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Showing posts with label Jeremiah Wright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jeremiah Wright. Show all posts
The shooter has been unofficially identified James W. von Brunn, of Annapolis, Md. The gun-battle occurred in the museum lobby and started when the attacker began shooting with a "long gun," said Sgt. David Schlosser. Mr. von Brunn has a Web site holywesternempire.org that includes anti-Semitic and racial statements. The site also states Mr. von Brunn has a journalism degree from a mid-Western university . . .
When I had breakfast with Obi's Sister and her family last week, her son said he was considering a major in journalism. I cautioned him strongly against it. As a general rule, with few exceptions, journalism majors don't amount to crap in the news business.
The spin on the left is that the suspect, James Von Brunn, is an agent of the GOP's "Christian-fascist" base. The truth is, via Melissa Clouthier, this guy's a deranged Holocaust denier. He represents no one on the conservative right - not me, nor any of those with whom I associate."
Exactly. The Left gets to decide what qualifies as "right-wing," and nothing any conservative says in contradiction can be taken seriously.
Asked if he had spoken to the President, Wright said: "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter, that he'll talk to me in five years when he's a lame duck, or in eight years when he's out of office. ... "They will not let him to talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is. ... I said from the beginning: He's a politician; I'm a pastor. He's got to do what politicians do."
Biting my tongue here, trying to resist the temptation to say anything accurate about the Rev. Wright.
Remember Joe Wilson, the preening narcissist who became a hero to the Left because of Plamegate? Well, he just came out with an op-ed column in the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer, saying that the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright raises "legitimate questions" about Barack Obama:
Judgment and leadership in foreign policy are not intuitive. They are learned through experience. Obama's long and close relationship with the anti-American hate-monger Wright, his inattention to his responsibilities in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his careless approach to Iraq all suggest that he would benefit from more experience. We should ask whether we want those lessons to be learned in the White House.
(Via No Quarter.) You gotta love that: Former left-wing hero turns his guns on new left-wing hero. It's a piranha pool.
For any spiritually minded, up-wardly mobile African-American living in Chicago in the mid-1980s, the Trinity United Church of Christ was -- and still is -- the place to be. That's what drew Oprah Winfrey, a recent Chicago transplant, to the church in 1984. She was eager to bond with the movers and shakers in her new hometown's black community. . . . Winfrey was a member of Trinity United from 1984 to 1986, and she continued to attend off and on into the early to the mid-1990s. But then she stopped. A major reason . . . was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. . . . Winfrey was never comfortable with the tone of Wright's more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America's favorite daytime talk-show host.
Very interesting. Oprah saw the potential for trouble, but Harvard-educated Obama didn't. On the other hand:
Winfrey, who has endorsed Obama and campaigned on his behalf, had long understood the perils of a close association with Wright . . . [but] was blindsided by the pastor's personal assault on Obama.
Surprising, yes, but not all that much. It's obvious Wright resents Obama's attempt to distance himself. If you want an insight on Wright's character, ask his wife's ex-husband:
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's loose cannon of a spiritual adviser, stole the wife of a parishioner - after the man sought Wright's help in saving his troubled marriage, the former husband told friends. Delmer Reed, 59, confided to pals that he believed the minister moved in on his wife while Wright was counseling the couple at his Chicago church in the early 1980s, The Post has learned. "That's exactly how he said it," Reed's divorce lawyer, Roosevelt Thomas, told The Post. "It looks like Delmer might have been right," he said, because after Delmer and Ramah Reed were divorced, she got remarried - to Wright. "Either that or this was the biggest coincidence in the world." Asked about the relationship between Wright and his ex-wife, Reed told The Post, "Oh, the things I could tell you." Initially, he didn't believe the rumors. "People were telling me that my extremely attractive wife was seen with the pastor," Reed said. "But I didn't believe it. I thought, 'So what?' " Was he wrong in the end? "Well, yeah," he said.
If the pastor treats his congregation like that, his vengeful behavior toward Obama is not surprising.
The controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright appears to have driven some of Sen. Barack Obama's supporters over the cliff, from messianic fervor into outright lunacy.
If Obama is done in by this whole Wright thing I am done with politics. I can't invest myself in something that is so sure to disappoint me time and time and time again.
Nice to have the starring role in your own adolescent melodrama, isn't it? Pouting and sulking are not effective strategies, and neither is denial. Which brings us to Exhibit B:
The only reason there is a "furor" as the press likes to say, is because the Repubs and the press who are so firmly snuggled up in their pockets have created one. And the only credibility Obama has lost in my eyes is due to him feeling that he has to address it as if it is valid.
Once you stop laughing at the contention that the "Repubs" have the press "in their pockets," consider the fierce denial involved in this Obamaphile's refusal to grant the validity of Wright as an issue in the Democratic primary.
That's the key point. Democratic voters (and superdelegates, too) are being asked to evaluate whether Obama's 20-year association with Wright -- and the revelation of Wright's radicalism -- creates a political vulnerability that will hurt Obama's chances of being elected in November.
It doesn't matter whether the Wright issue is "valid" in some objective, logical, bird's-eye-view perspective. What matters is how it will be perceived in the general election by independent voters. The Wright issue matters because of its potential to sink Obama in November.
If Sullivan and his sulky young e-mailer want to ignore Wright and keep pushing for Obama's nomination, nobody's stopping them. And if any other Obama supporters want to blame the media for the "furor," go right ahead. But if Obama does get the nomination, and then his association with Wright contributes to a loss in November, don't say you weren't warned.
On the other hand, maybe all this "furor" will be forgotten in a few days, and Obama will sail to a great triumph in November. Somehow, though, many people seem to think such a scenario is less likely now than it was before Wright decided to go on his media tour -- and you can't blame that decision on "Repubs and the press."
BTW, it's May 1, and we just finished the month of April -- best month ever for The Other McCain, with 16,174 visitors and a daily average of 780 page-views. During the best 7-day period of the month (April 19-25) the daily average page-views was 1,046. Thanks to all the bloggers who linked here during April, and thanks to the regular readers (and regular commenters, like SueK) who've contributed to a 137% increase in traffic in a single month.
Today is Wednesday. Democratic primary voters in Indiana and North Carolina go to the polls Tuesday. Sen. Barack Obama's relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright continues to dominate the news.
I've already done two talk-radio shows about my American Spectator article on the Obama-Wright story, and I'm about to do two more.
A week from today, we'll know the results of those two primaries, and I predict those results will be interpreted as a referendum on Obama's handling of l'affaire de Wright.
Michelle Malkin liveblogged the press conference in which Barack Obama tried to put more distance -- more like a Grand Canyon -- between himself and Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Malkin notices a big difference between what Obama said yesterday and what Obama said today, and concludes:
It wasn’t the fact that Wright has been spewing this same recycled crap for years that finally got Obama mad. It was that he finally realized it was hurting his campaign. And he was personally miffed by Wright’s insults against him.
Will this do the trick? Will the MSM now drop the Wright issue? Don't bet on it. This is the kind of juicy narrative that the MSM will still be chattering about on the Sunday shows. And then, if Hillary wins Indiana, the story will be revived: "Did Wright hurt Obama with white Democratic primary voters?"
Imagine his surprise at finding that his spiritual mentor of 20 years is a preening, hateful, attention whore. . . . The bottom line: After 20 years of friendship, if Obama didn’t know Wright held these beliefs he’s a moron and if he did know he’s a fraud.
Allah also links Ace, who provides the obligatory Ace-ification of the story:
Throwing him under the bus. I could no more disown him than I could disown someone who had become a serious political liability. This time, the media will crow, he really has put this issue completely behind him. Of course they said that last time, too, and six thousand times since then. Wright is a "distraction" from what really matters, he informs us. Wow, I didn't see that one coming.
This is exactly the way Obama should have addressed the issue to begin with instead of letting it linger. This is about as good as he could have done under the circumstances, but I still think Obama has major credibility problems on how he could have been so blind for so long about Wright.
That's just it. The ABC News story on Wright broke on March 13. It then takes 47 days until Obama finally comes out with a strong response?
Hate to repeat myself, but it's like McGovern and Eagleton. It was McGovern's delay in dumping Eagleton that proved so damaging. For 10 days, Eagleton sort of dangled in the wind, thereby producing a bummer of a story that clogged up news cycle after news cycle.
Oh, and anybody want to bet we haven't heard the last from Rev. Wright? He's liable to come back with a denunciation of Obama that stretches the story out even further.
The question of What It All Means will be hashed over by legions of pundits and commentators in the coming days, but Lifson's mention of the media's role in the Wright controversy reminds me of another question, one that's been nagging at my brain for weeks now.
Conservative media had been trying to draw attention to Wright's radicalism for months, without any MSM outfit following on. And then out of thin air -- two days after the Mississippi primary, with the six-week Pennsylvania campaign just getting underway -- ABC News jumped on it, thus inaugurating the long crisis.
There are three obvious possibilities:
The timing was entirely coincidental. Maybe ABC had been working on it for a while and it was not until March 13 that they were able to put together a story worth airing; or else, one of their producers just happened to stumble onto the Wright angle at that time. But nobody who knows anything about bigtime politics believes in coincidences, so maybe . . .
Republican operatives pushed the story. By early March, it was possible to count delegates and conclude that Obama had the nomination locked. Therefore, Karl Rove and the GOP Brain Trust decide that the six-week lull before Pennsylvania would be a good time to hit Obama with this Wright-the-radical-preacher angle. But does that make sense? Wouldn't it be better to time it until August? So maybe . . .
Team Clinton was behind it. Sid Blumenthal called in a favor from his old buddy George Stephanopoulos at ABC, and this conspiratorial collusion results in a story perfectly calculated scares Pennsylvania's working-class white voters into delivering a miracle comeback for Hillary.
None of these explanations, however, is entirely satisfactory. The paranoid tinfoil-hat conspiracy crackpot would rather think it was Halliburton or the Mossad than to buy any of those theories. Which leads us to a fourth -- less obvious, but genuinely twisted -- possibility:
The Obama people did it themselves. Obama's handlers had to know this Wright thing was going to make news sooner or later. After the Mississippi primary, Team Obama counted the delegates, concluded they had the nomination locked up and said, "Better sooner than later." So they got their friends at ABC to do the story in early March, figuring that the negative impact wouldn't hurt Obama in terms of the Democratic nomination, and it would be better to get the story out early -- months before the general election campaign began -- than for it to leak into the media in August or September.
Since when does a major presidential campaign uncork a 5,000-word speech in just five days? While I concede such a thing is possible -- a team of top speechwriters laboring long hours to improvise a major speech -- but I just don't think it's too bloody likely.
It smells like a set-up, and if I'm right -- if Obama's team got the Wright story to ABC in March as a sort of pre-emptive move against the Republicans -- then they did so expecting that Obama would emerge mostly unscathed by the self-inflicted controversy. The Philadelphia speech would fix the problem, Obama would move forward to victory in Pennsylvania, and that would be the last they'd hear about Wright for the rest of the campaign.
If so (and I admit we're now dangling at the end of a long string of hypothetical suppositions), then Team Obama badly miscalculated. Because of the "bitter" controversy, Obama got beaten badly in Pennsylvania, and Rev. Wright has refused to be silenced.
Most of all, if Team Obama believed the Democratic nomination was a lock as of March 11, they forgot to tell the news to Hillary Clinton. Notice how you're hearing a lot less pundit talk this week about how Hillary can't win?
Whatever the ultimate outcome of this election, the Wright controversy and Obama's handling of it will be one of the major episodes in this saga. And the mystery of that March 13 ABC News story will linger. It may be a blogosphere cliche, but I question the timing.
In his widely lauded Philadelphia speech, Barack Obama declared of Reverend Jeremiah Wright: "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community." It wasn't quiite up to George McGovern's expression of "1,000 percent" support for Thomas Eagleton as his running mate after revelations of his shock therapy, but it left Obama and Wright closely joined. Something about the revelation of Eagleton's shock therapy made his ultimate dumping by McGovern inevitable. Something about Wright's frank racism, among other things, now calls for some further response by Obama. It's too late for Barack Obama to have his own Sister Souljah moment with Reverend Jeremiah Wright. After Wright's performances before the NAACP in Detroit and before the National Press Club in Washington, however, it may be time for Obama's own Thomas Eagleton moment. As with Eagleton, the brain may be critical.
What's most interesting, by the way, about my apparent mental convergence with Scott Johnson is that he focuses on the same quote from Obama's Philly speech that I saw as crucial -- and links NR's Byron York, who highlights the same quote.
From convergence to divergence: Both Johnson and York put themselves in the position of advisors, telling Obama what he should do next. Frankly, I think that ship has sailed. It seems to me that the damage done by Wright is, at this point, beyond remedy.
The question is not how the damage can be repaired, but rather how bad is it? The problem is, we don't have enough recent polls in Indiana or North Carolina to be able to judge the impact in any concrete way.
So we won't know until next Tuesday, when primary voters go to the polls in those states. My gut hunch would be that Hillary wins Indiana fairly handily, although Obama's lead in North Carolina may be insuperable -- and neither of those results will be significantly different than they would have been before Wright went on his Farrakhan Lite Tour.
In politics, however, perception is reality, and a Hillary win in Indiana would be perceived as some sort of referendum on Wright.
It isn't hard to picture the TV pundits and commentators sitting around their "Decision '08 HQ" sets next Tuesday, asking each other how much Wright hurt Obama among working-class voters in Indiana. And if Hillary wins Indiana, her spin team will point out that, combined with Obama's defeats in Ohio and Pennsylvania, this shows that he can't win crucial swing states (or crucial swing voters). That goes straight to the "electability" argument Team Clinton is using to sway super-delegates.
The damage is done and, at this point, I don't know what Obama can do to undo it.
UPDATE: At the American Thinker, Thomas Lifson assesses the situation:
Was it the enthusiasm of his press claque that deceived him into believing that the story would just go away? If so, Obama is revealed as completely unprepared for the responsibilities of defending the nation from its enemies. A man who takes the optimistic view of his opponents, and makes best case assumptions only is not someone we want facing down our real enemies in Tehran, Damascus, and Pyongyang.
I'm not sure that Obama's handling of the Wright controversy necessarily implicates his Commander-in-Chief capabilities, but Lifson's point that Obama (or his campaign staff) may have counted on a sympathetic MSM to squelch the controversy is interesting. The Philly speech was the key blunder -- nearly 5,000 words, and yet not enough to close the controversy.
Monday afternoon, after hearing Dick Morris invoke Willie Horton in reference to the Jeremiah Wright controversy, I knew I had to write this article:
The scandal that refuses to go away, the blunder that cripples a candidacy, the error that defies every effort at correction -- this is what the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has become for Sen. Barack Obama's campaign. . . . Obama's predicament now resembles nothing so much as that faced by George McGovern in July 1972, after the Democratic presidential nominee belatedly discovered that his vice-presidential choice, Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton, had previously been hospitalized for mental illness. . . .
McGovern's mishandling of the Eagleton affair had been in my mind for several days, primarily because I'd recently finished re-reading Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72.
Thompson believed that the way the Eagleton affair was bungled was what doomed McGovern, completely changing public perception of him. The alternative hypothesis was that Nixon's re-election was inevitable. Yet Nixon had his own brewing scandal that year -- the break-in at the Watergate happened about a month before Eagleton was announced as McGovern's running mate. Democrats, however, were unable to get any traction on that scandal, in large part because they were so demoralized by the Eagleton affair.
McGovern, as I explain in the Spectator article, had delayed picking his No. 2 until the week of the convention. That in turn led to a last-minute scramble, and Eagleton essentially lied his way onto the ticket by failing to divulge his previous hospitalizations. Once that was discovered by the press, Eagleton should have resigned -- but he refused to do so, and thus began a 10-day melodrama that made McGovern look ineffective and indecisive.
Obama's failure to put away the Wright controversy in March, so that Wright is still making headlines six weeks later, is very much reminiscent of how the Eagleton affair plagued McGovern's campaign.
Martin and O'Brien parrot Wright's claim that his comments have been taken out of context -- in "sound bites" -- and that his overall message is not offensive. But to tell people that they are only offended because they are ignorant of the "African-American religious tradition"? In other words:
I apologize for your ignorance. If you weren't such an intolerant, uneducated bigot, you wouldn't be offended.
Millions of Americans will be tempted to reply by quoting that noted sociologist, The Outlaw Josey Wales: "Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining."
CNN’s Roland Martin and Soledad O’Brien are now official Jeremiah Wright groupies. . . . Wonder if they’ll be part of his permanent traveling press entourage now.
Their commentary from the scene could in no way be called reporting or analysis. For example, they made no reference to Wright's idiotic "left-brain/right-brain" claims, which Ed Morrisey compares to the controversy surrounding The Bell Curve.
UPDATE: No less an Obamaphile than Salon's Joan Walsh recognizes Wright as a "stone-cold narcissist . . . a man of enormous self-regard" who is "clearly trying to hurt Barack Obama."
It's sad, really. A huge element of Obama's appeal was his apparent ability -- and desire -- to transcend race. And now Wright appears to be saying, "Uh-uh. You ain't transcending me, brother. You're just another crab in the bucket!"
If even a left-of-Lenin liberal like Joan Walsh sees the writing on the wall, the MSM can't be pleased. Here's Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, writing about Wright's National Press Club appearance:
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." . . . 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. . . . 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.
The thing about the Wright controversy is that Obama failed to deal with it properly when the uproar began in mid-March. Wright was willing to recant or apologize, which gave Obama an excuse to repudiate Wright. Instead, Obama went to Philadelphia and declared:
As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. . . . I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.
Now, Obama's stuck with Wright. And if Obama wins the nomination, the Democrats are stuck with Wright, too.
UPDATE II: If there's a Pulitzer Prize for understatements, Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press is going to be a strong contender this year:
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is going after his critics on an incendiary tour that is doing his one-time congregant, Barack Obama, little good.
Ya think? Pickler continues:
Wright's tour couldn't come at a much worse time for Obama, who is campaigning for white working class voters in Indiana and North Carolina. Many of Wright's most controversial comments are angry condemnations of the United States for its treatments of blacks — thoughts that were applauded by the black church leaders in his audience Monday but risk offending white voters. An Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Monday suggests the Wright controversy may be hurting Obama among whites.
Hillary beat Obama 55-45 in Pennsylvania, even though he outspent her 3-to-1 in the state, and you need a poll to tell you that renewed media attention to the Wright controversy "may be hurting Obama"? More from Pickler:
Obama said Monday, after Wright's latest comments, "None of the voters I talk to ask about it. There may be people who are troubled by it and are polite and not asking about it. It's not what I hear."
Like nobody will mention your dandruff or bad breath. And now Obama offers his own Understatement of the Year contender:
"I have said before and I will say again that some of the comments Rev. Wright has made offend me and I understand why they have offended the American people. ... Certainly what the last three days indicates is we're not coordinating with him."
As I said, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is well on his way to becoming the Tom Eagleton of 2008. Barack Obama's top political advisors must be on suicide watch after Wright's performance at the National Press Club this morning. Video via Conservablog:
Again, Wright attempts to deflect criticism by invoking race and religion (1:34):
"This is an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African American religious tradition."
Notice Wright's self-satisfied smile after that remark, as if he'd said something extraordinarily clever in dismissing all his critics as ignorant bigots.
Next: Louis Farrakhan is "one of the most important voices of the 20th and 21st centuries. . . . When Louis Farrakhan speaks . . . all black America listens. . . . I'm not going to put down Louis Farrakhan any more than Mandela would put down Fidel Castro. . . . Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy."
If Obama fails to get the nomination, don't blame Karl Rove. Don't blame the media. Don't blame Hillary Clinton. Blame Jeremiah Wright and his irresponsible nonsense:
"As I said to Barack Obama . . . . last year, 'If you get elected, November the fifth, I'm coming after you, because you'll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.' . . . This country's leaders have refused to apologize."
Who is being "ground under" by America's policies? Do we need to apologize to the thousands of immigrants who come to this country every week? Would we have an illegal immigration problem if America was so horribly oppressive? When people are risking life and limb in the desert, paying money to coyotes to smuggle them into the United States, doesn't that suggest that America is a land of incredible opportunities, and the envy of the world?
It is impossible to reconcile this reality with Wright's rhetoric of "a government whose policies grind under people." He is not preaching the Gospel, he's peddling the politics of resentment and self-pity.
UPDATE: BTW, I just figured something out. The media notice from the National Press Club said "this event is sold out" and the event was open to "credentialed media only" -- the NPC even told The American Spectator's Phil Klein that he couldn't cover the event unless he had either White House or congressional press credentials. I've been in Washington for more than 10 years and never heard of such a thing at a Press Club event.
Watching the video, I now see why this is. Wright packed the room with his supporters. You'll see him repeatedly look off to his right and grin when they cheer and laugh at his "jokes." This explains why Wright keeps playing to the crowd as if he were a standup comedian.
UPDATE II:Michelle Malkin, commenting on Wright's Detroit "analysis" of brain differences between blacks and whites, says:
If he’s this comfortable mocking black/white differences in front of media cameras, I can only imagine what he says in private to his faithful black liberation ideology adherents.
A disturbing thought.
UPDATE III: A friend just e-mailed me the transcript of Obama's NPC appearance. The mind boggles. Asked about when he compared the U.S. Marine Corps to the Romans who crucified Christ, he defended the comparison:
The Roman oppression is the period in which Jesus was born. And comparing imperialism that was going on in Luke, imperialism was going on when Caesar Augustus sent out a decee that the whole world should be taxed -- they were in charge of the world; sounds like some other governments I know -- that yes, I can compare that. We have troops stationed all over the world, just like Rome had troops stationed all over the world, because we run the world. That notion of imperialism is not the message of the Gospel of the Prince of Peace nor God, who loves the world.
Venezuela? Do we have troops stationed in Venezuela, Rev. Wright? Does America "run" Venezuela?
How about Zimbabwe? France? Pakistan? Chad? Sweden? Cuba? Indonesia? Mexico? How is it that "we run the world" and yet all of these nations remain under the delusion that they are sovereign and independent?
Notice that the very example Wright cited -- Caesar's tax -- is one power that the American "empire" has never exerted. The whole point of Rome's imperial conquests was that it relieved Roman citizens of the burden of taxation, since the state's coffers were filled by plundering the provinces. By contrast, Americans are taxed to provide foreign aid to nearly every government in the world.
America is engaged in the exact opposite of imperialism. Rome plundered the world; the world plunders America.
UPDATE IV: Hmmm. Numbering my updates with Roman numerals? An imperialistic gesture, maybe? But never mind that, listen to Joe Klein:
Wright's purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself -- the guy is going to be a go-to mainstream media source for racial extremist spew, the next iteration of Al Sharpton -- and destroy Barack Obama.
That's what I'm saying. Wright's egotistical desire to hog the media spotlight is 180 degrees at odds with the Obama campaign's desire to put this story behind them. Every time Wright opens his mouth, he creates more problems for Obama.
Simple question: Do you think the average Democratic primary voter in Indiana is more or less likely to support Obama as a result of Wright's recent performances?
I almost wonder if Hillary's people somehow found a backdoor way to encourage Wright to keep stirring this up.
Rev. Jeremiah Wright starts getting wound up about the 4-minute mark. Notice that this is not improvised. He's reading from a text when he says (about the 9:10 mark):
Whites saw blacks as being deficient. It was none other than Rudyard Kipling who saw 'the white man's burden' as a mandate to lift brown, black, yellow people up to the level of white people, as if white people were the norm, and black, brown, yellow people were abnormal subspecies on a lower level, or deficient."
Wright's interpretation of Kipling's 1899 poem is essentially false. Kipling was writing at the beginning of the Second Boer War, and his poem is actually a warning about the dangers of imperialism. British boys were going being sent to fight to consolidate British rule in South Africa, and Kipling noted that by conquering foreign lands, the British would "bind your sons to exile/To serve your captives' need."
Kipling surely did not see any "mandate" to lift up anyone. But what does a British poet's musings on the perils of empire have to do with
In Detroit tonight at the NAACP’s Church of the Racial Hustle, Wright patted himself on the back for his “descriptive” powers of an America that he believes deserved 9/11. It’s not “divisive,” you see, to shout “God damn America” with your veins popping at the pulpit. That’s just “descriptive.” And anyone who says otherwise is a God-damned racist!
Here's Part 2 of the video:
Wright here, beginning around the 3-minute mark, gets into some nonsense about how "European-American" children have a "left-brain cognitive object-oriented learning style," while African-American children come from a "right-brain aural culture." Anyone who doubts that this is nonsense -- at least so far as academic achievement is concerned -- should ask themselves whether a "right-brain creative aural" learning style is an efficient way to learn calculus.
Bonus: At the 9-minute mark, Wright mocks John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural speech.
Before posting Part 3 of the video, let me first finish disassembling Wright's ranting about educational differences. It may indeed be true, as he says, that many black children are raised in an "aural culture"; that is to say, they are raised in a culture where the importance of literacy is not emphasized. But in a society where academic achievement requires high level of literacy, an "aural" culture is not merely a difference -- as Wright claims -- but is indeed a deficiency.
Furthermore, it is not merely black children who suffer as a result of being raised in culture that do not emphasize literacy and academic achievement. This is equally true among poor whites. There are still many white families in America where getting a high-school diploma is regarded as a signal accomplishment, white families where children are raised by semi-literate parents, where white children grow up in an environment where none of their relatives or close acquaintances have ever attended college.
It is mypoic for Wright to suggest that African-American children are the only ones disadvantaged in education due to their cultural background. Lots of poor little hillbilly children suffer similarly.
OK, now Part 3:
Holy cow! Mocking Ted Kennedy? Look, the Boston accent is eminently mockable, but it's only an accent. What's the point here?
Plenty of people who speak accented English nevertheless succeed in America. Hell's bells, go to the physics department at MIT and nearly half the students are Asian-Americans, including many whose heavy accents indicate that they only recently immigrated to the U.S. Speaking of Asian-American immigrants, perhaps Rev. Wright has heard of a guy named Dinesh D'Souza?
Wright goes on and on about "linguistics," and then goes into musicology, as if backbeat were something novel, and then mocks white people as lacking rhythm. I know that some white people -- perhaps even most white people -- lack rhythm, but it is a stereotype to imply that all white people lack rhythm. Rev. Wright misreads 6/8 time; the backbeat in a 6/8 soul ballad (e.g., "Always and Forever" by Heatwave) is still 1 and 4.
From all of this, beginning about 7:30 p.m., Wright begins ranting in defense of his "black religious tradition," declaring: "Some of our haters can't get their heads around that."
This is not helping Obama. Once some video editors get hold of this speech and throw some highlights up on YouTube, the entire issue will be revived and recycled. And to give you a hint of why some white people will resent the hell out of this, Ed Morrisey:
This racial demagoguery can easily be seen in his choice of “European” for whites in the US. We’re not European; we’re American. My family stopped being European when my great-great-great grandfather stepped off the ship about 160 years ago. “European” didn’t really describe us even then; my family came from Ireland, Italy, and what is now Poland over a period of 60 years. Nobody I know considers themselves “European”, and the only time I hear this applied is when racial divisionists use the term.
Rev. Wright words were certainly "twisted" in one sense, but he can't say they were misinterpreted. He said what he said, we've got it on tape, and if he didn't mean "God d--- America," he shouldn't have said "God d--- America."
I'm sure that at this point, Obama's ready to suggest that Rev. Wright go for a little car ride with Ted Kennedy -- and let Ted drive.
Never dreamed I'd see the day when prominent liberal Democrats would be calling each other racist hatemongers, but it's so delightfully true:
Former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro said today that she objected to the comparison Sen. Barack Obama drew between her and his former pastor in his speech on race relations Tuesday. . . . "To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable," Ferraro said today. "He gave a very good speech on race relations, but he did not address the fact that this man is up there spewing hatred."
Obama may wish that he hadn’t chased Ferraro out of the Hillary Clinton campaign for another reason other than the obvious hypocrisy. She no longer has to worry about how her speech reflects on Hillary, and so Ferraro is much freer to speak her mind on this issue. Calling Wright a racist bigot may just be the opening stanza for Ferraro, who clearly is not in the mood for reconciliation.
As they say down home, "Let's you and him fight." Or as we say in the blogosphere, "I'll pop some popcorn ..."
UPDATE:Mickey Kaus finds a problem with the NewsMax timeline: Obama was speaking July 22 at a Miami event. So, as Just One Minute says:
[I]f Obama was not attending church the specific day NewsMax claims he was, this gotcha is gone, and Obama's ludicrous claim that he was unaware of Wright's incendiary black separatism has not yet been disproven.
UPDATE II: The NewsMax story is specific about the date, specific about the content of the sermon, and specific that Obama "nodded in agreement" with Wright's rhetoric. Just One Minute wonders if there was time for Obama to have attended the 7 a.m. service and then flown to Miami in time for the 1:30 p.m. La Raza rally.
We are suffering from prejudice born from slavery and still 150 years after liberation we are fighting about race. Sure blacks are upset. Sure the situation calls for people who are oppressed to try to find solutions. . . . Their are those who want to keep the status quo. Who benefits; businesses like McDonalds, Wallmart and other low paying oppressive companies who pay employees below poverty wages. Defense contractors who want us to always be at war. Oil companies who want to stop green energy and green technologies of any kind.
There's a peek inside the "progressive" mind, full of nonsense. Just a few quick rejoinders:
Any American who thinks they're "oppressed" needs to wake the hell up. I was in Africa last month. Uganda is a lovely country, but the per-capita GDP in Uganda is $1,100. If the people in Rev. Wright's congregation are "oppressed," what word can describe the people of Uganda? (And in point of fact, many members of Trinity Church are comfortably middle-class.)
Wal-Mart and McDonald's are not "oppressive companies," and the fact that entry-level service jobs pay low wages is not the result of willful oppression by greedy corporations. It's simply a function of markets, and these low-wage jobs are actually an important source of economic opportunity, especially for young people.
The idea that wars are caused by defense contractors is a rehash of an old lie, the "Merchants of Death" myth.
Oil companies are not opposed to "green energy" and, in fact, major oil companies like BP and Exxon have invested millions in alternative energy technologies and fuel-economy technology.
Excuse the mini-rant, but I can't stand to see people propagate falsehoods as "McCLum" did in Armbinder's comments. I don't know who it is that fills people's heads with such nonsense.
UPDATE III: (Via Hot Air) Jackie and Dunlap of Red State Update have a lot of (arguably irreligious) fun with the Rev. Wright story:
UPDATE IV:Andrew Sullivan employs ideological labels against NewsMax, calling the site "a far-right Internet propaganda vehicle" run by "far right smear artists."
OK, first of all, whatever factual problems there are with the NewsMax story -- and it has not been conclusively proven false -- they're only reporting one episode in a much larger story that's been extensively covered by many other news organizations. And NewsMax is no more "far right" than Huffington Post is "far left."
Second, if Andrew Sullivan's going to throw rocks at NewsMax, we should point out the glass house of the former New Republic editor who hired Stephen Glass.
Contrary to Senator Barack Obama’s claim that he never heard his pastor Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. preach hatred of America, Obama was in the pews last July 22 when the minister blamed the “white arrogance” of America’s Caucasian majority for the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks. . . . In fact, Obama was present in the South Side Chicago church on July 22 last year when Jim Davis, a freelance correspondent for Newsmax, attended services along with Obama. . . . In his sermon that day, Wright tore into America, referring to the “United States of White America” and lacing his sermon with expletives as Obama listened. . . . Addressing the Iraq war, Wright thundered, “Young African-American men” were “dying for nothing.” The “illegal war,” he shouted, was “based on Bush’s lies” and is being “fought for oil money.”
(Via Memeorandum.) So now the scandal gets new "legs" because of Obama's false denial.
Team Hillary's got to be loving this. Now Newsweek weighs in with a ponderous examination of Wright and Trinity Church, and the Wall Street Journal's on the story, too.
Nearly three weeks before the 40th commemorative anniversary of the murder of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s character is being assassinated in the public sphere because he has preached a social gospel on behalf of oppressed women, children and men in America and around the globe. . . .
A. Attempting to depict Wright as a civil-rights martyr by implicitly comparing him to MLK is transparently bogus.
B. Wright is not being criticized because he "preached a social gospel," but because his rants were unhinged anti-American diatribes that have been condemned even by his protege, Barack Obama.
Obama’s campaign announced that the minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., had left its spiritual advisory committee after videotapes of his sermons again ignited fierce debate in news accounts and political blogs. Obama did not clarify whether Wright volunteered to leave his African American Religious Leadership Committee, a loose group of supporters associated with the campaign, or whether the campaign asked him to leave.
(Via Memeorandum.) I believe the correct term is "thrown under the bus" and, given the timing, this could also be termed a "Friday night massacre." However, it doesn't solve the essential problem that Wright represented to the Obama campaign.
Wright was not a hired staffer on the Obama campaign. Nor was he merely a dignitary appointed to a titular position in order to lend prestige to the campaign (as was true with Geraldine Ferraro's position with Hillary Clinton's campaign).
As Obama himself has written, Jeremiah Wright has been his pastor for 20 years. Obama tries rather ineptly to distance himself from Wright's inflammatory anti-American rhetoric:
The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.
So Obama spends 20 years in this church, proudly claims the minister as a spiritual mentor, and then when Wright's anti-American rants make the network news, suddenly Obama is shocked, shocked to discover that his minister harbors such unpatriotic sentiments?
[America] supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic.
This is just historical ignorance talking. America certainly has not ignored the Palestinians. The problem is that the Palestinian leadership has been fanatically dedicated to the liquidation of Israel, which tends to make negotiation difficult, if not altogether moot.
As to Wright's accusation that America "supported Zionism," this charge dates back to the Cold War era. Back then, U.S. support for Israel was largely a response to the fact that the Soviet Union was arming and training the Arab armies that sought to destroy Israel in successive wars. And the Soviet didn't just back Israel's enemies in conventional warfare. What most Americans today don't know is that the Soviet Union for many years trained and sponsored international terrorist organizations (a fact documented in a once-famous 1981 Heritage Foundation treatise), and thus today's terrorist threat can be said to have roots in the old "Evil Empire."
UPDATE II:Andrew Sullivan is more charitable toward Obama, calling the dismissal of Wright "a classy move." Well, if you accept that there's a "classy" way to throw someone under the bus . . .
You know what I haven't seen yet? Any accusation that the Hillary campaign was behind the ABC News report that turned Wright's rants into a major story. You'd never be able to prove such a thing, of course -- Hillary's people aren't stupid -- but you'd think that at least one pro-Obama blogger would think to ask, "Cui bono?" So far, I haven't seen any such suspicion expressed. C'mon, Obama people: Do you really think ABC News just stumbled onto these videos and decided to do a story without any prompting from anyone?
I was a member of Trinity when I lived in Chicago. People who attack the church without having experienced Trinity are missing the whole point. . . . Trinity is being attacked because of its belief system.
Williams then links a statement on Trinity's Web site, which asserts that the church's critics "are completely ignorant when it comes to the Black religious tradition." Furthermore:
Black theology is one of the many theologies in the Americas that became popular during the liberation theology movement. They include Hispanic theology, Native American theology, Asian theology and Womanist theology. . . . To have a church whose theological perspective starts from the vantage point of Black liberation theology being its center, is not to say that African or African American people are superior to any one else. African-centered thought, unlike Eurocentrism, does not assume superiority and look at everyone else as being inferior. . . .
This hardly qualifies as a defense of Trinity and its minister -- in fact, it seems like more of an indictment. Christianity is Christianity. Christ died for all mankind, and while the practice of Christian faith may vary in some ways from culture to culture, Christian theology requires no modifiers. There is no "Hispanic" or "Asian" theology distinct from mainstream Christianity, nor is there a "Black theology."
What this statement on Trinity's Web site is saying is that Trinity's theology is not strictly Christian, but is diluted or corrupted by ideas that are not part of legitimate Christian faith. In its departure from orthodoxy, of course, Trinity is hardly unique -- some churches now seem more excited about preventing global warming than they are about preaching the gospel and saving the lost. But simply to cite "black theology" as an excuse for Wright's rantings will not suffice.
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