Posted on 03/22/2008 6:16:31 PM PDT by jdm
‘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.
ping.
Vintage Steyn..
Ping
Thank you for posting this brilliantly reasoned and so well written piece by the unique, Mark Steyn. FR is the only place I would catch this! I would like to add to Mark’s observations that Barack Obama is so favorable of the hate-whitey-hustle the ‘great Wright Way’ teaches that Barack and his racist wife are bringing their two beautiful young daughters for the same inculcaiton in this hate. What a guy to carry the democrap party banner!
I’ve seen quite a number of articles asserting that Obama is having trouble with his preacher. What’s that all about?
Not the same message by the same pastor at the same church for 20 years.
"Gosh, darn! Fred Phelps has been like a crazy uncle to me .... for 20 years worth of sermons."
As usual, Steyn’s spotlight helps his readers see things clearly.
Going, going, gone!
It’s outa the park folks!
Uhhhh...Reverend Wright...I think you might be confusing the HIV virus with Planned Parenthood.
Speaking of which. Boy, would I like to have been a fly on the wall on the day he preached about the devastating effects of abortion on blacks.
I wonder if that DVD is available in the church bookstore.
I'm sure he stresses this while out marching for "choice."
It’s Steyn at his best.
The political party doesn't matter if the question of love & loyalty to country is in doubt. A leader, a president must at the very least understand our motivation. We don't harbor resentments from the past, we're happy to join hands with all who know this is the greatest country ever on earth.
Obama, his pastor, and any movement towards a symbolic achievement have taken several steps backwards in all this hubbub about the reverend Wright. However I think this has been a good exercise. In the end we'll all learn something, and I believe we'll be better off for it in the future.
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Obama’s abortive campaign is the worst thing that’s happened to race relations in this country in 40 years.
I wonder if he thinks his promiscous, bigamous father is a typical black man?
Oh, it DOES impact whites if a congregation is fed this nonsense.
For one, there’s the whole thing about votes being swung in one direction or another, economic and political opportunities being denied whites or Asians (and blacks as a result of bad voting and biases,) more spending on failed policies as opposed to constructive solutions or improvements and of course, violence of all kinds directed at whites or other non-blacks as a result of being fed this garbage.
Same as a madrassa or Saudi TV. If you’re fed that venom consistently, it makes it much easier to organize or act individually in a violent and evil way upon those you perceive as ‘oppressing’ you.
At the risk of being flamed from here to kingdom come, I want to warn people of something I'm concerned about. WARNING: THIS IS NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT.
Obama's refusal to repudiate Wright could be interpreted as a powerful signal of defiance.
I lived in Los Angeles county during the Rodney King riots. I saw people standing 24hr guard on top of their shops with shotguns. I saw buildings doused with gasoline and entire city blocks SYSTEMATICALLY set on fire.
The first thing you're going to see is cars full of cruising black kids strange to your neighborhood. Usually with the music as loud as possible to let you know they're out there. It might not even dawn on you what is happening at first, until some incident breaks out. The violence, arson and mayhem of the LA riots was mainly committed in the black communities. But they will come into yours as an act of defiance and intimidation.
In LA County the Asian community was specifically targeted -- the black community was full of notions that their jobs were being stolen by the Vietnamese and Cambodians. These people had their businesses looted and burned to the ground.
I also saw members of a black church on a Sunday line their cars up at a very large Shell station that was operated by a Korean man and buy gas. They had signs on the sides of their cars denouncing the violence. It was quite a statement and these people were to be commended for their courage and bravery.
But I'm not seeing this brand of moral authority now. I fear that the contributions of Martin Luther King Jr. are being repudiated. Maybe Barack Obama represents a new day? But I don't see what kind of day it is. Just today, his campaign claimed Clinton was using "McCarthy tactics". I'm no friend of Bill Clinton, but that was ridiculous.
I want you, my friends, black and white, to be careful out there, in case things get rough. In this environment, who knows?
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