Sully says it’s our patriotic duty to accept Obama’s unbelievable claim that he did not know Jeremiah Wright was a nutty, black nationalist who hates America and is filled with resentment and venom, viz.:
Those who ask questions and seek answers about the influence of Wright are doing their democratic duty. It is equally Obama’s duty to answer them as candidly and respectfully and precisely as possible. But those who do not want to hear an answer that gives hope and reconciles our divisions are betraying themselves and this country’s potential. Reveling in cynicism and partisanship is the act of those who truly do not love America.
Sullivan, always driven by emotion, does not want us to look behind the curtain to see what the maddeningly vague Obama really believes. It simply defies reason that Jeremiah Wright’s sermon saying “God damn America” was out of character. Likewise, Wright’s blaming of America after 9/11 is not the kind of foray anyone in his position would undertake after a major national tragedy unless this were a perfectly familiar theme for the preacher and the congregation in question.
Obama’s preferred response is to say he condemns the offensive statements without saying what in particular he condemns, why he condemns these statements, and what he believes that is different. In particular, Obama never reconciles his racial healing generalities with the resentment-driven dogmas of black nationalism. He chose this nationalism by choosing this church, even though there are plenty of other left-leaning, mixed raced congregations in the well integrated Hyde Park neighborhood. Even if Obama can escape a major political cost by comparing his reverend to a “lovable old coot of an uncle who sometimes says offensive things,” we have to ask which parts of Wright’s message does Obama like? (After all, Protestant people switch churches all the time, and preachers, unlike uncles, are not blood relations.)
Did Obama join this church for cynical self-interested reasons because it was the way to get ahead in South Chicago black politics? Did his angry harpy of a wife drag him there? Did he feel obliged as a mulatto, whose loyalties are frequently questioned, to plant himself firmly in the black community through a black nationalist church membership, even though this meant hearing hateful characterizations of his white mother and white family members? Or did he endorse Wright’s radical view in his youth when his identity was less certain, only to reject large portions of this extremism later in life? And, if so, what aspects of the black nationalist program does he reject and what does he still accept? For someone running as a racial healer emphasizing a positive agenda of hope and national solidarity, there is simply no way easily to reconcile his choice of church and preacher with his broader political message.
As in affirmative action, the promise of racial healing Obama advances seems to require willful blindness to reality by whites. In the case of affirmative action, the huge differences between white and black qualifications for universities are suppressed and not well known outside of university admission departments. It is, of course, something people notice through experience, but one is not allowed to write about it or discuss it seriously. So the gap in ability and culture ends up being something of an “official lie.” Likewise, in the case of black religious feelings and experiences, whites are not supposed to mention the extent of hatred, resentment, and alienation that is fomented by hysterical black preachers every Sunday from the pulpit. We’re supposed to accept at face value claims that they believe in the same Christian values the rest of the society aspires to–values that emphasize humility before God, the example of Jesus Christ, individual moral responsibility, solidarity of the human race, and forgiveness–even though every Sunday folks at Jeremiah Wright’s churches hear a Marxist gospel where whites are essentially the devils and blacks are the elect.
Jeremiah Wright is one of many black preachers who adopted this style in the Seventies. It is a far cry from the traditional Christian language of hope and deliverance of early 20th Century black American churches, and it is also a gross deviation from the American rhetoric of equality and fair play that characterized the highly effective early civil rights movement.
If whites knew how much hate and resentment is common among significant sectors of black America–a hatred that whites saw a glimpse of in the real joy of otherwise successful American blacks after the O.J. Simpson verdict–Obama’s post-racial appeal would fizzle because whites would realize how rooted Obama is to that hateful reality. Folks who thought they were endorsing Sidney Poitier would recoil in fear when they discovered the “bait and switch”: the real product would turn out to be a clever, dishonest Al Sharpton figure with a better haircut. Whites would realize how much the Marxist undercurrents of the Sixties have poisoned race relations by inculcating hateful attitudes among blacks, even as white people have effectively abandoned the racist attitudes of yesteryear. The news about Wright is a big deal, because, unless Obama rejects him root and branch, whites would realize that Obama has promised nothing to whites and done nothing to distance himself from nut-jobs like Wright, and this could mean that he promises a great deal of harm to whites as a group. Of course, it will be “for our own good,” the necessary supplication for “healing.”
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More on the larger context here: http://acropolisreview.com/2008/03/barack-obama-condemns-reverend-jeremiah.html
I suggest you read the article below written by a former White evangelical. The double-standard and historical amnesia of White America is sickening. You desire reconciliation without penance or the acceptance of America’s legacy of injustice, inhumanity and white racial privilege in every sector of society. If an African American recounts this history it’s political blasphemy and extremeism, but when white right-wing evangelical fundamentalists indict America it’s called Patriotism!!
Dr. Salim Faraji
Obama’s Minister Committed “Treason” But When My Father Said the Same Thing He Was a Republican Hero
Posted March 16, 2008 | 04:23 PM (EST)
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Read More: Barack Obama Jeremiah Wright, Francis Schaeffer, Jeremiah Wright, Obama Church, Obama Church Faith, Obama Faith, Obama Jeremiah Wright, Obama Pastor, Obama’s Pastor, Breaking Politics News
Buzz up!
When Senator Obama’s preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father — Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer — denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.
Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father’s footsteps) rail against America’s sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the “murder of the unborn,” has become “Sodom” by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, “under the judgment of God.” They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. By comparison Obama’s minister’s shouted “controversial” comments were mild. All he said was that God should damn America for our racism and violence and that no one had ever used the N-word about Hillary Clinton.
Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation’s sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the Republican Party. (This was while I was my father’s sidekick before I dropped out of the evangelical movement altogether.) We were rewarded for our “stand” by people such as Congressman Jack Kemp, the Fords, Reagan and the Bush family. The top Republican leadership depended on preachers and agitators like us to energize their rank and file. No one called us un-American.
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Consider a few passages from my father’s immensely influential America-bashing book A Christian Manifesto. It sailed under the radar of the major media who, back when it was published in 1980, were not paying particular attention to best-selling religious books. Nevertheless it sold more than a million copies.
Here’s Dad writing in his chapter on civil disobedience:
If there is a legitimate reason for the use of force [against the US government]… then at a certain point force is justifiable.
And this:
In the United States the materialistic, humanistic world view is being taught exclusively in most state schools… There is an obvious parallel between this and the situation in Russia [the USSR]. And we really must not be blind to the fact that indeed in the public schools in the United States all religious influence is as forcibly forbidden as in the Soviet Union….
Then this:
There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate… A true Christian in Hitler’s Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion… It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God’s law it abrogates it’s authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation…
Was any conservative political leader associated with Dad running for cover? Far from it. Dad was a frequent guest of the Kemps, had lunch with the Fords, stayed in the White House as their guest, he met with Reagan, helped Dr. C. Everett Koop become Surgeon General. (I went on the 700 Club several times to generate support for Koop).
Dad became a hero to the evangelical community and a leading political instigator. When Dad died in 1984 everyone from Reagan to Kemp to Billy Graham lamented his passing publicly as the loss of a great American. Not one Republican leader was ever asked to denounce my dad or distanced himself from Dad’s statements.
Take Dad’s words and put them in the mouth of Obama’s preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet when we of the white Religious Right denounced America white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words “godly” and “prophetic” and a “call to repentance.”
We Republican agitators of the mid 1970s to the late 1980s were genuinely anti-American in the same spirit that later Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both followers of my father) were anti-American when they said God had removed his blessing from America on 9/11, because America accepted gays. Falwell and Robertson recanted but we never did.
My dad’s books denouncing America and comparing the USA to Hitler are still best sellers in the “respectable” evangelical community and he’s still hailed as a prophet by many Republican leaders. When Mike Huckabee was recently asked by Katie Couric to name one book he’d take with him to a desert island, besides the Bible, he named Dad’s Whatever Happened to the Human Race? a book where Dad also compared America to Hitler’s Germany.
The hypocrisy of the right denouncing Obama, because of his minister’s words, is staggering. They are the same people who argue for the right to “bear arms” as “insurance” to limit government power. They are the same people that (in the early 1980s roared and cheered when I called down damnation on America as “fallen away from God” at their national meetings where I was keynote speaker, including the annual meeting of the ultraconservative Southern Baptist convention, and the religious broadcasters that I addressed.
Today we have a marriage of convenience between the right wing fundamentalists who hate Obama, and the “progressive” Clintons who are playing the race card through their own smear machine. As Jane Smiley writes in the Huffington Post “[The Clinton's] are, indeed, now part of the ‘vast right wing conspiracy.’ (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/im-already-against-the-n_b_90628.html )
Both the far right Republicans and the stop-at-nothing Clintons are using the “scandal” of Obama’s preacher to undermine the first black American candidate with a serious shot at the presidency. Funny thing is, the racist Clinton/Far Right smear machine proves that Obama’s minister had a valid point. There is plenty to yell about these days.
http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/03/17/report-places-obama-at-controversial-july-07-wright-sermon-official-schedule-places-him-in-miami/
If it turns out that Obama was at the church on July 22 and then flew to Miami, he is going to have a hard time recovering from the lie.
It seems to me if he’s got a 1pm engagement in Miami he’s probably getting to the airport in Chicago at 9am, or the night before, with no time for Church. The problem with this defense is that he undoubtedly was at many sermons that he disagreed with and someone will place him at one of them.
Yea, you’re right, particularly with the time change.
Until someone puts him at church when one of these sermons was preached, he will have plausible deniability (despite how unplausible it may seem to us).
It’s actually very plausible to me that a busy politician who travels a lot misses Church quite a bit.
So you think it is plausible that Wright’s positions are a surprise to Obama?
Maybe if he only came to church for photo ops and deal making. Or maybe if Wright is generally much less belligerant in his preaching and if Obama, with his busy political schedule, happened to miss all of his rants. Or maybe if Wright was much more laid back until these last couple years, when Obama has been in Washington and the campaign trail.
But given his long history of association with Wright, doesn’t it seem much more likely that he was well-aware of Wright’s positions?
Give me a break. Obama attended this church for twenty years,and the pastor married Obama and his wife. A white politician who attended a church led by a racist pastor would already have been toast, GAME OVER. The double standard is so evident. Besides all of the racial talk, I never could warm up to Obama, for one simply reason–he says nothing, nothing at all of substance. I am sick and tired of these type of politicians regardless of what race they are.
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