Preacher Wright understands Obama:

LGF informs us that Bill Moyer's interview with the meddlesome priest will be airing on PBS tomorrow.

And, "imagine my surprise; he claims his words were twisted."

According to the article on the NYT Politics blog, Wright appears to accept Senator Obama's public renunciation rather sanguinely:

“... so he had a political event, he goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician....

“He’s a politician... he says what he has to say as a politician.

... He does what politicians do. So that what happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bytes, he responded as a politician.”

I asked the question many times before, and I ask it again now:

Why do Obama's more radical constituencies keep supporting him, in spite of all the renouncing and rejecting that he has done, publicly? What do they think they know, or understand about this man?

So Rev. Wright thinks he understands and knows Obama better than others, better than Obama knows himself, apparently. These statements by Wright smugly and implicitly suggest that Obama is a smooth operator, a liar, who says what he thinks his audience wants to hear, not what he really feels.

In Ryan Lizza's article in The New Republic, we are told Wright is a former Muslim. No doubt his style of preaching is very reminiscent of the way Mullahs preach and inflame their flocks during Friday morning prayers, easily ignoring history, facts and good sense in favour of radical religion and political theories (that's a euphemism for conspiracies). I've seen black preachers preach with much fervour but not the kind of amalgam of politics, religion and hatred that characterizes the Wright's sermons. So I wonder how much of the former Muslim is still animating and motivating the sentiment and feeling of this preacher for Jesus. Moreover, seeing the ease with which he excuses Obama's apparent denunciation of his words and positions as merely keeping up appearances for a political end makes me wonder even further about his Muslim ethos. Isn't dissimulation permissible in Islam as a legitimate tactic, if it furthers a certain political end?

This blog also speculates about these issues:

(1) Wright uses the pulpit as Muslims do in mosques, to preach politics and hate.

(2) It may explain why Wright hates America so much, strongly opposes the Iraq war, and is viciously anti-semitic.

(3) It explains why Wright's newsletter supports Hamas.

(4) It explains why Wright conferred honors upon the Muslim extremist Louis Farrakhan in December, 2007.

(5) In times of conflict, Muslims are permitted to falsely "convert" to Judaism or Christianity. They can remain in this state indefinitely until called upon by other Muslims to return to Islam.

(6) It is hard to explain why neither Obama or Wright have been accused of renouncing their religion (apostasy) by Muslim leaders.

Well, these are legitimate questions and I doubt Bill Moyer asked them of his guest. The only way to know the answer is to wait until Obama gains the presidency and see what he does and whom he honours at that time. For those who simply have to know what all of it means there is no other way of finding out, but through tasting the pudding itself.

I have my own understanding of Obama, who is, I think, at the very least an agnostic who does not have a genuine religious sentiment in the way Bush does. It is quite possible that Rev. Wright has read the measure of the man more deeply than he realizes. If Obama is dissimulating about his denunciation of Wright's position, it is just as conceivable that he was dissimulating when he had chosen him and his church as his power base. He was an ambitious politician then, no less than he is now. If all politicians do is speak deceptively and appeal to their immediate audiences in the hope of gaining their trust, who is to know when a politician is sincerely expressing his true feelings and when he just says things that will please an audience?

Ryan Lizza's article is worth a read. It observes and follows young Obama's intellectual and political roots, how his decisions were made, who and what motivated him. He seems to have had three "fathers" whom he had to renounce, or forget, at one time or another, in order to make progress, and Wright was the last of the three.

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Update: Pajamas Media Tom Blumer digs deeper:

Thus far, Barack Obama and his campaign have only specifically condemned the inclusion of the Palestinian terrorist’s op-ed. I am not aware of any condemnation of the other three items noted above.

It would appear that if Obama wishes to put the Wright controversy behind him, he needs to convince the voting public that, as he claims is the case with Wright’s sermons, he was not aware of any church bulletin content that would, if he had known about it, have caused him to leave TUCC.

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Works and Days' Victor Davis Hanson:

Speaking of [Wright], the snippets from his interview with a fawning Bill Moyers were about as disingenuous as they come. He claimed they were out of context and his critics divisive, but never disowned what he said. He claimed he was a pastor outside of politics, but his attraction apparently hinges on his political views about everything from the AIDs conspiracy to apartheid. And on and on. The problem with Rev. Wright is, well, he loves the attention, makes a profit on it, and won’t shut up. And as long as he is not disowned by Obama, the more Obama has to explain why he continues to worship in that church, whether Wright is or is not really retired, and what exactly did Obama know and when did he know it. A fair reading of the Obama memoirs suggests he knew exactly what Wright was saying and heard a great deal of it.

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For a stupid commentary on the above, read here:

"And yes, as an example, being a different kind of politician means condemning Wright's comments but sticking by the man"

Only of course Rev. Wright did not say "Obama is a different kind of politician". He said: Obama is a politician" the implication being that there is only one kind of politicians and this kind is always about lying, pretending, playacting, obfuscating, etc etc. Wright seems to hold a rather dim view of this member of his church.

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Here is one commenter view with a counter point to the "he is a politician" credential:

I was willing to give Obama a pass for Rev. Wright. I chalked it up to his desire for “street creds” among the Chicago constituency he was trying to court. Not too admirable, but hey, he’s a politician. What do you expect? I refused to believe he actually bought into the jive the rev was talking.

But then, from his own mouth came the phrase “typical white person”, directed at his own grandmother. It was then that I knew, that after 20 years some of the bigotry propagated by the rev had taken root in Obama’s brain. A shame, since I did have hope for him.

He has Jewish friends... (Updated on Tuesday, April 29)

(sotto voce) and we know what that means

I. I watched parts of the grandiloquent circumlocutions by Dr. Reverend J. Wright last night on CNN. While I was terribly impressed by the man's erudition (endless strings of dropping names of scholars, books and publishing houses) and histrionics , I thought all in all he gave a rather self-indulgent, boring speech about difference and deficiency which seemed oddly obsolete in this day and age when difference is celebrated to a point of self-abandon (multiculturalism and all that, you know).

Richard Miniter's description is quite acute:

"...he was offered a prime speaking role at an NAACP convention. This was a chance to confound his critics and rescue his friends—by presenting himself as the measured, thoughtful, faithful man that the Obama campaign said he was.

Instead, he appeared in his natural plummage; a seemingly educated man who traffics in bizarre theories.

In the NAACP speech, he calls for reaching out to all faiths “including the Nation of Islam”—a sect that believes that white people are evil beings created a mad alien scientist underneath a volcano.

... he weirdly claims that no one in Detroit speaks English... He puts on a phony Boston accent to impersonate JFK. Than switches to a bad Texas drawl to channel LBJ. Then back to a fake Boston accent to imitate a senator he calls “Ed Kennedy.” Finally, the good reverend reveals his point: Why does no one fault these presidential and senatorial accents when they condemn black speech? That it is the grammar, not the pronunciation, never seems to occur to him. Nor does it occur to him that millions of blacks—from Tiger Woods and Bill Cosby to your doctor and your stock broker—speak standard English. The patois of the streets... is spoken only [by] a small minority. Why does Rev. Wright think the most uneducated are the most authentic?

... He says that blacks and whites love God differently. He then shifts into a mock “white” accent and says, with no feeling, “I love Jesus.” ... he continues, blacks are passionate.. bursts forth with praise music. Why ridicule other people’s faith if his point is religious tolerance?

... Rev. Wright is a racist. He sees people as inherently different in musical ability, speech patterns and nearly everything else based solely on something as inconsequential as their skin.

This is racism, in its full, undiluted essence.

Why would the NAACP give a man like this a forum?

Why would Obama sit in this man’s pews for almost 20 years?"

II. The Sequitur describes another unpleasant aspect of the godly pastor:

"On Sunday, his rebuttal against charges of anti-Semitic remarks and ties with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan appeared to be, in essence, ‘Look, I have Jewish friends.’

He thanked and ticked off a long list of Jewish leaders in the country that he knew (and he threw in at least one Muslim, for some balance, one can suppose).

But more interestingly than that, he thanked someone else: CNN’s Roland Martin, whom he referred to as a “friend.”

Having followed Martin's meteoric rise on CNN I was a little surprised by this nugget of information.

"...during the Wright-“Goddamn America” controversy, there has been no greater defender of the Illinois reverend on cable television than Martin. In fact, Martin, who wore a white Dashiki with gold embroidering while “reporting” on Wright’s speech Sunday night on CNN, has done more defending of Wright than Obama.

Martin should at least offer some clarity on what this friendship consists of.

What is discouraging, however, is that neither CNN nor Martin divulged that he was a “friend” of Wright while Martin repeatedly appeared on-air defending the Wright’s rants, telling us all how we were misinterpreting the statements, how the comments were taken out of context, how we just didn’t understand the black Diaspora (don’t you love when educated people use words like that?). "

III. Taking up the challenge of "Rev. Wright was quoted out of context" Hugh Hewitt went to some trouble and effort to provide Context For Reverend Wright. He has some long transcripts of the actual speeches from which the misleading "soundbites" were taken. I'm quoting just a smattering of some of statements that astounded me by their audacity of candour and upfront defamation:

Remember, they had to send Jesus to a court presided over by the enemy, a provisional governor appointed by their enemies, ran the civic and the political affairs of their capitol. He had him backing him up an occupying army with superior soldiers. They were commandos trained in urban combat, and trained to kill on command. Remember, it was soldiers of the 3rd Marine Regiment of Rome who had fun with Jesus, who was mistreated as a prisoner of war, an enemy of the occupying army stationed in Jerusalem, to ensure the mopping up action of Operation Israeli Freedom. (Jeremiah Wright - 4-13-03 - Cut 1 - Jesus' enemies)

Regime change, substituting one tyrant for another tyrant, with the biggest tyrant pulling the puppet strings of all the tyrants, that does not make for peace. Colonizing a country does not make for peace. (Jeremiah Wright - 4-13-03 - Cut 2 - Military making war for peace is like raping for virginity.)

Turn back to your neighbor and say it again. Governments lie (audience responds). The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment. They purposefully infected African-American men with syphilis. Governments lie. The government lied about bombing Cambodia. And Richard Nixon stood in front of the camera, let me make myself perfectly clear, we are not...governments lie. The government lied about the drugs for arms Contra scheme, orchestrated by Oliver North, and then they pardoned, the government pardoned all of the perpetrators, so they could get better jobs in the government. Governments lie. The government lied about adventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.
(Jeremiah Wright - 4-13-03 - Cut 5 - This government lies, Part 2.)

The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strikes law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no, not God bless America, God damn America, that's in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme (applause). The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent. Think about this, think about this, for every one Oprah, a billionaire, you've got five million blacks who are out of work. For every one Colin Powell, a millionaire, you've got ten million blacks who cannot read. For every one Condoskeezer Rice, you've got one million in prison. For every one Tiger Woods, who needs to get beat at the Masters, with his Cablasian hips, playing on a course that discriminates against women, God has His way of bringing you up short when you get too big for your Cablasian britches. For every one Tiger Woods, we've got ten thousand black kids who will never see a golf course. (Jeremiah Wright - 4-13-03 - Cut 7 - God damn America, and Condaskeezza Rice.)

And so on and so forth.

It seems quite obvious that the man does not differentiate between historical times, causes and effects. For him the past is present and alive. His Christianity fails to distinguish between ancient Judea and modern Washington. An extraordinary combination of a heated imagination and self-righteous manipulation. As I speculated elsewhere, he is more like a mullah than a Christian preacher.

I remember an Iranian friend telling me how Shiite Muslims going to Friday prayers at the mosque would be coming out of the services with tear stained faces, the mullah having re-told them of the martyrdom of Husayn in 680 at Karbala , as if the traumatic event happened the day before, not 1400 years ago. This is a way of keeping the faithful in a state of simmering indignation and grievance.

Another pastor on TV said today that he did not understand what Wright was doing. This report may help him understand:

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright said Monday that he will try to change national policy by “coming after” Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) if he is elected president. The pastor also insisted Obama “didn’t denounce” him and “didn’t distance himself” from Wright’s controversial remarks, but “did what politicians do.” Wright implied Obama still agrees with him by saying: “He had to distance himself, because he's a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was [portrayed as] anti-American.

... “I said to Barack Obama last year, ‘If you get elected, November the 5th I'm coming after you, because you'll be representing a government whose policies grind under people,’ Wright said.

Wright seems intent on wrecking havoc upon Obama's campaign. Does he consider him a prodigal son, deserving of being puuled up short for distancing himself from the mad priest publicly? For maybe pronouncing positions about American policies and Israel's rights which he cannot stomach?

Who knows?

I'll wait to see how this definitely operatic drama evolves.

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Update: Here is another view (links to the Wright event on video in six YouTube segments.)

It would be hard to imagine any Jew talking this way about Germans, and the Holocaust is still within recent memory. Wright not only never lived through the stuff he excoriates white America for, he grew up in middle class affluence, with a pastor father and a mother who was vice principal of Philadelphia High School for Girls.
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Latest insight about Wright's confused signifiers from the classically cool-headed and incisive left-brainer Norm:


Jesus said, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic, divisive principles.

That's the Reverend Jeremiah Wright speaking yesterday in Washington. Biblical or not, his interpretation is based on a rather flexible interpretation of the signifier 'you' - so that it has different referents within the same sentence. The whole point about terrorism, in its accurate meaning, is that the 'you' who has it 'coming back' to them is a different 'you' from those who were doing terrorism on other people, if indeed they were doing that. This flexibility of interpretation involves treating those who were in the Twin Towers on 9/11, or who were blown up on the London Underground on 7/7, as if they were culpable for some previous act of terrorism, which is, in general, false. Not only is Wright rather selective in what he takes from the Bible, since somewhere in it there will be an injunction against killing the innocent, he himself is innocent of the understanding that guilt is not acquired simply through community membership, much less by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And a belatedly shocked awakening from Andrew Sullivan:

If I believed for one second that Obama shared any of this bile, I couldn't begin to support him. But Wright's cooptation of Obama for his own agenda - his assertion that Obama's distancing from him is insincere - requires, in fact demands a response from Obama.

Obama needs not just to distance himself from Wright's views; he needs to disown him at this point. Wright himself, it seems to me, has become part of what Obama is fighting against: the boomer, Vietnam era's obsession with its red-blue, white-black, pro and anti-America fixations. That is not what this election needs to be about; and Wright's massive, racially divisive and, yes, bitter provocation requires a proportionate response.

We need a speech or statement from Obama in which he utterly repudiates this poison, however personally difficult that may be, however damaging the impact will be.

In this previous blogpost I tentatively compared Obama to Prince Hal. I think the comparison has been boosted in view of the more recent Wright self-exhibitionism. If Prince Hal is serious about ascending to the presidency, he should do as true leaders do, and cut himself loose from his past Falstaffs, who would cling to him in the hope that some of that power will rub on them...

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But I am a liberal offers some more grist for the mill...

Obama's preacher preaches again...

In his list of 22 questions for Senator Obama, Peter Wehner's question # 7 asks:

7. Can you cite a single public statement in which Reverend Wright acknowledges that what he said deeply offended people, and was both inappropriate and a mischaracterization of what you believe is the greatness of this country? To what evidence of Wright’s public contrition can you point?

Well, we have an answer of sorts for this question now, as reported here:

The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., former pastor of Barack Obama’s Trinity United The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., former pastor of Barack Obama’s Trinity United Church of Christ, has kept a low profile since some of his sermons landed him in the middle of a political firestorm.

But on Saturday Wright made his first extensive public remarks since the controversy began as he paid tribute to his friend, former appellate judge R. Eugene Pincham, a congregant at Trinity since 1987.While discussing “seven lessons the judge taught me,” Wright never mentioned church member Obama, who has rejected some of Wright’s comments, which included denunciations of America for its mistreatment of black people and claims that America’s promotion of terrorism abroad helped prompt the 9/11 attacks. But Wright did take the opportunity to bash some of the critics of his controversial statements, including Fox News personalities Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

And while Wright made no mention of terrorism, he did revisit the topic of America’s mistreatment of blacks, saying America’s founding fathers “planted slavery and white supremacy in the DNA of this republic,” and adding that Thomas Jefferson wrote, “ ‘God would punish America for the sin of slavery.’ I guess that makes Thomas Jefferson unpatriotic,” he said to the cheers of the congregation.

Escalating into full-preaching mode, Wright thundered, “Fox News can’t understand that. [Bill] O’Reilly will never get that. Sean Hannity’s stupid fantasy will keep him forever stuck on stupid when it comes to comprehending how you can love a brother who does not believe what you believe. [Pincham’s] faith was a faith in a God who loved the whole world not just one country or one creed.”At that point, congregants nearly drowned Wright out with a booming standing ovation. Delivering a eulogy for a late congregant of Trinity United Church of Christ — former appellate judge R. Eugene Pincham — Barack Obama’s former pastor said America’s mistreatment of blacks is the result of the founding fathers, who “planted slavery and white supremacy in the DNA of this republic.”

Louis Farrakhan joined Wright and others at the funeral.

The mad priest remains not only unrepentant but seems intent on damaging Senator Obama's hopes for the presidency now. Unlike Obama, who stood by him and did not shun him, in spite of the great pressure and temptation to do so-- willing to implicate his own grandmother while providing a broad enough cover for Wright's ass -- Rev. Wright seems unconcerned and unhindered by such loyalties. He has all the finesse and warmth of a road roller...

Rev. Wright is Rev. Wright, an unreformable extremist. But what are we to make of Obama's judgment skills in all of this? I mean, he had embraced this man, allowed him to play a spiritual role in his family's well-being, quoted him in his book.. Is this the kind of good judgment of people and positions that people should expect or excuse in their leader?

Is Obama a naive intellectual after all, and simply hasn't got the steel and razor sharp acumen that are needed for such a high position he is seeking to fulfill?

His latest gaff about the"bitter" Pennsylvanians seems to support this reading of the man. He looks for the "root causes" of behaviours and when he finds them, they are usually the kind of "root causes" which have some condescension and pity built into them. He thinks about these issues, his preacher's expostulations, the culture of small town America, in terms of grievances which serve as mitigation for what he actually thinks are reprehensible manifestations.

Lee Iaccoca's counsel about leadership: "I forgot to shake hands and be friendly. It was an important lesson about leadership." should have been heeded by Obama. Had he made a clean and unambiguous break with the preacher, he would have been free of any lingering stickiness engendered by Wright's penchant for incontinent rhetoric.

It's an almost tragic combination that I sense in the man. His fine intellect, his cool eloquence (reminiscent of Daniel Webster's in the famous story), his detached social analysis, they are all staples of a sceptical thinker. Yet leadership is actually about something else. Hilary understands it.

Watch :

Barack Obama's Pastor:

From The Wall Street Journal article:

No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."

"Mr. Wright thundered on: "America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

"We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic. . . . We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means. . . ."

"We started the AIDS virus . . . We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty. . . ."

The author of the WSJ rightly estimates that:

Hearing Mr. Wright's venomous and paranoid denunciations of this country, the vast majority of Americans would walk out. Instead, Mr. Obama and his wife Michelle have presumably sat through numerous similar sermons by Mr. Wright.

This pastor has been present and valued by Obama in the last twenty years of his life. He did not think this kind of rhetoric and actions (visiting to anoint Gaddafi's hands, awarding an honour to Farrakhan) merits that he and his wife should walk away from that church, removing his young daughters from the influence of such shocking sentiments and lies.

It is highly disturbing.

The affectionate dignity of Cass Sunstein's endorsement, Marty Peretz's meticulous analysis-- I suppose people really want to believe it all.

But words are cheap and easy. Real leadership is about deeds. When all is said...

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Update:

Senator Obama responds:

Let me say at the outset that I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy. I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies. I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it's on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue.

Because these particular statements by Rev. Wright are so contrary to my own life and beliefs, a number of people have legitimately raised questions about the nature of my relationship with Rev. Wright and my membership in the church. Let me therefore provide some context.

As I have written about in my books, I first joined Trinity United Church of Christ nearly twenty years ago. I knew Rev. Wright as someone who served this nation with honor as a United States Marine, as a respected biblical scholar, and as someone who taught or lectured at seminaries across the country, from Union Theological Seminary to the University of Chicago. He also led a diverse congregation that was and still is a pillar of the South Side and the entire city of Chicago. It's a congregation that does not merely preach social justice but acts it out each day, through ministries ranging from housing the homeless to reaching out to those with HIV/AIDS.

Most importantly, Rev. Wright preached the gospel of Jesus, a gospel on which I base my life. In other words, he has never been my political advisor; he's been my pastor. And the sermons I heard him preach always related to our obligation to love God and one another, to work on behalf of the poor, and to seek justice at every turn.

The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation.

[CC: 20 years of associating with the church and the guy, borrowing a book title from his words, and still, not a whiff of a notion where he was standing?]

When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign.

[CC: why just then? Why did he become sensitive at the very point when these statements were harmful to his ambitions?]

I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.

[CC: So the awakening to the awareness that one's pastor was preaching hatred of America and Israel, and awarding special honours to antisemites were not enough motivation to withdraw one's support for that church? Did Senator Obama try, at least, to repair some of the damage done by those statements upon the receptive congregation? To counter those hateful messages by truth and positive speeches?]

Let me repeat what I've said earlier. All of the statements that have been the subject of controversy are ones that I vehemently condemn. They in no way reflect my attitudes and directly contradict my profound love for this country.

[CC: Condemning them now is a bit self-serving, isn't it? Why now? Why not when he first heard them?]

With Rev. Wright's retirement and the ascension of my new pastor, Rev. Otis Moss, III, Michelle and I look forward to continuing a relationship with a church that has done so much good. And while Rev. Wright's statements have pained and angered me, I believe that Americans will judge me not on the basis of what someone else said, but on the basis of who I am and what I believe in; on my values, judgment and experience to be President of the United States.

I don't know. It may be that he stayed with the church and kept quiet about it because his wife was attached to it. I can only recall her own statements about her reluctance to feel proud of her country, until now, and wonder whether her own attitude was not influenced and encouraged by the fiery homilies of the pastor?

Here is an interesting portrait of Michelle Obama

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Update II: From ZioNation:

The will to believe is not absent. Already, the Wright relationship is being spun away by the true believers at The Nation, and the Wright remarks are being whitewashed and the whole problem is being blamed on right wingnuts:

Sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, otherwise known as Barack Obama's pastor, are circulating wildly around the internet the last 24 hours. They show Wright passionately denouncing racism against blacks in America, in sometimes sharp language, and pointing out the ills of American foreign policy pre-9/11. Fox News and the right-wing blogosphere are outraged, the mainstream media is eagerly amplifying the selected sermons and the Clinton campaign is delighting that Obama's Chicago ties are receiving serious scrutiny....

What Wright is saying, moreover, is not particularly radical. The legacy of racism in America--and its existence today--can't simply be ignored or washed away. As one of Wright's church members says of his sermons near the end of a highly skewed ABC News "investigation" into Obama's Chicago church, "I wouldn't call it radical. I'd call it being black in America."

Amen.

That is not a parody. Accusing the US of starting the AIDS epidemic, according to The Nation, is just "being black in America," and so is "Goddamn America." ABC News, which brought Wright's comments to the mainstream, is part of the right wing blogosphere according to this spokesman for the black people of America, whose first name is Ari. That's right! The person who wrote this nonsense, pretending to speak for black America, is Jewish! Wouldn't it be wiser for black Americans to explain how they feel about America? Really?

You don't have to be a right wingnut to understand that the US didn't start the AIDS epidemic and is not at fault for the 9-11 attacks. You don't have to be a flag waving RNC member with an eagle on your lawn to be scared of a US presidential candidate whose spiritual mentor, an honored member of his campaign, said, "Goddamn America." That might be a good campaign slogan in Tehran. In Wichita, it won't work. Not even in Spokane or Portland.

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Update III:

Obama Attended Hate America Sermon

Having considered Wright a friend and mentor for two decades, Obama now often mentions that his pastor recently retired. Wright suggested to the New York Times last year that he and Obama might have to do something of a distancing act in the run up to the election.

"If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me," Wright was quoted by The New York Times. "I said it to Barack personally, and he said, ‘Yeah, that might have to happen.'"

22 questions for Senator Obama :

These are prosecutor's questions, redacted by Peter Wehner on NRO. You Can read them all in the link. I'm excerpting only the questions that interest me:

5. In the speech on race you delivered a couple of weeks ago, you said you could “no more disown [Wright] than I can disown the black community.” Does that mean you believe Wright is synonymous with the embodiment of the black community, that they are one in the same? Is it your view that to disown any person who is black means you would therefore disown the black community? If so, does that mean you would be unable to “disown” someone like Louis Farrakhan? Are there any grounds on which you would disown Wright? If so, wouldn’t that (by your own logic) mean that you would disown the whole of the black community?

7. Can you cite a single public statement in which Reverend Wright acknowledges that what he said deeply offended people, and was both inappropriate and a mischaracterization of what you believe is the greatness of this country? To what evidence of Wright’s public contrition can you point?

12. Since the Wright story broke there seems to have been a concerted effort to keep Reverend Wright from speaking to the press or in public. If he is the man you says he is — if the soundbites we have all seen are anomalous and the portrait of him is a caricature — then why not encourage him to do interviews in order to set the record straight?

13. Do you think it was surprising or out of character for Reverend Wright to reprint an oped by a leading Hamas figure, Mousa Abu Mazook, in the “Pastor’s Page” of Trinity United’s church bulletin?

14. Do you consider Reverend Wright, within context and based on his public comments, to be anti-Semitic? What more would he need to say to cross that threshold?

18. If the GOP candidate for president had a close, intimate relationship of almost two decades with a pastor whose church provided shelter to homeless people, provided day care and marriage counseling but who was himself a white supremacist, asked God to damn rather than bless America, said that the United States got what was coming to it on 9/11, advocated conspiracy theories about genocidal policies being promoted by the American government, said that Israel is a “dirty word,” believed it was a terrorist state and promoted the views of Hamas leaders, would that trouble you? And would you accept the word of the GOP candidate if he insisted that he was not sitting in the pews when those things were said and therefore claimed he ought not be tarnished by the association?

Ed Koch is not happy

We learned recently that Wright's defamatory comments published in church bulletins were, on occasion, also directed at Italians. ABC News reported on March 27th, "Trumpet Newsmagazine, of which Wright is the chief executive officer, published an article written by Wright in which he described the crucifixion of Jesus as 'public lynching Italian style.'" He also wrote, according to CNSNews.com, "The Italians for the most part looked down their garlic noses at the Galileans." Finally, CNN reported on March 28th that, "They [church bulletins] also quote a historian who said that 'what the Zionist Jews did to the Palestinians is worse than what the Nazis did to the Jews.'"

...I am surprised that Obama's description of his minister's hate speech, which he condemns, is limited to the words, "controversial," "inexcusable," "inappropriate, "troubling" and "appalling." Why hasn't he called it by its rightful name - hate speech?

... Obama's explanation of why he was silent until now and the manner in which he characterizes Wright's remarks are worse. Interestingly, he also refers to an apology by Rev. Wright, which I've not seen published anywhere. Have you?

Roundup of reaction in the wake of Obama's repudiation of Rev. Wright:

Apparently, not everyone is convinced by Obama's total rejection of his preacher's attempt to besmirch him by attributing to him the qualities of a smarmy politician.

Here is, again what Rev. Wright said:

"... so he had a political event, he goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician.... “He’s a politician... he says what he has to say as a politician. ... He does what politicians do. So that what happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bytes, he responded as a politician.”

And how Senator Obama responded:

"What particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing ...I cannot prevent him from making these remarks," but "when I say I find these comments appalling I mean it. It contradicts what I'm about and who I am ... It is completely opposed to what I stand for and where I want to take this country."

No, no, no, Obama. You don't get off so easily. Not with your friends, you don't. Who are you kidding? They know you better. They know you are lying. You have to lie. If you don't lie, you won't get elected. It is so simple that only simpletons who value authenticity, integrity and honesty will fall for your schtick...

Where Were Obama's Friends?

This week we learned the limit of a dream in American politics. At Barack Obama's darkest hour, not one prominent ally came forward to support him. Everyone abandoned Everyman.

No prominent black clergyman came forth to make even the simple point that Jeremiah Wright's notion of the "black church" is but one point on a spectrum of faith. Rev. Wright, now written off as a virtual nut case, got more support from black clergymen than did Obama.

Barack Obama was bleeding by Monday and needed cover. Where, when he could have used them, were Obama's oh-so-famous endorsers...


Obama's friends - not to be found

I thought this all along. Why isn't anybody standing up for Barack Obama in his time of need?. The last two weeks have been pitiful for the man. Everybody seemed to just stand back willing to watch to see if he would implode. With "friends" like these...

How the Obama-Wright bond unraveled

Obama told close friends after watching the replay, he felt dumbfounded, even betrayed, particularly by Wright's suggestion that Obama privately agreed with him.

The next afternoon, Obama held a news conference and denounced his former pastor's views as "divisive and destructive." And so a tightly knit relationship finally unraveled.

...As for Wright, he saw a cascade of perceived slights coming from a bright young follower whose political ambitions were tugging him away from Trinity United Church of Christ.... And he made no secret of whom he blamed: Obama's political adviser, David Axelrod, a white Chicago political operative.*

(Axelrod? He wouldn't be a Joo, would he? Some of the Reverends implacable wrath is beginning to make some sense... One hates to speculate on that too much ... )

James McBride, Here:

...As a mixed-race black person whose story has been read by millions (“The Color of Water”), I have watched with angst and horror the unraveling of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. and the old guard of angry African-Americans ..... Like Senator Obama, I was raised by a white woman. As a child and an adult, I have lived in many of the same places that Senator Obama has lived in — that tight space between white and black America. Luckily for me, however, I was raised in the black church.

I think the senator was naïve about the black church.... He was betrayed by a smooth-talking preacher whose recent behavior is a clear example of how low the black church has sunk in the days after the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is heartbreaking.

The senator is not the first nor the last to suffer this kind of injustice. But if he loses the Democratic nomination because of it, the injustice will have been served on us all. (Thanks to Jogo, via Bob for this piece)

Jonah Goldberg:

"[T]he people who do say [we need a conversation about race] seem to be the same people who want the conversation about Jeremiah Wright and what he represents to go away. That is outrageously dishonest. Unless of course your real aim is to have the same old conversation about race again and again and again, in which the only villain is white America and the only victim is black America, and all of the old cliches get one more fresh coat of Wrightwash."

Marty Peretz: Heroic Liberals

Both of Michigan's U.S. Senators, both Democrats, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabanow attended the Detroit NAACP dinner this past weekend. An old habit, probably, and an honorable one. Senators spend much of their time at such events. But this event honored the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, bigoted nut-case extraordinaire. It's true that 10,000 other people came to honor Barack Obama's nemesis at the shindig, and that's a problem for the entire black political class. And for Obama, especially.

I don't know much about Stabanow. Levin purports to be a brave man, at least when it comes to George Bush and the Iraq war. But he (and Ms. Stabanow, too) should have stood with Obama on this one and simply not come to the NAACP fest. A decision simply not to show up would have been a passive act, but one of relative courage. Alas, they are cowards.

Did they stand when Wright was introduced? I bet you they did, and they applauded, too.

I think we more or less get the picture.

Victor Davis Hanson explained it, prophetically, the day before the kerfuffle broke out in full bloom:

Lately a number of Obama’s African-American supporters have taken the airways to make the argument that his astounding percentages of 90% and above among African-American voters are not racialist because the community would not vote in such numbers for a Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice.

But that is a dangerous comparison that raises only more questions. So it’s politics, not race? Why then not a mere 60/40 margin over the ultra-liberal Hillary, wife of our first “black” President? The answer? Obama represents a certain racial chauvinism that neither a white liberal nor black conservative can convey. In other words, in the world of identity politics, he seems to reflect an authentic representation of grievance, and a perpetuation of the entire industry of racial reparations.

Most think the corpus of Rev. Wright’s sayings, comments like “typical white person”, and snotty condescension about white Middle American yokels were terrible gaffes. True, but such wedge politicking apparently ensures him the astounding margins in the African-American community that really are unprecedented—when not long ago there were concerns among his strategists that he might not capture the black vote in such numbers. That problem of authenticy was put to rest by his choice not to disown Rev. Wright...

Well, he has disowned him since, and in no uncertain terms. As I said, I thought this was a defining moment for him. From what I have seen of his wife, Michelle, speaking about the terrible row, she gets it. I'm sure he discussed his public reaction with her, before going on to that fateful press conference. Some day, we may learn more about it. I can only imagine the foul mood, the bitter disappointment. I recently read this quote on the Internet which may define the sense of betrayal:

"The most dangerous thing I ever did was trusting that someone was a friend when they were not"...

Maureen Dowd summed it well: "The Illinois senator doesn’t pay attention to the mythic nature of campaigns, but if he did, he would recognize the narrative of the classic hero myth: The young hero ventures out on an adventure to seek a golden fleece or an Oval Office; he has to kill monsters and face hurdles before he returns home, knocks off his father and assumes the throne. Tuesday was more than a Sister Souljah moment; it was a painful form of political patricide. ‘I did not vet my pastor before I decided to run for the presidency,’ Obama said. In a campaign that’s all about who’s vetted, maybe he should have."

________

* If Obama didn't see this week's public betrayal coming, he is not only naïve but lacking in political skill. What is even more fascinating, and damning, is that Wright blamed Obama's chief campaign strategist, David Axelrod, for the dis-invitation; the NYT article goes on to quote Wright as saying "They're spiriting him away from people in the African-American community. David doesn't know the African-American church scene."

The Pastor that won't go away:
What's Wright got to do with understanding Obama

by Lee Smith

I am not sure why it seems surprising that Senator Barack Obama’s church has embraced Palestinian rejectionists. First the church newsletter reprinted an editorial by Hamas’s deputy political bureau chief, and then there was the “Open Letter to Oprah from Ali Baghdadi on her visit to Palestine,” where Baghdadi recommends the talk show hostess make a visit to the birthplace of Mary’s “beautiful Palestinian baby” (aka, Jesus), and describes an “ethnic bomb” Israel was developing in tandem with South Africa that would kill only “blacks and Arabs.”

The essential contours of the Islamist worldview are hardly alien to Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s flock. There’s the knee-jerk anti-Americanism (the Islamists’s “Death to America” and Reverend Wright’s “God Damn America”), and Wright’s use of the Arab world’s chestnut that America brought 9/11 on itself with its support of Israel. And the historical revisionism holding that the Jewish child of Jewish parents (and a Jewish God) is actually a “Palestinian” is consistent with the identity politics of Black Liberation theology.

But what’s really telling are the flights of paranoid fancy — like how Wright said that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor, that Bush was going to plant WMD in Iraq just like the Los Angeles Police Department frames suspects, and, most notoriously, that the U.S. government created HIV to kill “colored people.” The idea that the Jews were working on an “ethnic bomb” partakes of a genre that combines historical fiction with sci-fi fantasy. “But Daddy,” an alert sixth-grade biology student might query her well-educated father, “my teacher says you can’t build a weapon that only targets one kind of person.” Never mind the science, honey, we’re here for the sermon.
____

Reverend Wright’s sermons are signs of a bewitched mind, and Senator Obama’s apologia treated them as though they should initiate a discussion among the citizens of the nation that his deeply troubled preacher assailed. Senator Obama thinks that Wright’s ravings merit a national discussion on race, but there are other concerns that will not only take up much of the American president’s time, but will also constitute the issues that the executive branch actually has control over — like foreign policy. What sort of insight does the Wright affair give us into an Obama foreign policy?

_______

Instead of condemning violence, we need to contextualize murder and those who celebrate it, just like we have to understand Reverend Wright’s racist paranoia within the framework of “original sin.” By addressing the wrongs of history we can restore dignity and minimalize grievance.

“I don’t think anyone in the foreign policy community has as much an appreciation of the value of dignity as Obama does,” says Samantha Power, who is apparently still of the Obama campaign if no longer in it. And as Obama made clear in his Wright speech, no one running for president understands the depths of grievance like he does. An Obama presidency is not going to give us a national discussion on race, but a foreign policy that is a four-year-long international conference on grievance, for the world has many grievances with America.

The Reverend that won't melt into the night...

Why are we so transfixed by the freak show that was Jeremiah Wright's moment of fame?
Stanley Kurtz, unhappy with the scarcity and incompleteness of the explanation offered by Obama about the enigma of Wright's presence in his life for so long, has dug deeper into what it avaliable of Wright's writings.

He reports about his findings here.

It seems inconceivable that, in 20 years, Obama would never have picked up a copy of Trumpet. In fact, Obama himself graced the cover at least once (although efforts to obtain that issue from the publisher or Obama's interview with the magazine from his campaign were unsuccessful).

Money quote:

Wright is the foremost acolyte of James Cone's "black liberation theology," which puts politics at the center of religion. Wright himself is explicit:

[T]here was no separation Biblically and historically and there is no separation contemporaneously between 'religion and politics.' .  .  . The Word of God has everything to do with racism, sexism, militarism, social justice and the world in which we live daily.

More than anything the mad priest has said, publicly, in sermons, etc, this is the most dangerous concept. It is radically reactionary, in that it seems to want to reverse the flow and direction of the enlightenment. It took centuries of thinking and philosophical evolution to get to the point where the well being and safety of a citizen was defined as grounded in the freedoms of conscience, speech, association. To yearn to re-conflate politics and religion as a binding principle in a sane and just society seems highly irresponsible.

I'm not worried that Obama has secretly imbibed any of this garbage. He is, in my eyes, a model of the secular, enlightened thinker. His coolness about religion, about his Christian sentiments, is reassuring. I daresay, that if, according to Kurtz, Obama couldn't not know about his pastor's strange ideas, then the explanation the he offered, of Wright being like a crazy uncle, is the only plausible explanation for his attempt to protect him.

Wright, in some ways, is like Maria. While she is a very silly, pathetic woman being treated with consideration and some affection by those who are related to her in one way or another, so is Wright, a mad uncle, being treated in the same manner by Obama. Maria, however, is harmless. Wright is venomous. He couldn't be humoured into staying away from Obama's aspirations. So he turned on him.

Obama's repudiation of him was absolutely personal and went beyond the expediency that his campaign had demanded. We may try to be rational with the insanely indignant and aggrieved but we cannot force them to act responsibly. When they persist in trying to sabotage our prospects, good name, standing, then it is time for repudiation.

I hope this matter will be laid to rest.

There is that famous quote by E. M. Forster:

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

I've been wondering about the morality of the choice implied here. It has become, recently, more noble to betray one's country than to betray one's friend. But I was thinking: doesn't it rather depend on what that friend is advocating?

Obama was faced with something like this choice. He probably had gone along for some time trying to accommodate both his country and his friend. But then the realization, awakening, came, when he faced the truth about his pastor's megalomaniac motivations and stark idea, saw them clearly for what they were. And what he saw was in explicit contrast with his own view and love for the country he seeks to lead. A sixteen months long intimate acquaintance with America made him love the people and understand all of them better. And he knew that he could no longer have the luxury of choosing to stand by his friend, when that friend was the very opposite of all that he had come to know and value.

Friends are worthy of our loyalty but not when they work to undo the very fabric of the society that makes that very loyalty the glue which keeps it democratic and just.

A country is not just a geographical place with a nation in it. And a country like the US, a deep and thoughtful democracy, is more than anything a collection of the finest ideas which human philosophy distilled.

________


Monday Update:

"There is no Hamas 'smear'"; Aaron Klein explains:

Let's get something straight. There is no Hamas "smear." McCain wasn't offering his opinion that perhaps Hamas supports Obama.

The terror group's senior political adviser stated during a broadcast interview that Hamas "hopes" Obama wins the presidency. The Hamas figure also compared Obama to John F. Kennedy.

... Asked about Obama's repeated condemnations of Hamas, calling the Islamist group a terror organization, Yousuf replied, "I understand American politics, and this is the season for elections, and everybody tries to sound like he's a friend of the Israelis ... so whatever [the] Israelis didn't like they will take from all those candidates."

So Hamas thinks he can look into Obama's heart and know it. I wonder why... The speaker reminds me of Obama's less unusual supporters. They don't mind his lying to the public, as long as he can get elected. What does this say about those supporters?

A strange dilemma Obama has. a problem from the devil, you might say....

Monday Update II:

Concerning smears... Here is a list of them, as detailed by an Obama Jewish aficionado.

Read the article.

Then pay attention to these two paragraphs:

...it is important to note that Senator Obama is a strong supporter of Israel who is immensely popular in the Chicago Jewish community. He has never cast a vote against a pro-Israel position in the U.S. Senate and has been called pro-Israel by non-partisan analysts such as Haaretz’s Shmuel Rosner, who wrote that Obama "is pro-Israel. Period." The New York Sun (hardly a bastion of support for Democrats) editorialized: "At least by our lights, Mr. Obama's commitment to Israel, as he has articulated it so far in his campaign, is quite moving and a tribute to the broad, bipartisan support that the Jewish state has in America."

Ed Lasky of the conservative American Thinker has been a primary culprit in this endeavor. He has been writing about Obama for months and his "analysis" is to the Illinois Senator as was Walt and Mearsheimers’ to the pro-Israel community: a political agenda wrapped in faulty logic and incorrect assertions.

The first reaffirms what I said earlier: Obama supports Israel, has indicated that he will not speak to Hamas, unless they correct their politics and stop terrorising Israel. Which is exactly Bush's position. He has articulated his full understanding of Israel's precarious security, he has blamed the Palestinian leadership for bringing suffering upon their own nation:

The debate moderator NBC News anchor Brian Williams interrupted Obama, drawing his attention to the omission and quoting Obama as having once said, "No one suffers more than the Palestinians."

Obama, unperplexed, explained that the Palestinians suffer because of their leadership. "I said that no one suffers more than the Palestinian people because of their leadership's failure to recognize Israel, denounce violence and be serious about peace negotiations and regional security," he said.

"Israel is one of our most important allies in the world. It is the only democracy in the Middle East," Obama added.

He is declaratively as pro-Israel as any Jewish American or Israeli can hope for in an American President. There is nothing esoteric, or forced, about his statements. The "case" against him is being compared, negatively, to the case of the Measheimer&Walt made in their antisemitic book about the Israel Lobby.

Yet the very people who support Obama insist that he is a crypto- Pro-Palestinian (not pro-Palestinian as in pro-peace and compromise, but pro-Palestinian as in anti-Israel), who were celebrating the Mearsheimer&Walt book as the one true thing...

Those who attack Ed Lasky for being thoroughly sceptical about Obama's innermost intentions are actually in agreement with him. Like him, they don't buy Obama's open declarations favouring Israel's interests. They think it is all posturing, a means to an end.

But while Lasky warns against a candidate who might be dissimulating, those Obamists see it as an extra good reason to support him. He lies, so we must vote for him! They remind me of Louis de Funes's sticky problem in the film "Rabbi Jacob", when he falls into a tub of green bubble gum and can hardly extricate himself or perform the simplest act of picking up a telephone receiver without manufacturing a total mess...

See what I mean about Obama's problem from hell?

Obama Fest:

I ruminated here upon Obama's serendipitous ascent.

Hitchens' point is clear enough. He is questioning Obama's affiliation with a certain church:

All this easy talk about being a "uniter" and not a "divider" is piffle if people are talking out of both sides of their mouths. I have been droning on for months about how Mitt Romney needs to answer questions about the flat-out racist background of his own church, and about how Huckabee has shown in public that he does not even understand the first thing about a theory—the crucial theory of evolution by natural selection—in which he claims not to believe. Many Democrats are with me on this, but they go completely quiet when Sen. Obama chooses to give his allegiance to a crackpot church with a decidedly ethnic character. (Hitchens, here)

I seems that Hitchens' misgivings about Obama's choice are indeed on target:

Farrakhan Wins 2007 Lifetime Acheivement Award From Obama's Church

The Trumpet magazine is published by Barak Obama's Church in Chicago. Every year they give out awards at a charity banquet.

Trumpet connects the dots between the fight for social justice and the role music has played and continues to play in the lives of Africans living in the Diaspora, during the Sounds on the Shore gala. Trumpet pays tribute to musical artists who served and continue to serve on the frontlines of the civil rights movement, in efforts to EDUCATE, NURTURE and EMPOWER our youth.

Africans living in the Diaspora? Next year in Nairobi?

In addition to celebrating the music of our ancestors, and because of our commitment to enhancing the lives of our readers, Trumpet Newsmagazine will honor recipients of the 2007 Sounds on the Shore (SOS) ~ Contributing to Saving the Lives of Africans in the Diaspora Award. The honorees will be awarded in three sections, each having their own individual category...

Trumpet will donate proceeds, from the Sounds on the Shore Gala 2007, to the Luck Care Center, the only HIV/AIDS clinic independently operated by African Americans in the state of Illinois. We thank William A. Johnson, MD and his nurse practitioner wife, Bathsheba Johnson, for their ability to Educate, Nurture and Empower those infected with and affected by HIV/AIDS.

This year’s socially conscious giants, who allow us to see more clearly what it means to be educated, nurtured and empowered are: Educate - Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick ~ Torch, Tony Wafford ~ Lifeline, Cliff Kelley ~ Community; Nurture - Nancy Wilson ~ Sounds of the Struggle; Empower - Congresswoman Maxine Waters ~ Civil Rights, Father Michael Pfleger ~ Empowerment, Dr. Iva Carruthers ~ Social Justice.

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan is the recipient of this year’s Lifetime Achievement “Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. Trumpeter” Award.

(Via: The Iconoclast)

So who is this Louis Farrakhan?

Farrakhan has been the center of much controversy, and critics have, among other things, said that his views are racist, homophobic, and antisemitic. Farrakhan denies these charges, and frequently insists that his controversial comments are taken out of context by critics...


"... Here the Jews don't like Farrakhan and so they call me 'Hitler'. Well that's a good name. Hitler was a very great man. He wasn't great for me as a Black man but he was a great German and he rose Germany up from the ashes of her defeat by the united force of all of Europe and America after the First World War. Yet Hitler took Germany from the ashes and rose her up and made her the greatest fighting machine of the twentieth century, brothers and sisters, and even though Europe and America had deciphered the code that Hitler was using to speak to his chiefs of staff, they still had trouble defeating Hitler even after knowing his plans in advance. Now I'm not proud of Hitler's evil toward Jewish people, but that's a matter of record. He rose Germany up from nothing. Well, in a sense you could say there is a similarity in that we are rising our people up from nothing, but don't compare me with your wicked killers."

Farrakhan was censured unanimously by the United States Senate for the speech

At an NOI-sponsored event in February 2006, Farrakhan provoked accusations of antisemitism in Illinois by stating that "These false Jews promote the filth of Hollywood. It's the wicked Jews, the false Jews that are promoting lesbianism, homosexuality, [and] Zionists have manipulated Bush and the American government [over the war in Iraq]"

I should think that Obama might want to re-consider the church he frequents and maybe his breathless admirers would do well to signal their disapproval of their star candidate's connection with such a person as Farrakhan. But of course none of this will happen. The democrats will continue to remain tongue-tied when asked about Obama's church, and others may even publish this piece of information by way of increasing Obama's popularity and appeal at certain quarters.

Here is some more information about Obama's spiritual mentor:

At a recent Sunday service, following media coverage of Obama's last-minute decision not to have Wright speak at the senator's presidential announcement last month, Wright warned his flock not to believe any reports of a rift between him and the church's best-known member.

"Barack and I are fine," Wright, 65, on an out-of-state trip, said in a recorded message played to about 2,000 attendees. "The press is not to be trusted. ... Don't let somebody outside our camp divide us.".... Obama had taken "some bad advice from some of his own campaign people who thought it would not be a good idea for me to be in front of the cameras on the day he announced," ....

But in an interview with PBS's "Religion & Ethics Newsweekly" recorded just before Obama's February announcement, Wright said he warned the senator that their association could pose political problems, partly because of his history of supporting Palestinian causes.

Wright also told The New York Times in an interview published March 6: "When his (Obama's) enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli" with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to visit Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, "a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell."

The roughly 8,000-member church has often championed liberal causes, from gay rights to opposition to the Iraq war. It also emphasizes its African roots and asks parishioners to accept the "Black Value System," which includes tenets such as "commitment to the black family," "dedication to the pursuit of education" and one critics have seized upon _ "disavowal of the pursuit of 'middleclassness.'"...

For nearly two decades, Obama has identified strongly with Trinity and hasn't been shy about discussing his closeness to its pastor.

Wright's use of "audacity of hope" in one sermon inspired Obama to borrow those words as the title of his best-selling book, "The Audacity of Hope."

In an earlier memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Obama also tells how he was moved to tears during that sermon by Wright, an early proponent of the black liberation and black theology movements that gained ground in the 1960s.

Obama describes what he calls "a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters" and how he "felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams."

... he (Obama) was drawn to activist churches like Trinity because, in them, "I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world."

Trinity's critics, though, say it emphasizes black causes to a fault....

"I would feel uncomfortable with a church that used the word 'white' instead of 'black' when it talked about these things," she said. "It seems to me we are going backward if we're basing our churches and the help they give on skin color."

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a politics and African studies professor at Princeton University and an Obama supporter ... added that pinning Wright's left-leaning politics on Obama isn't fair.
"The question is what Barack Obama believes, not what Reverend Wright believes," she said, "because Barack Obama and Reverend Wright may be in agreement on some issues and deeply in disagreement on others."

Well, there is something schizophrenic about a church that considers itself liberal and advocates gay rights but then goes on to award a humanitarian accolade to Farrakhan, who considers homosexuality as a threat to Blacks. and whose pastor paid public homage to someone like Gadhafi.

Reverend Wright's choice of words in this statement should also provoke profound unease:

"When his (Obama's) enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli" with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan to visit Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, "a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell."

Obama's critics are a-priorily defined as "enemies". And who are those "enemies"? He doesn't say, but he does make a bee-line connection between those ominously nameless "enemies" and Obama's "Jewish supporters".

I consider this a preparation, a warning, a conditioning; If Obama's project fails to get him to the White House, Black people should know who to point the finger at for this failure. The honourable Reverend is doing Obama great disservice by expressing himself in these terms of disdain and lack of compassion, on Obama's behalf.

I'm thinking of Cass Sunstein's first public endorsement of Obama (that I know of), expressed in a short article he wrote in April 2007.

Cass Sunstein wrote about the way presidential candidates interact with their opponents. His points can easily extend to any discussion:

The antonym of respect is disdain or (better) contempt; the antonym of charity is selfishness or (better) stinginess. It is much worse to bedisrespectful than to be uncharitable. Politicians who show respect--SenatorMcCain is a good example--tend not to attack the competence, the motivations, or the defining commitments of those who disagree with him. Politicians who show charity as well as respect--Senator Obama is a rare example--tend to put opposing arguments in the best possible form, to praise the motivations of those who offer such arguments, and to seek proposals that specifically accept the defining commitments of all sides.

If true, and I believe Sunstein knows what he he talking about, since Obama was both his student and colleague, then I have to wonder at the bond that seems to attach Obama to his church and its pastor. As they say, it does not compute...

_____________

More on the same issues:

From Seattle's alternative weekly magazine (code word for Left of Left), The Stranger:

The Church of Obama by Jonathan Raban

In Obama's sacralized version of the "United States of America," folk sit down with folk they thought they couldn't stand, whether Republicans with Democrats or Americans with Iranians and Syrians. He's managed to articulate this so persuasively that poll after poll shows his support mounting among registered Republicans (the few Republicans I know personally have rejected their own candidates in favor of Obama), despite the fact that all his declared policies—like those he championed, to impressive effect, in the Illinois State Senate—are far to the left of those of the present Republican party. In a speech in Iowa on December 27, he announced that he was out to "heal a nation and repair the world." It says a lot about the grievously damaged state of America now that even lifelong Republicans hunger to take Obama—on his good days—seriously.

Why I'm Glad Hillary's Still in It by Erica C. Barnett

Obama Pays Lip Service to Good Ideas, But Doesn't Follow Through