Soccer Dad

Speech less

Even after Sen. Obama's speech explaining Rev. Wright, there are still aspects of his ties to Rev. Wright that are troubling. What his attendance at Church shows tolerance for, according to Jeff Jacoby, is:

The problem for Obama is that Wright, the spiritual leader he has so long embraced, is a devotee not of King, - who in that same speech warned against "drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred" - but of the poisonous hatemonger Louis Farrakhan, whom the church's magazine honored with a lifetime achievement award. The problem for Obama, who campaigns on a message of racial reconciliation, is that the "mentor" whose church he joined and has generously supported is a disciple not of King but of James Cone, founder of a "black liberation" theology that teaches its adherents to "accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy."

Above all, the problem for Obama is that for two decades his spiritual home has been a church in which the minister damns America to the enthusiastic approval of the congregation, and not until it threatened to scuttle his political ambitions did Obama finally find the mettle to condemn the minister's odium.

It doesn't make a difference how much Sen. Obama explains the harshness of his pastor's words, he was still in attendance hearing that harshness for twenty years (and perhaps he chose the church because of Rev. Wright's views)

Charles Krauthammer is even harsher in The Speech: A brilliant Fraud. (or here.)

Krauthammer identifies the two major points of the speech, moral equivalence and white guilt. The first he dismisses with:

"I can no more disown (Wright) than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus' time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did grandma.

Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?

In terms of the speech's appeal to white guilt Krauthammer argues that then Sen. Obama is approving of .

.. the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance.

This might work, except that Sen. Obama, as Krauthammer points out, was supposed to be the post-racial candidate, a black man who was beyond those concerns. Krauthammer concludes:

If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

This is the problem that no degree of eloquence can brush aside.

The media having been a part of this revelation that is hurting Sen. Obama at the polls has now found that Rev. Wright visited that Clinton White House and that Sen. McCain has sought out Rev. Hagee. So the effort to minimize the effort has begun.

Posted by SoccerDad at March 21, 2008 6:16 AM | TrackBack