I was last there in 1994, at the height of the genocide that claimed the lives of more than 800,000 Rwandans. The memories of what I saw haunt me still.
I wasn’t sure what to expect all these years later, but I found a country that has found in its deep scars the will to move on and rebuild a civil society. And the renaissance is being led by women.
Women are at the forefront of the physical, emotional and spiritual healing that is moving Rwandan society forward. One of them, from eastern Rwanda, told me her story — a violent, tragic and heartbreaking testimony of courage. She spoke of surviving multiple gang rapes, running at night in fear of losing her life, going days without food or water and witnessing the death of her entire family — one person at a time, before her eyes.
The injuries she sustained left her unable to bear children. Illness, isolation and an utter lack of hope left her in abject despair.
And yet the day I met her, she wasn’t consumed by hatred or resentment. She sat, talking with me and a few others, beside a man who had killed people guilty of nothing more than seeking shelter in a church. She forgave him. She forgave the perpetrators of her tragedy, and she explained her story with hope that such cruelty would never be repeated.
It is a humbling experience to be in the presence of those who have such a capacity for forgiveness and care. It is also instructive. If wealthy nations want their assistance programs to be effective, they should look to the women who form the backbone of every society. With some education, training, basic rights and empowerment, women will transform a society — and the world.
I quoted more than I first intended to because I was struck not so much by Ms. McCain’s argument—women can also blow up religious pilgrims—but by her humility. And not just because she uses the word. After employing the word “I” five times in the opening two paragraphs, she drops it almost entirely: this becomes not her story, but Rwanda’s. And the lessons are ours to draw, not just hers.
And did anybody read a word about her trip in the press?
Contrast that with the “this is our moment, this is our time” bilge. This is their fifteen minutes—God willing, it’s just about up.