Jeremiah Wright and Obama

You all have probably heard about Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s now-infamous sermons. He, of course, is the preacher at Barack Obama’s church, and has been known to say some nutty things. He’s been saying them for years, but apparently, the media was loathe to talk about it (MSNBC, CNN, ABC and CBS because they love the guy, and Fox because of fear of accusations of racism, most likely).

Wright is essentially a black nationalist. He hates America, admittedly so, and like many prominent blacks, honestly seems to believe that race is at the core of every issue. After 9/11, he ripped America for its evils and said it was just punishment, stated that AIDs is a disease created by “white America” to destroy blacks, and says that God Bless America should be changed to “God D*** America”.

Obama has been attending Wright’s church for 20-25 years. Wright conducted Obama’s marriage to his wife and baptized both of Obama’s children. Obama has put out a statement saying that not only was he not there the Sundays that Wright made these numerous statements, but that he disagrees vehemently with him.

What difference does it make whether Obama was there? What would he have done, confronted Wright in front of the entire multi-thousand person church? Walked out? Walking out would be admirable only if it were followed up by leaving the church and never setting foot in its doors again. Obama had to know, one way or another (if the comments Wright made were unusual, then wouldn’t someone in the congregation of 10,000 talked to Obama about them?) And if he didn’t, then he does now, and there’s no excuse for him to NOT switch churches. Wright has recently stepped down as the church’s preacher, but a presidential nominee for this country’s most honored position doesn’t belong at a church that would allow a man so bigoted to preach at their pulpit. Of every Democrat I’ve seen on TV trying to defend this, the best they can come up with is that George W. Bush spoke at Bob Jones’ University, which until recently has had an extremely racist past.

So maybe George W. Bush shouldn’t have spoken there. I understand that position. But does that compare to attending a church led by a racist not one Sunday, not until you figured out about his racism, but for 25 years, and allowing him to baptize your children and marry you to your wife, and accepting him as a spiritual advisor? No, it doesn’t.

As for Obama not hearing the comments, there is new evidence that he actually did know at least some of what Wright was saying. First off, he always states that he wasn’t in the pews when those words were said. That implies strongly that he knew something of what was being preached, because he simply says he didn’t hear the comments, not that he had no idea about them. If he had no idea they were being made, then he would’ve said so openly to resolve himself of the matter. Secondly, the church crowd was roaring and loving Wright’s speeches. Now, my church isn’t as openly expressive as Senator Obama’s, but if my preacher went into, say, an anti-Semitic rant, the only thing you could hear in the church was that stunned, awkward silence, and the preacher would be fired that afternoon. That’s because anti-Semitism is not tolerated in my church (neither would baselessly attacking America be tolerated). Anti-American rants are more than tolerated in Obama’s church: they are wildly applauded.

The next Democratic counterpoint, once again, is not at all a defense of Obama (a logical defense of his actions regarding his church is impossible), but accusations regarding McCain’s acceptance of John Hagee’s endorsement. John Hagee, a San Antonio preacher with what I call “End-Times-Syndrome” (that being the irrepressible obsession with interpreting Revelation and the end times so as to predict when the world will end), has stated that the Catholic Church is the “Great Whore of Babylon” mentioned in Revelation.

I encourage all of you to read the part in Revelation about the Great Whore of Babylon and see just how wrong Hagee is. But that’s beside the point. Hagee’s view of the Catholic Church is religious on every level; Wright’s view of the United States is political on every level. That’s not even mentioning that Hagee happened to endorse McCain, who likely has never attended his church, as opposed to Wright being Obama’s spiritual advisor for 20 or more years.

(I said my opinion on this fairly well here, but there’s a much better appraisal of this issue on The Weekly Standard’s website that I recommend: right here.)

Arrogance You Can Believe in

My prediction is that Obama will not leave his church. Why? Obama has shown a deeply disturbing pattern of arrogance in the way he deals with his problems. When confronted by Hilary Clinton in the last debate about his relations with Louis Farrakhan (the strongly anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam) and his refusal to reject Farrakhan’s support, Obama waved it off as a simple matter of semantics. When his wife faced trouble with her laughably ignorant anti-American comments, she hardly backed down at all, and had no apologies. Now that Obama is under pressure for his Chicago politicking past, he simply blows it off as a bit of poor judgment, and don’t we all have that sometimes? When Clinton confronted him in the debate about his plagiarizing from other politicians, he responded, “come on.”

Obama is soft, warm and fuzzy on the outside, and icily hard on the inside. We’re looking at a man who admits to no mistakes whatsoever, and never apologizes. Some folks do have this problem, especially politicians, but this continued and permanent hardness of the inside is what makes Obama the ultimate fair-weathered politician: he’s great when he has momentum; he’s awful when he’s thrown into a slugfest. That’s on the campaign trail, though. In the eight years most presidents spend in the Oval Office, about one or two years of it is spent with the wind at your back. In other words, it’s a longstanding slugfest between you and foreign leaders, you and terrorists, you and the military, you and your staff and Department heads, you and Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike, between you and three quarters of the country and four fifths of the world. The gridlock inducing gears of Washington will grind a self-centered man like Obama into dust, if given the chance. Presidents aren’t made by rousing speeches to buzzed college kids; they’re made through smashing your way through Washington as effectively as possible to do what you came to do. Woodrow Wilson had to shut down newspapers and propagandize the masses; Lincoln had to destroy half of the country; Reagan had to buck the conventional wisdom almost entirely at every turn; and Clinton had to weasel and lie his way through half the American public’s hatred.

Were all of those men great presidents? Of course not. But nobody denied their effectiveness at doing what they wanted. Only one normal (which is to say, excluding George Washington, whose status of American legend rightly had the masses at his feet) president has ever been effective at policy implementation by uniting a country, and that is Franklin Roosevelt. One president in 232 years of American politics has done it, and he was only able to do it by coming in during the greatest economic disaster in world history. Here’s to hoping Obama won’t be the second, and here’s why:

The problem with unifiers is that they have two deep flaws, those being ignorance and intolerance. Their ignorance is not that they don’t know enough, but that they ignore those who disagree with them on the basis that dissenters are not for unity. Their intolerance is based on that knack for dismissing any who disagree with them on the basis of being “against unity”. Obama, one could argue, really does listen to the other side. But does he really care what they say? Just because he listens to a pro-lifer doesn’t mean he will mitigate his pro-choice stance in any way, and the same applies to other issues. All Obama is trying to do is placate those who oppose him into thinking he’s on their side, even when he loses the War on Terror, encourages the deaths of the unborn, and ruins the country’s economy. He’s not reaching out, he’s running his mouth (which is far from the same thing). Obama’s not a unifier: he’s a hard leftist who will do anything, even if it includes deceiving independents and Republicans into thinking that he agrees with or respects them (he doesn’t agree with us, and when he pulls out of Iraq, appoints ultra-liberal Supreme Court justices that legislate from the bench, and raises taxes by large margins, his respect for any of our views will be totally irrelevant).

The government is not a place where mutual respect solves problems; it’s a place where if you’re not going to compromise, someone is going to have to win. It’s a mean business because it’s a deeply serious business (sorry, Michelle, Washington will always be mean and there’s nothing your husband can do about it).

Obama’s “unity” is just another ploy to win without compromising, and that’s what makes his flowery deception so incredibly disgusting.

Real Integrity

“Once again, we have a politician campaigning on integrity when he has none.” –Howard Dean, about John McCain.

Governor Dean, you never cease to amaze me, whether you’re screaming your head off after a loss, stating emphatically that George Bush is not your neighbor, telling a man twenty years your elder to shut up and sit down, or calling John McCain a liar, essentially. Dean did this because of McCain’s effort to get out of public funding. I’m not too clear on all the details of this whole affair, to be honest. But I do know that Dean, during his failed 2004 campaign, did almost exactly what McCain has done now, for starters. I also know that McCain is prompted to back out of public funding because Barack Obama is backing out of public funding, which Obama is doing because he’s realized how good at private fundraising he is.

Now, as for Dean claiming that McCain has no integrity, I do have more words on that. During a special one hour interview with Sean Hannity, John McCain related his story of capture and his time in the Vietnamese prison camps (I think it’s the 35 year anniversary of his release, coming up). He started by talking about how he crashed almost in the middle of Hanoi in north Vietnam, was dragged from his aircraft’s wreckage by an angry mob, which proceeded to break at least five bones and beat him severely (he stated he was very fortunate the Vietnamese authorities showed up when they did to “rescue” him). He went without medical attention for the better part of a week, when he first made it to the prison camp. A month or two into his tenure, his captors realized he was the son of an American Admiral, and offered to set him free. He refused.

When he was asked about why he didn’t accept this chance, he first cited United States military policy of “first come, first leave”, that it would be a direct violation of the rules to accept release before the men who came prior to him were released. McCain’s commitment to following military policy was impressive enough, but he had another reason, as well: he knew very well that the North Vietnamese weren’t fighting to win the war in a normal way, they were fighting a propaganda war. He knew that they would remind POW’s everywhere constantly that the son of the Admiral got out before they did, he knew that he would become a symbol for them of a weak but lucky American coward that only looked out for himself, and John McCain instead decided to become the opposite. He denied release, and said he was beat harshly and daily for the whole next month.

McCain stayed in that camp for the next 5 years. He bears all kinds of scars, both emotional and physical, from his awful tenure there, the most obvious of which is that he cannot raise his arms above his own head due to his broken shoulders that didn’t heal properly. But not all of McCain’s memories are heroic, from those camps: he was, after refusing for a long time (and being tortured continually for it), forced into sign a statement that said Americans were war criminals that had no place in Vietnam. He expressed, once he was released, a deep shame that haunts him still in committing this act, saying that he let down himself, his country, and his fellow servicemen. McCain gave in temporarily, but his hope was never crushed, and his spirit never truly broken. John McCain has said that he was inspired by his comrades, inspired by his patriotism, and inspired by his faith to hold as firm as humanely possible to his commitments in that Vietnamese prison.

That, Governor Dean, is integrity.

Why Obama’s Response Failed

So Obama gave a speech the other day in an attempt to clarify his relationship with Reverend Wright as well as to handle the discussion of race in America. He said generally what I expected and predicted above: he won’t distance himself from Wright, etc. But it was an awful speech for three reasons. The first is that he compared distancing himself from his bigoted, anti-American, hateful preacher to distancing himself from the black community.

Excuse me? Is he attempting to communicate that the ENTIRE black community is bigoted, anti-American, and hateful? A large part of it is, I believe. But to say that the black community mirrors Reverend Wright is to say that the Evangelical community mirrors Pat Robertson. In fact, the Wright-black community connection is even worse, because Robertson is generally more prominent (and normally more socially-acceptable) than Wright in evangelical circles.

I believe that there are two halves of black America (though I’m not sure as to the size of each): the Old half is led by men like Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright. It is living in 1960, remembering 1850, and can’t get over racism like white Americans have. The New half is the part that has gotten over racism, and is moving forward. So when someone asks “are we ready for a black president?” I immediately would answer, “which half is he from?” If the man is from the New half of black America, I would have no problem with voting for him on cultural grounds or view of race. If he’s from the Old half, then I have a deep problem voting for him, because he can’t see the way race has changed over the past 60 years, and will therefore be fighting the battles of 60 years ago. I believe I speak for almost all white Americans when I say this.

Obama was supposed to be from the New half of black America for many reasons: first of all, he’s not actually black, being half-white. Second of all, he’s from Honolulu, not exactly a place with history of prejudice. Third of all, he was raised by white grandparents in a white culture. Finally, he’s an Ivy League guy who graduated from Harvard law school. None of these things signifies any Old black American allegiances. Obama could’ve been almost a lock for the first president of significant African blood because of the fact that he was more a cross, both culturally and physically, between the New black America and white America, but the fact that he decided to attend Jeremiah Wright’s church may be what ends up stopping him. That’s because 90% of whites and Hispanics, whether they admit it or not, can’t stand the Old half of black America. In the words of Clarence Thomas (the leading proponent of the New black America), all the Old half of black America does is “B****, B****, moan, and whine.” Obama now is appearing less and less like a New black American or a white American, the kind Americans have been dying to vote for and have been voting for (respectively), but is appearing to be the Old kind of black American. That’s why this business with Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan is so important.

The second part of the speech that irked me was when Obama compared disowning Wright to disowning his grandmother on his mother’s side, who confessed to him her fear of black men and occasionally uttered ethnic stereotypes that made Obama cringe. Ok, let me give a little straight talk: some women are afraid of any men, regardless of their skin color, and blacks do have a higher crime rate than whites. Just the same, young men have a higher crime rate than anyone else. Add it all up, and logic tells us that it’s not the most ridiculous thing in the world for a paranoid woman with no means of self-defense to have a fear of young black men. I’m not excusing or justifying it, I’m saying that Obama made it sound like she stole young black children’s lunch money because she was a racist, and comparing it to Wright’s extremely hateful (as opposed to worried and mistrusting) statements and ideas made from a public pulpit at a church was insane.

As for the ethnic stereotypes, I’m going to be honest: if you were to take a room of 100 people and ask them how many had thought ethnic stereotypes to themselves, I would be willing to bet about 90 had. If you then ask them how many ever uttered, even as a joke, an ethnic stereotype, I would bet about 70 had. Once again, I’m not excusing Obama’s grandmother’s behavior, I’m saying that if this is as much of a qualification for disownment in Obama’s mind as saying, “G-D American,” the “U.S. of KKK”, claiming that the United States invented AIDS to kill black people, and giving a Lifetime Achievement award to a man who proclaimed that the white man is “the skunk of the earth,” then Obama’s judgment is seriously flawed. Not to mention that Wright is Obama’s preacher, no matter how close he is, he’s NOT the grandmother that raised him, and spent the latter part of her life as a mother to him, loving and aiding him however she could.

The third and final part of the speech that was angering to me was Obama’s insulting of every American’s intelligence by flip-flopping, in the middle of the speech, about whether he heard the comments or not. He essentially confessed to hearing them or at least knowing about them, even while sort-of implying he didn’t just days earlier. Now, he obviously was finally telling the truth this time: the Obama campaign juggernaut, like every big campaign, most definitely has a section dedicated to defense from potential attacks and threat assessments. You can’t tell me they didn’t do a little research on the man’s pastor of 20 years and spiritual mentor in an effort to prepare responses for Obama against potential attacks. The idea that Obama didn’t know about it until now is insane, and is proved by his uninviting of Jeremiah Wright to his announcement about his bid for the presidency (which actually helps prove that he didn’t need his campaign to dig it up, he knew before his campaign even got started). It’s also proved in his initial denial of knowing about it: “I wasn’t in the pews when Wright made the comments in question.” That doesn’t deny that he heard recordings of the comments. That doesn’t deny his friends at church talked to him about the comments. All it denies is that the three, four or five sentences the media has repeatedly played were actually heard by Barack Obama while he was sitting in a church pew at the United Trinity Church of Christ. It’s the most pathetically open-ended denial I’ve ever heard.

So why hasn’t Obama admitted that he knew about the comments, at least, and chose never to confront Reverend Wright about them? Why hasn’t he apologized for it? Because it’s not his way. Obama has built himself into the angel to save Washington, and how can he do that when he doesn’t have the guts, the will or the wit to confront his own preacher, a close friend of his, about the statements that preacher made? And if he can’t confront a man who’s probably his father figure about some bigoted and hateful statements, I wonder what he’s going to say to Kim Jong Il (the dictator of North Korea whom Obama has opened the possibility of speaking with), who is responsible for more death and pain than Osama Bin Laden can dream of. How will he handle Amendenijad, Iran’s dictator, a man who professedly wishes to throw Israel into the sea, effectively advocating genocide?

The mainstream media is completely swooning over his speech yesterday (Chris Matthews called it the greatest speech ever given on race, apparently forgetting one of the greatest of all American speeches and easily the best on race, spoken 45 years ago from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial) of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that in the words of Charles Krauthammer, Obama’ speech was “a beautiful and elegantly worded disaster.” (Doesn’t that describe Obama himself?)