March 14, 2008

Memo to Barack: How Do You Think “God Damn America” Will Play in Peoria?

Explains ABC:

Obama’s Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11

Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor says blacks should not sing “God Bless America” but “God damn America.”

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s south side, has a long history of what even Obama’s campaign aides concede is “inflammatory rhetoric,” including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own “terrorism.”

In a campaign appearance earlier this month, Sen. Obama 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.

Rev. Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, “The Audacity of Hope.”

An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright’s sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.

“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,” he said in a 2003 sermon. “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.”

In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism.

“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,” Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

“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,” he told his congregation.

. . .

“He has impacted the life of Barack Obama so much so that he wants to portray that feeling he got from Rev. Wright onto the country because we all need something positive,” said another member of the congregation.

. . .

Obama has praised at least one aspect of Rev. Wright’s approach, referring to his “social gospel” and his focus on Africa, “and I agree with him on that.”

Sen. Obama declined to comment on Rev. Wright’s denunciations of the United States, but a campaign religious adviser, Shaun Casey, appearing on “Good Morning America” Thursday, said Obama “had repudiated” those comments. …

No, we’re not done discussing Jeremiah Wright.

Provoked by an Obama supporter’s remark that white people can’t possibly understand what goes on in a black church, I’ve spent a good deal of time over the past 24 hours trying to understand the particular brand of theology that fuels much of Wright’s rhetoric.

I think I have a handle on it. While my opinion of Wright’s methods is even dimmer than it was yesterday, I think I have a better understanding of its origins, and even of some of the code phrases he employs.

I want to give myself some more time to gather my thoughts — or revelations, actually, as what I’ve discovered explains a lot of things, such as Barack’s refusal to do the right thing with regard to the Donnie McClurkin imbroglio, and Michelle Obama’s ongoing disparagement of America, among other things (and how all of this plays into a fascinating perspective of religious identity) — before I attempt to explain where I think this is all coming from… and the insight it provides into the real Barack Obama.

Judging from the astronomical number of hits yesterday’s Wright entry received, I know there are many, many people as simultaneously interested in and outraged by the Wrong Reverend Wright as I am.

Stay tuned.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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