How Barack Obama Inspired Me

Throughout the Republican nomination process, I – like many conservatives – was down in the dumps. None of our candidates resonated with “the base.” We had fine Christian social conservatives who had embraced big government policies; social libertarians who had embraced fiscal conservatism; and your R.I.N.O. (Republican In Name Only) candidates who had somehow just discovered their conservatism; and a “maverick” Republican who had stabbed his party in the back in his cooperation with Democrats a few times too often. The closest thing we had to a true conservative was probably Fred Thompson, who simply entered the race too late and proved unwilling to go out on the campaign trail and work for his votes.

I voted for the maverick back-stabbing Republican as the best choice of an uninspiring lot.

Democrats were apparently just thrilled with their two most popular candidates. They had a young, one-term Senator who had no experience whatsoever, and a former first lady whose entire political career had derived from her husband’s.

The media said that the nomination of Hillary Clinton might energize a listless Republican elecorate. That seemed like it might be true. The Clintons had accumulated more baggage than LAX Airport at Christmas time.

Apart from the fact that the young first-term senator from Illinois had nothing in his past to demonstrate that he was ready to be the chief executive and commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation on earth, nothing about Barack Obama energized me one way or the other.

And then I learned about Trinity United Church of Christ and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

I wouldn’t have been more energized if someone had started poking me with a red-hot branding iron and then started chasing me around the room with it.

It didn’t matter to liberals and godless Democrats, of course. A relationship with one’s pastor was no more significant to them than the occassional talks one might have with one’s barber or one’s mail carrier – and who really cared what a barber or a mailman said, anyway?

But it sure did matter to me.

I know that politicians have to be involved with a lot of shady people in order to finance their campaigns, obtain access with the movers and shakers, and smooze their way to power. I knew that politics makes for strange bedfellows. That’s just part of the game. Since I’m not a politician, and since (apart from consistently voting) I’ve never even been very political, I don’t know a whole lot about such relationships, or how they affect the politicians who forge all these political alliances and marriages of convenience.

But I do know about what goes on in a church.

If my pastor had preached a sermon like the many we have heard about, my church would have erupted in moral outrage. Most of the congregation would have simply got up and walked out well before the sermon was even finished. Those who weren’t there that week would have heard all about it “from the grapevine.” A lot of people would have left, and they wouldn’t have come back.

The words, “God damn America” would have met with righteous outrage, not with standing ovations. And the members of my church – including a number of black members – would likewise never have tolerated any of the other hateful, vile lies that came out of Jeremiah Wright’s mouth against white people or against their country.

Barack Obama said he wasn’t there when Rev. Wright preached his most vile sermons (I’ve always wanted to know where Obama actually was the Sunday morning after 9/11, when Wright preached some of his nastiest stuff of all). But he knew all about what was going on in his so-called “church.”

He had to know.

If Wright’s hateful remarks came out-of-the-blue, in contrast to his usual messges, people would have talked about it (“Did you hear what the Reverend said last Sunday?”). You can’t just say something that hateful or that crazy out of the blue without creating a stir. People would have brought it up and wanted to talk about it. And people would have continued to talk about it. I know all kinds of stuff that goes on in my church and in the lives of my fellow members, whether I was there last Sunday or not.

The only way folk wouldn’t bother to talk about one of Rev. Wright’s “fiery sermons” is if he hadn’t said anything out-of-line with his usual fare.

And of course, if Senator Obama had missed a given Sunday, he could always pick up his copy of Trumpet Magazine (which is very specific about the radical hate-mongering going on in the life of the church). You’d think he would have at least picked up the magazine and flipped through it in one of the several issues in which he’d made the cover.

There’s all kinds of radical and hateful garbage in that magazine.

Heck, he could have just walked into the Trinity Church bookstore one day:

Having been a practicing Christian for more than 40 years now, and a practicing Catholic for 26 of those years, I have visited perhaps 100 various Christian bookstores, both Protestant and Catholic. In all of those places, one thing tied together the books for sale: Christianity.

Not so in Obama’s church bookstore.

I spent more than an hour perusing available books, and found as many claiming to represent Muslim thought as those representing Christian thought. Black Muslim thought, to be specific.

And the books claiming to support Christianity were surprisingly of a more political than religious nature. The books by James H. Cone, Wright’s own mentor, were prominent and numerous.

Now that I have read a number of the books that presumably Wright’s congregants (including Barack Obama) have also read, I can only conclude that the thing tying these volumes together is not Christianity, nor any real religion, but the political philosophy of Karl Marx.

One way or another, Barack Obama was a smart enough man to know what was going on in his church after having been part of it for 23 years.

I remember reading about one of the Nazi death camps the American troops liberated in the closing days of WWII. The soldiers were so morally offended by what they saw that they marched the German citizens of the nearby town to the camp at gunpoint and forced them to look at the horror that had been going on all around them.

The German people said, “We didn’t know. We didn’t know.” And the emaciated, dying Jews summoned up what was left of their strength and shouted, “You knew! You knew!”

Barack Obama knew, too.

He stayed in that church because it suited his Chicago-liberal-politics ambition, and because he didn’t find anything offensive about the message that was being preached.

Nothing Jeremiah Wright said ever seemed to bother Barack Obama until it occurred to him that America might not stand up and cheer the hateful and radical lunacy that was going on in that church the way his fellow radicalized members did. That was when he decided he’d better disinvite his longtime spiritual mentor from speaking at his announcement to run for president.

Barack Obama didn’t become offended until it was politically expedient for him to become offended.

But it sure offended me. It offended my moral compass that a man running for the highest office in the world would listen to such despicable sermons and find nothing wrong with them. And it insulted my intelligence that he would so casually dismiss blame from himself with what amounted to his own version of “the Nuremburg defense.”

Now I’m not trying to argue that Barack Obama is any sort of a Nazi. Apart from remembering AND NEVER FORGETTING the horror this ideology caused, we should never cavalierly use such an evil label to attack opponents. What I’m saying is that Obama is trying to duck out of his knoweldge of and responsibility for what went on in his church the same way that the German people tried to duck out of their knoweldge of and responsibility for what happened in their country under Nazism.

Add to that Obama’s long (and getting longer) list of radical and even terrorist associations. Liberals keep saying, “Judge Obama by what he says, not by those around him.” But at what point do his voluntary, long-standing, adult choices actually cast a reflection on him, on his character, and on his actual values? The guy goes to a radical, marxist-oriented, anti-American church for over 20 years. He publically states that the racist, openly American-hating pastor is his spiritual mentor, and he names his book after one of that pastor’s racially hostile sermons (“White greed drives a world in need”).

And one begins to discover that Barack Obama has more radical associations than you could shake a stick at.

The liberal establishment has tried to destroy Republicans for merely going to speak at Bob Jones University; Barack Obama was a committed member of one of the most radical black-separatist churches in the nation for 23 years.

Is Barack Obama not to be held accountable for anything?

When I realized that the same people who blamed President Bush for every crime under heaven had no intention of applying anything resembling the same hyper-critical examination of their own candidate, I realized that somebody had to do something to reveal the truth. Somebody had to get involved to stop these people.

Barack Obama is the reason why I took up blogging. I had to act to do what I could to stop such a man from ever becoming president of my country. If my part is insignificant, if no one reads my work, if I don’t change a single person’s mind, it is not from my lack of trying.

John McCain wouldn’t have inspired me to get involved. I truly don’t even believe Hillary Clinton would have.

McCain is not great enough, and Hillary – bad as she is – is not quite terrible enough.

We have only to look at the radical church environment that Barack Obama embraced, and the radical anti-American friends and associations that keep popping up one after another, to know that this man has no business even serving in American public life, much less ever becoming our President.

Tags: Barack Obama, blogging, godless, inspired, Jeremiah Wright, John McCain, liberals, outrage, pastor, Trumpet Magazine