Obama’s Hypocritical Denunciation of Wright Is Too Little, Too Late

Barack Obama has decided it was time to pack up the campaign bus and move on. But before pulling out this time, Obama finally decided to throw his pastor under it.

“I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” Obama said in a last-minute press conference today. The candidate said that after watching Wright’s appearance from Monday, “What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for.”

I’d sure like to know whether Barack Obama was in his church – as so many Americans were – the Sunday following 9/11 when Wright offered one of his most inflammatory ravings of all. But this issue has exploded beyond such questions.

It’s frankly way past time Obama repudiated Jeremiah Wright. He should never have attended the extremely radicalized Trinity United Church in Chicago in the first place. He should have walked away in outrage twenty years ago.

Given full, repeated opportunites to show how he had been “taken out of context,” Jeremiah Wright instead demonstrated that he stood by every “sound bite” he had spoken exactly as it had been depicted. He does believe America is a terrorist nation who deserves terrorist attacks to be directed against it. He does believe that white America created AIDS as a genocide against people of color. He didn’t back away or in any way change the context of any of his radical statements.

By speaking out, Rev. Jeremiah Wright reveals that the “spin” that much of the media – and Barack Obama himself – had been putting on the story for the last couple months was a flat-out lie. These were not sound bites taken out of context. It was malicious to claim that Wright’s sermons had been deliberately taken out of context, because the charge was an attempt to assasinate the characters and reputations of men and women who are now revealed to have been right all the time.

You may despise Fox News’ Sean Hannity and love PBS’ Bill Moyers, but Hannity has been demonstrated to be the objective source, and Moyers the biased ideologue.

Conservatives keep saying that the elite media is biased to the left, and the elite media keeps proving that the allegation is completely true. You have only to go back and review every story that characterized Jeremiah Wright’s remarks as “soundbites” and “thirty second loops” spun “out of context” to see that the media was doing its own spinning out of a pro-liberal and pro-Obama agenda.

For the most part, there was simply no possible context that could have made most of these remarks palatable. America with three Ks, America as a terrorist state, America as a racist developer of genocidal death-viruses. Good luck with that, “What-the-Reverend-really-meant-to-say”-project.

But we still have another spin on this story. We still have the excuse that somehow Barack Obama never heard any of this stuff, and just didn’t know it was going on for all these years.

I can see it now:

Several thousand people settle into their pews as the worship team finishes leading the music.  Rev. Wright steps into the pulpit  to preach. The auditorium quiets down.

“Is he here?” The doormen charged with monitoring Barack Obama’s attendance shake their heads.

“Well, then, America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. 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. 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.! 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. 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!”

And then a security radio crackles in with a report that Barack Obama has driven in and is walking toward the auditorium.

“And Jesus said, love your enemies. Do good to them that hate you,” Wright sweetly and sublimely preaches as Obama files in and takes a pew.

The rest of the congregation smiles knowlingly. And the vast conspiracy, which has succeeded in keeping Barack Obama completely in the dark for twenty years, has succeeded yet again.

The problem with this scenario is that the facts simply say otherwise. Allow me to quote myself from 19 April:

First of all, it is a frankly incredible claim. Barack Obama spent 20 years in this church, and 20 years in an intimate personal mentoring friendship with Jeremiah Wright. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. has been well-known for being a fiery radical way out of the mainstream ever since he coming to the church in 1972. The fact that Wright married Barack and Michelle and baptized their children are only embarrasing details. And Barack Obama had no idea what his mentor for twenty years stood for? When the Reverend Wright delivered a particularly offensive, hateful and anti-American sermon, no one ever told Obama about it? The fact is, in his 1993 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Barack Obama himself reveals this argument for the lie it is. In a vivid description recalling his first meeting with Wright back in 1985, the pastor warned Barack Obama that getting involved with Trinity might turn off other black clergy because of the church’s radical reputation. And when Obama disinvited Jeremiah Wright to give the convocation speach at his announcement of his presidential campaign last year, he essentially told his pastor that he was too extreme for Barack to openly associate himself with him.  Obama knew.

When the video of Rev. Wright’s hateful, racist, anti-American rants first became public, the Obama campaign indignantly indicated that there was nothing worthy of bothering itself about. They had no problem with anything Wright had said. Later in the day, as the video of the ranting pastor spread, the campaign offered a lame dodge. A little after that, Obama himself offered that he’s never heard any of the remarks. Then he gave his speech saying, “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.”

And, of course, the left-leaning media swooned over the speech.

Well, I guess now he’s disowning the black church.  Sorry grandma. You gotta go.

Obama personally records the warning that Wright gave him about the church’s radicalism. The only thing that changed since that day in 1985 was that Barack Obama’s political ambitions have grown to the point where his twenty-year “association” (a word the liberal media loves to use to imply a bogus “guilt by association”) is no longer expedient for a man who had used the influence of Trinity United and its pastor to climb the ladder in Chicago politics. Obama had found the church offered him street credibility with common black folk as well as powerful local connections. And now he finds it politically expedient to bite the hand that fed him.

Obama chooses some interesting words to describe his reason for distancing himself from Wright. “What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for.”

Jeremiah Wright’s worldview has not changed. He is presenting the same worldview that he has been presenting for twenty years.

Let me quote myself again from 15 April, and note that I specifically refer to Jeremiah Wright’s worldview:

When revelations of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racist, anti-American remarks first began to surface, Democratic supporters of Barack Obama quickly claimed that these were just a few comments that were taken out of context. But when one considers black liberation theology, and when one listens to the words of numerous other black liberation theology theologians, this defense quickly becomes untenable.

When Jeremiah Wright talked about “white greed” in his now-famous “Audacity of Hope” message, he was perfectly expounding on black liberation thought. When he claimed that white America deliberately created the AIDS virus as a genocide against blacks, he was accurately exegeting black liberation ideology of class based warfare against the oppressed black class. Or, expressed negatively, when he said that anti-crack cocaine penalties were instituted by racist legislators for the purpose of incarcerating as many blacks as possible, how was that in any way contrary to his central theological beliefs? When Wright denounced Israel as a Zionist state that imposed “injustice and … racism” on Palestinians, how was this not in perfect accord with his theology? When Wright railed against “AmeriKKKa” in his sermons, just how was that contrary to black liberation thought? And when Wright lectured American society that it deserved 9/11, was this in any way out of bounds with either the teachings of black liberation theologians or the Marxism from which they derived their message?

Has Barack Obama, the Harvard Law School graduate, the former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and full-fledged elitist intellectual snob, somehow been totally unaware of black liberation theology? Was he totally unaware of the teachings of his church? Was he completely ignorant of the beliefs of the man who led him to his faith, who married him, who bapatized his children, and who taught him and mentored him for twenty years?

Get real.

Now the Obama campaign is pitching itself as the poor victim of this crazy Jeremiah Wright. And the media is just gobbling it up. But a New York Post story coming out today quotes a source that is problably closer to the mark; that the pastor felt betrayed by a man who had once embraced him as a friend, a mentor, and a spiritual guide. That the pastor feels betrayed that Obama is now distancing himself from views that he knew Wright had had for years and years.

Joe Scarborough is claiming that now that Obama has finally come out and denounced Wright that no one can bring this up any more, as though by sheer brute force of ultra-left-wing will can overcome every question and doubt that this relationship so justifiably raises. What is this guy putting in his coffee?

The media spins, and most of the media spins fast and furiously left. But the truth of the matter is that Barack Obama’s central campaign theme is, and has always been, a fraud. There’s nothing new about him, he isn’t the candidate of hope, and the change he will bring will only be for the worse.

Barack Obama’s close and long-term relationship with Jeremiah Wright calls his character, his honesty, his integrity, and his own beliefs into open question. Should we believe his current campaign spin, or should we believe his actions over the last twenty years?

Jeremiah Wright Needs to Go Home And Read His Bible

Jeremiah Wright, speaking at the 53rd annual Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner sponsored by the NAACP, said, “One of your cities’ political analysts says in print that first just my appearance here in Detroit will be polarizing. Well, I’m not here for political reasons. I am not a politician. I know that fact will surprise many of you because many in the corporate-owned media have made it seem as if I had announced that I’m running to for the Oval Office. I am not running for the Oval Office. I’ve been running for Jesus a long, long time, and I’m not tired yet.”

Jeremiah Wright?  Not political?  Jeremiah Wright?  Running for Jesus?  Wrong and More Wrong. 

Jeremiah Wright claims to be speaking as a Christian pastor.  But let’s look at how Jesus spoke, or how Paul or Peter spoke, and see how radically different Jesus and the men who knew Him spoke about their government.  Jeremiah Wright is clearly NOT speaking in anything resembling their tradition.  Did Jesus rail against the evils of Rome, even once?  No.  Jesus didn’t launch hateful tirades against Pontius Pilate or Ceasar, even as He was being condemned to death by them and by their system of justice.  Did Paul and Peter rail against Rome?  No.  Did they castigate the Roman caesar who would have them both killed?  No.  Did they call upon Christians to become embittered against Roman oppression, or call upon Christians to become bitter and judgmental people because Rome had denied them this benefit or that?  No.  They didn’t.  Nothing of the sort. 

Interestingly, Jesus DID rail against religious leaders who, claiming to know God, in fact were bitter, hateful people who condemned and judged others around them and who greedily enriched themselves at their followers expense.

People rather like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in other  words.

Wright publicly corrected a local Republican politician who called him divisive.  “I am not divisive,” Wright said. “Tell him the word is ‘descriptive’ — I described the conditions in this country. Conditions divide, not my descriptions.”

“I describe the conditions in this country. Conditions divide, not my descriptions. Somebody say “Amen.” If you can’t say “Amen,” you’re too mad, just say “Ouch.””

The problem is that most of his “descriptions” are flat-out lies motivated by flat-out hatred for whites and for America.

When he labeled this country’s attempts to gain some handle on the rampant abuse of crack and the crime it generates as a scheme motivated to incarcerate black men, that was as malicious as it was false.  When he claimed that white America had created the AIDS virus as a genocide against people of color, that was as hateful as it was factually incorrect.  When he characterized America as AmeriKKKa, that was as racist and hateful as it was untrue.  

That aint “speaking truth to power.”  And it sure aint “running for Jesus.”

I am familiar with the “Tuskegee Experiment,” which provides Wright with his grounds for claiming that America created the AIDS virus to kill blacks.  And I realize that it was a medical experiment that was based on incredibly callous and racist attitudes.  Of the 400 black men used like laboratory animals, 128 died from syphillis or related complications, 40 wives had been infected, and 19 children were born with the disease.  But I also realize that this “experiment” – as vile as it was – does not and did not represent the values of the United States of America.  It should be taught as an object lesson in history.  It should not be presented as a depiction of the racist attitudes of Americans today, as Wright presents it.  If we were the sort of people who would favor treating black men in this manner today, I’m thinking we probably wouldn’t be considering a black man for President.

And mind you, the incredibly evil Japanese Unit 731 was directly responsible for 10,000 deaths due to such practices as vivisection of living humans, subjecting living humans to germ and chemical warfare, performing amputations on living humans, submitting living humans to die of slow exposure to cold, etcetera.  And they were responsible for 200,000 more deaths as their experiments bore fatal fruit.  But Jeremiah Wright has labeled America as a hateful warmonger who “nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye” for putting an end to Japan’s barbarity (which, by the way, extended way, way, way beyond Unit 731).  I simply don’t understand the implicit contradiction.   

Wright also attempts to separate himself from politics, but he is political to his very core, just as his black liberation theology is political (as well as Marxist) to its very core.

“It is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright. It is an attack on the black church,” he said, to applause.

Only a genuine politician – and a politician of the worst stripe at that – could be so arrogant and so vain as to wrap himself in an entire movement, such that any criticism of himself is tantamount to criticism of the movement.

The great mind of Booker T. Washington recognized that “There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do do not want to lose their jobs.”

I actually have come to believe that Jeremiah Wright does not want Barack Obama to become president.  If “white America” elects him, after all, it would serve as a disproof for all the anger and blame and hatred and charges of racism that Jeremiah Wright has based his career upon.  It would mean that he – and not the United States – is the real hater.