Barack Obama for President of God Damn America

John Edwards to his class warfare cue from Karl Marx and turned “the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie” dialectic into “two Americas.”

Well, I think that both Marx and Edwards are full of crap; but there clearly are two Americas these days.

I think that Barack Obama’s pastor, spiritual mentor, and member of the family for 23 years hit the “two Americas” nail closer to the head.  Jeremiah Wright said there were two Americas, too:

“No, no, no, not ‘God Bless America,’ ‘God Damn America.’“

There’s the United States of God bless America, and there’s the United States of God damn America.  Ronald Reagan tried to lead us toward the former, and Barack Obama will try to lead us toward the latter.  And we shouldn’t confuse Wright’s and Obama’s two America’s anymore than we should confuse Marx’s and Edwards’ version.

Am I being unfair?  Absolutely not.

Barack Obama made this church – and its theology, and its pastor, and its congregation – his home for 23 years.  That’s a long time.  It’s way past long enough to realize that you’ve made a mistake.  And it’s way, way past long enough to claim ignorance as an excuse.  How many years can you freely choose to immerse yourself in an environment before you become personally responsible for your choice?

The leftist Rolling Stone had this to say:

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama’s life, or his politics. The senator “affirmed” his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a “sounding board” to “make sure I’m not losing myself in the hype and hoopla.” Both the title of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright’s sermons. “If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from,” says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, “just look at Jeremiah Wright.”

So I’m looking at him.

John McCain once had the famous line that “I looked into Putin’s eyes and I saw K.G.B.”  Well, when I look into Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama’s eyes I see, “God damn America.”

The whole nation looked at Jeremiah Wright, and we all heard him shout, “God damn America!”  And how Barack Obama’s congregation cheered and applauded when Rev. Wright shouted, “No, no, no.  Not God bless America.  God damn America!”  We heard him viciously attack America and white Americans on any number of fronts.  Barack Obama’s pastor and spiritual mentor for 23 years – who married him, bappized his children, and was like family to him – said that racism was how this country was founded and how it is still run.  He said that America was the number one killer in the world.  He said that we immorally bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki without batting an eye.  He said that we killed women and children by bombing Cambodia, Iraq, and Nicaragua (where Marxist liberation theology came from). He said 9/11 was merely America’s own chickens coming home to roost and we deserved to be attacked by terrorists because WE were the real terrorist.  He said that the government gives black people drugs just so it can put them in prison.  He said that AIDS is a white-America-created genocide against black people.  He spelled America with three KKKs.  The very sermon that so inspired Obama that it inspired his book title, “The Audacity of Hope,” had the phrase, “white greed drives a world in need.”

If you would have sat through that year after year, then you vote for the man who did sit through it year after year.  Vote for God damn America.

Jeremiah Wright preached his famous “God damn America” message and all the others before thousands of Barack Obama’s fellow congregation more than five years ago.  Barack Hussein Obama’s pastor preached a lot of vicious, vile, racist, and profoundly anti-American stuff while Obama’s fellow congregants stood up and cheered.  And it never bothered Barack Obama one little bit until the public started finding out about it.

Obama said he wasn’t ever at the church when anything REALLY bad was said.  But how could such an intelligent man be so completely ignorant, and be such a pathetic judge of character?  Thousands of his friends heard those messages, and the same vicious stuff that was coming out of Jeremiah Wright’s mouth on Sundays was similarly featured in the Church’s Trumpet Magazine (which featured Obama on its cover several times). Even AFTER those “soundbites” came out, Obama continued to sit on the fence.  He said he could no more disown Wright than he could disown the black community.  In the same way that we would later find out that Obama did not care about the terrorist past of William Ayers – whom Obama partnered with to advance a “education” agenda that taught children radicalism rather than “the Three R’s,” Obama revealed how comfortable he was to be immersed in a radicalized environment.

He continued to remain in the church after ALL of the above sermon messages surfaced, and he remained in the church until it became more of a political liability than an asset.

Barack Hussein Obama has known about Jeremiah Wright’s radical nature from day one, and embraced it.  The Rolling Stone biography of Obama continues:

In his 1993 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Obama recounts in vivid detail his first meeting with Wright in 1985. The pastor warned the community activist that getting involved with Trinity might turn off other black clergy because of the church’s radical reputation.

And that incredibly radical influence is very much a part of him, as the Rolling Stone article embraces:

Obama has now spent two years in the Senate and written two books about himself, both remarkably frank: There is a desire to own his story, to be both his own Boswell and his own investigative reporter. When you read his autobiography, the surprising thing — for such a measured politician — is the depth of radical feeling that seeps through, the amount of Jeremiah Wright that’s packed in there. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising.

It isn’t at all surprising that a man who spent 23 years immersing himself in the radical theology of a radical spiritual guru at a radical and racist church would himself be a radical.  What is incredibly surprising is that so many millions of voters would so ignorantly and so naively dismiss that background and embrace the man who was so profoundly shaped by it.

So they are voting for God damn America.

I’m not going to try to tell anyone not to vote for God damn America.  If you want it, vote for it.  I’m simply saying, don’t be an uninformed ignorant fool who doesn’t even have a clue who the man he or she is voting for actually is.  You aren’t what you say in your flowerly speech; you’re what you do.  And for the overwhelming majority of Barack Hussein Obama’s life, he has been a willing part and participant in God damn America.  Open your eyes.

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.

Trinity Magazine a Trumpet Call to Obama’s Link to Extremism

The ties between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ are not going away – because they shouldn’t. There’s just too much meat on that rotting carcass.

Prior to the revelations of Obama’s associations with the Rev. Wright and Trinity, I was one of the substantial majority of conservatives that feared and distrusted a Hillary Clinton administration far more than an Obama presidency. Other than his documented liberalism, I had no axes to grind with the junior senator from Illinois.

But as soon as I started hearing the words of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and started to understand the twenty year relationship Barack Obama had with a purveyor of hatred, bitterness, and racism, that changed like a dirty diaper.

I immediately knew that: 1) I’d never heard anything remotely so vile come from any pastor I’ve ever sat under; and 2) that I would have got up and walked out of any church in which I ever did hear anything so vile.

And right from the start, I simply could not believe that a man as intelligent and articulate as Barack Obama clearly is – a graduate of Harvard Law School and editor of the Harvard Law Review – could be so completely ignorant of the basic theology and teaching of a church he attended for over twenty years.

The progress of this story is telling:

In a campaign appearance in early March, Sen. Obama initially 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.

In a statement made to ABCNews.com the day the Wright “statements” began to come out, 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.”

The attitude of the Obama camp was really more selective outrage that the press would cover Wright’s outrageous remarks than over the nature of the remarks themselves.

But within days, it was evident that Barack Obama had to distance himself from his longtime pastor.

In his Philadelphia speech, delivered March 18, Obama said:  Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.”

He went on to say of Wright, “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.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

But Jeremiah Wright proceeded to go from forum to forum to prove that Obama’s characterization of Wright’s remarks was a flat-out lie.  Rather than “the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube,” Wright proceeded to defend every single one of the hateful “soundbites” that had been seen coming out of his mouth.  It turned out that Trinity United Church of Christ really HAD “conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators.”  It turned out that those commentators had been far more accurate and honest than Obama was.

And as Jeremiah Wright repeatedly and passionately defended his views – and demonstrated that they had represented his key beliefs all the time – Barack Obama finally did come out and denounce the man who had been his spiritual advisor for over twenty years.  We can only surmise that he has not yet denounced his grandmother (a.k.a. that “typical white person.”

The question is not whether Obama believes exactly the same things that Jeremiah Wright believes (we frankly don’t know what Obama believes, given the massive disconnect between his words and his actions).  The thing that bothers me is the fact that Wright said one hateful thing after another, and somehow nothing seemed to trigger sufficient outrage to walk out and denounce the pastor as well  the church that gave this pastor his pulpit.

What would it take to make you vote with your feet and say, “That’s it.  I’m out of here”? The fact is that somehow, in this absolutely toxic environment, Barack Obama never heard anything that reached his threshold.

I have never heard the kinds of things that Wright has said come out of the mouth of any pastor I have ever heard.  And if I ever were to hear such remarks, I would be out of that church as fast as I would be out of a toxic dump facility.

Obama has continued to maintain that – although he heard certain “controversial remarks” (being careful to never ever mention the specific content of said “controversial remarks”) – he has never heard any of the outright hate that he now acknowledges have “outraged” and “saddened” him.

But that story has seemed so implausible.

And now its even more implausible.

Now we know that Obama has repeatedly appeared in a church publication called Trumpet Magazine, a magazine that has repeatedly featured one Barack Obama on its pages, and even on its cover.

Now it’s not just a matter that Obama didn’t bother to hear.  It’s that he didn’t bother to read either.

Stanley Kurtz has a devastating piece titled, “Jeremiah Wright’s ‘Trumpet’“: The content of the magazine produced by Barack Obama’s pastor reveals the content of his character.

Kirtz says, “Wright founded Trumpet Newsmagazine in 1982 as a “church newspaper”–primarily for his own congregation, one gathers–to “preach a message of social justice to those who might not hear it in worship service.” So Obama’s presence at sermons is not the only measure of his knowledge of Wright’s views. Glance through even a single issue of Trumpet, and Wright’s radical politics are everywhere–in the pictures, the headlines, the highlighted quotations, and above all in the articles themselves. It seems inconceivable that, in 20 years, Obama would never have picked up a copy of Trumpet.”

Kurtz provides a littany of the absolute poison that this magazine contains.

Another arcticle is titled, “Obama Featured With Farrakhan MANY Times on Trinity’s “Trumpet” magazine cover.”

The article – after linking Obama to the Black Panthers by way of statements from the Panthers – concludes: “This is the disaster of Barack. Instead of transcending race, he has embraced and lived in the heart of a radical theology that preaches racial division and black dominance. I’ll stick with Martin Luther King. I want to be judged by the content of my character, not the color of my skin. Malik Shabazz certainly does not believe that.”

Another article on the same vein is title, “Obama, The Fulfillment of Black Liberation.”

A very valuable resource of Barack Obama’s future electibility problems is titled, “Barack “I-didn’t-know” Obama.”

Now, it’s bad enough that Barack Obama is linked to all of this.  But now it turns out that someone at Trinity has been scrubbing the church webstite to delete embarassing ties between Barack Obama and the church, prompting ABC’s Jake Tapper to ask the question, “Who’s Scrubbing the Trinity United Church of Christ Website?”

Interestingly, Trumpet used to have a web presence and now it doesn’t seem to.

Here’s the Google cache of the Trumpet Magazine heralding Louis Farrakhan (“When Minister Farrakhan speaks, Black America listens,” says the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright,likening the Minister’s influence to the E. F. Hutton commercials of old. “Everybody may not agree with him, but they listen…Minister Farrakhan will be remembered as one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African American religious experience.”)

Through a web archive search I also found THIS ARTICLE from the September 2005 Trumpet, in which Rev. Wright wrote: “Conservative fanatics line up on the side of al-Qaeda or they line up behind George Bush. Both are terrorists! Both believe that war is the answer. Both believe in murdering innocent people…”

Who’s scrubbing the web to sanitize this story?

Ever hear of Watergate?

Duane R. Patterson posts a longer story detailing more information.

An article by Aaron Klein subtitled, “Magazine’s reinforcement of anti-American rhetoric
casts doubt on senator’s insistence he was not aware” contains still more ammunition.

Most Americans have only seen the tip of the iceberg of facts establishing a connection between Barack Obama and all kinds of hateful ideas, people, and groups.

Let’s hope that the Democratic Party – which is well on its way to anointing this man as its presidential nominee – is in the process of pulling off a modern day “Titanic.”