Posted on 03/19/2008 6:55:07 AM PDT by gridlock
Barack Obama has run a campaign based on a simple premise: that words of unity and hope matter to America. Now he has been forced by his charismatic, angry pastor to argue that words of hatred and division don't really matter as much as we thought.
(snip)
The problem with Obama's argument is that Wright is not a symbol of the strengths and weaknesses of African Americans. He is a political extremist, holding views that are shocking to many Americans who wonder how any presidential candidate could be so closely associated with an adviser who refers to the "U.S. of KKK-A" and urges God to "damn" our country.
(snip)
Take an issue that Obama did not specifically confront yesterday. In a 2003 sermon, Wright claimed, "The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color."
This accusation does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an "occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy." It makes Wright a dangerous man. He has casually accused America of one of the most monstrous crimes in history, perpetrated by a conspiracy of medical Mengeles. If Wright believes what he said, he should urge the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he views as guilty of unspeakable evil. If I believed Wright were correct, I would join him in that cause.
(snip>
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Where can other folks buy a few of those "get out of hot water for free" cards that Obama is handing out to "too-set-in-their-way" racists like Wright?
Don’t speak to soon about that “...without the violence” bit. This could be one long, hot summer.
And I ain’t talking about Global Warming...
If he could just figure out a way to sell Racism Credits, he would be making the big bucks, just like Al Gore!
You obviously don’t know who most of the subscribers of the WP are. They believe the pro-forma fluff in much the same way that they believed the endless attacks against George Allen on the use of the word macaca.
Howard Fineman, on MSNBC, uncritically quoted someone who said that folks who don't understand Obama's high-minded speech are Knuckleheads
Headline?
Obama's grandmother to be charged with hate crime
Obama mulling possible violations of law revealed in speech.
Hillary is just as big a racist as Obama, and she's antisemitic to boot......
One has to wonder why he still refuses to disown Wright. The excuse that he can’t disown a family member just doesn’t fly. When I was young, my parents took us away from a church and pastor that they cared about, the very pastor that married them, simply because they decided to allow smoking inside the church. That church has since taken on increasingly radically liberal philosophies (such as saying that every soldier of the Iraq war is committing murder), but we left as soon as there were warning signs that their philosophy had begun to diverge from ours. You don’t stay with a church and a pastor whose philosophy is fundamentally different from your own, you always have the choice to leave - there is no moral equivalency with a family member situation.
Obama says that we’ve all had pastors who have said things we disagree with, but I can say that my family had no problem leaving a pastor and his church after they began saying and doing things we deeply disagreed with. It just does not make any sense to retain a spiritual advisor whose philosophy and outlook you deeply disagree with. This is not a minor quibble over the interpretation of a verse of scripture, this should be a deep fundamental division that prevents Wright from being a good pastor or advisor to anyone who isn’t a conspiracy theorist nutjob. Obama claims he never heard Wright say these things before, and though I don’t believe he’s being honest about that, I still expect his response to be that he will disown his pastor and never seek his advice again. He failed to do that, indicating that he does not disagree with what he sees as his pastor’s “wisdom.”
If Obama is the nominee I look forward to finding out what dates we can be certain that he was in attendence, and then comb through the archives of “sermons” to find out just how radical they were. It’s likely that we can prove Obama flat out lied when he said he had no idea that his pastor had said any of these things. It will be the death of his canidacy if we can do the research. The trick will be to nail his attendence down to specific dates.
They wanted to vote against Allen, and "macaca" was the excuse. But we're talking about angels on pinheads here. You're right in that the effect is the same.
The real story is all this hype about the newness of Obama, how different he is and yet he admittedly sat in the pews maybe with his wife and daughters by his side and listened to these diatribes.
Where was his courage?
Where was his conviction?
at the minimum he could have disagreed with the Pastor and left the church.
In truth However, he had a responsiblilty to set the Pastor straight. Listening to Jeramiah Wright spew his LIES about America is sickening and it begs the question
Couldn’t Obama even recognize the lies of the Pastor?
He allowed this minister of hate to disparage a nation that has always answered the call... I have never been unproud of America, generations of our fathers have sacrificed so much so that other nations could live in freedom in this world. Obama does not know what it means to be a Proud American he has given that up as he was slowly hypnotized by the rhetoric of hate.
If Obama is elected POTUS then Mr. Wright I would’nt preach G.D. America... No, No, No, I would preach God Help us all.
And he was quick enough to “disown” his own grandmother.
And all the denials and pleas of his ignorance at the beliefs of his own pastor for 20 years, how can any thinking person be expected to believe that he was unaware, for twenty years, of what it took the media and the general public only a few weeks to know?
If my Priest said that 9/11 was the US chickens coming home to roost or that the US Government invented AIDS in a genocidal plot, he would not have to wait until the end of the sermon to see the last of me.
You can bet the files of Trinity UCC are being scrubbed even as we speak to eliminate such tasty tid-bits.
And half the Republican...
“I still can’t believe how he threw his grandmother under the bus.” Excellent point.
John McCain goes to Hagee’s church????
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