The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud (Barack's Speech)

Washington Post ^ | 21 March 2008 | Charles Krauthammer

[shrinkermd]

But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave...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...

"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.

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...

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.

[shrinkermd]

This is a comprehensive, carefully worded and thought out polemic. I have excerpted only a few of the key points.

[gusopol3]

the item about Wright’s reprinting the LAT Hamas-written op-ed , justifying the denial of Israel’s legitimacy, in the church newsletter, ought to drive off even the sycophants. But I’ve been disappointed before.

[Canedawg]

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...

Exactamundo.

Typical, aint it?

[littlehouse36]

Excellent.

[shrinkermd]

If you want a good example of punditry suckered into the Obama sophistry, see this quote from today's WSJ written by Peggy Noonan:

...It seemed to me as honest a speech as one in his position could give within the limits imposed by politics. As such it was a contribution. We'll see if it was a success. The blowhard guild, proud member since 2000, praised it, and, in the biggest compliment, cable news shows came out of the speech not with jokes or jaded insiderism, but with thought. They started talking, pundits left and right, black and white, about what they'd experienced of race in America. It was kind of wonderful. I thought, Go, America, go, go..."

The title of her speech is A Thinking Man's Speech and it can be found on FR as well as: HERE.

[TomGuy]

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.

And then he tripped and fell in to the same tripe the Sharptons and Jacksons have been peddling for decades.

Parts of Obama's speech sounded too similar to some of JJ's shakedowns. In effect, Obama's speech was an attempt as a shakedown of white voters by playing heavily on the ole white guilt.

It will be interesting to see what the polls reflect in the coming days. Some of the quick polls yesterday were showing Obama's numbers falling significantly.

==

[Chris Wallace gives Obama a pass on F&F this morning.]

[tm61]

his grandmother would probably prefer to be disowned after the number of times she has been used this week to prop up his campaign.

now whe is a “typical white person”, and is afraid of blacks.

hmm, would that make a “typical black person”, someone who avoids work, spends time in prison, bails out on his family obligations,blames everyone (ie whites) for their problems? nahh, that would be racist.

[Girlene]

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

Excellent anaylsis. Somehow Wright spreading racial lies and hatred from the pulpit is the moral equivalence of his grandmother being afraid of a black man who was harrassing her on the street. Secondly, somehow Wright spreading these lies and hatred is America's fault because of past injustices to the black community. Doesn't sell to rational people.

Victor Davis Hanson also had an excellent analysis of Obama's speech. He found the same "moral equivalence" theme.

Referring to whether Obama heard about Wright's sermon on 9/16/01, Krauthammer writes, "Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?" I don't think Barack or Michelle Obama have ever said where they were that Sunday. The churches were packed that weekend with people who regularly or irregularly attended churches. I'm curious why they have never said where they were. That is one Sunday that anybody who went to church will remember.

[mainepatsfan]

It’s nice to see some focus on what Obama actually says rather than how good he says it.

[fightinJAG]

Thank you, Charles.

[Obadiah]

"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?"

[Southern Partisan]

Thank you Mr. Krauthammer, brilliant as usual.

[syriacus]

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.

First Obama declares he won't indulge in a particular behavior. Then Obama indulges in it. If I had a penny for every time he did it, I'd be a rich woman.

[bboop]

Hahah, what a wonderful wordsmith Krauthammer is. Spewing coffee here... Thanks for posting.

[yankeedame]

Referring to whether Obama heard about Wright's sermon on 9/16/01, Krauthammer writes, "Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?" I don't think Barack or Michelle Obama have ever said where they were that Sunday....

And even if they didn't make it to church that day, didn't they at least even hear about that sermon? Considering they were regular parishioners you'd think they'd know someone -- or several somebodies -- who would have clued them into what had been said, i.e. "Oh, you should have been in church Sunday. You should have heard what the Reverend said..."

[y6162]

...”end of the spectrum” there’s Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action..”

Anyone who opposes AA is a racist? Supreme Court must be racist when they ruled Michigan’s AA program was reverse discrimination.

AA is simply a racial spoils system and won’t end until college presidents and admission officers are frog walked off campus in cuffs for violating the civil rights of non black applicants.

[syriacus]

Obama couldn't find the strength to walk out of his church.

Still, he looks strong enough to tap Wright on the shoulder.
And he looks strong enough to whisper into Wright's ear that he is scandalizing the young people in his congregation.

Is Obama only capable of speaking through a microphone to strangers?

[Mike Darancette]

Were the wife and kiddies in church to hear the good reverend.

[aimhigh]

My brother was swooning over Obama's speech. I had to point out Obama's criticism of Imus and how he used his daughters as an example to condemn Imus. Obama's daughters live in a household making $1.5 million, yet Obama lets them go to a church where they are indoctrinated with hate and victimology.

Note that when Reverend's Wright accused the government of creating the aids virus to destroy blacks, that accusation falls on the Jimmy Carter, who was president when the first aids cases appeared.

[Guenevere]

Good point!

The Sunday church services immediately after 9/11/01 drew crowds, as a rule, because people wanted comfort & answers.

I remember it clearly (as clearly as I remember where I was when Kennedy was shot) and the church I had been attending in Los Angeles which drew modest crowds, was packed to the rafters.

I doubt Obama & Michelle's memory bank is that deficient.

[Kay Syrah]

I think Krauthammer nails it. I found the speech to be a well crafted seduction, and very manipulative. Peggy Noonan bought it evidently, hungering for a pol who uses words that she understands and references she identifies. A very nice touch, giving the chatterers a very sleek stroking.

However, there remains the uneasy truths, that Wright condemns America in much the same rhetoric I have heard blare from the mosques on Friday.

Our enemies will understand the condemnation was perfuctory and carried with it the same manipulative message(we really do have much to regret)

His two fisted approach to the issue was like this: On the one hand SLAVERY, RACISM, HISTORY, on the other hand, some immigrants had no part in this and have no debt to pay.

But no mistake, there is a debt, and its not ever going to be payed, because as Noonan says quoting Faulkner, “the past isn’t.... past.”

Nice touch, that.

I found it a very disquieting speech because he rather deftly ignored the consequences of the hateful rhetoric, the stew in which his wife and daughters steep, and his fellow parishoners. Sometimes it is useful to know who is with you and who is not. This pretty much cemented the deal for me.

[Girlene]

The Sunday church services immediately after 9/11/01 drew crowds, as a rule, because people wanted comfort & answers.

I remember it clearly (as clearly as I remember where I was when Kennedy was shot) and the church I had been attending in Los Angeles which drew modest crowds, was packed to the rafters.

I doubt Obama & Michelle's memory bank is that deficient.

Yes. September 16, 2001 would be the one time most people would remember whether they went to church, and which church it was.

[Biblebelter]

This column is a great example of why Krauthammer is a pundit that should be taken seriously. His punditry when communicated with the written word has few peers. But he does NOT distinguish himself in the way he does on paper by appearing as a Fox News All-Star where the talking heads seem to be employed for merely filling up air time, rather than offering anything which closely approaches the analysis and thought that Mr. Krauthammer has put in the column posted here.

[nuconvert]

“answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness?”
“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? “

Exactly

[onedoug]

Feelings over values. It goes on and on and on and....

[Sudetenland]

That woman has become so full of herself that she is virtually insufferable. I used to really like Peggy Noonan, but over the past several years she has deteriorated into a self-congratulatory, sophomoric elitist.

That entire editorial reeks of her high minded "I'm such an enlightened reader and sophisticated writer" attitude that it fills me with an irresistible urge to regurgitate all over my genuinely superior keyboard. :)

What a self-absorbed prig she has become.

[Unicorn]

BTTT

[Grampa Dave]

The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave...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.

Just What Did Obama Know About Wright's Past Sermons? (Plenty)

“Barack Obama either agreed with what was preached from the Trinity pulpit, or he tuned it out and stayed around pretending to for political reasons. To say he stayed for 20 years but doesn't agree with Wright's preaching is incredible denial. It'd be like a man buying White Sox season tickets for 20 years, attending the games, and saying he's not a fan.”

Obama’s supporters want us to ignore this story… just push it under the rug. While they’ll align Republicans with any obscure pastor who does or says something controversial, they’re trying to convince us that Obama’s 20-year long close relationship with Wright, including his effective endorsement of him, his church and rhetoric with a $22,500 donation in 2006 is irrelevant.

“When Obama decided against wearing an American flag pin, we may all have been a bit too quick to accept his rationale, too quick to find that issue unimportant. Now, that American flag pin has gotten a lot bigger for a lot of us, especially in light of what may have been and may still be Obama’s deeper, and, perhaps, secret, less than patriotic beliefs about America.”

Notice her ear ring!

“Wright says that blacks can’t be expected to sing God Bless America because of racism. Obama doesn’t salute the flag during the National Anthem. That sure strikes me as an amazing coincidence since Obama swears he never heard Wright say anything against America.”

Here is the link to the Star Spangled Banner video with obama standing there without his hand over his heart...

[miele man]

bump

[cake_crumb]

This bit is important too, IMO:

" '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."

[cake_crumb]

By context, he seems to have meant “they did it, they did it!” Two wrongs don’t make a right; they make the same message of Wright: “I’m a victim.”

[cake_crumb]

"now whe is a 'typical white person', and is afraid of blacks."

And OBAMA HIMSELF said in one of his books that his grandma was scared of A (one, singular, uno) panhandler attacking her in the street.

He changed his story again.

[cake_crumb]

"It’s nice to see some focus on what Obama actually says rather than how good he says it."

But then people would have to acknowledge that he lied through his teeth at least twice in that speech: the first time when he threw granny under the bus, and the second when he admitted he HAD been in church and heard Wright make racially divisive speeches when just a week before that he said he HAD NOT heard Wright say anything of the sort.

[Sgt_Schultze]

Many of the “Reverend’s” defenders on the tube have gone to lengths to say that his sermons are not out of step for the “black church.” At least one can now see the source of the venom that pervades so many of the youth. Witness the transit bus beatings of a white couple by Baltimore middle-schoolers a few months back.

[Sgt_Schultze]

Note that when Reverend's Wright accused the government of creating the aids virus to destroy blacks, that accusation falls on the Jimmy Carter, who was president when the first aids cases appeared.

And we know AIDS wasn't created by the government to destroy blacks - it was to destroy gays. That was the accusation against Reagan. It would be nice if the far, radical , uber, ultra, mega, socialist left would keep their invective consistent.

[cake_crumb]

I don't see how it matters if he DID miss church on the day of the words that he "denounces" were spoken. A lot of people seem to be missing the basic point here: those were weasel words. Obama carefully worded his "denunciation" ONLY to include the words Wright said that got him into trouble - and he doesn't say he wasn't in church that day for ALL of those sermons we've all been sickened by by now. Only that particular one.

Obama then went on to say, in the very next sentence, that he denounced or whatever word he used, ANY racially divisive or insults against his country. He said he would heave the church if he had. He admitted in this week's speech that he HAD heard such words. He never left. And he didn't denounce the words he DID admit he heard. Only the ones that caused the trouble.

Doesn't matter that Wright's allegedly gone now, Obama said he would have left if he had hears such remarks and DID NOT when he DID hear them. He didn't. So he lied at least THREE times.

[cake_crumb]

Right. If Obama denounces Wright’s vitriolic racist hate speech and the way he danced on the graves of our dead WHILE allowing his two young daughters to be indoctrinated into becoming Wright lites, he’s either unfit to be a parent or a lying. Again.

[devolve]

[Responsibility2nd]

Oh Hai Girlene. Weren’t we just trading lol cat pictures on the OFST?

Excellant analysis indeed! Krauthammer nails it with his white guilt comments.

But since I just changed my tagline yesterday

I have to wonder. What do I know about white guilt?

[Godwin1]

The broader point is that Obama, as a twenty year member and financial supporter of a racist institution, lacks the moral authority to lecture the rest of us on race.

[Girlene]

Oh Hai Girlene. Weren’t we just trading lol cat pictures on the OFST?

LOL. I am busted! I noticed your tagline too late, otherwise I would have labelled my last lol pic on that thread as "Typical White Kitty".

[shrinkermd]

What Krauthammer misses is another facet of “guilt.” Guilt is not only believing you are better than your behavior but, at the same time, it can function as a sort of reward--moral superiority.

If you have ever traveled in circles where a post graduate degree is required, you will affirm that these people are some of the most competitive types on earth. It is no longer kosher to compete as to possessions or wages but it is quite permissible to compete on being the most moral. Striving for moral superiority by claiming to not being "racist" is, then, one facet of guilt.

[Responsibility2nd]

Agree.

And when it comes to white guilt.... It is usually described best as....

White LIBERAL Guilt

And they want to throw (taxpayer) money at the problem.

[WOSG]

Krauthammer nails it.

Bullseye.

“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.”

In short, he told the White Liberals the guilt-complex racism-is-to-blame story they already believe. In telling this, he both excuses wright and evades the question of where he stands.

[Jeff Head]

Obama does not leave the Trinity Church for one simple reason. He has bought into and agreess with the theology that the church teaches. He is raising his kids in it.

Most of us feel the same about the churches we attend. If they deppart from the theology that we accept in our hearts, we leave them and find a congregation and doctrine that we subscribe to and will make better men and women of us and allow us to help others.

The Black Liberation theology subscribed to by Trinity is what Obama subscribes to. He's been going and donating to it for twenty yerars. That theology, is the admitted theology of Reverend Wright and the congregation. Wright admits that he preaches his brand of that theology based, in part, on the works of one James Cone...who describes that theology as follows:

""Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community ... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.""

Sounds like a form of Jihad to me.

That theology accepts a perverted and wrested interpretation of Jesus Christ because it describes him as a poor black man (or man of color) living under oppressive white European rule (the Romans) and that he was as much about social change as he was spiritual. He therefore meets their criteria for a God who supports their black power insurgency against what they describe as the ruling rich white men and women in America.

They have perverted the love, peace, forgiveness, and inner focus (spiritual focus) of Christ and His atonement which teaches us that we change within, and when we are healed spiritually, then the outter man follows... and they have turned turned him into a social radical, hell bent on political and social change at any cost who supports their hate and "revenge" to suit their needs.

This is the message about Obama and his "church" that needs to be spread. I do not believe it is at all subscribed to by most blacks, and certainly not by society at large. But it has been hidden and flying under the radar in these churches and for political correctness purposes has been heretofore untouchable. But now the cat is out of the bag.

It is shocking, is is disgusting...and it is dangerous.

This same type of liberation theology has been used for decades in Latin America to pervert Catholics and goad them into rising into Marxist rebellions in class warfare. That is what this is...and it is the version accepted and practised by black radicals in this country and it is intent on changing this country into a socio-marxist state where wealth, opportunity, and position opr not earned by individuals, but instead are handed out by the state...and in this case they simply want to be the ones redistributing it all.

[Squantos]

It is shocking, is is disgusting...and it is dangerous.

More dangerous than Americans can even dream ......Stay Safe !

[AuntB]

Shhh, now....Mr. McCain doesn’t like your type of campaigning......no truth telling against Obama or the democrats!

McCain Aide Suspended For Circulating Obama/Wright Video
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1989382/posts

[Jeff Head]

McCain can stear clear of this all he wants...the message still MUST and WILL get out.

There needs to be some very straight talk about the things that are hiding away in radical muslim and radical black churches in this country...or any other for that matter.

When they preach insurrection and the overthrow of our form of government, and when they preach hate and the clear desire to trample the rights of others because of class envy and because somehow they feel another group has used the freedom this nation provides to get ahead...then they are no longer "religious", they have stepped over the line and need to be brought to heal.

As you know AuntB, it needs to be nipped now, and the more people who are loyal Americans who know about it, up fronbt, the more likely it is to be stopped. Otherwise...they will grow to the point and become embolden to the point that they forment physical insurrection and blood baths in the street.

That's where this "liberation theology" leads.

[AuntB]

I agree with you, but McCain doesn’t. McCain doesn’t agree with much that is ‘conservative’. “Pander first, pay later” should be the new McCain campaign slogan.

[Red in Blue PA]

I am disappointed in her.....surely not her finest (or most lucid) moment.