The Obamastrophe
The Me-Campaign
Victor David Hanson
http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/victordavishanson/2008/03/20/the_obamastrophe.php

I admire Barack’s Obama rhetorical skills and ability to run against Clinton, Inc., but racial polarization will be the legacy of an Obama campaign that promised to transcend race.

It now routinely counts on winning 90% of the African-American community on the basis of racial affinity against a similar liberal Democratic candidate, who herself in short order in turn relies on racial identity politics. Pennsylvania might prove to be the most polarized election yet, and it’s likely that Obama will reap what he’s sown with his failure to disassociate himself from a racist. The speech, for some reason aimed at solidifying the African-American base and capturing praise in the New York Times, succeeded on those counts as much as it turned off middle-class America, set racial relations backward, and destroyed his campaign.

One legacy of his speech is that 85-year-old Mrs. Madelyn Dunham, once praised for saving the Obama failed household, will be remembered by America for her supposed racist, “made me cringe” sneers that provoked her brilliant grandson’s metamorphosis into a trans-racial messiah. That cruel evocation was symptomatic of a generation that does all it can to claim credit for itself for its perceived successes, and to allot blame to its predecessors for all its present unhappiness.

But then the Obama campaign already had focused on the Obama’s neuroses, their angst about their loans, the cost of their kids’ school and camp, and whether or not Michelle felt ‘pride’ this particular week in the rest of us. The Wright mess and the relativist apology for it are not the only reason for the slide in the polls; America also got tired of the self-indulgence and self-referencing that exceeded even that of the Clintons’, heretofore the past masters of the me-generation.

The only suspense will be how the great healer explains to the nation why in the world white voters outside of the elite suburbs suddenly turned on him in record numbers that cannot be balanced by the record majorities he piles up in African-American communities. Pennsylvania will be the barometer of the reaction to his modified hangout speech this week, and I think he could well lose the state by 20%. And that will send a powerful message that the Democrats have nominated someone who will not or cannot “disown” an abject racist—or at least apply the same standards of condemnation that he once applied to Don Imus when he asked him to resign.

Indeed, as two liberal candidates duke it out, we now matter-of-factly talk of the “white voter” and the “black voter” and the “Latino voter.” The overwhelming majority of black commentators on television who hear the replays of the Wright venom find ways of assuring audiences that what they are hearing is not what they think they are hearing—given that listeners are not experienced with that past grievance or this present custom in the black religious community.

Reporters hunt in vain for a black preacher or members of churches similar to Trinity who find Wright’s racism, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism abominable. But then why should they when Barack Obama himself has put such hatred in the proper context of ‘everyone does it’—your rabbi, his grandmother, the “corporate culture”, the “Reagan Coalition”, Geraldine Ferraro, and all the other racists who are moral equivalents of Rev. Wright spouting out “God Damn America”, “rich white folks,” the “KKK of A”, “Clarence Colon” and all the other sickness? (In this regard I smiled when the Rev. Sharpton the other night swore that the Rev. Wright had not said anything untoward about “whites” (cf.”KKK of A”) or toward any one person (cf. e.g., “Clarence Colon”, “Condamnesia” Rice).

Giddy elite whites chime in solemn tones that the “speech” was historical and the burden is on the less sensitive than they to appreciate it and fall into line. Meanwhile tens of millions in the middle-class of all races remain appalled. They are puzzled that their intelligence is being insulted—that a would-be President can neither explain his past intimacy with a racist nor promise to disassociate himself from the font of such hatred.

So history will record that the disturbing legacies of the Obama racial paradigm are his twins of moral equivalence and contextualization. That is, once a private remark of a grandmother is elevated to the same sin as a public hate-fest, for purposes of rationalization, or a quip of Geraldine Ferraro is similar to “God Damn America” or the “KKK of A”, then all metrics disappear. The next time someone utters something reprehensible, there will be a chorus that points out a similar tit-for-tat pretext.

And since we are to understand that the peculiar frustrations of blacks and the protocols of expression within in the black church must pardon the effects of the Wright hatred, it unfortunately won’t be long until the next racist outburst is likewise explained away. Imus tried that when he advanced the argument that his past good works and the raunchiness of talk-jock radio made his racist remarks merely crude rather than ill-intended.

That argument rightly failed (as the “old” Obama pointed out at the time); after Wright and Obama, similar ones won’t next time—and the future is sadly going to be wide-open, true to the Wright brand of coarseness and crudity. Thanks to Obama there will be fewer to speak out with any credibility that an absolute standard of decency condemns all forms of racism from anyone under all circumstances.

Obama’s eloquence and his postmodern deftness with false analogies and slick relativism may have ensured both that the super delegates don’t yank his nomination, and that public anger over his falsehoods about what he knew and when is chalked up to racism, but the damage he’s done won’t be undone easily. The Democrats flocked to this Pied Piper and now he’s going to lead them over the proverbial cliff.


The Dishonesty of Hope
Obama has risen on his words, and will be hard-pressed to talk his way out of this one.
By Rich Lowry
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDI2Y2IyMDY2YjE3YTMzOThhM2Y1ZmNmOTU1YWYxZjA=

In the first sermon Barack Obama ever heard from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the pastor railed against “white folks’ greed,” the bombing of Hiroshima and “the callousness of policymakers in the White House and in the statehouse.” For Obama, the experience was formative. The sermon’s title, “The Audacity of Hope,” became the title of Obama’s second book and the theme of his presidential campaign.

Now that videotapes have surfaced of Wright’s more scorching diatribes — arguing that America deserved 9/11, exclaiming “God damn America” for spreading drugs in the black community, and declaring the U.S. the “US-KKK-a” — Obama professes shock, even though he attended the church for nearly two decades and Wright was his spiritual mentor. Evidently, Obama wants us to believe they never talked about anything besides the Gospel and the weather.

Nothing is so unbecoming as a beacon of the new politics resorting to such naked evasion. Obama adviser David Axelrod tried to tell reporters on a conference call that a reason Wright was disinvited from giving the invocation at Obama’s announcement speech in February 2007 was that it was so cold, the program had to be shortened.

Axelrod quickly admitted they kept Wright from the podium because he was potentially controversial. He was loath to do it because it means Obama knew about Wright’s venom well before he expressed surprise and dismay over the videotapes. Given that black-liberation theology — inherently anti-white and hostile to America as a repository of white sinfulness — underlies the Rev. Wright’s ministry, there couldn’t have been any escaping it.

Are we to believe that the Rev. Wright had the ushers scan the crowd at every service and, if Barack Obama and his family were present, reverted to a mainstream Christianity and colorblind calls for love and mercy? That Wright suddenly hit upon his theory that the U.S. government had hooked blacks on drugs in the videotaped sermon of 2003, and never mentioned a word of it before?

When Wright loosed his broadsides against the United States, members of the congregation didn’t look at each other awkwardly because their pastor had said something uncharacteristic and embarrassing. Instead, they erupted in paroxysms of affirmation; they were used to such statements and enjoyed them.

Of course Obama knew of Wright’s commitment to “social justice” (read racialism and anti-Americanism). It’s why the Rev. Wright told the New York Times last April: “If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.”

But just three weeks ago, when asked about his church at a campaign event, Obama replied: “I don’t think that my church is actually particularly controversial. It is a member of the United Church of Christ. It’s got a choir. We sing hymnals. We talk about scripture. You would feel at home if you were there.” At least if you didn’t mind vitriolic ravings with your Bible readings.

Obama was spinning, a pattern of late. When he made an idiotic pledge in Ohio to withdraw from NAFTA unless it’s renegotiated, one of his foreign-policy aides reassured the Canadians it was just campaign rhetoric. Before she was forced from the campaign, top-level Obama aide Samantha Power told the BBC that as president, Obama would reevaluate his position in favor of a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, exposing one of the policy pillars of his campaign as a fraud.

The Rev. Wright drives a wedge into the central contradiction of Obama’s campaign — an orthodox liberal politician who rose to prominence in a left-wing milieu in Chicago and has never broken with his party on anything of consequence is campaigning on unifying the country. There is nothing particularly unifying about Obama’s past and his voting record. The senator has risen on his words, and will be hard-pressed to talk his way out of his long, jarring association with the gleefully divisive Rev. Jeremiah Wright.


The Obama Bargain
By SHELBY STEELE
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120579535818243439.html

Geraldine Ferraro may have had sinister motives when she said that Barack Obama would not be "in his position" as a frontrunner but for his race. Possibly she was acting as Hillary Clinton's surrogate. Or maybe she was simply befuddled by this new reality -- in which blackness could constitute a political advantage.

But whatever her motives, she was right: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." Barack Obama is, of course, a very talented politician with a first-rate political organization at his back. But it does not detract from his merit to say that his race is also a large part of his prominence. And it is undeniable that something extremely powerful in the body politic, a force quite apart from the man himself, has pulled Obama forward. This force is about race and nothing else.

The novelty of Barack Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. Jesse Jackson displayed considerable political talent in his presidential runs back in the 1980s. But there was a distinct limit to his white support. Mr. Obama's broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama's genius to understand this. Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed -- an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.

How to turn one's blackness to advantage?

The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama's extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.

His actual policy positions are little more than Democratic Party boilerplate and hardly a tick different from Hillary's positions. He espouses no galvanizing political idea. He is unable to say what he means by "change" or "hope" or "the future." And he has failed to say how he would actually be a "unifier." By the evidence of his slight political record (130 "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much.

Race helps Mr. Obama in another way -- it lifts his political campaign to the level of allegory, making it the stuff of a far higher drama than budget deficits and education reform. His dark skin, with its powerful evocations of America's tortured racial past, frames the political contest as a morality play. Will his victory mean America's redemption from its racist past? Will his defeat show an America morally unevolved? Is his campaign a story of black overcoming, an echo of the civil rights movement? Or is it a passing-of-the-torch story, of one generation displacing another?

Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans -- black and white -- Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America's very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?

But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.

No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

Mr. Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win" (Free Press, 2007).

Buried in Eloquence, Obama Contradictions About Pastor
In Speech, Obama Contradicted More Than a Year of Denials About His Knowledge of Rev. Wright's Sermons
By BRIAN ROSS and AVNI PATEL
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4480868&page=1

Buried in his eloquent, highly praised speech on America's racial divide, Sen. Barack Obama contradicted more than a year of denials and spin from him and his staff about his knowledge of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's controversial sermons.

Similarly, Obama also has only recently given a much fuller accounting of his relationship with indicted political fixer Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a longtime friend, who his campaign once described as just one of "thousands of donors."

Until yesterday, Obama said the only thing controversial he knew about Rev. Wright was his stand on issues relating to Africa, abortion and gay marriage.

"I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial," Obama said at a community meeting in Nelsonville, Ohio, earlier this month.

"He has said some things that are considered controversial because he's considered that part of his social gospel; so he was one of the leaders in calling for divestment from South Africa and some other issues like that," Obama said on March 2.

His initial reaction to the initial ABC News broadcast of Rev. Wright's sermons denouncing the U.S. was that he had never heard his pastor of 20 years make any comments that were anti-U.S. until the tape was played on air.

But yesterday, he told a different story.

"Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes," he said in his speech yesterday in Philadelphia.

Obama did not say what he heard that he considered "controversial," and the campaign has yet to answer repeated requests for dates on which the senator attended Rev. Wright's sermons over the last 20 years.

In the case of his relationship with Rezko, Obama has also been slow to acknowledge the full extent of his relationship.

It was only last week that he revealed Rezko had raised some $250,000 in campaign contributions for him.

The campaign had initially claimed Rezko-connected contributions were no more than $60,000, an amount the campaign donated to charity. Then the figure grew to around $86,000, and there were additional revelations that put the amount at about $150,000. Obama's $250,000 accounting was a substantial jump and clearly contradicted earlier campaign statements that Rezko was just one of "thousands of donors."

Rezko is now on trial in federal court in Chicago, charged with a pattern of bribing state officials to obtain various Illinois state contracts. Rezko has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Obama was initially vague about Rezko's role in helping him buy a new home on Chicago's south side. Unable to afford an adjacent vacant lot the seller wanted to sell at the same time as the house, Obama approached Rezko. Rezko's wife bought the lot on the same day Obama bought the house, and then later, Mrs. Rezko sold the Obamas a strip of the lot which gave the Obamas a larger backyard.

Obama called it a "bone-headed" mistake but never revealed, until he met with Chicago reporters last week, that Rezko had actually toured the house with him and been deeply involved in the transaction.

In a statement, campaign press secretary Bill Burton said, "Last week, Sen. Obama spent almost three hours answering every single question about Tony Rezko posed by the local reporters who've covered the story closest for years. Those newspapers said they were more than satisfied with his open, honest answers. We've given all of the money contributed to Barack Obama's federal campaigns that could reasonably be credited to Mr. Rezko's political support to charity. Sen. Obama also provided an estimate of the most that could have possibly been raised as a result of Mr. Rezko's efforts, but that estimate is not a basis upon which any individual contributions can be donated to charity. "

As to Rev. Wright, Burton said, "While Sen. Obama was not in church for the incendiary and offensive statements of Rev. Wright that have been played on television over the last week, yesterday he delivered a deeply personal, honest speech on race in America in which he acknowledged that over the course of 20 years, of course he heard statements from Wright that could be considered controversial."


The Quality of Obama's Character
Caroline Glick
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2008/03/obama_and_me.asp

I grew up on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s so I have a bit of local interest in Senator Barack Obama’s race for the White House.

Obama and his family live in my old neighborhood, Hyde Park. My siblings and I all attended our local public high school – Kenwood Academy. Obama’s wife Michelle went to Whitney Young High School. The city swimming championship was always held there. My older brothers were members of Kenwood’s swim team. Aside from its swimming pool, I never saw much of Whitney Young. It was a magnet school. But my parents always said that didn’t mean much. All of Chicago’s public schools were basically horrible.

Kenwood was reclassified an academy rather than a regular high school sometime in the 1970s. It was the principal’s way of expelling the gang members from the school. In the Chicago public school system, if you attended an academy and weren’t passing your classes you could be expelled. I understand that the distinction was removed a couple of years after I graduated in 1987, and the school rapidly declined to its previous status as a gang and drug infested flophouse for adolescents. The year after I graduated, in a sign of what was happening, the school authorities installed metal detectors at all the entrances.

When I went to Kenwood, the school was 85 percent black and 15 percent other. The others were mainly white with a sprinkling of Asians and Latinos. Going to school there probably gave me a somewhat skewed view of the reality of race relations in America, because the only bigotry I experienced was black bigotry against whites.

I was one of the only white girls on the track team and my coach was quite a black bigot. She made every white girl on the team run the mile and two mile. Only the black girls could sprint. It didn’t matter to her that I was better at the 200 than the mile. When I asked to run sprints, she just said, “No, that’s not for you girl.” So I quit.

I was in 9th grade in the lead-up to the 1984 presidential elections. Most of the kids in the school were fired up about Jesse Jackson’s candidacy. I was personally offended by their support for a man who referred to New York as a “hymietown,” and I let my feelings be known. I don’t think that anyone thought worse of me for saying I didn’t support a man who was anti-Jewish. But then, it never occurred to me to care. If they had thought worse of me for standing up for my rights as a Jew, then that was their problem, not mine.

At any rate, I remembered my exchanges with my classmates about Jackson today as I read Obama’s speech about race and his pastor Jeremiah White. It was an excellent speech as far as it goes. But it left me feeling very uneasy about the quality of Obama’s character.

I was 13 years old when I stood up alone to all my classmates and told them that I thought they should be ashamed of themselves for supporting an anti-Semite for president. I was a child. But Obama came to Wright as an adult. And as an adult, he sat through 20 years of Wright’s anti-white, anti-Jewish, and anti-American vitriol and said nothing. Indeed, until just a few months ago, he was honoring him as his spiritual mentor.  What does that say about him?

As a child, I thought that my track coach was discriminating against me because I was white and so I got up and left. When he -- as an adult -- heard his pastor spewing poison, he never said anything and he didn’t quit.

It can be argued that there is a difference between how I reacted to black bigotry and how he reacted to black bigotry because I was an outsider and he was an insider. I wasn’t trying to become a member of the black community. I was simply demanding to be treated with respect as a non-black by blacks who happened to be the vast majority of my classmates and teachers.

But then, here’s another example.

In January, I spoke at an anti-jihad conference in Dallas, TX. It was organized by a group called the America Truth Forum. Basically, it was a conclave of an anti-jihad public with anti-jihad speakers. That is, we were all members of the same ideological community – or so I thought when I agreed to attend.

One of the speakers on my panel was an older man named Paul Williams. I had never heard his name before. He approached me before the panel and flattered me, saying that I was the best writer around. So it goes without saying that I was not ill-disposed to him.

But then he began to speak; and pure poison came out. He began his remarks by telling the audience of mainly religious Christians that some woman had told him that he is a prophet. That already had me questioning his character. But then he went on, giving incorrect statements about Muslims. Rather than provide information about jihadist doctrine or infiltration of American mosques, he simply began demonizing Muslims as a group. They became this amorphous “other” incapable of individual choices or actions. It was bigotry pure and simple.

And so, I walked off the stage and out of the hall. I didn’t return until he finished speaking and when I returned, I refused to shake his hand or have anything to do with him.

I saw that the audience had given him a standing ovation and so I began to wonder if I shouldn’t simply return the check I had received from the organizers and leave. But I decided to stay and to challenge him.

And that is what I did. I quietly and forcefully explained why what Williams said was wrong, un-American, and in defiance of both Christian and Jewish values and approaches to human beings. And, as luck would have it, I received an even larger standing ovation than Williams did.

The point here is that I didn’t nod my head to fit in, or treat him politely simply because we sat on a stage together. And I didn’t surrender the floor to him. We were supposedly on “the same side,” but his statements were so contrary to what I believe that it occurred to me that I’d rather be shopping with Nancy Pelosi than sitting through his hateful nastiness.

And I write all of this not to puff myself up. I don’t think I did anything extraordinary by standing up to Williams or to my classmates and teachers in high school. I think that it is how people should behave particularly if they are smart enough to understand that ideas are important. And Obama is certainly smart enough to understand that ideas are important.

Obama’s denunciation of Wright’s bigotry amounts to too little too late. The time to stand up to him wasn’t now, when his association with Wright is sinking his hopes for the White House. The time to have stood up to Wright was when Obama was just another member of his church. If he truly believes in what he says he believes, he should have walked out of Wright’s church or grabbed Wright’s microphone and told his fellow churchgoers that Wright was wrong and that they mustn’t hate. In twenty years of attending Wright’s church, why didn’t Obama once stand before his fellow church members and tell them that they mustn’t hate their country and their fellow Americans?

The fact that he didn’t, and the fact that he upheld this man until just a few months ago as his spiritual mentor and still refuses to condemn him and his deeply flawed character tells me everything I need to know about Barack Obama. I think that he is an opportunistic, weak man. I hope and pray that he doesn’t become President. 


The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud
By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/20/AR2008032003017.html

The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.

An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which"controversial" remarks?

Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented HIV "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible for Sept. 11 -- "chickens coming home to roost" -- because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?) What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them?

Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?"

But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave -- why doesn't he leave even today -- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.

His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence and (b) white guilt.

(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?

"I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was Grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus's time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.

Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?

(b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then he proceeds to do precisely that. What lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.

This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.

But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?


Obama's Speech
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2008/03/19/obamas_speech

Did Senator Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia convince people that he is still a viable candidate to be President of the United States, despite the adverse reactions to statements by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright?

The polls and the primaries will answer that question.

The great unasked question for Senator Obama is the question that was asked about President Nixon during the Watergate scandal; What did he know and when did he know it?

Although Senator Obama would now have us believe that he is shocked, shocked, at what Jeremiah Wright said, that he was not in the church when pastor Wright said those things from the pulpit, this still leaves the question of why he disinvited Wright from the event at which he announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination a year ago.

Either Barack Obama or his staff must have known then that Jeremiah Wright was not someone whom they wanted to expose to the media and to the media scrutiny to which that could lead.

Why not, if it is only now that Senator Obama is learning for the first time, to his surprise, what kinds of things Jeremiah Wright has been saying and doing?

No one had to be in church the day Wright made his inflammatory and obscene remarks to know about them.

The cable news journalists who are playing the tapes of those sermons were not there. The tapes were on sale in the church itself. Obama knew that because he had bought one or more of those tapes.

But even if there were no tapes, and even if Obama never heard from other members of the church what their pastor was saying, he spent 20 years in that church, not just as an ordinary member but also as someone who once donated $20,000 to the church.

There was no way that he didn't know about Jeremiah Wright's anti-American and racist diatribes from the pulpit.

Someone once said that a con man's job is not to convince skeptics but to enable people to continue to believe what they already want to believe.

Accordingly, Obama's Philadelphia speech -- a theatrical masterpiece -- will probably reassure most Democrats and some other Obama supporters. They will undoubtedly say that we should now "move on," even though many Democrats have still not yet moved on from George W. Bush's 2000 election victory.

Like the Soviet show trials during their 1930s purges, Obama's speech was not supposed to convince critics but to reassure supporters and fellow-travelers, in order to keep the "useful idiots" useful.

Best-selling author Shelby Steele's recent book on Barack Obama ("A Bound Man") has valuable insights into both the man and the circumstances facing many other blacks -- especially those who were never part of the black ghetto culture but who feel a need to identify with it for either personal, political or financial reasons.

Like religious converts who become more Catholic than the Pope, such people often become blacker-than-thou. For whatever reason, Barack Obama chose a black extremist church decades ago -- even though there was no shortage of very different churches, both black and white -- in Chicago.

Some say that he was trying to earn credibility on the ghetto streets, to facilitate his work as a community activist or for his political career. We may never know why.

But now that Barack Obama is running for a presidential nomination, he is doing so on a radically different basis, as a post-racial candidate uniquely prepared to bring us all together.

Yet the past continues to follow him, despite his attempts to bury it and the mainstream media's attempts to ignore it or apologize for it.

Shelby Steele depicts Barack Obama as a man without real convictions, "an iconic figure who neglected to become himself."

Senator Obama has been at his best as an icon, able with his command of words to meet other people's psychic needs, including a need to dispel white guilt by supporting his candidacy.

But President of the United States, in a time of national danger, under a looming threat of nuclear terrorism? No.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.


Throwing Grandma Over the Side
By Mona Charen
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MonaCharen/2008/03/21/throwing_grandma_over_the_side

It's a mistake to try to pigeonhole Barack Obama. He is too smart and too agile to succumb to easy categorization. But the candidate's eloquence is often more of a curtain than a window to his soul -- and one is left to wonder where his heart truly lies. As George Burns said of acting, "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made."

Discussing his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who asked God to "damn" America, who called this country the "No. 1 killer in the world," Obama's defense was subtle. Oh yes, he agreed, the rhetoric is "divisive at a time when we need unity" and reflects "profoundly distorted views of this country" that "rightly offend both white and black." But there's so much more to the man. He serves his community, housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, serving those with HIV/AIDS, and so forth. He brought Obama to Christianity. And Obama can no more "disown him than he can disown the black community" and no more disown him than he can disown his own white grandmother.

Obama's white grandmother, according to the account in "Dreams from My Father," had once flinched before a black man on a public bus -- hoping that her husband would drive her to work the following day so that she could avoid him. On other occasions, he recounts, she had uttered "racial or ethnic stereotypes" that made Obama "cringe."

This is a false equivalence. In the first place, what pastor or congregational leader does not minister to the poor and unfortunate? Pastoral work in the community is the norm, not the exception. One can say the same of Louis Farrakhan and Hamas for that matter. It doesn't begin to excuse or justify stoking the flames of hatred and bitterness that Wright so flagrantly fired.

And wasn't it a bit of a cheap shot to take public aim at grandmother, who sacrificed so much for Obama, who served as his surrogate mother during his high school years? If she used racial and ethnic stereotypes, that was wrong. But the episode about the bus, as related in his book, is hardly a damning indictment of a secret racist. After Obama's grandmother confessed to having been harassed by an aggressive panhandler, Obama writes:

"He (Obama's grandfather) turned around and I saw now that he was shaking. 'It is a big deal. It's a big deal to me. She's been bothered by men before. You know why she's so scared this time? I'll tell you why. Before you came in she told me the fella was black.' He whispered the word. 'That's the real reason she's bothered. And I just don't think that's right.'

"It was like a fist to my stomach, and I wobbled to maintain my composure."

I don't claim to know Obama's grandmother and am in no position to judge her racial sentiments. But it does seem to an outsider that Obama's judgment upon his grandmother is as harsh as his tolerance of Wright is benign. It isn't as if he was raised in Trinity Baptist Church. He chose it as an adult. He chose those sermons he now calls "incendiary" and "inexcusable." He says now that Wright misses the dynamism of American society, yet when it came time to decide where his daughters would attend church, he chose Trinity, where they would "learn" that the U.S. government concocted the AIDS virus to wipe out the African-American population, that the U.S. would "plant" WMDs in Iraq, and that blacks harming other blacks are "fighting the wrong enemy." A beautifully delivered speech cannot overcome that history.

The solution, Obama asserts, to racial divisiveness, is to come together and say "Not this time." This time "we want to talk about "the crumbling schools ... to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem." This time, in other words, we can demonstrate our racial bona fides by, you guessed it, voting for Obama for president.

Barack is the new kid on the block, but surely he can recall the campaign of 2000. One of the candidates that year made education reform a keystone of his effort, more or less explicitly aiming at minority kids. He called his package No Child Left Behind and denounced the "soft bigotry of low expectations." One doesn't expect Obama, a very liberal Democrat, to endorse George W. Bush's programs. But it would be nice if he were not suggesting that by voting for something very similar, we are taking a bold step toward racial reconciliation and universal love.


The Politics of Friendship
Obama and me.
By Stephen Spruiell
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGZmMTgyYTZhMzI4NTRlNjkyZDg5NWQ3OWNlNGRmYzM=

After I accepted a job at National Review Online, several guys I considered to be good friends gradually became less so. These were liberal guys, and we had argued in the past about politics over beers. But something changed when I started to publish my opinions. Some stopped calling me. One, who had been a groomsman in my wedding, told me I just wasn’t someone he was interested in talking to anymore.

This was painful to me at the time, but I accepted it. There was nothing about the expression of mainstream conservative views in a mainstream conservative publication that I thought merited this kind of shunning, but if my friends felt they could not in good conscience remain friends with an outspoken conservative, there was nothing I could do about it.

At the same time, I resolved never to end a friendship over a political disagreement. Life is too short, and friendship too important, to go turning your back on a friend because the two of you no longer see eye to eye on certain political abstractions or even on questions as profound as whether the country should go to war. As William F. Buckley Jr. was fond of saying, “Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them.”

Perhaps because I write about politics professionally, I find it is important to separate the political from the personal. It’s not just that I have liberal friends. I have friends who are in the business of advocating policies that I am in the business of opposing, and vice versa. In fact, my brother works for a Democratic member of Congress, and while I wrack my brain wondering what went wrong, I don’t hold it against him. He’s the same guy who’s always been there for me, and so what if we disagree about FISA reform?

That said, some political beliefs really are beyond the pale, and my resolution was put to the test a few months ago when a close friend of mine told me that he had read some things that made him doubt the “official theory” behind the Sept. 11th attacks. While I found my friend’s admission troubling, I never seriously considered it grounds for ending our friendship, which dates back almost 12 years.

Instead, I tried to convince him that he had been misled. We argued about it for while, and then we put it behind us. I don’t know if I was able to persuade him, because we haven’t discussed the matter since. If he brings it up again, then I’ll reiterate the many reasons why I find 9/11 conspiracy theories pernicious and disgusting. But I’m not going to go out of my way to pick a fight with him.

Close friendships are a scarce commodity, not to be jettisoned lightly. I’m not sure what offense short of outright betrayal would cause me to turn my back on this friend, but it would have to be something more grievous than his susceptibility to artfully constructed conspiracy theories, as offensive as I may find them to be.

This brings us to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr., Barack Obama’s pastor, his spiritual adviser and, if we are to take Obama at his word, his friend. In a sermon he delivered the Sunday after 9/11, Wright claimed that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus “as a means of genocide against people of color,” accused the U.S. of supporting “state terrorism” against the Palestinians, and said of the attacks, “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” In a sermon he delivered in 2003, Wright said, “God damn America” for committing a long list of alleged crimes.

Obama has been less than candid about his knowledge of Wright’s political views. He used the occasion of a high-profile speech on race relations this week to concede that over the course of their 20-year relationship, he heard Wright say “controversial” things and express political views that Obama “strongly disagree[d]” with. But he has denied ever hearing the aforementioned statements. Of those, he said:

[T]he remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.
Later in the speech, Obama offered this to those “for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough”:

Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth — by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
Obama wants us to believe that he did not turn his back on Wright, leave Wright’s church or “disown” him because for the past 20 years, Wright has been “like family” to him. But Obama wants us simultaneously to believe that he was not aware that his close friend held such a “profoundly distorted view of this country” — a view that encompassed Wright’s beliefs that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus, introduced crack to the ghettos, invited the 9/11 attacks through acts of wanton violence throughout the world and therefore ought to be damned.

I don’t believe it. Obama’s friendship with Wright is probably genuine, and I do not blame Obama for refusing to abandon his friend over what amounts to a political disagreement. But it’s highly unlikely that Obama did not know about his close friend’s very public and “profoundly distorted” beliefs about America.

What bothers me is that we don’t have any evidence — either an old letter or a statement from the campaign — that Obama ever confronted his friend and tried to change his mind. Such confrontations can grate on friendships, if they happen frequently enough, and especially if they concern trivial matters. But here we have a situation where a friend of Obama’s was spreading poisonous beliefs to a congregation that included Obama’s own daughters. Obama was in a unique position to lead by asking his friend to reconsider some of his hateful and paranoid ideas.

Evidently, he didn’t, and what might have been silent disagreement now looks like passive acceptance. No one should ask Obama to turn his back on his friend. But we have a right to ask those who wish to lead us: If they can’t confront their friends, how will they confront our enemies?

Obama's Pastor Problem
By Richard Cohen
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/17/AR2008031702153.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

Some questions: Why did Barack Obama take so long to "reject outright" the harshly critical statements about America made by his minister, Jeremiah Wright, not to mention the praise the same minister lavished on Louis Farrakhan just last November?

How is it possible that Obama did not know about these remarks, when he is a member of Wright's congregation and so close to the man that he likens him to "an old uncle"?

How is it possible that a campaign apparatus that sniffed out Geraldine Ferraro's offensive statement to a local California newspaper (the Daily Breeze, 12th paragraph) did not know that Wright's statements condemning America were all over the Internet and had been cited March 6 by the (reputable) anti-Obama columnist Ronald Kessler? The sermon was also available on YouTube.

In other words, how is it possible that a man who has made judgment the centerpiece of his presidential campaign has shown so little of it in this matter?

One possible answer to these questions is that Obama has learned to rely on a sycophantic media that hears any criticism of him as either (1) racist, (2) vaguely racist or (3) doing the bidding of Hillary and Bill Clinton. You only have to turn your attention to the interview Obama granted MSNBC's fawning Keith Olbermann for an example. Obama was asked whether he had known that Wright had suggested substituting the phrase "God damn America" for "God bless America."

"You know, frankly, I didn't," Obama said. "I wasn't in church during the time when the statements were made."

But had you heard about them? Did your crack campaign staff alert you? And what about Wright's honoring Farrakhan? Had you heard about that? Did you feel any obligation to denounce those remarks -- not Farrakhan's, as you had done, but those of Wright himself? Don't you consider yourself a public figure whom others look to for leadership? Do you think you failed them here?

Olbermann asked none of those questions.

In a certain sense, I am sympathetic toward Obama. When he said of Wright, "Because of his life experience, [he] continues to have a lot of anger and frustration, and will express that in ways that are very different from me and my generation," anyone who knows anything about the black experience in America has to nod.

The 66-year-old Wright was born when blacks were still being lynched, when Jim Crow ruled the South -- and when raw bigotry prevailed virtually everywhere else. He knows a different America from the one familiar to most whites. I can also understand why Farrakhan has a following in black America. He may be a gutter anti-Semite, but he stands up to whites, and within parts of the African American community, he is admired for, among other things, rehabilitating criminals.

So for Obama, Wright posed a dilemma. The minister is well known and respected and, clearly, adored by Obama. His language of resentment, even of hate, has a certain context to Obama. It does not shock. I understand, really I do.

But a presidential candidate is not a mere church member, and he operates in a different context. We examine everything about him for the slightest clue about character. On Wright, Obama has shown a worrisome tic. He has done so also with his relationship with Tony Rezko, the shadowy Chicago political figure. Obama last week submitted to a grilling on this matter by the staff of the Chicago Tribune and was given a clean bill of health. I accept it. But that hardly changes the fact that Obama should never have done business with Rezko in the first place. He concedes that now, but it was still a failure of judgment.

After I wrote in January about Wright's praise for Farrakhan, I was pilloried by Obama supporters who accused me of all manner of things, including insanity. But when I asked some of them what they would have done if their minister had extolled David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan official, or Rabbi Meir Kahane, the late anti-Arab racist, they either rejected the question entirely or simply didn't answer. Don't they think that everyone, particularly a public figure, has an obligation to denounce bigotry, as well as those who praise the bigots?

As I wrote in that column, the manifest abilities and stunning political talents of Barack Obama still recommend him to the presidency. But he has been less than forthright or responsible about Wright. This does not disqualify him from the White House, but it does suggest that if the vaunted red phone rings at 3 a.m., there might be times when he will simply not answer.


Obama Blew It
What the candidate should have said about race.
By Michael Meyers
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oew-meyers20mar20,1,5615767.story?track=rss

Tim Rutten's column, "Obama's Lincoln moment" and The Times editorial, "Obama on race" both miss the mark.

In my considered judgment as a race and civil rights specialist, I would say that Barack Obama's "momentous" speech on race settled on merely "explaining" so-called racial differences between blacks and whites -- and in so doing amplified deep-seated racial tensions and divisions. Instead of giving us a polarizing treatise on the "black experience," Obama should have reiterated the theme that has brought so many to his campaign: That race ain't what it used to be in America.

He should have presented us a pathway out of our racial boxes and a road map for new thinking about race. He should have depicted his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as a symbol of the dysfunctional angry men who are stuck in the past and who must yield to a new generation of color-blind, hopeful Americans and to a new global economy in which we will look on our neighbors' skin color no differently than how we look on their eye color.

In fact, I'd say that considering the nation's undivided attention to this all-important speech, which gave him an unrivaled opportunity to lift us out of racial and racist thinking, Obama blew it.

I waited in vain for our hybrid presidential candidate to speak the simple truth that there is no such thing as "race," that we all belong to the same race -- the human race. I waited for him to mesmerize us with a singular and focused appeal to hold all candidates to the same standards no matter their race or their sex or their age. But instead Obama gave us a full measure of racial rhetoric about how some of us with an "untrained ear" -- meaning whites and Asians and Latinos -- don't understand and can't relate to the so-called black experience.

Well, I am black, and I can't relate to a "black experience" that shields and explains old-style black ministers who rant and rave about supposed racial differences and about how America ought to be damned. I long ago broke away from all associations and churches that preached the gospel of hate and ethnic divisiveness -- including canceling my membership in 100 Black Men of America Inc., when they refused my motion to admit women and whites. They still don't. I was not going to stay in any group that assigned status or privileges of membership based solely on race or gender.

We and our leaders -- especially our candidates for the highest office in the land -- must repudiate all forms of racial idiocy and sexism, and be judged by whether we still belong to exclusionary or hateful groups. I don't know any church that respects, much less reflects, my personal beliefs in the absolute equality of all people, so I choose not to belong to any of them. And I would never -- as have some presidential candidates -- accept the endorsement of preachers of the gospel according to the most racist and sexist of doctrines.

But someone's race or religion is not mine or anybody else's concern. I couldn't care less that Wright is a Christian or that Louis Farrakhan professes to be a Muslim. I couldn't care less whether the hateful minister who endorsed John McCain is, deep inside, a decent man or a fundamentalist. But I do care about these pastors' divisive and crazed words; I do care that their "sermons" exploit and pander to the worst fears and passions of people based on perceptions and misperceptions about race. I hate that these preachers' sermons prejudge people's motives or behavior based on their race or ethnicity. I hate the haters, and I expected Obama to make a straightforward speech about what has become the Hate Hour -- and the most segregated hour -- in America on Sunday mornings.

I expected Obama, who up to now had been steering a perfect course away from the racial boxes of the past, to challenge racial labels and so-called black experiences. We're all mixed up, and if we haven't yet been by the process of miscegenation, trans-racial adoptions and interracial marriage, we sure ought to get used to how things will be in short order.

That would have been the forward-looking message of a visionary candidate. But Obama erred by looking backward -- as far back as slavery. What does slavery have to do with the price of milk at the grocery store? He referenced continuing segregation, especially segregated public schools, but stopped short. What is he going to do about them? How does he feel about public schools for black boys or single-sex public schools and classes? What does the gospel according to Wright say about such race-based and gender-specific schemes for getting around our civil rights laws?

We can't be united as a nation if we continue to think racially and give credence to racial experiences and differences based on ethnicity, past victim status and stereotypical categories. All of these prejudices surrounding tribe-against-tribe are old-hat and dysfunctional -- especially the rants of ministers, of whatever skin color or religion, who appeal to our base prejudices and to superstitions about our supposed racial differences. The man or woman who talks plainly about our commonality as a race of human beings, about our future as one nation indivisible, rather than about our discredited and disunited past, is, I predict, likely to finish ahead of the pack and do us a great public service.

Michael Meyers is executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and a former assistant national director of the NAACP.


The Wright Stand
Judgment, character and Barack Obama.
By Peter Wehner
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTU2N2ViMGFkN2VmMzdmMTk1YzVlMDc0NzUyODQyMmQ

Several years ago my wife and children attended a Presbyterian church in Washington, D.C. We liked and respected the senior pastor, we had close friends in the congregation, and we felt spiritually nourished by the congregants and the worship. Two of our children were baptized there.

Not long after the attacks of September 11, my wife and I heard two different visitors — one in remarks during a church service, the other while teaching an adult Sunday-school class — that were derogatory of and inflammatory toward Israel.

Upon hearing the words of these two people — which I found both shocking and disquieting — I immediately raised concerns with the senior pastor. He tried to reassure me and then put me in touch with an associate pastor who was in charge of a ministry to Palestinian Christians (one I had been previously unaware of). I engaged in conversations and written correspondence with the associate pastor and the head of the board of elders over this issue; in the process, I discovered that our church hosted an annual conference which featured only speakers who were highly critical of the state of Israel. For the first time it became clear to me that the church we attended was deeply biased against the Jewish state. When what we deemed to be adequate counter steps were not taken, we left the church, in good measure because of this matter and how it was handled.

I thought of this episode in our lives in the aftermath of learning about the bigoted and vicious anti-American statements by Barack Obama’s pastor, friend, and spiritual adviser, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. of United Trinity Church of Christ.

I don’t for a moment believe that Senator Obama shares Wright’s manifold and manifest hatreds. What bothers me — particularly as one who has had good things to say about Obama in the past — is why Obama apparently never raised any concerns with Wright about his rhetoric or the black liberation theology being practiced at United Trinity. This was the obvious and appropriate thing to do.

Reverend Wright clearly preaches from a particular cast of mind, one with which Obama was surely familiar. If Obama isn’t willing to voice his concerns and objections with Wright and stand up for his country as it is being slandered by his pastor, what can we expect from Obama when he is asked to stand up against some of the world’s worst dictators?

The options aren’t particularly good for Senator Obama. He either agreed with the views and core beliefs of Reverend Wright, which would essentially disqualify him as a serious candidate for the presidency; or he didn’t agree with Wright but for decades sat passively by and accepted Wright’s teaching and rants. Didn’t Obama consider, even once, pulling Wright aside and pointing out — as any true friend would, in a civil but forceful way — that hailstones of hate simply have no place in a church and that the “social gospel” is not synonymous with preaching bigotry and anti-Americanism?

Beyond that, Senator Obama’s speech on Tuesday, for all the praise it has garnered in many quarters, created additional doubts about Obama’s candor and his willingness to speak up and speak out against a charismatic, forceful, and pernicious figure.

ABC News reports that earlier this month Obama, at a community meeting in Nelsonville, Ohio, said, “I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial.” Obama went on to say, “[Wright] has said some things that are considered controversial because he’s considered that part of his social gospel; so he was one of the leaders in calling for divestment from South Africa and some other issues like that.”

Last Friday, as Senator Obama was making the round on cable TV trying to explain Wright’s remarks that were being replayed over and over again, Obama indicated that he had never heard his pastor of 20 years make any comments that were anti-American until last week. But in his Philadelphia speech two days ago, Senator Obama seemed to change his explanation:

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely — just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country.

This is where things begin to get sticky for Obama. In half-a-month we’ve gone from Wright and his church being essentially non-controversial; to Obama implying that the venomous statements by Wright came as news to him; to admitting that he was in the pews when Wright spoke as a “an occasionally fierce critic” of American domestic and foreign policy. Those remarks were so fierce that even Obama, himself an orthodox liberal who has scorched the Bush administration, was clearly made uncomfortable by what Wright said.

It also begs the question: What exactly did Wright say that Obama strongly disagreed with? Was Wright in fact presenting a “profoundly distorted view of this country”? The odds are a good deal better than even that he was. But Obama has yet to answer those questions — and he probably won’t, at least with any specificity, unless he’s forced to do so. This story, which seemingly changes in every re-telling, is beginning to resemble nothing so much as Bill Clinton’s evolving explanation about his draft notice. It was then that most of America was introduced to “Slick Willie.”

Senator Obama’s speech on Tuesday was a brilliant effort to deflect attention away from what remains the core issue: what did Obama hear, when did he hear it, and what did he do about it? The answers, as best we can tell at this stage, is that Obama heard some very harsh things said from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ; that Obama heard them said a long time ago and probably repeatedly; and that he did little or nothing about it. This from a man who tells us at almost every stop along the campaign trail that he has the “judgment to lead.”

One always wants to be careful about making sweeping conclusions about any individual, particularly one as interesting and compelling as Senator Obama. All of us, in replaying our lives, would change certain things. We would all hope to show more integrity, more courage, more honor. Nevertheless, in a presidential campaign we have to judge based on the available evidence. And given his deep and long-standing association with Reverend Wright, it is fair to ask whether Senator Obama — a gifted writer and speaker and a man of obvious intelligence and appeal — has the appropriate judgment and character to lead this nation. Spending 20 years at Trinity United Church of Christ under the leadership of Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. doesn’t tell us everything we need to know about Barack Obama — but it may well tell us enough.

Peter Wehner, former deputy assistant to the president, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.


Obama's Church Pushes Controversial Doctrines
By Margaret Talev
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/31079.html

Jesus is black. Merging Marxism with Christian Gospel may show the way to a better tomorrow. The white church in America is the Antichrist because it supported slavery and segregation.

Those are some of the more provocative doctrines that animate the theology at the core of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Barack Obama's church.

Obama's speech Tuesday on race in America was hailed as a masterful handling of the controversy over divisive sermons by the longtime pastor of Trinity United, the recently retired Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

But in repudiating and putting in context Wright's inflammatory lines about whites and U.S. foreign policy, the Democratic presidential front-runner didn't address other potentially controversial facts about his church and its ties.

Wright has said that a basis for Trinity's philosophies is the work of James Cone, who founded the modern black liberation theology movement out of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Particularly influential was Cone's seminal 1969 book, "Black Theology & Black Power."

Cone wrote that the United States was a white racist nation and the white church was the Antichrist for having supported slavery and segregation.

Today, Cone, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, stands by that view, but also makes clear that he doesn't believe that whites individually are the Antichrist.

In an interview, Cone said that when he was asked which church most embodied his message, "I would point to that church (Trinity) first." Cone also said he thought that Wright's successor, the Rev. Otis Moss III, would continue the tradition.

Obama, 46, who's biracial, joined Trinity in his late twenties when he worked as a community organizer. He says he'll continue to worship there.

He and other Chicagoans have praised Trinity's role as a melting pot that brings together blacks and some whites from all levels of wealth and education, boasts a joyous and energetic choir, and is deeply involved in community work, such as helping the homeless, the incarcerated and those touched by HIV and AIDS.

But Trinity has a history. Its affiliation with the United Church of Christ makes it part of a liberal, mostly white denomination that was the first in America to ordain gays, women and blacks as ministers.

Trinity goes further, embracing black liberation theology and its emphasis on empowering oppressed groups against establishment forces.

In that and related doctrines, the church and some of its guiding thinkers at times have been socially ahead of the curve and other times outside the mainstream of American religious and political thought.

For example, the 8,000-member congregation embraces the idea that Jesus was black. It's historically supported left-wing social and foreign policies, from South Africa to Latin America to the Middle East.

Wright, who hasn't been giving interviews since the controversy broke, told conservative TV talk-show host Sean Hannity last year that Trinity's black value system also had parallels to the liberation theology of laypeople in Nicaragua three decades ago. There, liberation theology became associated with Marxist revolution and the Sandinistas, and split the Roman Catholic Church.

White America today embraces Nelson Mandela, and he won the Nobel peace prize. But in the early 1980s, when the U.S. government considered Mandela's anti-Apartheid African National Congress a terrorist organization because of its support from communists and use of violence, Trinity became one of the first U.S. churches to support the group.

It isn't clear where Obama's beliefs and the church's diverge. Through aides, Obama declined requests for an interview or to respond to written questions about his thoughts on Jesus, Cone or liberation theology. Trinity officials also didn't respond to requests.

Obama's Illinois state and U.S. Senate voting records and his speeches suggest that, if elected president, he'd take a liberal but mainstream line and seek partisan bridge-building rather than agitation as his style.

It's possible that Obama joined Trinity as much because it gave him credibility as a newcomer to south side Chicago's black community as for its particular theological teachings.

"As a community organizer, would people join Trinity? Yes!" said Dwight Hopkins, a Trinity member and liberation theology professor at the University of Chicago's divinity school. (He said he'd contributed $25 to Obama's campaign.)

However, "someone who wanted to run for public office would think twice about intentionally using Trinity as a leverage," Hopkins said. "When it's Election Day, all the politicians come to Trinity. But not every day."

Cone, the Union professor, said he didn't know Obama personally. He supports his candidacy and considers the senator's worldview as set out in books and speeches "certainly not alien to black theology.

"But it doesn't have as much of a radical edge to it," Cone said of Obama's view. "He couldn't succeed with my message. He speaks less of the hurt and the pain of African-American history. I think his own life has been less of that."

But Cone stands by his message, and sometimes Obama echoes it.

Consider this passage: "Hope is the expectation of that which is not. It is the belief that the impossible is possible, the 'not yet' is coming in history."

Those words sound as if they were pulled from Obama's latest campaign speech. Instead, they're from a memoir Cone wrote in the 1980s. In it, Cone said blacks shouldn't limit their hope to what the Republican and Democratic parties stand for. Then he posited a thought that voters are unlikely to hear from Obama:

"Together, black religion and Marxist philosophy may show us the way to build a completely new society."

Asked about that, Cone said: "I'm not a Marxist. . . . I'm a theologian, and I want to change society. I was searching for my way forward. I want a society in which people have the distribution of wealth, but I don't know how quite to do that institutionally."

He said that the idea of a black Jesus didn't mean Jesus necessarily looked like a black African, but it did rule out Jesus being a white European. More importantly, he said it meant that Jesus "made a solidarity with the (oppressed) people of the land."

Black liberation theology doesn't hold that Africans or black Americans are superior to others. Cone said its concern for the oppressed often allied it with conventional liberal goals.

He argued early on the imperative of supporting women's rights and gay rights. He's said that environmentalism and fighting racism should go hand in hand, as minorities and Third World nations are affected disproportionately by pollution and the environmental costs of capitalism. Civil rights, black liberation and helping the oppressed all share the same values, he said.

"When the Berlin Wall came down, they were saying, 'We shall overcome.' In Tiananmen Square, they were saying, 'We shall overcome.' "

Liberation theology's stance on the rights of Palestinians likewise is informed by its emphasis on seeing God's mission through the lens of oppressed people.

"Black theological liberation is not anti-Israel. It's never been that Zionism is racism," theologian Hopkins said. "It's more for a truly two-state solution."

Still, Hopkins believes, "black theology liberation is to the left of Obama."

On Middle East policy, Obama is strongly pro-Israel. He's rejected an argument voiced by Wright that U.S. support of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians helped fuel the 9-11 attacks.


JEREMIAD
He's Preaching to A Choir I've Left
By Jonetta Rose Barras
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/21/AR2008032102742.html

I've known preachers like the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., former pastor to Sen. Barack Obama. Like many of them, he no doubt sees his congregation as full of victims, and thinks that his words will inspire them to rise out of their victimhood. I understand that.

Once upon a time, I saw myself as a victim, too, destined to march in place. In the 1970s and '80s, as a clenched-fist-pumping black nationalist with my head wrapped in an elaborate gele, I reflected that self-concept in my speech. My words were as fiery as the Rev. Wright's. And more than a few times, I, too, damned America, loudly, for its treatment of blacks.

But I turned away from such rhetoric. Is it time that Wright and other ministers do, too?

African Americans differ on this question. "Some of these ministers are like some hip-hop artists," says E. Ethelbert Miller, an Afro-American studies expert. "Their language is not healing." Counters former civil rights leader Lawrence Guyot: "I am so proud of Rev. Wright, who speaks with unreserved passion, who accepts no quarter and gives no quarter. I'm glad the church is standing with him."

The recent furor over the incendiary rhetoric of the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago pulled back a curtain on black America, sending many in the white commentariat into shock and outrage. But African Americans have been hearing words like Wright's in churches across the country for decades. And for many of us, the uproar over his comments only underlined the quiet culture war going on within our own community.

For a decade, tensions have been rising over questions ranging from what it means to be black, to whether there needs to be a new, post-civil rights meaning of racism, to what features of black America should be transmitted to the mainstream, to whether there even is such a thing as "black America" anymore. Many of these skirmishes have been relegated to our kitchens and living rooms. But they are increasingly being brought to the public square -- often because a white person, a Don Imus or a Michael Richards, commits some infraction or demonstrates cluelessness about African American culture and its unspoken boundaries.

Now the debate is over Wright -- instigated, as many blacks see it, by the media after the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton accused news organizations of insufficiently scrutinizing Obama. Reporters went trolling for stories and found Trinity Church and its controversial pastor -- and what may have been a Sunday dinner conversation in black households exploded onto the public stage.

At the center of the storm is Wright's practice of what is called "prophetic speech," according to the Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler, pastor of Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington. This is "provocative speech that attempts to awaken and cause people to respond."

Such speech has been the lingua franca of much of the black leadership since the days of the civil rights movement, aimed at galvanizing blacks and equipping them with an armor for the battle against segregation. Combined with instruction in the history of blacks in Africa and the diaspora, it has helped to transform the psychological landscape of many who had been crushed over time by racism and had come to feel inferior to whites.

It's also, at least in part, the tradition of Wright's denomination. In several incarnations, the United Church of Christ (UCC) has been a leader in the fight for racial equality since the 19th century. According to Hagler, "congregationals," as the church's members were then called, were involved in the case on behalf of 43 African captives who revolted against their captors aboard the Spanish ship La Amistad in 1839. In the 1970s, the UCC established a commission on racial justice; Wright was on its board of directors.

Wright's impassioned speech can be seen as a continuation of a uniquely black religious experience. "The fundamental question is how do I use a religion that has been used to oppress me to now fight against that oppression," says Maurice Jackson, a history professor at Georgetown University. "There has always been this debate about how far black ministers should go."

Some think they should go as far as they need to. "Without prophetic speech," argues Graylan, "we would not have had Martin Luther King Jr. People remember the 'I Have a Dream' speech, but they do not remember his radical critiques of capitalism and the American system. They easily forget his speech on April 4, 1967." That was the one in which King declared: "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government."

Concedes Miller: "Some people need to hear" Wright's words. "It's looking in the mirror to get a better self-concept."

In my years as a black nationalist, I often spelled America in my poems with a "k" -- sometimes three. I believed that organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan couldn't possibly have operated and prospered without permission, tacit or otherwise, and support from the U.S. government. It seemed logical to conclude that racism and injustice were fundamental, inherent elements of the United States -- of its government, its policies and its institutions.

In those days, I believed that I was in a serious battle for my future. My fiery words were part of an effort to persuade myself that I had the power to break out of the narrow confines created by segregation. And I sought to seduce others to join in the fight. We could not permit the discrimination we faced daily to beat us down.

I never met the Rev. Wright during this explosive period of my life. But I met and listened to others whose speeches were equally blistering and damning of the United States, its government and its economic system. I even flirted with the ideology of a black separatist group.

Obama doesn't share my heritage. But as a child of mixed-race parentage and culture, surely he, too, struggled for his place in a society that has not always been welcoming to mulattos. His white family loved him, but more than an ocean separated him from his black father and relatives. I know what it's like to long for a father, having never known my own. Perhaps Obama found a surrogate black family in Trinity Church.

"Obama had to go to a church" like Trinity, says Miller. "That was part of his homecoming, part of his self-discovery."

That other African Americans and I were able to overcome seemingly insurmountable hurdles is undeniably due, in part, to Wright-like prophetic speech. Like Negro spirituals, it helped us organize, motivate and empower ourselves.

But just as spirituals eventually lost their relevance and potency as an organizing tool against discrimination -- even as they retained their historical importance in the African American cultural narrative -- so, I believe, has Wright-speak lost its place. It's harmful and ultimately can't provide healing. And it's outdated in the 21st century.

I came to this realization gradually. As I expanded my associations and experiences -- organizing in places such as San Francisco, Providence, R.I., Patterson, N.J. and Northeast Washington, meeting caring Hispanics, Asians and whites -- I came to know that we are all more alike than different. I saw that our dreams sat inside each other. All of us wanted a better America, not so much for ourselves as for our children, and their children. Achieving this meant that we had to get beyond our past segregated lives and work together, inspiring the best in ourselves -- not the bitterness and the biases.

This is Obama's message. "I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together," he said last week in a somber, historic address about race, racism and our country's future, presenting grievances on both sides: the pain and anger of blacks and the resentments of working- and middle-class whites.

Earlier, he had denounced Wright's words and dismissed the minister from his ceremonial campaign role. But in his speech he also made clear that he could no more distance himself from his former black pastor than he could from his white grandmother, both of whom are imperfect people.

I understand this sentiment. I have not removed myself from people in my community who continue to rely on Wright-speak. We simply engage in debates. But their numbers are diminishing. More and more African Americans are coming to understand what we have in common with other Americans. Whites, Hispanics and Asians seem to be going through similar metamorphoses. What else can account for the surprising support Obama has received among non-blacks?

And today, there is an entire generation of young people who know nothing of segregation, who see one another as individuals, not as symbols of a dark past. They do not look into white faces and see, as I once did, a burning cross, a white sheet and a vicious dog on a police officer's leash. This is the coalition pushing for a new America.

Some blacks will remain ever distrustful of mainstream America. They cite the noose-hanging incident last year in Jena, La., and the killing of a black man in New York City on the eve of his wedding as evidence that nothing has changed. They praise the Rev. Wright and, like Lawrence Guyot, say that he should continue using the same incendiary language "as long as it is true."

Others, like Miller, believe that the mirror-gazing days of Wright-speak are over. "You have to turn away; if you look too long, it's narcissistic," he says. "Sometimes you have to be radical and smash the mirror. And then you go outside and take your rightful place in the world."

Perhaps Obama's campaign -- with its call for unity and for transcending the negative characteristics of race -- is part of breaking with a painful past. Many of us, blacks as well as whites, hope so.

Jonetta Rose Barras is the political analyst for National Public Radio affiliate WAMU-88.5.


Post ‘Post-Racial Candidate’
Things get out-of-his-tree flown-the-coop nuts on the campaign trail.
By Mark Steyn
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjExNzMwYzMyMjk0MDY4YzlhOTIwM2YzYWYzNGIyNjU=

‘I’m sure,” said Barack Obama in that sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac, fries, and strawberry shake sound profound, “many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”

Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests, or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree flown-the-coop nuts. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose legions of “spiritual advisers” at the height of his Monica troubles outnumbered the U.S. diplomatic corps, Senator Obama has had just one spiritual adviser his entire adult life: the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, two-decade pastor to the president presumptive. The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years.

Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.

Before the speech, Slate’s Mickey Kaus advised Senator Obama to give us a Sister Souljah moment: “There are plenty of potential Souljahs still around: Race preferences. Out-of-wedlock births,” he wrote. “But most of all the victim mentality that tells African Americans (in the fashion of Rev. Wright’s most infamous sermons) that the important forces shaping their lives are the evil actions of others, of other races.” Indeed. It makes no difference to white folks when a black pastor inflicts kook genocide theories on his congregation: The victims are those in his audience who make the mistake of believing him. The Reverend Wright has a hugely popular church with over 8,000 members, and Senator Obama assures us that his pastor does good work by “reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDs.” But maybe he wouldn’t have to quite so much “reaching out” to do and maybe there wouldn’t be quite so many black Americans “suffering from HIV/AIDs” if the likes of Wright weren’t peddling lunatic conspiracy theories to his own community.

Nonetheless, last week, Barack Obama told America: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”

What is the plain meaning of that sentence? That the paranoid racist ravings of Jeremiah Wright are now part of the established cultural discourse in African-American life and thus must command our respect? Let us take the senator at his word when he says he chanced not to be present on AIDs Conspiracy Sunday, or God Damn America Sunday, or U.S. of KKKA Sunday, or the Post-9/11 America-Had-It-Coming Memorial Service. A conventional pol would have said he was shocked, shocked to discover Afrocentric black liberation theology going on at his church. But Obama did something far more audacious: Instead of distancing himself from his pastor, he attempted to close the gap between Wright and the rest of the country, arguing, in effect, that the guy is not just his crazy uncle but America’s, too.

To do this, he promoted a false equivalence. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother,” he continued. “A woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.” Well, according to the way he tells it in his book, it was one specific black man on her bus, and he wasn’t merely “passing by.” When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life.” In Philadelphia, Senator Obama topped that: Greater love hath no man than to lay down his gran’ma for his life. In the days that followed, Obama’s interviewers seemed grateful for the introduction of a less complicated villain: Unlike the Reverend Wright, she doesn’t want God to damn America for being no better than al-Qaeda, but on the other hand she did once express her apprehension about a black man on the bus. It’s surely only a matter of days before Keith Olbermann on MSNBC names her his “Worst Person In The World.” Asked about the sin of racism beating within Gran’ma’s breast, Obama said on TV that “she’s a typical white person.”

Which doesn’t sound like the sort of thing the supposed “post-racial” candidate ought to be saying, but let that pass. How “typically white” is Obama’s grandmother? She is the woman who raised him — that’s to say, she brought up a black grandchild and loved him unconditionally. Burning deep down inside, she may nurse a secret desire to be Simon Legree or Bull Connor, but it doesn’t seem very likely. She does then, in her own flawed way, represent a post-racial America. But what of her equivalent (as Obama’s speech had it)? Is Jeremiah Wright a “typical black person”? One would hope not. A century and a half after the Civil War, two generations after the Civil Rights Act, the Reverend Wright promotes victimization theses more insane than anything promulgated at the height of slavery or the Jim Crow era. You can understand why Obama is so anxious to meet with President Ahmadinejad, a man who denies the last Holocaust even as he plans the next one. Such a summit would be easy listening after the more robust sermons of Jeremiah Wright.

But America is not Ahmadinejad’s Iran. Free societies live in truth, not in the fever swamps of Jeremiah Wright. The pastor is a fraud, a crock, a mountebank — for, if this truly were a country whose government invented a virus to kill black people, why would they leave him walking around to expose the truth? It is Barack Obama’s choice to entrust his daughters to the spiritual care of such a man for their entire lives, but in Philadelphia the senator attempted to universalize his peculiar judgment — to claim that, given America’s history, it would be unreasonable to expect black men of Jeremiah Wright’s generation not to peddle hateful and damaging lunacies. Isn’t that — what’s the word? — racist? So much for the post-racial candidate.

[Salamantis]  But for some here on CoV, Barak Obama has been avatarized into their own Personal Jesus, who can do, or say, no wrong.

This song's for you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UhXaE_XL_8

The Prophetic Stream, Conspiracy Theory and Paranoia: What’s Wrong with African-American Preaching
Richard Landes
http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2008/03/23/the-prophetic-stream-conspiracy-theory-and-paranoia-whats-wrong-with-african-american-preaching/

There’s a brouhaha about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. which deserves close consideration. I have written a good deal about self-criticism, and its origins in the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Bible. Recently I have been hearing a consistent invocation of this “prophetic tradition” among those explaining (if not justifying and admiring) Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr.’s preaching style.

Reverend Joseph Lowery explained on CNN that Wright’s sermons were only “divisive” in the sense that they distinguished between people who were in this prophtetic tradition and those who weren’t “in the community of faith” defined by that tradition.

Well, they certainly separate us from the people who are not from the community of faith and who do not subscribe to prophetic preaching. There are hundreds and hundreds of preachers in black churches across this country who may not use identical language, but they have a common theology with Jeremiah Wright. They’re in the prophetic stream.

The prophets of old, the Jeremiahs, the Amos, and they spoke angrily and sometimes with cruel phrases and words, to the rulers and kings of their day. That’s who they were talking to on behalf of the poor and oppressed of their day.

The black church has been a place where black people take their sorrow, their travail and their longing for hope and for deliverance. They expect the preacher and thank the preacher and say, “Amen, hallelujah,” to the preacher, who takes their burden to the Lord. And then they join in a movement to help bring new order and a new day into being. That’s prophetic preaching, and it’s traditionally the black church.
Similar remarks from Randall Bailey:

I often wonder if those who criticize these homiletical strategies of calling the nation to judgment do not read the 8th to 7th C. BCE prophets, such as Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. They delivered judgment speeches against the nations of Israel and Judah and their rulers because of the ways in which they oppressed the poor, perverted justice, and ignored the moral and ethical imperatives of the religion.
As someone who has read the prophetic texts, and thought a good deal about them in the context of the tradition of self-criticism, I think these characterizations of the “prophetic stream” represent a profound misunderstanding. The prophets are ferocious in their criticism of their own people; they have relatively little to say about the real oppressive forces in the world of their day in the 8-7th centuries BCE. When the people of Israel get smashed by the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the prophets don’t go into a rant about how evil these vicious imperialists are; they invoke them as God’s agents in punishing Israel for their sins. When, under more normative conditions, when they chastize rulers and aristocracy for their treatment of the poor, they do so again with vigorous, even violent rhetoric, but they do so in the hopes of changing their people. The prophets, however rough they may be, love the people they chastize, and rebuke them for the sake of their transformation.

Historically, this “prophetic turn” represents something exceptional among ancient peoples, and one of the reasons that the Jews have survived these defeats, while the other nations, once conquered, decimated, sent into exile, tended to disappear. For these rebukes of the prophets aimed at reminding the elites that they had obligations to the poor; that the people of Israel constituted the unit, and that rulers ruled “for the people.” As a result, Jewish communities in the ancient and medieval world had an exceptionally high degree of internal cohesion that permitted them to survive under the most adverse conditions. Among elites in various civilizations — rulers, aristocrats, wealthy — Israelite and Jewish elites have the most highly developed sense of obligation to their commoners. Most nations, once conquered, saw their elites abandon them and join the lower echelons of the imperial administration that now held power. As Abraham Heschel pointed out, the prophets were among the few who denounced “the idolatry of power” with such fervor.

But the core reason for their success comes from the profound attachment that the prophets felt for their people. There is no trace of hatred in their clean anger, no desire to see failure and punishment, no joy in the downfall of the sinners. Indeed, their commitment to the very people they rebuked, in some cases, so savagely, meant that, often enough, those rebuked took them seriously. The very fact that these prophetic denunciations became canonized as sacred scripture — that we hear the shepherd Amos’ version of the tale, not that of the royal priest Amatzia — tells us that not only the prophets, but the leaders of the people shared these values and accepted the prophetic rebukes.

All this is very far from what is here invoked as “Black Liberation Theology” or the “prophetic stream” of African-American churches. There, although Reverend Wright repeatedly speaks about “we,” he really means the white ruling class who, in his mind, deliberately conspire to destroy, even wipe out the blacks, the innocent victims of that malevolence.

Some commentators have complained that Wright’s sermons have been cherry-picked — snippets out of context — for their shock value, and that a longer exposure to his thought gives a significantly different impression. Here is a larger segment of the post-9-11 sermon that Wright gave, so one can get a sense of the context.

The people who posted this did so under the title “FOX Lies!! Barack Obama Pastor Wright”. They apparently think that this longer piece makes the snippet that played — as far as I know it was ABC, not FOX who broke this story — negates the meaning of the snippet. It certainly does show Reverend Wright calling 9-11 “unspeakable” and showing empathy at the tragedy of people — “black people” — throwing themselves out of the burning building. And this may or may not mitigate the appalling expressions of triumphalism — even glee — that Reverend Wright expresses to the delight of the audience, as he hits his “chickens coming home to roost” theme, although it hardly makes a “lie” of the snippet.

Let’s examine some of this larger sermon. After a look at the disturbing concluding lines of Psalm 137 — “Happy are they who smash your babies’ heads against the rocks!” — Reverend Wright appropriately calls such savage Schadenfreude into question today. He then turns to the 9-11 attack, which he informs us:

…spotlights the insanity of the cycle of violence and the cycle of hatred. The people of faith have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents… the babies, the babies. And that, my beloved, is a dangerous place to be. Yet that is where the people of faith were in 551 BC, and far too many people of faith are in 2001 AD. We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies, to the hatred unarmed innocents. We want revenge, we want payback, and we don’t care who gets hurt in the process.
Aside from the tired rhetoric of “the cycle of violence” so often invoked about Jihadi violence, so far so good. The delight in killing innocent civilians in revenge is a dangerous and ugly direction to move in, whatever the biblical justification. But just who does the Reverend have in mind here? The obvious people described by this thinking are the perpetrators of the deed — Muslims so aroused by their desire for revenge, so filled with hatred, that they have indeed moved from hatred of armed enemies to hatred of civilians. Indeed, nothing illustrates that more than 9-11. In the “prophetic” scheme, Islamic terror represents the Assyrians.

But that’s clearly not what Reverend Wright means. His subsequent “faith footnote” — curiously a political rant, rather than a discussion of matters of faith — in which he hits his “chickens coming home to roost” theme, focuses not on the long list of crimes against humanity that one could attribute to Islamic terrorists, not on the spiritually dangerous hatreds in which America’s enemies — men of faith, to be sure — indulge on a regular basis, but rather on what “we” have done to deserve this hatred. When he hits his notorious high note, gesturing for emphasis, he is all but justifying this hatefull deed: “we” — arrogant, racist, imperialist, white America — deserved it. And his audience agrees.

In other words, the very interpretation he rejects — take delight in the smashing of the enemies children against the rocks — he refuses to apply to perpetrators of 9-11, but rather he takes “prophetic” delight in enumerating the sins of “his own” people that explain why these perpetrators take this delight. It was a bold and disturbing move for the prophets to see the Assyrians as agents of God’s punishment; but none of them delighted in the punishment.

Are we Americans the ones who take such delight? Is this why, despite the impressive evidence of widespread remorse to the contrary, Reverend Wright tells his congregation that “we” nuked the Japanese without batting an eye?

The segue here from those perpetrators of 9-11 who delight in killing civilians to Americans suggests a profound antipathy for “us.” This is hardly the “prophetic stream.” You cannot find an Israelite prophet who calls on God to “damn” his people. He might say God damns, or God will damn his people if they continue to sin. But everything the prophet does seeks to avoid that “damnation.” Only someone who hates those he criticizes can call on God to damn them.

One gets the sense that, in this post-colonial “Black Liberation Theology, the Jihadis are not “them” punishing “us”, but “us” — we people of color who have been ruined by white imperial dominion — punishing “them” — the people who run America.

And this tendency seems firmly imbedded in Reverend Wrights other sermons and his church’s activities. For example, the Church’s website hosts the Hamas manifesto published by the LA Times last summer. In other words, a column that compares the US Declaration of Independence with a charter that calls for genocide against the Jews, finds its way on to the “Pastor’s page.” And apparently, the Pastor’s page is full of violent contempt for white America and admiration and support for the most radical of the Palestinians.

This kind of thinking is not, I submit, in the “prophetic stream” of self-criticism. Indeed it replicates the a longstanding problem in the history of anti-Semitism. Often one cannot tell the difference between a prophetic diatribe (say Jeremiah) and an anti-Semitic one (say, John Chrysostom). The difference is that the former uses the verbal violence to chastize, the latter, to demonize. No prophet, no matter how angry with Israel, no matter how willing to see the Assyrians or Babylonians as agents of the Lord’s vengeance, ever tried to present these empires built on “state terror,” as somehow moral, justified, worthy of support and sympathy.

When Reverend Wright focuses exclusively about the moral depravity of the US, and adopts the victim and grievance narrative of our enemies, when he uses “we” when he means “powerful whites” (and maybe their black lackeys like Condoskeeza Rice), he’s making the same category error of the anti-Semites. Far from embracing those he criticizes, he justifies hating them.

Behind this profound slippage from prophetic loving rebuke to hatemongering demonization, lies a culture of grievance best seen at work in Wright’s conspiracy thinking.

The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied! The government lied about Pearl Harbor. (cheering) They knew the Japanese were going to attack. Government’s lied. We’ve got a paranoid group of patriots in power that now, in the interests of homeland stupidity (laughter) — I mean homeland security. The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment. They purposely infected African-American men with syphilis! [snip] “Fighting for peace,” is like raping for virginity… What’s going on in white America, US of KKKA, black men turning on black men. That is fighting the wrong enemy. You both are the primary targets in an oppressive society, that sees both of you as a dangerous threat. [snip] We cannot see how what we are doing is the same thing Al-Qaeda is doing under a different color flag (cheers and applause), and guess what else? If they don’t find them some weapons of mass destruction, they gonna do that like the LAPD (wild cheering) and plant some weapons of mass destruction. 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…
Now this gets to the heart of the problem. Although Reverend Wright has no problem attributing paranoia and stupidity to the “group of patriots in power”, he does not seem to have much awareness of the power of paranoid thinking on his own ministry, and the terrible consequences of taking refuge in this thinking. And this is, indeed, a pervasive problem in the Black community.

I had my first glimpse of this problem in 2000, when, as the head of the Center for Millennial Studies, I sat on a panel with three rappers and a black academic colleague, discussing the apocalyptic themes in Hip-hop. The AIDS conspiracy came up repeatedly. Finally, a member of the audience asked, “How many on the panel believe these AIDS conspiracies?” The three rap artists all said they did. I said I did not. The African American professor said:

I don’t want to answer that, because if I say I do, I’ll lose credibility with my colleagues, and if I say I don’t, I’ll lose credibility with the brothers.
The implications of this reluctance to speak replicate closely the dilemma of Barack Obama when he says, “I can no sooner repudiate Reverend Wright, than I can my own family.”

Conspiracy theories offer the clearest markers that the prophetic spirit of loving rebuke designed to provoke genuine soul searching has been violated. Conspiracy theories operate in the exact opposite direction from real self-criticism. They blame a denomized “other” for all the malevolence, and reject any responsibility on the part of the self. Far from provoking self-examination, conspiracy theories feed sentiments of grievance and victimization, paralyzing any ability to self-improvement: my misery is someone else’s fault. And that someone else is most decidedly “not me.” Mark Steyn nailed the problem with this kind of thinking:

If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior… “But most of all the victim mentality that tells African Americans (in the fashion of Rev. Wright’s most infamous sermons) that the important forces shaping their lives are the evil actions of others, of other races.”
The terrifying (and shame-driven) silence and denial in Africa about the real source of AIDS has contributed to the spread of the virus.

South Africa is the unkindest cut of all. It is the only country in Africa, amongst all the countries I have traversed in the last five years, whose government is still obtuse, dilatory and negligent about rolling out treatment. It is the only country in Africa whose government continues to propound theories more worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate state. Between six and eight hundred people a day die of AIDS in South Africa. The government has a lot to atone for. I’m of the opinion that they can never achieve redemption.
Steyn continues:

It makes no difference to white folks when a black pastor inflicts kook genocide theories on his congregation: The victims are those in his audience who make the mistake of believing him. The Reverend Wright has a hugely popular church with over 8,000 members, and Senator Obama assures us that his pastor does good work by “reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDs.” But maybe he wouldn’t have to quite so much “reaching out” to do and maybe there wouldn’t be quite so many black Americans “suffering from HIV/AIDs” if the likes of Wright weren’t peddling lunatic conspiracy theories to his own community.
This may seem harsh, a form of “blaming the victim.” But that’s partly because such harsh criticisms are not really the job of white folks. That’s the job of black prophetic ministries. That’s real “self-criticism,” not a politicized “prophetic ministry” that at the same time as it empowers resentment it disempowers the people who absorb such a “victim narrative.” Here’s the reflection of one member of the black community on this problem that cuts to the core:

10. “The Victim Mentality” — This is what I despise the most. The victim mentality is that this bad thing happened to me because I am black. I will be honest with you all; I am partly ignorant to this because I am a child of the 80s. I did not grow up during slavery or during the civil rights movement. What I do know is that if you always feel or think like a victim, think about the words associated with victim? Weak, defenseless, tricked, scared, etc (you see the kind of negative connotation at which I am arriving?) Personally, I refuse to live a life where I am a weak-minded individual. Perhaps, the victim mentality was suitable during those difficult times in our history, but times have change. We still have many imperfections, but if you always feel like the victim, that paranoia in itself, will prevent you from succeeding.
And, of course, the conspiracy theory is the obverse side of the “they owe us” mentality.

The depth of this problem comes out in the responses of Reverend Otis Moss to the question posed by Terry Gross about whether the “younger” generation, not embittered by the failure of the 60s like Reverend Wright, still adhere to these beliefs. His intellectual effort has not gone into examining whether Wright’s lunatic accusations of the US government “inventing AIDS to commit genocide against people of color” has any merit. (By the way, what an incredibly stupid strategy for white America, if it were deliberate. Given the incredible expense of AIDS’ slow death, and the impossibility of keeping it confined to your “target” audience, it would have to be the most incompetent genocidal weapon ever invented… and one that the black community could foil merely by mobilizing self-control.) Rather his effort goes into rationalizing the conspiratorial thinking.

Otis’ answer effectively shifts attention from the conspiracy theory to the plausibility, to an appeal to the outside audience to “understand” how blacks might find such thinking believable. And there are no absence of white “liberals” ready to go along. In doing so, in focusing on the Tuskegee experiments which were a) revolting, b) over half a century ago, and c) firmly denounced and renounced by the very culture in which it appeared, Otis prolongs the life of the very thinking that prevents “change.” Similarly, the very idea of comparing a scientific project like the Hubble Space Craft with a social problem like drugs or AIDS in the black community, suggests that he has no appreciation for the cultural dimensions of the problem. Blacks in America don’t need more well-educated “leaders” who can jive talk honkeys, but honest prophetic types who can challenge the collective, victim narrative of their communities.

Obama, in refusing to reject this thinking, in claiming that “I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can disown the black community,” Obama reveals just how hard it is, even under the most perilous conditions, to challenge this thinking. Steyn notes:

What is the plain meaning of that sentence? That the paranoid racist ravings of Jeremiah Wright are now part of the established cultural discourse in African-American life and thus must command our respect? Let us take the senator at his word when he says he chanced not to be present on AIDs Conspiracy Sunday, or God Damn America Sunday, or U.S. of KKKA Sunday, or the Post-9/11 America-Had-It-Coming Memorial Service. A conventional pol would have said he was shocked, shocked to discover Afrocentric black liberation theology going on at his church. But Obama did something far more audacious: Instead of distancing himself from his pastor, he attempted to close the gap between Wright and the rest of the country, arguing, in effect, that the guy is not just his crazy uncle but America’s, too.
Which brings me to a possible hypothesis about Obama. Here’s a man who has political ambitions, who moves to Chicago and gets advice about joining a church for the sake of his community work, who joins Jeremiah Wright’s congregation and receives a warm welcome, who listens to sermons that, even as they may strike him as inappropriate, seem so widely accepted, even popular, that criticizing them would only hurt him both personally and politically. And then, when he moves from the parochial to the national, from the victim narrative of the black community to the “post-racial” narrative of the American people, finds himself between a rock and a hard place.

He is in the same dilemma as the BU Professor who didn’t want to answer the question about AIDS conspiracies: somewhere he’s going to lose credibility. And somewhere he should lose credibility. Somewhere he needs to make some critical decisions. Maybe if Reverend Wright had taken seriously his own pious comments about the call of 9-11 to engage in some personal reflection, to “ask about my relationship to God” — a God who, at last check, in the Bible commands us not to “bear false witness,” there would be a productive place to move here.

But the evidence suggests that we are far from that. Instead of offering us blacks capable of serious introspection, the media analysts have a string of smart, educated black commentators ready to defend this thinking. And when they get “on a roll,” they reveal a remarkably rigid (post-colonial) ideological thinking about the nature of “evil” in today’s world. Indeed, one gets the sense that any black who had the nerve to challenge their community’s victim narrative, anyone who draws attention to the dysfunctions of the black family, to the “crabs-in-the-basket” attitude from both peers and family towards blacks who do well in school, to the devastating impact of entitlement on effort — whether it’s a Bill Cosby or a Shelby Steele — will be dismissed as an “oreo,” a sell-out.

Could that be the meaning of Black “Liberation” theology’s hostility to “middle classness“? You can make money, but don’t you dare “betray” your people by challenging their “comforting” tale. You can get out of the economic “crab basket,” but don’t you dare try to get out of the ideological one. Solidarity, brother.

America is by no means a “post-racial” society, not only because of lingering “racism” among whites, but because of flourishing “victimization” among blacks. This is a mutual problem, not, as Reverend Wright seems to think, a problem of white people conspiring against innocent blacks. No true prophet would ever argue that his own people are innocent victims. When the Israelites were — certainly by modern, “post-colonial” standards — innocent victims of imperial terrorism on the part of the Assyrians and Babylonians, their prophets were not “comforting” their people with fantasies of innocence, but flagellating them for their shortcomings.

The Black “prophetic stream” needs to aim a fraction of such (in current conditions) ferociously harsh criticism towards themselves and their communities. And when they do, there are many white people eager to work with them.


Obama On His Not "Typical White" Grandparents
Judith Apter Klinghoffer
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/48659.html

To fully appreciate the venality of Obama's treatment of his grandmother, one needs to read the other stories he tells about her. Yes, Obama does tell in his book the story of his grandmother fear of a man who accosted her on the bus (p.88):

I took her into the other room and asked her what happened.
"A man asked me for money yesterday. While I was waiting for the bus."

That's all?"

Her lips pursed with irritation. "He was very aggressive, Barry. Very aggressive. I gave him a dollar and he kept asking. If the bus hadn't come, I think he might have hit me over the head."

It is to justify his refusal to give her a ride that his grandfather reveals that the man was Black implying that that added to her concern. Is she prone to exaggeration? Not according to Barry/Barack. Unlike, his grandfather, she was not (21):

She's wise that way, my grandmother, suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense. Which is why I tend to trust her account of events.

So, why did he choose in this case to accept his grandfather's version of the events? Would his grandmother not be as scared if an aggressive white man had accosted her?

Does he have any reason to believe she was a "typical" prejudiced "white person?" No. The opposite is true. Unlike Barack himself, his grandparents were active anti-racist. So much so, that they had difficulty fitting into Texas' racist society of the early 1960s.

He writes(pp.18-21):

. . . At a bank where she worked, Toot (his grandmother's nickname)made the acquaintance of the janitor, a tall and dignified black World War II vet she remembers only as Mr. Reed. While the two of them chatted in the hallways one day, a secretary in the office stormed up and hissed that Tood should never, ever, "call no nigger 'Mister.'" Not long afterworlds, Toot would find Mr. Reed in a corner of the building weeping quietly to himself. . . .

They (grandparents) decided Toot would keep calling Mr. Reed "Mister," . . . . Grams began to decline invitations from coworkers to go out for a beer, telling them he had to get home to keep the wife happy.

He goes on to tell a story about his 11 year old mother who played in the front yard with a young Black girl. Neighborhood Children gathered outside the picket fence shouting: "Nigger lover!" and "Dirty Yankee!" The grandmother tried to get them into the house. The grandfather went further:

Gramps was beside himself when he heard what had happened. He interrogated my mother, wrote down names. The next day he took the morning off from work to visit the school principal. He personally called the parents of some of the offending children to give them a piece of his mind.

No, his grandfather did not say that he could no more disown racist whites than disown the white community. The grandmother, he dismisses as a "typical white (racist) person" explained their attitudes thus:

Your grandfather and I just figured we should treat people decently, Bar. That's all."

It seems that she succeeded in raising a color blind daughter but not a color blind grandson. Obama said his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, is "glued to CNN"’ and follows the campaign closely, even though severe osteoporosis prevents her campaigning. I can only imagine how defeated his dismissal of her as a "typical white person" must make her feel. She may be grateful, her husband is no longer alive and forced to see himself dismissed as a typical white racist.

Dr. Judith Apter Klinghoffer is an affiliate professor at Haifa University, Member of the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom of Bar-Ilan University and was the 1996 Fulbright professor at Aarhus, Denmark. She is the co-author of International Citizens' Tribunals: Mobilizing Public Opinion to Advance Human Rights and the author of Vietnam, Jews and the Middle East: Unintended Consequences.


The Obama Crash and Burn
If he acts as if the Wright controversy is behind him, it's over for Obama.
By Victor Davis Hanson
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjBjODFmNmMxZWU2ZGE5YjBhMjZlYmQ2MmM2MzNiZTc=

The latest polls reflecting Obama’s near-collapse should serve as a morality tale of John Edwards’s two Americas — the political obtuseness of the intellectual elite juxtaposed to the common sense of the working classes.

For some bizarre reason, Obama aimed his speech at winning praise from National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Harvard, and solidifying an already 90-percent solid African-American base — while apparently insulting the intelligence of everyone else.

Indeed, the more op-eds and pundits praised the courage of Barack Obama, the more the polls showed that there was a growing distrust that the eloquent and inspirational candidate has used his great gifts, in the end, to excuse the inexcusable.

The speech and Obama’s subsequent interviews neither explained his disastrous association with Wright, nor dared open up a true discussion of race — which by needs would have to include, in addition to white racism, taboo subjects ranging from disproportionate illegitimacy and drug usage to higher-than-average criminality to disturbing values espoused in rap music and unaddressed anti-Semitism. We learn now that Obama is the last person who wants to end the establishment notion that a few elite African Americans negotiate with liberal white America over the terms of grievance and entitlement — without which all of us really would be transracial persons, in which happiness and gloom hinge, and are seen to do so, on one’s own individual success or failure.

Instead there were the tired platitudes, evasions, and politicking. The intelligentsia is well aware of how postmodern cultural equivalence, black liberation theory, and moral relativism seeped into Obama’s speech, and thus was not offended by an “everybody does it” and “who’s to judge?/eye of the beholder” defense. But to most others the effect was Clintonian. Somehow Obama could not just say,

There is nothing to be offered for Rev. Wright except my deepest apologies for not speaking out against his venom far earlier. We in the African-American community know better than anyone the deleterious effects of racist speech, and so it is time for Rev. Wright and myself to part company, since we have profoundly different views of both present- and future-day America.

The more the pundits gushed about the speech, the more the average Americans thought, “Wait a minute — did he just say what I thought he said?” It’s not lost on Joe Q. Public that Obama justified Wright’s racism by offering us a “landmark” speech on race that:

(1) Compared Wright’s felony to the misdemeanors of his grandmother, Geraldine Ferraro, the Reagan Coalition, corporate culture, and the kitchen sink.

(2) Established the precedent that context excuses everything, in the sense that what good a Wright did (or an Imus did) in the past outweighs any racist outburst of the present.

(3) Claimed that the voice of the oppressed is not to be judged by the same rules of censure as the dominant majority that has no similar claim on victim status.

What is happening, ever so slowly, is that the public is beginning to realize that it knows even less after the speech than it did before about what exactly Obama knew (and when) about Wright’s racism and hatred.

Even elites will wake up to the fact that they’ve been had, in a sense, once they deconstruct the speech carefully and fathom that their utopian candidate just may have managed to destroy what was once a near-certain Democratic sweep in the fall. And a number of African-Americans will come to resent that they are being lumped into a majority akin to the Rev. Wright, millions of whom the majestic Sen. Obama has nobly chosen not to “disown,” despite their apparently similar embarrassing racialism.

Over the past four days, I asked seven or eight random (Asian, Mexican-American, and working-class white) Americans in southern California what they thought of Obama’s candidacy — and framed the question with, “Don’t you think that was a good speech?” The answers, without exception, were essentially: “Forget the speech. I would never vote for Obama after listening to Wright.” In some cases, the reaction was not mild disappointment, but unprintable outrage.

The blame, such as it is, for all this goes to the Obama campaign “pros,” who, in their apparent arrogance over Obamania (a phenomenon due to the candidate’s charisma, not their own savvy), simply went to sleep and let the senator and his wife resort to their natural self-indulgence — itself the offspring of the Obamas’ privilege and insularity. Any amateur handler could have scanned that speech and taken out just 8-10 phrases, called for a tougher stance on Wright, a genuine apology, and put the issue behind them.

Now it’s too late. Like Hillary’s tear, one only gets a single chance at mea culpa and staged vulnerability — and he blew it.

Where are we now? At the most fascinating juncture in the last 50 years of primary-election history.
Superdelegates can’t “steal” the election from Obama’s lock on the delegate count. And they can’t easily debase themselves by abandoning Obama after their recent televised confessionals about abandoning Hillary.

But they can count and compute — and must try to deal with these facts:

(1) Obama is crashing in all the polls, especially against McCain, against whom he doesn’t stack up well, given McCain’s heroic narrative, the upswing in Iraq, and the past distance between McCain and the Bush administration;

(2) Hillary may not just win, but win big in Pennsylvania (and maybe the other states as well), buttressing her suddenly not-so-tired argument about her success in the mega-, in-play purple states. Michigan and Florida that once would have been lost by Hillary in a fair election, now would be fairly won — and Clinton is as willing to replay both as Obama suddenly is not; and

(3) The sure thing of Democrats winning big in the House and Senate is now in danger of a scenario in which a would-be Senator or Representative explains all autumn long that the party masthead really does not like Rev. Wright, whose massive corpus of buffoonery no doubt is still to be mined. (The problem was never “snippets,” but entire speeches devoted to hatred and anger, often carefully outlined in a point-by-point format).

What is the remedy?

I would go buy about 10,000 American flags to blanket every Obama appearance, have a 4x4 lapel-button flag custom-made for the senator, have Michelle finish every appearance by leading a chorus of “God Bless America,” draft every middle-of-the-road crusty drawling Democratic veteran (the knightly Harris Wofford doesn’t cut it) to criss-cross the country — and try to Trotskyize Rev. Wright from the campaign.

Oh, and no need for any more Obama half-conversations about race and “typical white person” clarifications. All that does far more damage to the country than even to Obama himself.

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author, most recently, of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.


Blind Faith
The statements of clergymen like Jeremiah Wright aren't controversial and incendiary; they're wicked and stupid.
By Christopher Hitchens
http://www.slate.com/id/2187277/pagenum/all/

It's been more than a month since I began warning Sen. Barack Obama that he would become answerable for his revolting choice of a family priest. But never mind that; the astonishing thing is that it's at least 11 months since he himself has known precisely the same thing. "If Barack gets past the primary," said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the New York Times in April of last year, "he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen." Pause just for a moment, if only to admire the sheer calculating self-confidence of this. Sen. Obama has long known perfectly well, in other words, that he'd one day have to put some daylight between himself and a bigmouth Farrakhan fan. But he felt he needed his South Side Chicago "base" in the meantime. So he coldly decided to double-cross that bridge when he came to it. And now we are all supposed to marvel at the silky success of the maneuver.

You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily. (Yet why do I say I am surprised? He still gets away with absolutely everything.)

Looking for a moral equivalent to a professional demagogue who thinks that AIDS and drugs are the result of a conspiracy by the white man, Obama settled on an 85-year-old lady named Madelyn Dunham, who spent a good deal of her youth helping to raise him and who now lives alone and unwell in a condo in Honolulu. It would be interesting to know whether her charismatic grandson made her aware that he was about to touch her with his grace and make her famous in this way. By sheer good fortune, she, too, could be a part of it all and serve her turn in the great enhancement.

This flabbergasting process, made up of glibness and ruthlessness in equal proportions, rolls on unstoppably with a phalanx of reporters and men of the cloth as its accomplices. Look at the accepted choice of words for the ravings of Jeremiah Wright: controversial, incendiary, inflammatory. These are adjectives that might have been—and were—applied to many eloquent speakers of the early civil rights movement. (In the Washington Post, for Good Friday last, the liberal Catholic apologist E.J. Dionne lamely attempted to stretch this very comparison.) But is it "inflammatory" to say that AIDS and drugs are wrecking the black community because the white power structure wishes it? No. Nor is it "controversial." It is wicked and stupid and false to say such a thing. And it not unimportantly negates everything that Obama says he stands for by way of advocating dignity and responsibility over the sick cults of paranoia and victimhood.

That same supposed message of his is also contradicted in a different way by trying to put Geraldine Ferraro on all fours with a thug like Obama's family "pastor." Ferraro may have sounded sour when she asserted that there can be political advantages to being black in the United States—and she said the selfsame thing about Jesse Jackson in 1984—but it's perfectly arguable that what she said is, in fact, true, and even if it isn't true, it's absurd to try and classify it as a racist remark. No doubt Obama's slick people were looking for a revenge for Samantha Power (who, incidentally, ought never to have been let go for the useful and indeed audacious truths that she uttered in Britain), but their news-cycle solution was to cover their own queasy cowardice in that case by feigning outrage in the Ferraro matter. The consequence, which you can already feel, is an inchoate resentment among many white voters who are damned if they will be called bigots by a man who associates with Jeremiah Wright. So here we go with all that again. And this is the fresh, clean, new post-racial politics?

Now, by way of which vent or orifice is this venom creeping back into our national bloodstream? Where is hatred and tribalism and ignorance most commonly incubated, and from which platform is it most commonly yelled? If you answered "the churches" and "the pulpits," you got both answers right. The Ku Klux Klan (originally a Protestant identity movement, as many people prefer to forget) and the Nation of Islam (a black sectarian mutation of Quranic teaching) may be weak these days, but bigotry of all sorts is freely available, and openly inculcated into children, by any otherwise unemployable dirtbag who can perform the easy feat of putting Reverend in front of his name. And this clerical vileness has now reached the point of disfiguring the campaigns of both leading candidates for our presidency. If you think Jeremiah Wright is gruesome, wait until you get a load of the next Chicago "Reverend," one James Meeks, another South Side horror show with a special sideline in the baiting of homosexuals. He, too, has been an Obama supporter, and his church has been an occasional recipient of Obama's patronage. And perhaps he, too, can hope to be called "controversial" for his use of the term house nigger to describe those he doesn't like and for his view that it was "the Hollywood Jews" who brought us Brokeback Mountain. Meanwhile, the Republican nominee adorns himself with two further reverends: one named John Hagee, who thinks that the pope is the Antichrist, and another named Rod Parsley, who has declared that the United States has a mission to obliterate Islam. Is it conceivable that such repellent dolts would be allowed into public life if they were not in tax-free clerical garb? How true it is that religion poisons everything.

And what a shame. I assume you all have your copies of The Audacity of Hope in paperback breviary form. If you turn to the chapter entitled "Faith," beginning on Page 195, and read as far as Page 208, I think that even if you don't concur with my reading, you may suspect that I am onto something. In these pages, Sen. Obama is telling us that he doesn't really have any profound religious belief, but that in his early Chicago days he felt he needed to acquire some spiritual "street cred." The most excruciatingly embarrassing endorsement of this same viewpoint came last week from Abigail Thernstrom at National Review Online. Overcome by "the speech" that the divine one had given in Philadelphia, she urged us to be understanding. "Obama's description of the parishioners in his church gave white listeners a glimpse of a world of faith (with 'raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor … dancing, clapping, screaming, and shouting') that has been the primary means of black survival and uplift." A glimpse, huh? What the hell next? A tribute to the African-American sense of rhythm?

To have accepted Obama's smooth apologetics is to have lowered one's own pre-existing standards for what might constitute a post-racial or a post-racist future. It is to have put that quite sober and realistic hope, meanwhile, into untrustworthy and unscrupulous hands. And it is to have done this, furthermore, in the service of blind faith. Mark my words: This disappointment is only the first of many that are still to come.


The Audacity of Rhetoric
By Thomas Sowell
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/post_25.html

It is painful to watch defenders of Barack Obama tying themselves into knots trying to evade the obvious.

Some are saying that Senator Obama cannot be held responsible for what his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said. In their version of events, Barack Obama just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time -- and a bunch of mean-spirited people are trying to make something out of it.

It makes a good story, but it won't stand up under scrutiny.

Barack Obama's own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far left fringe. In college, "I chose my friends carefully," he said in his first book, "Dreams From My Father."

These friends included "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets" -- in Obama's own words -- as well as the "more politically active black students." He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.

Obama didn't just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college -- members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.

In Shelby Steele's brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama -- "A Bound Man" -- it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were -- and, like many converts, he went overboard.

Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the U.S. Senate is the furthest left of any Senator. There is a remarkable consistency in what Barack Obama has done over the years, despite inconsistencies in what he says.

The irony is that Obama's sudden rise politically to the level of being the leading contender for his party's presidential nomination has required him to project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who can heal divisiveness and bring us all together.

The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleon-like change, and entranced both white and black Democrats, is a tribute to the man's talent and a warning about his reliability.

There is no evidence that Obama ever sought to educate himself on the views of people on the other end of the political spectrum, much less reach out to them. He reached out from the left to the far left. That's bringing us all together?

Is "divisiveness" defined as disagreeing with the agenda of the left? Who on the left was ever called divisive by Obama before that became politically necessary in order to respond to revelations about Jeremiah Wright?

One sign of Obama's verbal virtuosity was his equating a passing comment by his grandmother -- "a typical white person," he says -- with an organized campaign of public vilification of America in general and white America in particular, by Jeremiah Wright.

Since all things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities, it is always possible to make things look similar verbally, however different they are in the real world.

Among the many desperate gambits by defenders of Senator Obama and Jeremiah Wright is to say that Wright's words have a "resonance" in the black community.

There was a time when the Ku Klux Klan's words had a resonance among whites, not only in the South but in other states. Some people joined the KKK in order to advance their political careers. Did that make it OK? Is it all just a matter of whose ox is gored?

While many whites may be annoyed by Jeremiah Wright's words, a year from now most of them will probably have forgotten about him. But many blacks who absorb his toxic message can still be paying for it, big-time, for decades to come.

Why should young blacks be expected to work to meet educational standards, or even behavioral standards, if they believe the message that all their problems are caused by whites, that the deck is stacked against them? That is ultimately a message of hopelessness, however much audacity it may have.


Obama's Wright Stuff
Bill Bradley
http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/billbradley/2008/03/24/monday_morning_quarterback_oba.php

Obama got a good start on addressing his Jeremiah Wright last week. But only a start.

As I wrote in real time as the Jeremiah Wright firestorm broke 10 days ago, it was a clearly survivable situation.

And as I wrote in real time when Obama gave his speech on race in America and the Jeremiah Wright controversy six days ago, he solved much of his problem with regard to the Democratic nomination fight. Polls show that his speech worked, especially with Democratic voters, and largely with independent voters.

An even more recent poll for CBS News showed, as does the Rasmussen poll, that most Americans think highly of Obama’s speech.

Nevertheless, Barack Obama’s path to the White House has certainly gotten longer and more perilous.

I think that Obama is not going to become president unless he can explain Malcolm X (Wright’s most outrageous statements are a stand-in for what he represented), the anger that produced him, and the preposterous statements that not infrequently emanate from the black church.

He can’t simply float as the easy post-racial figure, a man Americans can vote for as a salve for the issue of race in America.

Which may have been inevitable. And was certainly inevitable when he decided not to be a Hawaiian, or a nice Ivy League lawyer, but a black Chicago politician who ended up running for president.

For Obama made a choice. He was born and in large measure raised in Hawaii, America’s polyglot paradise in the Pacific, a place where questions of racial background can become so complex as to be irrelevant. But after a glittering Ivy League debut, he decided to enter into politics, not as a multi-racial, post-racial figure in Hawaii or California — where he spent two years attending Occidental College — but in a 76% black state senate district in Chicago.

Why he decided to embrace his blackness as a very young man may be a matter more for the psychologically inclined than the politically inclined. In any event, it is what he did.

As a man who was neither a movie star nor super-rich, Obama needed a base for his rise. As he is a politician and not a deity, he is by nature an opportunist. (All politicians are opportunists. The question is the degree of egregiousness.) A big part of his opportunity was being a member of what is arguably the leading black church in Chicago.

For a man with a missing father, Trinity United Church of Christ and the Rev. Wright played a key role in Obama’s life. Mothered by a white woman and raised in large measure by white grandparents, Obama sought what he did not have in his life as a biracial boy. A black family. The black church in Chicago became a stand-in for that. And Wright, a complex man who, by most accounts, has done some serious good in Chicago to balance his now well-publicized ranting, became in Obama’s own recent words, an “uncle.”

The church also answered the formerly frequently posed question about Obama. Is he “black enough?”

But as a result of this embrace — and Obama notably refused to disown Wright even as he renounced his now infamous comments — Obama still has serious questions to answer.

He has to explain to America — and in particular, to key voting groups such as the Scots-Irish who make up much of the working class and patriotically-oriented in the country — the anger that produced such irrational notions as the US government inventing AIDS to destroy the black people. And the idea that the US may have deserved 9/11. And why men such as Wright, whose generation grew up with a frequently rugged racism directed toward them and developed within them, have a chip on their shoulder today.

It’s certainly not what Obama wanted to do when he launched his candidacy on a wave of high-flown, impressively-delivered rhetoric, floating over the historic divisions of America on a cloud of post-racialism.

But it is what he must do now. He didn’t intend to run as “the black candidate” but as a candidate who happened to be black. But being black, or at least, “black enough,” as it turns out, was at least in part a choice for Obama. And as a result of that choice, he rose in Chicago enough to become a United States senator. And as a result of being a senator, he has enough stature to wage this campaign.

This conversation about race will continue throughout the campaign.

As will a conversation about patriotism. “God damn America” is not a concept that goes down well with most voters.

This may be even more of an imperative for Obama than the racial issue, though the two are joined.

What is his idea of America? How is he an American patriot in a time of war?

What can he do to convince the Scots-Irish American voter that he is enough of a patriot to take on the uber-patriot, John McCain, a man who does not have to wave the flag because his very presence waves the flag?

In many respects, Obama represents an emerging America. Multi-racial, with an internationalist perspective. But he will not represent any America, at least as president, until he demonstrates that he represents the enduring America.