Posted on 05/06/2008 3:50:29 PM PDT by SJackson
HOW CAN BARACK OBAMA’S pastor of 20 years, a man of golden tongue and lofty ideals, shove his own candidate to the back of the bus?
This isn’t a stupid man; this is a man who has the audacity to kill hope. He’s John McCain’s and Hillary Clinton’s dream come true.
“G-d Damn America!” he infamously intoned in an old sermon that has been splattered across the airwaves, “Not God bless America. No! G-d Damn America for treating its citizens as less than human!”
You could just see the veins popping out on white people’s forehead from sea to shining sea.
It’s been sound-bite heaven. There are excerpts of him accusing the US Government of inventing the Aids virus to finish people of colour, or preaching that Americans are responsible for bringing the 9/11 attacks upon themselves.
Obama knew how it looked. This was his spiritual adviser, the man who presided over his wedding and baptised his children. Obama took the title of his book, The Audacity of Hope, from one of the Rev Wright’s sermons.
I CAN’T THINK OF ANY POLITICIAN in all of America who wouldn’t have bolted the other way just to distance himself from that kind of political sludge.
But Obama did something extraordinary. After the spit hit the fan, he gave a speech that marked one of the finest moments by any candidate in this campaign.
He knew what it would cost him, but in an address that finally brought up the issue of colour in America, Obama stood by Jeremiah Wright.
He did not walk away. And he certainly never ran in the other direction. He spoke about race with a full-throated complexity that America had not heard in decades.
“I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped to 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, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love,” Obama said.
The campaign moved on to more scintillating Pennsylvanian inanities like why Obama hasn’t worn an American flag lapel-pin to prove his patriotism, or his association with a professor with a radical past from 40 years ago. Trivial pursuits these!
Until last week: The gleam of the nation’s bully pulpit must have been too hard to resist. Wright scheduled press appearances, insisting: “This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright. This is an attack on the black church.”
Puh-leeze. He might as well have been describing sniper fire on the tarmac with Hillary in Bosnia. This chicken had come home to roost on Obama’s front door, and its squawking had everything to do with one man — Wright, all by himself.
Wright was so busy shadow-boxing with the media that he forgot the black man he was really punching in the gut was the first one who has a chance to become the next US president.
Republicans are already using excerpts of the preacher in scare-mongering ads. Is actively helping to dive-bomb Obama’s poll numbers on the eve of Tuesday’s primaries in Indiana and North Carolina something the pastor will carry back to his black pulpit with pride?
Wright took his eye off the prize and shot his own people in the foot. Whose greater good is he serving now?
EITHER OBLIVIOUS OR BLIND TO the risk Obama had taken by standing behind him, the pastor even called the candidate’s previous comments political posturing. Obama was not amused.
Jeremiah Wright was so busy defending himself as the messenger, he’d completely lost sight of the message — how to put a black man in the big White House.
There is a fine line between imperfect fidelity and propagating division. This time, it was crossed. The Senator did the right thing, a second time. He denounced his former pastor without hesitation.
With too costly an irony, the Rev Wright lectured to the Washington Press Club last week, before Obama had even commented: “It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
Maybe the preacher really is a prophet, after all.
Mr Barnett is an American journalist working in Auckland, New Zealand.
because it’s all about his own self importance. Very telling.
I hate to be picky.. but the appropriate spelling according to various Internet sources is Jeremiad Wright.
I do not think Wright did anything that he and B. Hussen Obama had not already PLANNED.
I believe that the entire Wright/Obama outrageous restatement and disavowal sequence was pure charade - an act, worked out and scripted in advance.
Wright’s task was to bloviate - to be as publicly and flagrantly outrageous as possible. Obama would then have his own opportunity to disavow his mentor and spiritual guide - to distance himself from the racist rhetoric that he had immersed himself and his family in for the past 20 years, as though it had never happened.
Wright did his job to perfection. He found two PERFECT opportunities, in two perfect venues, to attract the maximum possible attention to his screeds.
But Obama was not quite up to the task. Instead of seizing the opportunity to totally renounce, reject, and condemn reverend Wright and his wrongheaded “Wright” ideas, he tried to walk the tightrope between condemnation and rejection. But he fell off - to the left, of course - and has been falling ever since.
So he planned The Great Speech all along? Maybe. But he still should have left Granma’ out of it. That Trinity Church has corrupted his mind.
Wright gave Osama cover when he spoke.
It was all part of the act.
The plan was executed perfectly.
How could Wright do this? He had to do it. To preserve his lucrative racist hate-monger industry.
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