Posted on 06/19/2009 6:52:38 PM PDT by Libloather
Fight crazy talk with sanity
By Clarence Page
Published: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 5:16 PM EDT
What is it about President Obama that drives some people crazy? Take, for example, his former pastor. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is back in the news again. This time hes apologizing.
He really did not mean to blame them Jews in an earlier interview for keeping him away from the president, he says now. He had meant to refer to Zionists and not all Jews.
The sound bite in question occurred a day earlier. In a walking interview with a reporter for Virginias Daily Press, Wright was asked why he thought Obama had not talked to him. My guess is that the snub has something to do with how Wrights inflammatory remarks almost scuttled Obamas presidential campaign. But Wright found other parties to blame.
Hes got to do what politicians do, the retired pastor of Chicagos Trinity United Church of Christ said. And the Jewish vote, the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) vote thats controlling him, that will not let him send representation to the Darfur Review Conference, thats talking this craziness on Israel because theyre Zionists, they will not let him talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is. Ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza - the ethnic cleansing of the Zionists is a sin and a crime against humanity.
Wright apologized the next day in an interview on Sirius Satellite Radios Make It Plain with Mark Thompson. He misspoke. He meant to blame Zionists, not Jews, he said.
Maybe, but Wright slipped over the line. Theres a clear line between legitimate criticism of Israels politics and a sweeping conspiracy theory that smears an entire ethnic group.
In fact, Wrights remarks sound all the worse because of their timing. They sound eerily - and ironically - similar to the rants of James Wenneker von Brunn, 88, the white supremacist who is charged with killing Stephen T. Johns, a black security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum - on the same day as Wrights original remarks.
Take, for example, this passage from his notebooks quoted in an FBI affidavit: The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what Jew owners tell him to do. Jews captured Americas money. Jews control the mass media. The First Amendment is abrogated - henceforth.
Hatred of blacks and Jews ate him alive like a cancer, a woman identifying herself as von Brunns ex-wife said of the alleged gunman, according to the New York Daily News.
Thats what bigotry can do to you. Scapegoating other groups and invisible conspiracies can be emotionally satisfying for some tortured souls, but it provides no real answers. It only leads to further madness.
Thats important to the sane world as it tries to make sense of the recent string of high-profile violence and alleged plots from opposite edges of the lunatic fringe. On one side we have far-right fanatics whose heads swarm with paranoid conspiracy theories. On the other we have domestic Islamic extremists, many of them converts, whose heads stew with angry perceptions of U.S. policies abroad.
A tragic example of the latter appears to be another recently alleged homicidal terrorist, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, formerly Carlos Leon Bledsoe. The recent Muslim convert is charged with fatally shooting one soldier and wounding another outside an Army recruiting booth in suburban Little Rock, Ark., on June 1.
He told police that he targeted soldiers because he was angry about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and what U.S. policies toward Muslims had done in the past.
Never mind the thousands of U.S. soldiers who also have fought and died on behalf of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Kosovo and other countries.
I would never call for limits on the free-speech rights of those with whom I disagree. But the persistent threat of armed and bitter lone-wolf fanatics like Muhammad and Brunn make it incumbent on the rest of us to denounce loose paranoid talk by leaders who should know better.
I put Rev. Wright in that territory. He loves to act out for cameras and microphones from time to time, but his antics have only hurt his reputation, just as they almost sunk Obamas presidential candidacy.
Right-wing commentators and talk show hosts have taken a lot of fire from critics who say their excessive Obama-bashing fueled Brunns hate.
Some of that criticism is justified. But so is the criticism from the other side that holds liberals accountable for the loose talk that emits out of their own side of the lunatic fringe. Its time for both sides to fight crazy talk with a heavy dose of sanity, as long as we can still find some.
Nah. Once the intent is mentioned, the racists apologizes don't really count.
Right-wing commentators and talk show hosts have taken a lot of fire from critics who say their excessive Obama-bashing fueled Brunns hate.
James Wenneker von Brunn, Abdulhakim Mujahid and the Unibomber are HUGE leftist brothers in arms.
One day the leftists will see it and be ashamed.
On the flip side - what was it about Dubya that drove some people nuts?
Wright is crazy all on his own, Obama didn’t make him that way.
Never ID'd Von Brunn as a leftist either huh?
He's a commie.
I don't like commies.
There is a commie in the White House.
This is a pebble in the shoe. A bone out of joint. Clouds without rain.
Fingernails scratching across a chalkboard.
He has an unnatural zeal for supporting abortion that convinces me his 'moral compass' is missing its needle...
Yes, he is an irritant.
All of the above.
Plus, I just cannot stand the sound of his voice. It is like fingernails on chalkboard. I have to turn the radio off.
Bambi drives me nuts because he is a leftist puke with no morals. What drives me even more nuts is that people refuse to look beyond the crap he says into what he actually does.
Wow. Silly me. I thought that Obama’s advisors — Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Pete Rouse, et al. were refusing to allow Obama see Wright.
But no, there’s this Zionist conspiracy that won’t allow Obama to see Wright.
I don’t see Zionist leanings in Rahm Emanuel. I’ll admit I don’t know the others’ leanings quite so well.
Wow. Silly me. I thought that Obama’s advisors — Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Pete Rouse, et al. were refusing to allow Obama see Wright.
But no, there’s this Zionist conspiracy that won’t allow Obama to see Wright.
I don’t see Zionist leanings in Rahm Emanuel. I’ll admit I don’t know the others’ leanings quite so well.
Although I can't pinpoint it exactly, one of the early moments when I started to loathe & detest him was when he made his 'lipstick on a pig' comment, and then pretended that he hadn't said anything rude. That's when I definitively knew that he was a duplicitous bastard.
I really don’t give a crap about Rev. Wright. I see no mystery whatsoever about who and what he is. He’s just another “automatically excused” malevolent and twisted influence on 0bama, in a long line of same.
From the title, I thought the article was about “what drives people nuts about 0bama”. One among many of the things that irritates me about him is indeed how all these obvious anti-American “get whitey” thug influences on him are just so much water under the bridge. He’s entirely and transparently a product of all these weirdos that seem so borderline ghoulish, but somehow, he’s the one, he’s the messiah, his ideas are the answer to our prayers.
It would be easier for me to answer “what do I like about 0bama”. And there’s really not much of anything. And all those things I dislike are seen by his supporters and cronies as plusses. He’s the embodiment, the warhead, of a mass utopian delusion that has taken over the country and is nothing short of a grisly reminder of how despots can come to power in confused and desperate times. This is government by “get whitey”, I really can’t explain it any simpler. That the impoverished folks who elected him think they will benefit is tragic. That the liberal elites, including Jews of whom I am one, voted for him in large numbers is a deep embarassment. I believe 0bama et al will set back race relations by fifty years. I detest what he’s doing to the economy. While the roots of the situation belong to both parties, the observations that power-hungry cliques and individuals in Wash DC are using this crisis to both consolidate and expand bureaucracies without apparent limit, seize more power, and overturn critical issues covered in the Constitution are nauseating.
Man, isn’t that the damn truth.
Yep, Zero is a big joke. We know nothing about this individual, and people bought that hopey changy crap. So be it. We are out numbered by the idiots. And I, too, am bewildered why the Jewish folks flock toward this crap.
News to me, honestly. How is he a lefty?
He describes himself as a Pagan Socialist
Von Brunn was one of yours, Clarence, ol' buddy, ol' pal. He self-identified as a Socialist -- not to mention Holocaust denier and white supremacist.
"Right-wing commentators" had nothing to do with Von Brunn's crazed rampage.
Which still leaves unanswered the question about, across twenty years, exactly how much influence the president's pastor had over him. How many of those hatreds does he share...???
Clarence, I don't think you want to know the answer to that question.
Who of course were a party of the Left.
That sounds pretty close to what he considered himself.
When you're talking about popular sovereignty or popular supremacy, the primacy of a people, you're talking about the Old Left, i.e. the 19th-century Left, of which our classical liberals, ordoliberals, Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and so on (now including paleocons and neocons), were a part.
The more exotic weeds of the Left grew into cover stories for vanguard despotism. There were Communism, Nazism, Trotskyism, Maoism [someone tell me quick, the difference between Maoism and Trotskyism -- I can't think of one], and New World varieties like Mexican Communism, or PRIismo, and Peruvian Aprismo, from APRA, a Communist-nativist movement and political party rather like Nazism. Aprista political refugees in the 1930's cross-pollinated Mexican Communists with their nativism afresh: PRI had been a very mestizo and indio party in 1919, but it was gradually becoming Creolized, and so the Apristas reinvigorated the Mexican Communists' identification with indio problems and agenda.
The North American variety of classical liberalism and democratic republicanism (i.e. Jeffersonianism) grew into populism, Progressivism, nativism (the Know Nothings), and Kluxerism, together with Kluxerism's offshoots, white supremacy and segregationism, all of which were centered around the welfare of The People (however defined), and particularly the less well-off, since the well-off did fine on their own, thank you.
But there was never as much daylight between a classical American economic liberal practicing laissez-faire and busting his unions (and calling in the bulls to do it, and having the State lege write convenient gun-grabber laws like Chicago's to help him do it: which was what gun control was all about, after it stopped being about keeping black freemen and slaves disarmed), on the one hand, and the populist Grangers and small-business Mugwumps he affected to disdain, as there was between any of those representatives of popular sovereignty on the one hand and the exponents of Leviathan government and the authority of the State, the Church, and other self-ordering, self-seeking institutional Lords Ordainers and their votaries, whether they called themselves Falange, or Fascists, or royalists, on the other.
In fact, it was precisely this division that ranged Whiggish English businessmen and American business and political groups on one side, and the victorious powers of the Vienna Congress and their anti-liberty, anti-Masonic, anti-Protestant representatives of the old feudal order on the other, as the daughters of Spain fought it out with their mother country for liberty and independence, and Britain and America, with Spain finally defeated after a civil war of 44 years, interposed the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and the Monroe Doctrine between Spain and her lost possessions, to deny authoritarianism a fresh foothold in the New World, a world that Americans and Englishmen agreed the Old Order had lost on merit.
Thug thizzle, baby. Watch him get off Marine One and do that slow, ponderous thug stroll, rolling as he walks slow, across the White House lawn to the White Crib, middle digit uplifted.
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