From Chicago Sun-Times on June 3, 2008: "The firebrand pastor of St. Sabina parish was removed from his duties there Tuesday, according to a statement released by the Archdiocese of Chicago.
In the statement, Cardinal Francis George says he asked the Rev. Michael Pfleger, 59, to "take leave for a couple of weeks from his pastoral duties." The statement said Pfleger "does not believe this to be the right step at this time." "While respecting his disagreement, I have nevertheless asked him to use this opportunity to reflect on his recent statements and actions in the light of the Church's regulations for all Catholic priests," George said.
The recent statements in question were video clips broadcast on You Tube where Pfleger mocked Hillary Clinton for crying on the campaign trail. He suggested her tears were due to "white entitlement" leading Clinton to believe the Democratic nomination should go to her, not Barack Obama.
Pfleger has been a priest for 33 years, serving nearly all that time at St.
Sabina's in the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood.
Fr. William Vanecko, Pastor of St. Kilian's parish, will be temporary administrator of St. Sabina's, the statement said.
"I ask the members of St. Sabina's parish to cooperate with him and to keep him and Fr. Pfleger in their prayers," the statement reads. "They are in mine."
Showing posts with label Obama's church. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Obama's church. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Obama's Pastor Problems and Bombshell Michelle Tape
From Wall Street Journal Political Diary
June 3, 2008
Pastor Problems
by John Fund
"The Rev. Michael Pfleger was a busy preacher on Sunday, May 25. In addition to his mocking criticism of Hillary Clinton in a sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ – which yesterday Barack Obama severed his ties with – he gave another sermon at his own church in which he issued the following healing statement: "Racism is still America's greatest addiction. I also believe that America is the greatest sin against God."
Mr. Pfleger had earlier apologized for his Clinton comments. It's unclear how he will react now that his second sermon has been made public. While the 59-year-old radical preacher is no longer affiliated with the Obama campaign, many are bound to ask why he was involved at all. Mr. Obama had frequently appeared at public events with Mr. Pfleger over the years and counted him as an adviser. Team Obama brought Mr. Pfleger to Iowa last year to host several interfaith forums on behalf of the campaign. As an Illinois state senator, Mr. Obama steered over $225,000 in taxpayer funding to Mr. Pfleger's church.
Now Team Obama is responding to the latest Pfleger outburst by once again saying the candidate is "deeply disappointed" in what was said.
The problem here is that voters may begin to detect a pattern in Mr. Obama's increasingly odd set of advisers and allies. Jeremiah Wright. William Ayers. Michael Pfleger. As the political blogger Jerry Fuhrman notes: "Traveling in this circle, is it any wonder that Obama's wife Michelle never found a reason to be proud of her country?"
Indeed, rumors are swirling on the campaign trail that a new video will soon surface featuring Mrs. Obama appearing on a panel with radical speakers during which she makes more controversial statements.
Mr. Obama has performed brilliantly in all but wrapping up the Democratic nomination. But he clearly has lost control of the storyline surrounding his Chicago advisers. If he doesn't move to address these problems more forthrightly, they will continue to haunt his campaign.
"
June 3, 2008
Pastor Problems
by John Fund
"The Rev. Michael Pfleger was a busy preacher on Sunday, May 25. In addition to his mocking criticism of Hillary Clinton in a sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ – which yesterday Barack Obama severed his ties with – he gave another sermon at his own church in which he issued the following healing statement: "Racism is still America's greatest addiction. I also believe that America is the greatest sin against God."
Mr. Pfleger had earlier apologized for his Clinton comments. It's unclear how he will react now that his second sermon has been made public. While the 59-year-old radical preacher is no longer affiliated with the Obama campaign, many are bound to ask why he was involved at all. Mr. Obama had frequently appeared at public events with Mr. Pfleger over the years and counted him as an adviser. Team Obama brought Mr. Pfleger to Iowa last year to host several interfaith forums on behalf of the campaign. As an Illinois state senator, Mr. Obama steered over $225,000 in taxpayer funding to Mr. Pfleger's church.
Now Team Obama is responding to the latest Pfleger outburst by once again saying the candidate is "deeply disappointed" in what was said.
The problem here is that voters may begin to detect a pattern in Mr. Obama's increasingly odd set of advisers and allies. Jeremiah Wright. William Ayers. Michael Pfleger. As the political blogger Jerry Fuhrman notes: "Traveling in this circle, is it any wonder that Obama's wife Michelle never found a reason to be proud of her country?"
Indeed, rumors are swirling on the campaign trail that a new video will soon surface featuring Mrs. Obama appearing on a panel with radical speakers during which she makes more controversial statements.
Mr. Obama has performed brilliantly in all but wrapping up the Democratic nomination. But he clearly has lost control of the storyline surrounding his Chicago advisers. If he doesn't move to address these problems more forthrightly, they will continue to haunt his campaign.
"
Obama's Irrelevant Apology
From RealClearPolitics.com by Thomas Sowel: "It is amazing how seriously the media are taking Senator Barack Obama's latest statement about the latest racist rant from the pulpit of the church he has attended for 20 years. But neither that statement nor the apology for his rant by Father Michael Pfleger really matters, one way or the other. Nor does Senator Obama's belated resignation from that church.
For any politician, what matters is not his election year rhetoric, or an election year resignation from a church, but the track record of that politician in the years before the election.
Yet so many people are so fascinated by Barack Obama's rhetorical skills that they don't care about his voting record in the U.S. Senate, in the Illinois state senate, the causes that he has chosen to promote over the years, or the candidate's personal character and values, as revealed by his actions and associations.
Despite clever spin from Obama's supporters about avoiding "guilt by association," much more is involved than casual association with people like Jeremiah Wright and Father Pfleger.
In addition to giving $20,000 of his own money to Jeremiah Wright, as a state senator Obama directed $225,000 of the Illinois taxpayers' money for programs run by Father Pfleger. In the U.S. Senate, Obama earmarked $100,000 in federal tax money for Father Pfleger's work. Giving someone more than 300 grand is not just some tenuous, coincidental association.
Are Barack Obama's views shown by what he says during an election year or by what he has been doing for decades before?
The complete contrast between Obama's election year image as a healer of divisions and his whole career of promoting far-left grievance politics, in association with America-haters like Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, are brushed aside by his supporters who talk about getting back to "the real issues."
There is nothing more real than a man's character and values. The track record of what he has actually done is far more real than anything he says, however elegantly he says it.
There is no office where the character and values of the person in that office matter more than the office of President of the United States. He holds the destiny of 300 million Americans in his hands and the fate of generations yet unborn.
That was never more true than today, with Iran moving ever closer to a nuclear bomb, while the United Nations wrings its hands and Congress fritters away its time on everything from steroids in sports to earmarks for pet projects back home.
Does anyone seriously consider what it would mean for Iran to have nuclear weapons? They are already supplying terrorists with the means of killing people in other countries, including killing American troops in Iraq.
Senator Obama has been downplaying the Iran threat, saying that they are just "a small country," not like the Soviet Union. The people who flew planes into the World Trade Center were an even smaller group than the Iranian government.
Half a dozen terrorists like that with nuclear weapons would be a bigger danger than the Soviet Union ever was, because the Soviet leaders were not suicide bombers. They could be deterred by the threat of what we would do to Moscow if they attacked New York.
You cannot deter suicidal fanatics. They are not going to stop unless they get stopped. Rhetoric is not going to do it.
Not only Senator Obama, but too many other Americans, seem to have no concept of the seething hatred that can lead people to destroy their own lives in order to lash out at others.
But terrorists have been doing this repeatedly, not only in Iraq and in Israel, but in other countries around the world-- including the United States on 9/11.
Have we already forgotten how the Palestinians were cheering in the streets over the news of the attack on the World Trade Center? How videotapes of sadistic beheadings of innocent people by terrorists have found an eager audience in the Middle East?
Are we going to leave our children hostages to hate-filled sadists with nuclear weapons? Are we to rely on Barack Obama's rhetoric to protect them?
Senator Obama's foreign policy seems to be somewhere between Rodney King's "Can't we just get along?" and Alfred E. Neuman's "What, me worry?"
"
For any politician, what matters is not his election year rhetoric, or an election year resignation from a church, but the track record of that politician in the years before the election.
Yet so many people are so fascinated by Barack Obama's rhetorical skills that they don't care about his voting record in the U.S. Senate, in the Illinois state senate, the causes that he has chosen to promote over the years, or the candidate's personal character and values, as revealed by his actions and associations.
Despite clever spin from Obama's supporters about avoiding "guilt by association," much more is involved than casual association with people like Jeremiah Wright and Father Pfleger.
In addition to giving $20,000 of his own money to Jeremiah Wright, as a state senator Obama directed $225,000 of the Illinois taxpayers' money for programs run by Father Pfleger. In the U.S. Senate, Obama earmarked $100,000 in federal tax money for Father Pfleger's work. Giving someone more than 300 grand is not just some tenuous, coincidental association.
Are Barack Obama's views shown by what he says during an election year or by what he has been doing for decades before?
The complete contrast between Obama's election year image as a healer of divisions and his whole career of promoting far-left grievance politics, in association with America-haters like Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, are brushed aside by his supporters who talk about getting back to "the real issues."
There is nothing more real than a man's character and values. The track record of what he has actually done is far more real than anything he says, however elegantly he says it.
There is no office where the character and values of the person in that office matter more than the office of President of the United States. He holds the destiny of 300 million Americans in his hands and the fate of generations yet unborn.
That was never more true than today, with Iran moving ever closer to a nuclear bomb, while the United Nations wrings its hands and Congress fritters away its time on everything from steroids in sports to earmarks for pet projects back home.
Does anyone seriously consider what it would mean for Iran to have nuclear weapons? They are already supplying terrorists with the means of killing people in other countries, including killing American troops in Iraq.
Senator Obama has been downplaying the Iran threat, saying that they are just "a small country," not like the Soviet Union. The people who flew planes into the World Trade Center were an even smaller group than the Iranian government.
Half a dozen terrorists like that with nuclear weapons would be a bigger danger than the Soviet Union ever was, because the Soviet leaders were not suicide bombers. They could be deterred by the threat of what we would do to Moscow if they attacked New York.
You cannot deter suicidal fanatics. They are not going to stop unless they get stopped. Rhetoric is not going to do it.
Not only Senator Obama, but too many other Americans, seem to have no concept of the seething hatred that can lead people to destroy their own lives in order to lash out at others.
But terrorists have been doing this repeatedly, not only in Iraq and in Israel, but in other countries around the world-- including the United States on 9/11.
Have we already forgotten how the Palestinians were cheering in the streets over the news of the attack on the World Trade Center? How videotapes of sadistic beheadings of innocent people by terrorists have found an eager audience in the Middle East?
Are we going to leave our children hostages to hate-filled sadists with nuclear weapons? Are we to rely on Barack Obama's rhetoric to protect them?
Senator Obama's foreign policy seems to be somewhere between Rodney King's "Can't we just get along?" and Alfred E. Neuman's "What, me worry?"
"
Monday, May 5, 2008
Obama's Wright Controversy Affects the Polls
From RealClearPolitics.com By Michael Barone:
"Is the bottom falling out for Barack Obama? It's too early to say that, but there are some disturbing signs. On the positive side, superdelegates still are breaking his way. Rep. Baron Hill, whose southern Indiana district almost certainly will vote for Hillary Clinton, came out for Obama. So did fellow Hoosier Joe Andrew, who previously endorsed Clinton and who was named Democratic national chairman by Bill Clinton in the 1990s. (James Carville may have another name for him.) Obama is still well ahead among delegates chosen in primaries and caucuses, and he is not very far behind in superdelegates, either.
But what about the voters? Here there are some ominous signs. The latest Fox News poll, conducted after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's appearance at the National Press Club, showed Obama's favorable/unfavorables at 63 to 27 percent among Democrats, compared to Hillary Clinton's 73 to 22 percent. Suddenly she's not the only one with high negatives. And 36 percent of Democrats say they would be disinclined to vote for Obama because of his longtime relationship with his former pastor. There's more bad news in The Pew Research Center poll of Democrats. Obama's national lead among Democrats is down from 49 to 39 percent to a statistically insignificant 47 to 45 percent.
These results are not outliers. The Rasmussen tracking poll showed Obama leading Clinton 49 to 41 percent before Wright spoke to the National Press Club. Afterward the numbers were 46 to 44 percent in favor of Clinton. The Gallup Poll had Obama leading Clinton 50 to 41 percent the night before the Pennsylvania primary. The results reported May 1 were Clinton 49 percent, Obama 45 percent.
Obama's standing as a general election candidate also seems to have taken a hit. Gallup showed him tied with John McCain 45 to 45 percent before the Wright appearance and trailing 47 to 43 percent afterward; at the same time, it shows Hillary Clinton tied with McCain 46 to 46 percent. Similarly, Rasmussen has McCain now ahead of Obama 46 to 43 percent and McCain tied with Clinton 44 to 44 percent.
All the numbers in this deluge of numbers tell the same story. Not just liberal but also many conservative commentators said that Obama's speech on race March 18, in response to ABC News' broadcasting of excerpts from Wright's sermons, had solved any problems he had with voters, or at least with Democratic voters. And it was hard to argue with that conclusion, at least as to Democrats. Obama's loss in Pennsylvania April 22, in line with expectations, didn't necessarily contradict that. The response to Obama's repudiation April 29, in response to Wright's remarks April 28, is clearly different.
One reason is that Obama now has taken two diametrically opposed stands on the minister whose church he attended for 20 years, who married him and his wife and baptized their children, whose sermon inspired the title of his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope." On March 18, his response was: No, I cannot renounce my pastor. On April 29, his response was: Yes, I can.
Another and more important reason is that Obama's long association with a minister who says that the federal government manufactured the AIDS virus to kill black people, who likens American soldiers to terrorists, who celebrates Louis Farrakhan as a great man -- that long association tends to undermine the central theme of Obama's candidacy. Obama has presented himself since his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech as a leader who can unite America across political and racial divides. He presented himself to American voters, most of whom, I believe, think it would be a very good thing if we elected a black president. (I personally feel that way.) "In the blue states," Obama told the convention in Boston and the nation watching on TV, "we worship an awesome God." Now it turns out that the God worshipped in the Rev. Wright's church was "awesome" in ways we didn't expect.
The appeals of Obama and Hillary Clinton will be tested in the May 6 primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, the nation's 10th- and 15th-most populous states. The Real Clear Politics average of recent polling shows Obama's share of the two-candidate vote in North Carolina at 54 percent, down from 59 percent in April, and Clinton with 53 percent of the two-candidate vote in Indiana, where she trailed not long ago. A few pundits still are saying that Obama's choice of pastor is a distraction, an irrelevancy. But some voters, perhaps in the belief that a president's judgment and values have important consequences, don't agree."
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.
"Is the bottom falling out for Barack Obama? It's too early to say that, but there are some disturbing signs. On the positive side, superdelegates still are breaking his way. Rep. Baron Hill, whose southern Indiana district almost certainly will vote for Hillary Clinton, came out for Obama. So did fellow Hoosier Joe Andrew, who previously endorsed Clinton and who was named Democratic national chairman by Bill Clinton in the 1990s. (James Carville may have another name for him.) Obama is still well ahead among delegates chosen in primaries and caucuses, and he is not very far behind in superdelegates, either.
But what about the voters? Here there are some ominous signs. The latest Fox News poll, conducted after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's appearance at the National Press Club, showed Obama's favorable/unfavorables at 63 to 27 percent among Democrats, compared to Hillary Clinton's 73 to 22 percent. Suddenly she's not the only one with high negatives. And 36 percent of Democrats say they would be disinclined to vote for Obama because of his longtime relationship with his former pastor. There's more bad news in The Pew Research Center poll of Democrats. Obama's national lead among Democrats is down from 49 to 39 percent to a statistically insignificant 47 to 45 percent.
These results are not outliers. The Rasmussen tracking poll showed Obama leading Clinton 49 to 41 percent before Wright spoke to the National Press Club. Afterward the numbers were 46 to 44 percent in favor of Clinton. The Gallup Poll had Obama leading Clinton 50 to 41 percent the night before the Pennsylvania primary. The results reported May 1 were Clinton 49 percent, Obama 45 percent.
Obama's standing as a general election candidate also seems to have taken a hit. Gallup showed him tied with John McCain 45 to 45 percent before the Wright appearance and trailing 47 to 43 percent afterward; at the same time, it shows Hillary Clinton tied with McCain 46 to 46 percent. Similarly, Rasmussen has McCain now ahead of Obama 46 to 43 percent and McCain tied with Clinton 44 to 44 percent.
All the numbers in this deluge of numbers tell the same story. Not just liberal but also many conservative commentators said that Obama's speech on race March 18, in response to ABC News' broadcasting of excerpts from Wright's sermons, had solved any problems he had with voters, or at least with Democratic voters. And it was hard to argue with that conclusion, at least as to Democrats. Obama's loss in Pennsylvania April 22, in line with expectations, didn't necessarily contradict that. The response to Obama's repudiation April 29, in response to Wright's remarks April 28, is clearly different.
One reason is that Obama now has taken two diametrically opposed stands on the minister whose church he attended for 20 years, who married him and his wife and baptized their children, whose sermon inspired the title of his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope." On March 18, his response was: No, I cannot renounce my pastor. On April 29, his response was: Yes, I can.
Another and more important reason is that Obama's long association with a minister who says that the federal government manufactured the AIDS virus to kill black people, who likens American soldiers to terrorists, who celebrates Louis Farrakhan as a great man -- that long association tends to undermine the central theme of Obama's candidacy. Obama has presented himself since his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech as a leader who can unite America across political and racial divides. He presented himself to American voters, most of whom, I believe, think it would be a very good thing if we elected a black president. (I personally feel that way.) "In the blue states," Obama told the convention in Boston and the nation watching on TV, "we worship an awesome God." Now it turns out that the God worshipped in the Rev. Wright's church was "awesome" in ways we didn't expect.
The appeals of Obama and Hillary Clinton will be tested in the May 6 primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, the nation's 10th- and 15th-most populous states. The Real Clear Politics average of recent polling shows Obama's share of the two-candidate vote in North Carolina at 54 percent, down from 59 percent in April, and Clinton with 53 percent of the two-candidate vote in Indiana, where she trailed not long ago. A few pundits still are saying that Obama's choice of pastor is a distraction, an irrelevancy. But some voters, perhaps in the belief that a president's judgment and values have important consequences, don't agree."
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Obama's Wright Turn
From RealClearPolitic.com: "When Barack Obama made his official announcement that he was running for President over 14 months ago in Springfield, Illinois, the Senator made sure that his pastor Jeremiah Wright had no speaking role and was kept away from the ceremony. Obama campaign manager David Axelrod has admitted that there were concerns back then about what Wright might say.
When Senator Obama made his speech in Philadelphia on race in America following the first round of Reverend Wright media exposure several weeks back, he admitted he had heard some of the Reverend's more controversial remarks in person in church.
"I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely -- just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed."
But now, the Senator has really had enough of Reverend Wright. In a press conference Tuesday, Obama condemned Wright, and claimed that Wright had offended him with his latest tirade on Monday at the National Press Club.
Many Americans did not have to wait for Wright's talk to the National Press Club to have taken offense. In fact, there is nothing the Reverend said Monday or with Bill Moyers on PBS, or at the NAACP dinner in Detroit (to thunderous ovations) that was in any substantive way different from what he has been saying over and over again for decades (to thunderous applause among the thousands packing Trinity Church). We had already heard about the US government bringing AIDS into the black community, and how Louis Farrakhan was a great American.
So why did this particular performance by Wright finally create the need for Obama to speak up more forcefully? That answer is simple: falling poll numbers in Indiana, North Carolina and nationally, and to that, we can safely conclude, Barack Obama takes great offense.
One of the charter members of the Obama media worship team, Chris Matthews, has already compared Obama's "courageous" actions in denouncing Wright to those of King Henry II telling Thomas Becket where to get off 8 centuries ago. That comparison will likely not resonate with many voters. Tom Shales, Hendrik Hertzberg, Andrew Sullivan, and other members of this flack troupe are sure to chime in with their vigorous applause, and with pleas for the media to get back to the real story of George Bush's crimes against humanity.
Barack Obama has been showing up at Wright's church for close to 20 years and was exposed to his brand of crackpot racist anti-American lunacy on more than one occasion during this long period. So it is really way too generous, I think, to applaud the Senator for his dramatic "Sister Souljah moment" with his late-to-the party denunciation of Wright. A real Sister Souljah moment would have required leaving Trinity Church before Wright became politically inconvenient for Obama, and not when Wright is beginning to threaten Obama's bid for the Democratic nomination.
Will Obama's pivot work politically? If he earns a split on May 6th, winning North Carolina, and losing Indiana, he will have avoided a political freefall. North Carolina is a state with a 21% African American population, and black voters make up about a third of Democratic Party primary voters. Given that Obama has been winning 90% of the vote among blacks, he would need but 30% of the white vote to win a narrow victory in North Carolina.
It is likely that Obama's team saw a sharp drop-off in white support in North Carolina with the latest Wright feeding frenzy the last few days. While most pundits have been focusing on the perceived tight race in Indiana, and assumed North Carolina was a lock for Obama, the Clinton team has been spending more money on media in North Carolina the last week than in Indiana, and sent Bill Clinton down to work the white rural areas, the same kinds of places where he helped deliver huge margins for Hillary in Pennsylvania.
Then came word that popular Governor Michael Easley was backing Clinton. So suddenly the Clintons are smelling the possibility of a sweep, including an upset in North Carolina, or at the least a very close finish there. These results would put more doubts in the minds of the nearly 300 super delegates who remain uncommitted that the Obama campaign is a train wreck waiting to happen in the general election.
One part of this story that I have not seen discussed is that while the Obama distancing from Wright is aimed at shoring up support among white voters, his campaign seems to take for granted that he will suffer no losses among black voters for his sharp statements Tuesday. In other words, they are counting on black voters winking and nodding their approval of Obama's words, as if Wright were out there on his own, when in fact he is not, and many ministers and black talk radio hosts speak just as Wright does, and have been doing so for years.
In fact, we have been told repeatedly these last few weeks, that whites just do not understand the black church vernacular, and we live in separate societies on Sundays. This may be true, but Obama is now saying he is not part of that angry chorus on Sundays, and his church's minister is out of line. Not to play the cynic, but I find this sudden split a bit inauthentic. Senator Obama has told us about Reverend Wright many times before: he was his pastor, his mentor, his moral compass, his sounding board, his teacher. But now Wright has said these horrible things at the National Press Club. And so, he must be sacrificed, at least for the benefit of lower middle income rural white voters in North Carolina and Indiana.
Barack Obama has been able to get away with projecting a different image to different groups as he has risen up the political ladder in Chicago. As long as he was a state senator or even a United States Senator, he could get away with fealty to Reverend Wright, dinner parties at Bill Ayers' house, all the while assuring white middle class and working class voters that he was a man interested in bipartisanship good government. But as many a politician before him has learned, a presidential race is an entirely different political beast."
When Senator Obama made his speech in Philadelphia on race in America following the first round of Reverend Wright media exposure several weeks back, he admitted he had heard some of the Reverend's more controversial remarks in person in church.
"I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely -- just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed."
But now, the Senator has really had enough of Reverend Wright. In a press conference Tuesday, Obama condemned Wright, and claimed that Wright had offended him with his latest tirade on Monday at the National Press Club.
Many Americans did not have to wait for Wright's talk to the National Press Club to have taken offense. In fact, there is nothing the Reverend said Monday or with Bill Moyers on PBS, or at the NAACP dinner in Detroit (to thunderous ovations) that was in any substantive way different from what he has been saying over and over again for decades (to thunderous applause among the thousands packing Trinity Church). We had already heard about the US government bringing AIDS into the black community, and how Louis Farrakhan was a great American.
So why did this particular performance by Wright finally create the need for Obama to speak up more forcefully? That answer is simple: falling poll numbers in Indiana, North Carolina and nationally, and to that, we can safely conclude, Barack Obama takes great offense.
One of the charter members of the Obama media worship team, Chris Matthews, has already compared Obama's "courageous" actions in denouncing Wright to those of King Henry II telling Thomas Becket where to get off 8 centuries ago. That comparison will likely not resonate with many voters. Tom Shales, Hendrik Hertzberg, Andrew Sullivan, and other members of this flack troupe are sure to chime in with their vigorous applause, and with pleas for the media to get back to the real story of George Bush's crimes against humanity.
Barack Obama has been showing up at Wright's church for close to 20 years and was exposed to his brand of crackpot racist anti-American lunacy on more than one occasion during this long period. So it is really way too generous, I think, to applaud the Senator for his dramatic "Sister Souljah moment" with his late-to-the party denunciation of Wright. A real Sister Souljah moment would have required leaving Trinity Church before Wright became politically inconvenient for Obama, and not when Wright is beginning to threaten Obama's bid for the Democratic nomination.
Will Obama's pivot work politically? If he earns a split on May 6th, winning North Carolina, and losing Indiana, he will have avoided a political freefall. North Carolina is a state with a 21% African American population, and black voters make up about a third of Democratic Party primary voters. Given that Obama has been winning 90% of the vote among blacks, he would need but 30% of the white vote to win a narrow victory in North Carolina.
It is likely that Obama's team saw a sharp drop-off in white support in North Carolina with the latest Wright feeding frenzy the last few days. While most pundits have been focusing on the perceived tight race in Indiana, and assumed North Carolina was a lock for Obama, the Clinton team has been spending more money on media in North Carolina the last week than in Indiana, and sent Bill Clinton down to work the white rural areas, the same kinds of places where he helped deliver huge margins for Hillary in Pennsylvania.
Then came word that popular Governor Michael Easley was backing Clinton. So suddenly the Clintons are smelling the possibility of a sweep, including an upset in North Carolina, or at the least a very close finish there. These results would put more doubts in the minds of the nearly 300 super delegates who remain uncommitted that the Obama campaign is a train wreck waiting to happen in the general election.
One part of this story that I have not seen discussed is that while the Obama distancing from Wright is aimed at shoring up support among white voters, his campaign seems to take for granted that he will suffer no losses among black voters for his sharp statements Tuesday. In other words, they are counting on black voters winking and nodding their approval of Obama's words, as if Wright were out there on his own, when in fact he is not, and many ministers and black talk radio hosts speak just as Wright does, and have been doing so for years.
In fact, we have been told repeatedly these last few weeks, that whites just do not understand the black church vernacular, and we live in separate societies on Sundays. This may be true, but Obama is now saying he is not part of that angry chorus on Sundays, and his church's minister is out of line. Not to play the cynic, but I find this sudden split a bit inauthentic. Senator Obama has told us about Reverend Wright many times before: he was his pastor, his mentor, his moral compass, his sounding board, his teacher. But now Wright has said these horrible things at the National Press Club. And so, he must be sacrificed, at least for the benefit of lower middle income rural white voters in North Carolina and Indiana.
Barack Obama has been able to get away with projecting a different image to different groups as he has risen up the political ladder in Chicago. As long as he was a state senator or even a United States Senator, he could get away with fealty to Reverend Wright, dinner parties at Bill Ayers' house, all the while assuring white middle class and working class voters that he was a man interested in bipartisanship good government. But as many a politician before him has learned, a presidential race is an entirely different political beast."
Monday, April 28, 2008
Obama's Voice of Doom
Dana Milbank on the Washinton Post on April 28, 2008: "The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, explaining this morning why he had waited so long before breaking his silence about his incendiary sermons, offered a paraphrase from Proverbs: "It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
Barack Obama's pastor would have been wise to continue to heed that wisdom.
Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama's presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama's longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered - and added lighter fuel.
Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks ("God damn America") and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.
In front of 30 television cameras, Wright's audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama's vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio's April Ryan, confirmed that Wright's security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.
Wright suggested that Obama was insincere in distancing himself from his pastor. "He didn't distance himself," Wright announced. "He had to distance himself, because he's a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American."
Explaining further, Wright said friends had written to him and said, "We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected." The minister continued: "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."
Wright also argued, at least four times over the course of the hour, that he was speaking not for himself but for the black church.
"This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright," the minister said. "It is an attack on the black church." He positioned himself as a mainstream voice of African American religious traditions. "Why am I speaking out now?" he asked. "If you think I'm going to let you talk about my mama and her religious tradition, and my daddy and his religious tradition and my grandma, you got another thing coming."
That significantly complicates Obama's job as he contemplates how to extinguish Wright's latest incendiary device. Now, he needs to do more than express disagreement with his former pastor's view; he needs to refute his former pastor's suggestion that Obama privately agrees with him.
Wright seemed aggrieved that his inflammatory quotations were out of the full "context" of his sermons -- yet he repeated many of the same accusations in the context of a half-hour Q&A session this morning.
His claim that the September 11 attacks mean "America's chickens are coming home to roost"?
Wright defended it: "Jesus said, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles."
His views on Farrakhan and Israel? "Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion. He was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter's being vilified for and Bishop Tutu's being vilified for. And everybody wants to paint me as if I'm anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago. He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century; that's what I think about him. . . . Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn't make me this color."
He denounced those who "can worship God on Sunday morning, wearing a black clergy robe, and kill others on Sunday evening, wearing a white Klan robe." He praised the communist Sandinista regime of Nicaragua. He renewed his belief that the government created AIDS as a means of genocide against people of color ("I believe our government is capable of doing anything").
And he vigorously renewed demands for an apology for slavery: "Britain has apologized to Africans. But this country's leaders have refused to apologize. So until that apology comes, I'm not going to keep stepping on your foot and asking you, does this hurt, do you forgive me for stepping on your foot, if I'm still stepping on your foot. Understand that? Capisce?"
Capisce, reverend. All too well."
Barack Obama's pastor would have been wise to continue to heed that wisdom.
Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama's presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama's longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered - and added lighter fuel.
Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks ("God damn America") and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.
In front of 30 television cameras, Wright's audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama's vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio's April Ryan, confirmed that Wright's security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.
Wright suggested that Obama was insincere in distancing himself from his pastor. "He didn't distance himself," Wright announced. "He had to distance himself, because he's a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American."
Explaining further, Wright said friends had written to him and said, "We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected." The minister continued: "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."
Wright also argued, at least four times over the course of the hour, that he was speaking not for himself but for the black church.
"This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright," the minister said. "It is an attack on the black church." He positioned himself as a mainstream voice of African American religious traditions. "Why am I speaking out now?" he asked. "If you think I'm going to let you talk about my mama and her religious tradition, and my daddy and his religious tradition and my grandma, you got another thing coming."
That significantly complicates Obama's job as he contemplates how to extinguish Wright's latest incendiary device. Now, he needs to do more than express disagreement with his former pastor's view; he needs to refute his former pastor's suggestion that Obama privately agrees with him.
Wright seemed aggrieved that his inflammatory quotations were out of the full "context" of his sermons -- yet he repeated many of the same accusations in the context of a half-hour Q&A session this morning.
His claim that the September 11 attacks mean "America's chickens are coming home to roost"?
Wright defended it: "Jesus said, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles."
His views on Farrakhan and Israel? "Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion. He was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter's being vilified for and Bishop Tutu's being vilified for. And everybody wants to paint me as if I'm anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago. He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century; that's what I think about him. . . . Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn't make me this color."
He denounced those who "can worship God on Sunday morning, wearing a black clergy robe, and kill others on Sunday evening, wearing a white Klan robe." He praised the communist Sandinista regime of Nicaragua. He renewed his belief that the government created AIDS as a means of genocide against people of color ("I believe our government is capable of doing anything").
And he vigorously renewed demands for an apology for slavery: "Britain has apologized to Africans. But this country's leaders have refused to apologize. So until that apology comes, I'm not going to keep stepping on your foot and asking you, does this hurt, do you forgive me for stepping on your foot, if I'm still stepping on your foot. Understand that? Capisce?"
Capisce, reverend. All too well."
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Obama Claims Pastor Wright Acknowledged Offending People...Then His Campaign Denies He Said It
From ABC's Jake Tapper in Political Punch: "March 28, 2008 4:14 PM
On "The View" this morning, Barbara Walters asked Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., what he would have done had he learned about the incendiary remarks made by his since-retired pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, if Wright had not been on his way out the door?
"Had the reverend not retired and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I think is the great character of this country - for all its flaws - then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying there at the church," Obama said.
This seemed to imply that Wright had acknowledged that he'd deeply offended people with inappropriate remarks. Right?
Wrong, says the Obama campaign.
"Sen. Obama was clearly saying that were Rev. Wright not retiring, he would need to be assured that the reverend understood why what he had said had deeply offended people and mischaracterized the greatness of this country," says spox Bill Burton.
Okay, except Obama wasn't "clearly" saying that at all.
Here's a clear way to say that: 'Had the reverend not retired I would have confronted him about his remarks. If after that Wright still refused to acknowledge that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I think is the great character of this country -- for all its flaws -- then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying there at the church.'
For an eloquent man, not his most eloquent moment."
On "The View" this morning, Barbara Walters asked Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., what he would have done had he learned about the incendiary remarks made by his since-retired pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, if Wright had not been on his way out the door?
"Had the reverend not retired and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I think is the great character of this country - for all its flaws - then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying there at the church," Obama said.
This seemed to imply that Wright had acknowledged that he'd deeply offended people with inappropriate remarks. Right?
Wrong, says the Obama campaign.
"Sen. Obama was clearly saying that were Rev. Wright not retiring, he would need to be assured that the reverend understood why what he had said had deeply offended people and mischaracterized the greatness of this country," says spox Bill Burton.
Okay, except Obama wasn't "clearly" saying that at all.
Here's a clear way to say that: 'Had the reverend not retired I would have confronted him about his remarks. If after that Wright still refused to acknowledge that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I think is the great character of this country -- for all its flaws -- then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying there at the church.'
For an eloquent man, not his most eloquent moment."
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
A Real Conversation About Race? What Are You talking About?
Jonah Goldberg in RealClearPolitics.com on march 26, 2008: "Thank God for Barack Obama. For until his "More Perfect Union" speech last Tuesday, it seems it never occurred to anyone that America needed to talk about race. "Maybe this'll be the beginning of a conversation," Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan proclaimed on "Meet the Press." According to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, just the fact of Obama's address proves that a "national dialogue on race" is "essential." The Chicago Tribune reported that "many voters, black and white, say they were moved by Obama's speech ... which they see as a long-awaited invitation to begin an honest, calm national dialogue about race." Newspaper editorial boards agree. In the words of the San Diego Union-Tribune: "Prodding Americans to confront their racial differences is, by itself, an accomplishment of historical proportions."
Because so many people agree on this brilliant new strategy to heal our national wounds, I can only assume that I'm the one missing something. Because when one luminary after another smacks his forehead like someone who forgot to have a V8 in epiphanic awe over the genius of Obama's call for a national conversation on race, all I can do is wonder: "What on Earth are you people talking about?"
"Universities were moving to incorporate the issues Mr. Obama raised into classroom discussions and course work," the New York Times reported within 48 hours of the speech.
Oh, thank goodness Obama fired the starter's pistol in the race to discuss race. Here I'd been under the impression that every major university (and minor one for that matter) in the country already had boatloads of courses -- often entire majors -- dedicated to race in America. I'd even read somewhere that professors had incorporated racial themes and issues into classes on everything from Shakespeare to the mating habits of snail darters. And scratching faintly in the back of my mind, I felt some vague memory that these same universities recruited black students and other racial minorities, on the grounds that interracial conversations on campus are as important as talking about math, science and literature. A ghost of an image in my mind's eye seemed to reveal African American studies centers, banners for Black History Month and copies of books like "Race Matters" and "The Future of the Race" lined up on shelves at college bookstores.
Were all of the corporate diversity consultants and racial sensitivity seminars mere apparitions in a dream? Also disappearing in the memory hole, apparently, were the debates that followed Hurricane Katrina, Trent Lott's remarks about Strom Thurmond, the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, the publication of "The Bell Curve" and O.J. Simpson's murder trial. Not to mention the ongoing national chatter about affirmative action, racial disparities in prison sentences and racial profiling by law enforcement.
And the thousands of hours of newscasts, television dramas and movies -- remember Oscar-winning films such as 2004's "Crash?" -- dedicated to racial issues? It's as if they never existed, vanishing like the image on a TV screen after the plug's been pulled. The New York Times' six-week Pulitzer Prize-winning series, "How Race Is Lived in America": just an inkblot?
It all seems so otherworldly. I feel like one of the last humans in an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" movie in which all of the pod people are compelled by some alien DNA to pine continually for yet another "conversation" about a topic we've never, ever stopped talking about. And if I just fall asleep, I too can live in the pod-people's dream palace, where every conversation about race is our first conversation about race. Snatching me from any such reverie was this masterful understatement from Thursday's New York Times: "Religious groups and academic bodies, already receptive to Mr. Obama's plea for such a dialogue, seemed especially enthusiastic."
No kidding. Janet Murguia is one such especially enthusiastic person. She hoped, according to the Times, that Obama's speech would help "create a safe space to talk about [race]."
Who is Janet Murguia? Oh, she's just the president of a group called the National Council of La Raza, which -- despite what they'll tell you -- means "the race." In fact, doesn't it seem like the majority of people begging for a "new conversation" on race are the same folks who shout "racist!" at anyone who disagrees with them?
This sort of disconnect between rhetoric and reality is the kind of thing one finds in novels by Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Milan Kundera. To my un-rehabilitated ear, Murguia sounds like an old Soviet apparatchik saying that what the U.S.S.R. really needs is an open and frank conversation about the importance of communism.
Why do voluptuaries of racial argy-bargy want another such dialogue? For some, it's to avoid actually dealing with unpleasant facts. But for others -- like La Raza or the college professors scrambling to follow Obama's lead -- when they say we need more conversation, they really mean their version of reality should win the day. Substitute "conversation" with "instruction" and you'll have a better sense of where these people are coming from and where they want their "dialogue" to take us.
Copyright 2008, Tribune Media Services Inc."
Because so many people agree on this brilliant new strategy to heal our national wounds, I can only assume that I'm the one missing something. Because when one luminary after another smacks his forehead like someone who forgot to have a V8 in epiphanic awe over the genius of Obama's call for a national conversation on race, all I can do is wonder: "What on Earth are you people talking about?"
"Universities were moving to incorporate the issues Mr. Obama raised into classroom discussions and course work," the New York Times reported within 48 hours of the speech.
Oh, thank goodness Obama fired the starter's pistol in the race to discuss race. Here I'd been under the impression that every major university (and minor one for that matter) in the country already had boatloads of courses -- often entire majors -- dedicated to race in America. I'd even read somewhere that professors had incorporated racial themes and issues into classes on everything from Shakespeare to the mating habits of snail darters. And scratching faintly in the back of my mind, I felt some vague memory that these same universities recruited black students and other racial minorities, on the grounds that interracial conversations on campus are as important as talking about math, science and literature. A ghost of an image in my mind's eye seemed to reveal African American studies centers, banners for Black History Month and copies of books like "Race Matters" and "The Future of the Race" lined up on shelves at college bookstores.
Were all of the corporate diversity consultants and racial sensitivity seminars mere apparitions in a dream? Also disappearing in the memory hole, apparently, were the debates that followed Hurricane Katrina, Trent Lott's remarks about Strom Thurmond, the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, the publication of "The Bell Curve" and O.J. Simpson's murder trial. Not to mention the ongoing national chatter about affirmative action, racial disparities in prison sentences and racial profiling by law enforcement.
And the thousands of hours of newscasts, television dramas and movies -- remember Oscar-winning films such as 2004's "Crash?" -- dedicated to racial issues? It's as if they never existed, vanishing like the image on a TV screen after the plug's been pulled. The New York Times' six-week Pulitzer Prize-winning series, "How Race Is Lived in America": just an inkblot?
It all seems so otherworldly. I feel like one of the last humans in an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" movie in which all of the pod people are compelled by some alien DNA to pine continually for yet another "conversation" about a topic we've never, ever stopped talking about. And if I just fall asleep, I too can live in the pod-people's dream palace, where every conversation about race is our first conversation about race. Snatching me from any such reverie was this masterful understatement from Thursday's New York Times: "Religious groups and academic bodies, already receptive to Mr. Obama's plea for such a dialogue, seemed especially enthusiastic."
No kidding. Janet Murguia is one such especially enthusiastic person. She hoped, according to the Times, that Obama's speech would help "create a safe space to talk about [race]."
Who is Janet Murguia? Oh, she's just the president of a group called the National Council of La Raza, which -- despite what they'll tell you -- means "the race." In fact, doesn't it seem like the majority of people begging for a "new conversation" on race are the same folks who shout "racist!" at anyone who disagrees with them?
This sort of disconnect between rhetoric and reality is the kind of thing one finds in novels by Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Milan Kundera. To my un-rehabilitated ear, Murguia sounds like an old Soviet apparatchik saying that what the U.S.S.R. really needs is an open and frank conversation about the importance of communism.
Why do voluptuaries of racial argy-bargy want another such dialogue? For some, it's to avoid actually dealing with unpleasant facts. But for others -- like La Raza or the college professors scrambling to follow Obama's lead -- when they say we need more conversation, they really mean their version of reality should win the day. Substitute "conversation" with "instruction" and you'll have a better sense of where these people are coming from and where they want their "dialogue" to take us.
Copyright 2008, Tribune Media Services Inc."
Ed Koch on Why Obama's Speech Was Unconvincing
Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch on Obama in RealClearPolitics.com on March 25, 2008: "Barack Obama's speech last week addressing his 20-year relationship with his radical pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was very well done, yet unconvincing.
Obama sought to explain that relationship and why he could not end this close association, despite the minister's hate-filled rhetoric. He said, "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Rev. Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?"
Yes, those are the questions that people are asking.
Many of Rev. Wright's incendiary statements are on videos sold by his church. Minister Louis Farrakhan, a friend of Rev. Wright with whom he traveled to visit Muammar Khadaffi in Libya, also makes his sermons and those of others associated with the Nation of Islam available for sale. Their attacks on the U.S. and Israel often coincide with those of Rev. Wright.
Rev. Wright's sermons charge that the U.S. government gives African-Americans drugs, created AIDS and is deliberately infecting blacks with that disease. His sermons claim that the U.S. unjustifiably nuclear bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, and that 9/11 and the deaths of 3,000 Americans were caused by U.S. foreign policy. He alleges Israeli state terrorism against the Palestinians; calling Israel a "dirty word" and "racist country." He blames Israel for 9/11 and supports the divestment campaign against it, denouncing "Zionism." His venomous thoughts are summed up in his most discussed sermon in which he says the U.S. government "wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, not God Bless America. God damn America. God damn America for killing innocent people."
Senator Obama in his speech acknowledged that the rantings of his minister are "inexcusable," but stated, "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - 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, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
Before we discuss his grandmother, let's examine the impact of Rev. Wright's statements on the Senator's two daughters. Nothing says it better than a song from the musical "South Pacific," to wit, "You have to be taught to hate and fear...You've got to be carefully taught." Few dispute that Rev. Wright's sermons are filled with hate.
Why didn't Senator Obama stand up in the church and denounce his hateful statements or, at the very least, argue privately with his minister? It was horrifying to see on a video now viewed across America the congregation rise from the pews to applaud their minister's rants.
Now to Obama's grandmother. There was a time spanning the 70's to the mid-90's when many blacks and whites in large American cities expressed the same feelings on street crime held by Obama's grandmother. Indeed, Reverend Jesse Jackson made similar comments in 1993 at a meeting of his organization, Operation Push, devoted to street crime. According to a November 29, 1993, article in the Chicago Sun-Times, he said, "'We must face the No. 1 critical issue of our day. It is youth crime in general and black-on-black crime in particular.' Then Jackson told the audience, 'There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved....After all we have been through,' he said. 'Just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating.'"
Isn't that exactly what Obama's grandmother was referring to? To equate her fears, similar to Jesse Jackson's, with Wright's anti-American, anti-white, anti-Jew, and anti-Israel rantings is despicable coming from a grandson. In today's vernacular, he threw her under the wheels of the bus to keep his presidential campaign rolling.
For shame.
What is it that I and others expected Obama to do? A great leader with conscience and courage would have stood up and faced down anyone who engages in such conduct. I expect a President of the United States to have the strength of character to denounce and disown enemies of America - foreign and domestic -- and yes, even his friends and confidants when they get seriously out of line.
What if a minister in a church attended primarily by white congregants or a rabbi in a synagogue attended primarily by Jews made comparable statements that were hostile to African-Americans? I have no doubt that the congregants would have immediately stood up and openly denounced the offending cleric. Others would have criticized that cleric in private. Some would surely have ended their relationships with their congregation. Obama didn't do any of these things. His recent condemnations of Wright's hate-filled speech are, in my opinion, a case of too little, too late.
It is also disturbing to me that Obama's wife, Michelle, during a speech in Wisconsin last month, said, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."
Strange. This is a woman who has had a good life, with opportunities few whites or blacks have been given. When she entered Princeton and Harvard and later became a partner in a prestigious law firm, didn't she feel proud to be an American? When she and the Senator bought their new home, was there no feeling of accomplishment and pride in being a U.S. citizen? When her husband was elected to the state legislature and subsequently to the United States Senate, didn't she feel proud of her country?
Senator Obama was asked if he thought his speech changed any minds. He replied he didn't think so, and certainly not of those who weren't already for him. A more important question is, whether his 20-year relationship with Wright has done lasting damage to his candidacy. We will soon know.
Ed Koch is the former Mayor of New York City."
Obama sought to explain that relationship and why he could not end this close association, despite the minister's hate-filled rhetoric. He said, "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Rev. Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?"
Yes, those are the questions that people are asking.
Many of Rev. Wright's incendiary statements are on videos sold by his church. Minister Louis Farrakhan, a friend of Rev. Wright with whom he traveled to visit Muammar Khadaffi in Libya, also makes his sermons and those of others associated with the Nation of Islam available for sale. Their attacks on the U.S. and Israel often coincide with those of Rev. Wright.
Rev. Wright's sermons charge that the U.S. government gives African-Americans drugs, created AIDS and is deliberately infecting blacks with that disease. His sermons claim that the U.S. unjustifiably nuclear bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, and that 9/11 and the deaths of 3,000 Americans were caused by U.S. foreign policy. He alleges Israeli state terrorism against the Palestinians; calling Israel a "dirty word" and "racist country." He blames Israel for 9/11 and supports the divestment campaign against it, denouncing "Zionism." His venomous thoughts are summed up in his most discussed sermon in which he says the U.S. government "wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, not God Bless America. God damn America. God damn America for killing innocent people."
Senator Obama in his speech acknowledged that the rantings of his minister are "inexcusable," but stated, "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - 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, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
Before we discuss his grandmother, let's examine the impact of Rev. Wright's statements on the Senator's two daughters. Nothing says it better than a song from the musical "South Pacific," to wit, "You have to be taught to hate and fear...You've got to be carefully taught." Few dispute that Rev. Wright's sermons are filled with hate.
Why didn't Senator Obama stand up in the church and denounce his hateful statements or, at the very least, argue privately with his minister? It was horrifying to see on a video now viewed across America the congregation rise from the pews to applaud their minister's rants.
Now to Obama's grandmother. There was a time spanning the 70's to the mid-90's when many blacks and whites in large American cities expressed the same feelings on street crime held by Obama's grandmother. Indeed, Reverend Jesse Jackson made similar comments in 1993 at a meeting of his organization, Operation Push, devoted to street crime. According to a November 29, 1993, article in the Chicago Sun-Times, he said, "'We must face the No. 1 critical issue of our day. It is youth crime in general and black-on-black crime in particular.' Then Jackson told the audience, 'There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved....After all we have been through,' he said. 'Just to think we can't walk down our own streets, how humiliating.'"
Isn't that exactly what Obama's grandmother was referring to? To equate her fears, similar to Jesse Jackson's, with Wright's anti-American, anti-white, anti-Jew, and anti-Israel rantings is despicable coming from a grandson. In today's vernacular, he threw her under the wheels of the bus to keep his presidential campaign rolling.
For shame.
What is it that I and others expected Obama to do? A great leader with conscience and courage would have stood up and faced down anyone who engages in such conduct. I expect a President of the United States to have the strength of character to denounce and disown enemies of America - foreign and domestic -- and yes, even his friends and confidants when they get seriously out of line.
What if a minister in a church attended primarily by white congregants or a rabbi in a synagogue attended primarily by Jews made comparable statements that were hostile to African-Americans? I have no doubt that the congregants would have immediately stood up and openly denounced the offending cleric. Others would have criticized that cleric in private. Some would surely have ended their relationships with their congregation. Obama didn't do any of these things. His recent condemnations of Wright's hate-filled speech are, in my opinion, a case of too little, too late.
It is also disturbing to me that Obama's wife, Michelle, during a speech in Wisconsin last month, said, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback."
Strange. This is a woman who has had a good life, with opportunities few whites or blacks have been given. When she entered Princeton and Harvard and later became a partner in a prestigious law firm, didn't she feel proud to be an American? When she and the Senator bought their new home, was there no feeling of accomplishment and pride in being a U.S. citizen? When her husband was elected to the state legislature and subsequently to the United States Senate, didn't she feel proud of her country?
Senator Obama was asked if he thought his speech changed any minds. He replied he didn't think so, and certainly not of those who weren't already for him. A more important question is, whether his 20-year relationship with Wright has done lasting damage to his candidacy. We will soon know.
Ed Koch is the former Mayor of New York City."
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
The Shape of Things to Come
From NoQuarterusa.net: "Sometimes things are so obvious that they pass us by without notice. Perhaps it is because they are so blatantly true that we choose not to acknowledge them. Or maybe it is that because they challenge our preheld conceptions so strongly that we choose to ignore their reality. Because otherwise we would feel bewildered, alone and helpless.
I know that many who once supported Senator Obama are in complete shock over the revelations of his 20 year intimate association with a bigot and a racist. It doesn’t fit into the mold of who we think Barack Obama is. His pastor surely doesn’t preach the “message” of hope that Obama is associated with. In fact his pastor preaches what one could only define as hate. But just why is it that we so strongly believe that Senator Obama has a message of hope and a new kind of politics? In the preface of his book The Audacity of Hope which he patterned after a sermon of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright, Obama gives us a glimmer of an answer.
Audacity of Hype
“I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.”
You see, Senator Obama believes that if enough people project their views of what he should be onto him that he will be able to take advantage of their ignorance and become elected to the highest office of the most powerful nation on earth. That is the more subtle message to what Obama states plainly. But he won’t tell you that because doing so would cause you to wake up and realize that he is just taking advantage of your hope and your faith in him to hoodwink you into giving him the reins to power.
How else do you explain his oft-cited ability to bring people together? Does he have any experience whatsoever of doing this in a legislative body? Has he used his supposedly remarkable skills to bring an end to the partisan bickering and stalemate on Capitol Hill? Has he been able to work across the aisle and bring people together to end the Iraq war? Has he been able to work across the aisle to do anything other than water down regulatory legislation so much that it becomes unnecessary while at the same time taking money from the industry he was supposed to be regulating?
Unfortunately the answer to all these questions is a simple word: NO!
And yet still we hear from pundits and political hacks how Obama has the ability to do this and that without a shred of evidence that he has ever demonstrated the slightest capacity to do so. Not a shred of evidence. In fact many of his supporters when asked what his legislative achievements are seem bewildered and begin to stutter just like he is so famous for doing. Because quite simply they cannot answer the question. Truthfully.
So we are to take his word that he has these abilities because why? Because he tells us he can? Because people say that he can? Because his opponent and/or her husband are such terrible people? Because we may never again have the chance?
It seems there are no easy or substantial answers. Because to answer these questions based on the evidence requires not only a willing suspension of disbelief, it requires a huge leap of faith. And faith is an article of religion not politics.
So to form our judgments we are left with the truth. And the truth is that Senator Obama has a pattern of associations with unsavory characters. And I am being generous and polite. What follows is one of the most recent videos making it’s way around the internet. It includes clips I have not seen before that I find revolting and entirely offensive. And I am a Democrat.
America is the same as Al Qaeda?
What this type of information in the hands of the Republican machine and their money will do is beyond anyone’s comprehension. Mark my words, if we are so unfortunate to have this man as our candidate we will need to redefine the term swiftboating for an entire generation."
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Obama's Toxic Mentors Corrode Campaign
From timesonline.com on March 23, 2008: "Long before Barack Obama launched his campaign for the White House, when he was considering a run for the US Senate in 2003, he paid an intriguing visit to a former Chicago sewers inspector who had risen to become one of the most influential African-American politicians in Illinois.
“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”
According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.
The exchange also sealed an intimate personal and political relationship that is likely to attract intense scrutiny amid the furore over Obama’s links to some of Chicago’s most controversial political and religious power brokers.
Obama has often described Jones as a key political mentor whose patronage was crucial to his early success in a state long dominated by near-feudal party political machines. Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”
Like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken pastor of Obama’s Chicago church, and like Tony Rezko, the millionaire fundraiser and former friend of Obama who is on trial for corruption, Jones is in danger of becoming a hindrance to his prot駩’s presidential ambitions.
For almost a year Jones has used his position as leader of the state senate to block anticorruption legislation passed unanimously by the state’s lower house. He has also become embroiled in ethical controversies concerning his wife’s job and his stepson’s business.
None of them is linked to Obama, but the Democratic contender can ill afford another scandal related to his former Chicago allies. Despite his electrifying speech on race last week, the opinion polls make worrying reading for the senator and his aides. Hillary Clinton appears to be regaining lost ground and John McCain, the Arizona senator who has sewn up the Republican nomination, has edged ahead of his warring rivals.
When Obama stood before a row of American flags in Philadelphia on Tuesday, he faced the greatest challenge of his candidacy. His campaign was reeling from the potentially fatal fallout of Wright’s rabid videotaped sermons, in which the Chicago preacher exclaimed, “God damn America,” and said that the US government had invented Aids to infect black people.
Obama’s response was hailed as one of the bravest and most eloquent speeches on race delivered by an American politician. Even conservative commentators such as Charles Murray of National Review called it “flat-out brilliant”; Michael Gerson, former speechwriter to president George W Bush, called it “one of the finest political performances under pressure” since John F Kennedy addressed concerns about his Catholicism in 1960.
Other analysts, Democrat and Republican, took a different view of Obama’s refusal to turn his back on Wright – whom he portrayed as part of an embittered legacy of discrimination.
Some saw it as a potential gift both to Clinton, who has been surging in opinion polls since videos of Wright were posted on the internet, and to McCain, whose aides have begun to wonder whether Obama might prove an easier target than Clinton in November.
“Nothing could be more dangerous to Mr Obama’s aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday – for 20 years – in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable,” said Shelby Steele, a Stanford University historian and author of a book on Obama.
Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk-show foghorn, expressed the popular view more succinctly: “No country wants a president who is a member of a church with this kind of radicalism as its mainstream.”
The latest polls confirm that, for all the acclaim heaped on Obama’s speech by political insiders, voters seemed to be taking a sharp step back from the charismatic candidate who built his campaign on the promise of a break from “old politics”. One of Obama’s best-known slogans – and the title of his bestselling book – is “the audacity of hope”, a phrase that originally came from one of Wright’s sermons.
In Pennsylvania, the next big state to hold a primary, on April 22, Clinton has doubled her lead in the past two weeks and is now 26 points ahead. In North Carolina, which votes on May 6, Obama has been leading comfortably all year but is now only one point ahead. A national Gallup poll on Friday put Clinton ahead of Obama by two points for the first time since January.
Unfortunately for Democrats, their nomination battle seems to be helping McCain. The Republican rose to a eight-point lead over Obama and a 10-point lead over Clinton in Rasmussen tracking polls released on Friday.
Obama retains an almost insurmountable lead in the crucial count of convention delegates who will pick the Democratic nominee, and on Friday he picked up a useful endorsement from one of those delegates – Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, one of America’s leading Hispanic politicians. Richardson had been close to the Clintons and was regarded as a possible vice-presidential choice for Hillary. His first task will be to rally Hispanic voters in the hope of averting late primary losses that would damage Obama’s chances of picking up uncommitted party officials – the so-called superdelegates likely to decide the contest.
Other Democrats are worried that Obama may have given his Republican rivals the ammunition needed to undermine his campaign. McCain insists he will not engage in dirty tricks, and his aides distributed a memo last week warning Republicans to stay away from “overheated rhetoric and personal attacks”.
Yet Republican surrogates are drooling at the prospect of linking Obama to Wright’s rants.
They intend to ask why he has stopped wearing an American flag badge on his lapel, and why his wife, Michelle, said at a rally: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.”
The Clinton camp is treading carefully, aware that overt attacks on Obama might alienate black voters. Yet the New York senator’s aides are quietly pleased by what they regard as an overdue scrutiny of Obama’s past. They believe he will come to be seen not as some Messiah but as an unusually gifted political hack who has made compromises with dodgy associates, just like most other American politicians.
That intensifying scrutiny may soon lead to Jones’s Illinois door, and to further uncomfortable insights into the unflattering political realities that accompanied Obama’s climb from obscurity.
At one point during Obama’s 2003 Senate campaign, Jones set out to woo two African-American politicians miffed by Obama’s presumption and ambition. One of them, Rickey “Hollywood” Hendon, a state senator, had scoffed that Obama was so ambitious he would run for “king of the world” if the position were vacant.
When Jones secured the two men’s support, Obama asked his mentor how he had pulled it off. “I made them an offer,” Jones said in mock-mafioso style. “And you don’t want to know.”
Jones is now at the centre of a long row over his attempt to block proposed laws cracking down on his state’s “pay-to-play” tradition – whereby companies hoping to win government contracts have to contribute to the campaign funds of officials.
Jones’s staff say he blocked the bill because he intends to produce something tougher. No proposals have appeared.
Cynthia Canary, an activist against corruption who is fighting to have the laws passed, says Obama had little choice as an Illinois politician but to deal with an ethically dubious regime. “You hold your nose and work through the system,” she said.
Yet she also thinks America is being done a disservice by those who portray Obama as somehow above the uglier wheeler-dealing of politics. “He’s a pragmatic politician, and in the end if you think that he’s superman, your heart is going to get broken.”
“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”
According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.
The exchange also sealed an intimate personal and political relationship that is likely to attract intense scrutiny amid the furore over Obama’s links to some of Chicago’s most controversial political and religious power brokers.
Obama has often described Jones as a key political mentor whose patronage was crucial to his early success in a state long dominated by near-feudal party political machines. Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”
Like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken pastor of Obama’s Chicago church, and like Tony Rezko, the millionaire fundraiser and former friend of Obama who is on trial for corruption, Jones is in danger of becoming a hindrance to his prot駩’s presidential ambitions.
For almost a year Jones has used his position as leader of the state senate to block anticorruption legislation passed unanimously by the state’s lower house. He has also become embroiled in ethical controversies concerning his wife’s job and his stepson’s business.
None of them is linked to Obama, but the Democratic contender can ill afford another scandal related to his former Chicago allies. Despite his electrifying speech on race last week, the opinion polls make worrying reading for the senator and his aides. Hillary Clinton appears to be regaining lost ground and John McCain, the Arizona senator who has sewn up the Republican nomination, has edged ahead of his warring rivals.
When Obama stood before a row of American flags in Philadelphia on Tuesday, he faced the greatest challenge of his candidacy. His campaign was reeling from the potentially fatal fallout of Wright’s rabid videotaped sermons, in which the Chicago preacher exclaimed, “God damn America,” and said that the US government had invented Aids to infect black people.
Obama’s response was hailed as one of the bravest and most eloquent speeches on race delivered by an American politician. Even conservative commentators such as Charles Murray of National Review called it “flat-out brilliant”; Michael Gerson, former speechwriter to president George W Bush, called it “one of the finest political performances under pressure” since John F Kennedy addressed concerns about his Catholicism in 1960.
Other analysts, Democrat and Republican, took a different view of Obama’s refusal to turn his back on Wright – whom he portrayed as part of an embittered legacy of discrimination.
Some saw it as a potential gift both to Clinton, who has been surging in opinion polls since videos of Wright were posted on the internet, and to McCain, whose aides have begun to wonder whether Obama might prove an easier target than Clinton in November.
“Nothing could be more dangerous to Mr Obama’s aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday – for 20 years – in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable,” said Shelby Steele, a Stanford University historian and author of a book on Obama.
Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk-show foghorn, expressed the popular view more succinctly: “No country wants a president who is a member of a church with this kind of radicalism as its mainstream.”
The latest polls confirm that, for all the acclaim heaped on Obama’s speech by political insiders, voters seemed to be taking a sharp step back from the charismatic candidate who built his campaign on the promise of a break from “old politics”. One of Obama’s best-known slogans – and the title of his bestselling book – is “the audacity of hope”, a phrase that originally came from one of Wright’s sermons.
In Pennsylvania, the next big state to hold a primary, on April 22, Clinton has doubled her lead in the past two weeks and is now 26 points ahead. In North Carolina, which votes on May 6, Obama has been leading comfortably all year but is now only one point ahead. A national Gallup poll on Friday put Clinton ahead of Obama by two points for the first time since January.
Unfortunately for Democrats, their nomination battle seems to be helping McCain. The Republican rose to a eight-point lead over Obama and a 10-point lead over Clinton in Rasmussen tracking polls released on Friday.
Obama retains an almost insurmountable lead in the crucial count of convention delegates who will pick the Democratic nominee, and on Friday he picked up a useful endorsement from one of those delegates – Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, one of America’s leading Hispanic politicians. Richardson had been close to the Clintons and was regarded as a possible vice-presidential choice for Hillary. His first task will be to rally Hispanic voters in the hope of averting late primary losses that would damage Obama’s chances of picking up uncommitted party officials – the so-called superdelegates likely to decide the contest.
Other Democrats are worried that Obama may have given his Republican rivals the ammunition needed to undermine his campaign. McCain insists he will not engage in dirty tricks, and his aides distributed a memo last week warning Republicans to stay away from “overheated rhetoric and personal attacks”.
Yet Republican surrogates are drooling at the prospect of linking Obama to Wright’s rants.
They intend to ask why he has stopped wearing an American flag badge on his lapel, and why his wife, Michelle, said at a rally: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.”
The Clinton camp is treading carefully, aware that overt attacks on Obama might alienate black voters. Yet the New York senator’s aides are quietly pleased by what they regard as an overdue scrutiny of Obama’s past. They believe he will come to be seen not as some Messiah but as an unusually gifted political hack who has made compromises with dodgy associates, just like most other American politicians.
That intensifying scrutiny may soon lead to Jones’s Illinois door, and to further uncomfortable insights into the unflattering political realities that accompanied Obama’s climb from obscurity.
At one point during Obama’s 2003 Senate campaign, Jones set out to woo two African-American politicians miffed by Obama’s presumption and ambition. One of them, Rickey “Hollywood” Hendon, a state senator, had scoffed that Obama was so ambitious he would run for “king of the world” if the position were vacant.
When Jones secured the two men’s support, Obama asked his mentor how he had pulled it off. “I made them an offer,” Jones said in mock-mafioso style. “And you don’t want to know.”
Jones is now at the centre of a long row over his attempt to block proposed laws cracking down on his state’s “pay-to-play” tradition – whereby companies hoping to win government contracts have to contribute to the campaign funds of officials.
Jones’s staff say he blocked the bill because he intends to produce something tougher. No proposals have appeared.
Cynthia Canary, an activist against corruption who is fighting to have the laws passed, says Obama had little choice as an Illinois politician but to deal with an ethically dubious regime. “You hold your nose and work through the system,” she said.
Yet she also thinks America is being done a disservice by those who portray Obama as somehow above the uglier wheeler-dealing of politics. “He’s a pragmatic politician, and in the end if you think that he’s superman, your heart is going to get broken.”
Thursday, March 20, 2008
ABC News: Bureid in Eloquence, Obama Contraditions About Pastor
From ABC News By BRIAN ROSS and AVNI PATEL
March 19, 2008—
"Buried in his eloquent, highly praised speech on America's racial divide, Sen. Barack Obama contradicted more than a year of denials and spin from him and his staff about his knowledge of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's controversial sermons.
Similarly, Obama also has only recently given a much fuller accounting of his relationship with indicted political fixer Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a longtime friend, who his campaign once described as just one of "thousands of donors."
Until yesterday, Obama said the only thing controversial he knew about Rev. Wright was his stand on issues relating to Africa, abortion and gay marriage.
"I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial," Obama said at a community meeting in Nelsonville, Ohio, earlier this month.
"He has said some things that are considered controversial because he's considered that part of his social gospel; so he was one of the leaders in calling for divestment from South Africa and some other issues like that," Obama said on March 2.
His initial reaction to the initial ABC News broadcast of Rev. Wright's sermons denouncing the U.S. was that he had never heard his pastor of 20 years make any comments that were anti-U.S. until the tape was played on air.
But yesterday, he told a different story.
"Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes," he said in his speech yesterday in Philadelphia.
Obama did not say what he heard that he considered "controversial," and the campaign has yet to answer repeated requests for dates on which the senator attended Rev. Wright's sermons over the last 20 years.
In the case of his relationship with Rezko, Obama has also been slow to acknowledge the full extent of his relationship.
It was only last week that he revealed Rezko had raised some $250,000 in campaign contributions for him.
The campaign had initially claimed Rezko-connected contributions were no more than $60,000, an amount the campaign donated to charity. Then the figure grew to around $86,000, and there were additional revelations that put the amount at about $150,000. Obama's $250,000 accounting was a substantial jump and clearly contradicted earlier campaign statements that Rezko was just one of "thousands of donors."
Rezko is now on trial in federal court in Chicago, charged with a pattern of bribing state officials to obtain various Illinois state contracts. Rezko has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Obama was initially vague about Rezko's role in helping him buy a new home on Chicago's south side. Unable to afford an adjacent vacant lot the seller wanted to sell at the same time as the house, Obama approached Rezko. Rezko's wife bought the lot on the same day Obama bought the house, and then later, Mrs. Rezko sold the Obamas a strip of the lot which gave the Obamas a larger backyard.
Obama called it a "bone-headed" mistake but never revealed, until he met with Chicago reporters last week, that Rezko had actually toured the house with him and been deeply involved in the transaction.
In a statement, campaign press secretary Bill Burton said, "Last week, Sen. Obama spent almost three hours answering every single question about Tony Rezko posed by the local reporters who've covered the story closest for years. Those newspapers said they were more than satisfied with his open, honest answers. We've given all of the money contributed to Barack Obama's federal campaigns that could reasonably be credited to Mr. Rezko's political support to charity. Sen. Obama also provided an estimate of the most that could have possibly been raised as a result of Mr. Rezko's efforts, but that estimate is not a basis upon which any individual contributions can be donated to charity. "
As to Rev. Wright, Burton said, "While Sen. Obama was not in church for the incendiary and offensive statements of Rev. Wright that have been played on television over the last week, yesterday he delivered a deeply personal, honest speech on race in America in which he acknowledged that over the course of 20 years, of course he heard statements from Wright that could be considered controversial."
March 19, 2008—
"Buried in his eloquent, highly praised speech on America's racial divide, Sen. Barack Obama contradicted more than a year of denials and spin from him and his staff about his knowledge of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's controversial sermons.
Similarly, Obama also has only recently given a much fuller accounting of his relationship with indicted political fixer Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a longtime friend, who his campaign once described as just one of "thousands of donors."
Until yesterday, Obama said the only thing controversial he knew about Rev. Wright was his stand on issues relating to Africa, abortion and gay marriage.
"I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial," Obama said at a community meeting in Nelsonville, Ohio, earlier this month.
"He has said some things that are considered controversial because he's considered that part of his social gospel; so he was one of the leaders in calling for divestment from South Africa and some other issues like that," Obama said on March 2.
His initial reaction to the initial ABC News broadcast of Rev. Wright's sermons denouncing the U.S. was that he had never heard his pastor of 20 years make any comments that were anti-U.S. until the tape was played on air.
But yesterday, he told a different story.
"Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes," he said in his speech yesterday in Philadelphia.
Obama did not say what he heard that he considered "controversial," and the campaign has yet to answer repeated requests for dates on which the senator attended Rev. Wright's sermons over the last 20 years.
In the case of his relationship with Rezko, Obama has also been slow to acknowledge the full extent of his relationship.
It was only last week that he revealed Rezko had raised some $250,000 in campaign contributions for him.
The campaign had initially claimed Rezko-connected contributions were no more than $60,000, an amount the campaign donated to charity. Then the figure grew to around $86,000, and there were additional revelations that put the amount at about $150,000. Obama's $250,000 accounting was a substantial jump and clearly contradicted earlier campaign statements that Rezko was just one of "thousands of donors."
Rezko is now on trial in federal court in Chicago, charged with a pattern of bribing state officials to obtain various Illinois state contracts. Rezko has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Obama was initially vague about Rezko's role in helping him buy a new home on Chicago's south side. Unable to afford an adjacent vacant lot the seller wanted to sell at the same time as the house, Obama approached Rezko. Rezko's wife bought the lot on the same day Obama bought the house, and then later, Mrs. Rezko sold the Obamas a strip of the lot which gave the Obamas a larger backyard.
Obama called it a "bone-headed" mistake but never revealed, until he met with Chicago reporters last week, that Rezko had actually toured the house with him and been deeply involved in the transaction.
In a statement, campaign press secretary Bill Burton said, "Last week, Sen. Obama spent almost three hours answering every single question about Tony Rezko posed by the local reporters who've covered the story closest for years. Those newspapers said they were more than satisfied with his open, honest answers. We've given all of the money contributed to Barack Obama's federal campaigns that could reasonably be credited to Mr. Rezko's political support to charity. Sen. Obama also provided an estimate of the most that could have possibly been raised as a result of Mr. Rezko's efforts, but that estimate is not a basis upon which any individual contributions can be donated to charity. "
As to Rev. Wright, Burton said, "While Sen. Obama was not in church for the incendiary and offensive statements of Rev. Wright that have been played on television over the last week, yesterday he delivered a deeply personal, honest speech on race in America in which he acknowledged that over the course of 20 years, of course he heard statements from Wright that could be considered controversial."
Monday, March 17, 2008
Bad News for Obama: American's Don't Like His Pastor
March 17, 2008 from RasmussenReports.com: "Pastor Jeremiah Wright, who has become part of the national political dialogue in recent days, is viewed favorably by 8% of voters nationwide. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 58% have an unfavorable view of the Pastor whose controversial comments have created new challenges for Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign.
Wright was Obama’s Pastor until he retired last month, but Obama has repudiated the preacher’s comments.
Seventy-three percent (73%) of voters say that Wright’s comments are racially divisive. That opinion is held by 77% of White voters and 58% of African-American voters. In addressing the issue, Obama warned against injecting race into the campaign .
Most voters, 56%, said Wright’s comments made them less likely to vote for Obama. That figure includes 44% of Democrats. Just 11% of voters say they are more likely to vote for Obama because of Wright’s comments.
However, among African-Americans, 29% said Wright’s comments made them more likely to support Obama. Just 18% said the opposite while 50% said Wright’s comments would have no impact.
Overall, voters are evenly divided as to whether Obama should resign his membership in the Church—42% say that he should while 40% disagree. White voters, by a 46% to 33% margin, say that Obama should leave the Church. African-American voters, by a 68% to 16% margin, say he should not. Wright retired last month as Pastor of the Church.
The story became big news in the past several days and has had at least a temporary impact on public perceptions of Obama. Last Thursday, 52% of voters nationwide had a favorable opinion of Obama. That figure has fallen to 47% on Monday (see recent daily results). In recent days, Obama has also lost ground to John McCain in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.
Sixty-six percent (66%) of voters say they have read, seen, or heard news stories about Wright’s comments.
A recent Fox News report looked at the question of whether or not Wright is a political liability for Obama .
Crosstabs are available to Premium Members only.
Rasmussen Reports is an electronic publishing firm specializing in the collection, publication, and distribution of public opinion polling information."
Wright was Obama’s Pastor until he retired last month, but Obama has repudiated the preacher’s comments.
Seventy-three percent (73%) of voters say that Wright’s comments are racially divisive. That opinion is held by 77% of White voters and 58% of African-American voters. In addressing the issue, Obama warned against injecting race into the campaign .
Most voters, 56%, said Wright’s comments made them less likely to vote for Obama. That figure includes 44% of Democrats. Just 11% of voters say they are more likely to vote for Obama because of Wright’s comments.
However, among African-Americans, 29% said Wright’s comments made them more likely to support Obama. Just 18% said the opposite while 50% said Wright’s comments would have no impact.
Overall, voters are evenly divided as to whether Obama should resign his membership in the Church—42% say that he should while 40% disagree. White voters, by a 46% to 33% margin, say that Obama should leave the Church. African-American voters, by a 68% to 16% margin, say he should not. Wright retired last month as Pastor of the Church.
The story became big news in the past several days and has had at least a temporary impact on public perceptions of Obama. Last Thursday, 52% of voters nationwide had a favorable opinion of Obama. That figure has fallen to 47% on Monday (see recent daily results). In recent days, Obama has also lost ground to John McCain in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.
Sixty-six percent (66%) of voters say they have read, seen, or heard news stories about Wright’s comments.
A recent Fox News report looked at the question of whether or not Wright is a political liability for Obama .
Crosstabs are available to Premium Members only.
Rasmussen Reports is an electronic publishing firm specializing in the collection, publication, and distribution of public opinion polling information."
Pastor Was An Early Concern for Obama Campaign
From LA Times Top of the Ticket Blog: "After he moved to Chicago in the mid-1980s to work as a community organizer, Barack Obama forged close ties with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- joining the pastor’s Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988 and using the topic of a Wright sermon, "the audacity of hope," as the title of his most recent best-selling book.
But more than a year ago -- long before some of Wright’s more incendiary sermons became hot-button videos on YouTube, forcing Obama to publicly renounce his pastor last week -- the Obama campaign had a sense that Wright's sharp tongue might spell trouble for the Illinois senator. (For a sermon sample, click on the Read more line below.)
That was the word anyway Sunday from Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, who acknowledged during a conference call with reporters that Wright was disinvited ...
from Obama's official candidacy announcement on Feb. 10, 2007, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill.
Wright had been expected to lead an invocation of some kind, but never appeared.
“There was no doubt that there was controversy surrounding him,” Axelrod said Sunday. “And we didn’t want to expose him … [or] make him the target and a distraction on a day when Sen. Obama was going to announce his candidacy.”
So if the savvy Obama campaign knew Wright was a problem a year ago, why did the Illinois senator, a parish member for two decades, wait until last week to disassociate and denounce the minister's inflammatory statements?
The topic is clearly uncomfortable for Obama and his aides, personally and politically. Axelrod's comments came only after prodding from a reporter and after he had initially suggested that Wright’s absence that day was due merely to the fact that the temperature was in the single digits.
And even as Obama has condemned some of Wright’s rhetoric and distanced himself from his longtime spiritual advisor, doing so has not been easy. Wright remained on an African American religious advisory committee for the campaign until Friday.
“Rev. Wright married him, introduced him, as he said, to the church, brought him into the church, into Christianity, baptized his children,” Axelrod said. “So this is a painful thing for him because he condemns the things Rev. Wright said, but he also knows him as a person.”
Wright has proven controversial in the past because of his association with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has made anti-Semitic remarks. But the controversy has grown in recent weeks with the spread of videos from Wright sermons where he condemns the United States for its foreign policy and treatment of blacks and takes on Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton.
As Wright put it, “Hillary ain't never been called a nigger! Hillary has never had her people defined as non-person."
On Friday, Obama posted a message at the Huffington Post website, explaining that he had not seen such sermons in person and saying that he disagreed with them. "I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy," he wrote.
-- Peter Wallsten"
But more than a year ago -- long before some of Wright’s more incendiary sermons became hot-button videos on YouTube, forcing Obama to publicly renounce his pastor last week -- the Obama campaign had a sense that Wright's sharp tongue might spell trouble for the Illinois senator. (For a sermon sample, click on the Read more line below.)
That was the word anyway Sunday from Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, who acknowledged during a conference call with reporters that Wright was disinvited ...
from Obama's official candidacy announcement on Feb. 10, 2007, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill.
Wright had been expected to lead an invocation of some kind, but never appeared.
“There was no doubt that there was controversy surrounding him,” Axelrod said Sunday. “And we didn’t want to expose him … [or] make him the target and a distraction on a day when Sen. Obama was going to announce his candidacy.”
So if the savvy Obama campaign knew Wright was a problem a year ago, why did the Illinois senator, a parish member for two decades, wait until last week to disassociate and denounce the minister's inflammatory statements?
The topic is clearly uncomfortable for Obama and his aides, personally and politically. Axelrod's comments came only after prodding from a reporter and after he had initially suggested that Wright’s absence that day was due merely to the fact that the temperature was in the single digits.
And even as Obama has condemned some of Wright’s rhetoric and distanced himself from his longtime spiritual advisor, doing so has not been easy. Wright remained on an African American religious advisory committee for the campaign until Friday.
“Rev. Wright married him, introduced him, as he said, to the church, brought him into the church, into Christianity, baptized his children,” Axelrod said. “So this is a painful thing for him because he condemns the things Rev. Wright said, but he also knows him as a person.”
Wright has proven controversial in the past because of his association with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has made anti-Semitic remarks. But the controversy has grown in recent weeks with the spread of videos from Wright sermons where he condemns the United States for its foreign policy and treatment of blacks and takes on Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton.
As Wright put it, “Hillary ain't never been called a nigger! Hillary has never had her people defined as non-person."
On Friday, Obama posted a message at the Huffington Post website, explaining that he had not seen such sermons in person and saying that he disagreed with them. "I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy," he wrote.
-- Peter Wallsten"
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Friday, March 14, 2008
Obama Fails Another Test
From TaylorMarsh.com: "Obama Fails Second Sister Souljah Moment
Senator Obama has a problem. Unfortunately, the possible Democratic nominee is handling the Wright revelations like Kerry handled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. He's ignoring the building outrage as if it's going away. Not a good sign looking towards the general election.
Obama missed another sister souljah moment. The first when he had to be pushed into "denouncing and rejecting" Louis Farrakhan's high praises. Reverend Wright awarded Farrakhan an award, which caused quite a stir. But the light shining on the relationship between Obama and the Minister is something quite different altogether. It's not enough to say through your spokesperson that the candidate "deplores divisive statements." For a preacher, calling this country the "US KKK of A" deserves a little more than that. Obama "disagrees?" with Wright is not enough.
... .. Hearing Mr. Wright's venomous and paranoid denunciations of this country, the vast majority of Americans would walk out. Instead, Mr. Obama and his wife Michelle have presumably sat through numerous similar sermons by Mr. Wright.
Indeed, Mr. Obama has described Mr. Wright as his "sounding board" during the two decades he has known him. Mr. Obama has said he found religion through the minister in the 1980s. He joined the church in 1991 and walked down the aisle in a formal commitment of faith.
The title of Mr. Obama's bestseller "The Audacity of Hope" comes from one of Wright's sermons. Mr. Wright is one of the first people Mr. Obama thanked after his election to the Senate in 2004. Mr. Obama consulted Mr. Wright before deciding to run for president. He prayed privately with Mr. Wright before announcing his candidacy last year.
Mr. Obama obviously would not choose to belong to Mr. Wright's church and seek his advice unless he agreed with at least some of his views. In light of Mr. Wright's perspective, Michelle Obama's comment that she feels proud of America for the first time in her adult life makes perfect sense.
Much as most of us would appreciate the symbolism of a black man ascending to the presidency, what we have in Barack Obama is a politician whose closeness to Mr. Wright underscores his radical record.
The media have largely ignored Mr. Obama's close association with Mr. Wright. This raises legitimate questions about Mr. Obama's fundamental beliefs about his country. Those questions deserve a clearer answer than Mr. Obama has provided so far.
This is the second time Senator Obama is been faced with a sister souljah moment. He's failed this one too. Here's what he said today in Pennsylvania:
Q: I don't know if you've seen it, but it's all over the wire today (from an ABC News story), a statement that your pastor (the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's South Side) made in a sermon in 2003 that instead of singing "God Bless America," black people should sing a song essentially saying "God Damn America."
A: I haven't seen the line. This is a pastor who is on the brink of retirement who in the past has made some controversial statements. I profoundly disagree with some of these statements.
Q: What about this particular statement?
A: Obviously, I disagree with that. Here is what happens when you just cherry-pick statements from a guy who had a 40-year career as a pastor. There are times when people say things that are just wrong. But I think it's important to judge me on what I've said in the past and what I believe.
"I haven't seen the line?" This is just disingenuous, at best. If Obama is this clueless we're all in trouble. Where has Mr. Obama been, under a rock?
Who's going to drag the possible Democratic nominee into reality? He's obviously having trouble relating to it himself.
Reverend Wright's convenient and timely retirement, which Obama makes sure to mention, is not going to get Obama off the hook with many Americans, and a statement through a political operative doesn't do the trick. Obviously, this guy just doesn't get it. In this country you can't simply say you can't blame "cherry picking" on a preacher that espouses such hatred towards his own country, but especially white Americans. Well you can, but it's not going to get you to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in a general election."
Senator Obama has a problem. Unfortunately, the possible Democratic nominee is handling the Wright revelations like Kerry handled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. He's ignoring the building outrage as if it's going away. Not a good sign looking towards the general election.
Obama missed another sister souljah moment. The first when he had to be pushed into "denouncing and rejecting" Louis Farrakhan's high praises. Reverend Wright awarded Farrakhan an award, which caused quite a stir. But the light shining on the relationship between Obama and the Minister is something quite different altogether. It's not enough to say through your spokesperson that the candidate "deplores divisive statements." For a preacher, calling this country the "US KKK of A" deserves a little more than that. Obama "disagrees?" with Wright is not enough.
... .. Hearing Mr. Wright's venomous and paranoid denunciations of this country, the vast majority of Americans would walk out. Instead, Mr. Obama and his wife Michelle have presumably sat through numerous similar sermons by Mr. Wright.
Indeed, Mr. Obama has described Mr. Wright as his "sounding board" during the two decades he has known him. Mr. Obama has said he found religion through the minister in the 1980s. He joined the church in 1991 and walked down the aisle in a formal commitment of faith.
The title of Mr. Obama's bestseller "The Audacity of Hope" comes from one of Wright's sermons. Mr. Wright is one of the first people Mr. Obama thanked after his election to the Senate in 2004. Mr. Obama consulted Mr. Wright before deciding to run for president. He prayed privately with Mr. Wright before announcing his candidacy last year.
Mr. Obama obviously would not choose to belong to Mr. Wright's church and seek his advice unless he agreed with at least some of his views. In light of Mr. Wright's perspective, Michelle Obama's comment that she feels proud of America for the first time in her adult life makes perfect sense.
Much as most of us would appreciate the symbolism of a black man ascending to the presidency, what we have in Barack Obama is a politician whose closeness to Mr. Wright underscores his radical record.
The media have largely ignored Mr. Obama's close association with Mr. Wright. This raises legitimate questions about Mr. Obama's fundamental beliefs about his country. Those questions deserve a clearer answer than Mr. Obama has provided so far.
This is the second time Senator Obama is been faced with a sister souljah moment. He's failed this one too. Here's what he said today in Pennsylvania:
Q: I don't know if you've seen it, but it's all over the wire today (from an ABC News story), a statement that your pastor (the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's South Side) made in a sermon in 2003 that instead of singing "God Bless America," black people should sing a song essentially saying "God Damn America."
A: I haven't seen the line. This is a pastor who is on the brink of retirement who in the past has made some controversial statements. I profoundly disagree with some of these statements.
Q: What about this particular statement?
A: Obviously, I disagree with that. Here is what happens when you just cherry-pick statements from a guy who had a 40-year career as a pastor. There are times when people say things that are just wrong. But I think it's important to judge me on what I've said in the past and what I believe.
"I haven't seen the line?" This is just disingenuous, at best. If Obama is this clueless we're all in trouble. Where has Mr. Obama been, under a rock?
Who's going to drag the possible Democratic nominee into reality? He's obviously having trouble relating to it himself.
Reverend Wright's convenient and timely retirement, which Obama makes sure to mention, is not going to get Obama off the hook with many Americans, and a statement through a political operative doesn't do the trick. Obviously, this guy just doesn't get it. In this country you can't simply say you can't blame "cherry picking" on a preacher that espouses such hatred towards his own country, but especially white Americans. Well you can, but it's not going to get you to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in a general election."
Obama Expresses "Deep Affection" and "Appreciation for Good Works" of His Racist Pastor
From ABC News: "By BRIAN ROSS and REHAB EL-BURI
March 13, 2008—
Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor says blacks should not sing “God Bless America” but “God damn America.”
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s south side, has a long history of what even Obama’s campaign aides concede is “inflammatory rhetoric,” including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own “terrorism.”
In a campaign appearance earlier this month, Sen. Obama said, “I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial.” He said Rev. Wright “is like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with,” telling a Jewish group that everyone has someone like that in their family.
Rev. Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, “The Audacity of Hope.”
An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright’s sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.
“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” he said in a 2003 sermon. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism.
… the United States had brought on al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism.
“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.
“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” he told his congregation.
Sen. Obama told the New York Times he was not at the church on the day of Rev. Wright’s 9/11 sermon. “The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification,” Obama said in a recent interview. “It sounds like he was trying to be provocative,” Obama told the paper.
[…]
“He has impacted the life of Barack Obama so much so that he wants to portray that feeling he got from Rev. Wright onto the country because we all need something positive,” said another member of the congregation.
Rev. Wright, who declined to be interviewed by ABC News, is considered one of the country’s 10 most influential black pastors, according to members of the Obama campaign.
Obama has praised at least one aspect of Rev. Wright’s approach, referring to his “social gospel” and his focus on Africa, “and I agree with him on that.”
Sen. Obama declined to comment on Rev. Wright’s denunciations of the United States, but a campaign religious adviser, Shaun Casey, appearing on “Good Morning America” Thursday, said Obama “had repudiated” those comments.
In a statement to ABCNews.com, Obama’s press spokesman Bill Burton said, “Sen. Obama has said repeatedly that personal attacks such as this have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they’re offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church. Sen. Obama does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms. Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Sen. Obama deeply disagrees. But now that he is retired, that doesn’t detract from Sen. Obama’s affection for Rev. Wright or his appreciation for the good works he has done.”
March 13, 2008—
Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor says blacks should not sing “God Bless America” but “God damn America.”
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s south side, has a long history of what even Obama’s campaign aides concede is “inflammatory rhetoric,” including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own “terrorism.”
In a campaign appearance earlier this month, Sen. Obama said, “I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial.” He said Rev. Wright “is like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with,” telling a Jewish group that everyone has someone like that in their family.
Rev. Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, “The Audacity of Hope.”
An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright’s sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.
“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” he said in a 2003 sermon. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism.
… the United States had brought on al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism.
“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.
“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” he told his congregation.
Sen. Obama told the New York Times he was not at the church on the day of Rev. Wright’s 9/11 sermon. “The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification,” Obama said in a recent interview. “It sounds like he was trying to be provocative,” Obama told the paper.
[…]
“He has impacted the life of Barack Obama so much so that he wants to portray that feeling he got from Rev. Wright onto the country because we all need something positive,” said another member of the congregation.
Rev. Wright, who declined to be interviewed by ABC News, is considered one of the country’s 10 most influential black pastors, according to members of the Obama campaign.
Obama has praised at least one aspect of Rev. Wright’s approach, referring to his “social gospel” and his focus on Africa, “and I agree with him on that.”
Sen. Obama declined to comment on Rev. Wright’s denunciations of the United States, but a campaign religious adviser, Shaun Casey, appearing on “Good Morning America” Thursday, said Obama “had repudiated” those comments.
In a statement to ABCNews.com, Obama’s press spokesman Bill Burton said, “Sen. Obama has said repeatedly that personal attacks such as this have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they’re offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church. Sen. Obama does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms. Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Sen. Obama deeply disagrees. But now that he is retired, that doesn’t detract from Sen. Obama’s affection for Rev. Wright or his appreciation for the good works he has done.”
Obama's pastor caught on tape: "God Damn America"
First, I need to say...I don't care how often a Presidential candidiate goes to church..I don't care if he or she claims to pray daily...short of some cult that endorses human sacrifice, I don't care what religion our candidates endorse or belong to. I am concerned when a candidiate exercises bad judgement...when a candidate seems to endorse clearly racist, ignorant, hate-speech..when a candidate's "religious advisor" is video taped saying "god damn America" in a sermon...and when a candidate dismisses thoses concerns as being like when your crazy uncle says things that they shouldn't...so, in the hope that Obama will actually do the right thing while assuming that he won't...here if the latest on Obama's bad judgement from Larry Johnson' NoQuarterUSA.net/blog: "Imagine for a moment Hillary had for two decades embraced a minister and a church that preached racism or hatred for America as Wright’s has done. Imagine that she had embraced a minister who claims that America “started the AIDS virus . . . We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty.”
Hillary Clinton not only would not be running for president, she wouldn’t be in the Senate, she probably would not be employable in public life anywhere. The question is after how many such speeches was Mr. Obama’s response to draw the man closer, to elevate him higher?
What if Hillary’s response to Ferraro’s outburst (which was not in the slightest bit racist) was to say, “Aw, shucks, don’t mind her, she’s like a batty old aunt who sometimes says things she shouldn’t?”
Do you think CNN’s Anderson Cooper, as he did last night about Obama’s pastor, would have asked, “I mean, does it matter?”
Or that Gloria Borger would have replied, “I think, honestly, it depends on how much the Clinton [Obama] campaign decides to make of this …”?
Or that Ms. Borger would have offered Clinton this reassurance? “If he feels the need to distance himself even more, I bet he will.” Ahhhh.
No. Jack Cafferty, Wolf Blitzer, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews et al. would be hammering the $22,500 donation to Jeremiah Wright’s racist church — more than twice what the Obamas gave to any other charitable group — at the TOP of their newscasts. That is if this were Clinton’s tax form:
Obama’s 2006 Tax Form. It is shown on page 21 of 23 of the pdf file. The amount is $22,500 to Trinity United Church of Christ.
Hillary Clinton knows this. She knows how the media will fixate on the most trivial or the most meaningful parts of her tax returns. She has complied fully, and yearly, with the Senate Ethics Committee’s requirements for financial disclosure, but she has to have trepidation about releasing all to the media in the midst of a highly contested race because she knows what the media will do.
The media are couching all criticisms of Obama’s 20-year association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who married him and Michelle and baptized both of their daughters with remarks like Ms. Borger’s — “If he feels the need to distance himself even more, I bet he will.”
The media are not reporting, clearly, that the Obamas give Wright’s church more than they give to any other charitable group.
The media are not — in light of the anti-American views of his minister — re-scrutinizing the infamous photograph of Obama standing next to Bill Richardson — with Obama’s hands at his side, while Richardson’s right hand is over his heart during the pledge of allegiance.
The media are ignoring the now-obvious (to anyone with common sense) ties between Michelle’s negative statements about America and the views held by her pastor, who she’s listened to for decades.
[She won’t even commit to supporting the Democratic nominee if it’s not her Barack? Astonishing. IMAGINE IF BILL OR CHELSEA CLINTON HAD SAID THIS.]
[The Seattle Times op-ed adds: “And Michelle Obama didn’t help with her comment about finally, in her 40s, “being proud of my country for the first time,” and suggesting to a young audience in a working-class Ohio town that they should sidestep “corporate America” and instead seek out more rewarding, lower-paying jobs in teaching and social work. Whom did she think she was talking to, the senior class at Vassar?”]
I’ll stick my neck out and ask this:
Do we want a president and First Lady who have been inculcated for 20+ years with the racist propaganda that America is AmeriKKKa, that America had it coming on 9/11, that AIDS was given to black people by white people, and that rich white men run America and therefore America deserves nothing but their contempt and incendiary hatred?
Do we?"
Hillary Clinton not only would not be running for president, she wouldn’t be in the Senate, she probably would not be employable in public life anywhere. The question is after how many such speeches was Mr. Obama’s response to draw the man closer, to elevate him higher?
What if Hillary’s response to Ferraro’s outburst (which was not in the slightest bit racist) was to say, “Aw, shucks, don’t mind her, she’s like a batty old aunt who sometimes says things she shouldn’t?”
Do you think CNN’s Anderson Cooper, as he did last night about Obama’s pastor, would have asked, “I mean, does it matter?”
Or that Gloria Borger would have replied, “I think, honestly, it depends on how much the Clinton [Obama] campaign decides to make of this …”?
Or that Ms. Borger would have offered Clinton this reassurance? “If he feels the need to distance himself even more, I bet he will.” Ahhhh.
No. Jack Cafferty, Wolf Blitzer, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews et al. would be hammering the $22,500 donation to Jeremiah Wright’s racist church — more than twice what the Obamas gave to any other charitable group — at the TOP of their newscasts. That is if this were Clinton’s tax form:
Obama’s 2006 Tax Form. It is shown on page 21 of 23 of the pdf file. The amount is $22,500 to Trinity United Church of Christ.
Hillary Clinton knows this. She knows how the media will fixate on the most trivial or the most meaningful parts of her tax returns. She has complied fully, and yearly, with the Senate Ethics Committee’s requirements for financial disclosure, but she has to have trepidation about releasing all to the media in the midst of a highly contested race because she knows what the media will do.
The media are couching all criticisms of Obama’s 20-year association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who married him and Michelle and baptized both of their daughters with remarks like Ms. Borger’s — “If he feels the need to distance himself even more, I bet he will.”
The media are not reporting, clearly, that the Obamas give Wright’s church more than they give to any other charitable group.
The media are not — in light of the anti-American views of his minister — re-scrutinizing the infamous photograph of Obama standing next to Bill Richardson — with Obama’s hands at his side, while Richardson’s right hand is over his heart during the pledge of allegiance.
The media are ignoring the now-obvious (to anyone with common sense) ties between Michelle’s negative statements about America and the views held by her pastor, who she’s listened to for decades.
[She won’t even commit to supporting the Democratic nominee if it’s not her Barack? Astonishing. IMAGINE IF BILL OR CHELSEA CLINTON HAD SAID THIS.]
[The Seattle Times op-ed adds: “And Michelle Obama didn’t help with her comment about finally, in her 40s, “being proud of my country for the first time,” and suggesting to a young audience in a working-class Ohio town that they should sidestep “corporate America” and instead seek out more rewarding, lower-paying jobs in teaching and social work. Whom did she think she was talking to, the senior class at Vassar?”]
I’ll stick my neck out and ask this:
Do we want a president and First Lady who have been inculcated for 20+ years with the racist propaganda that America is AmeriKKKa, that America had it coming on 9/11, that AIDS was given to black people by white people, and that rich white men run America and therefore America deserves nothing but their contempt and incendiary hatred?
Do we?"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)