April 28, 2008

So, Jeremiah Wright is sinking Barack Obama? Told ya so.

In the course of less than one hour this morning, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., did more damage to Barack Obama than any ten of his lunatic “God Damn America” rants from the pulpit.

Even the Obamaniacs are upset — yes, even the ones who have been screaming “Wright is RIGHT!” and “Obama could NOT disown his pastor” and “This is just a tempest in a teapot, a manufactured controversy, a non-issue — Wright won’t have any effect on Obama’s candidacy,” and all the rest of the “Blah, blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah, blah“ garbage that, these days, has about as much effect on those of us rooted in reality-based thinking as dragging one’s foot to stop a 747.

Well, guess what? The unending Wright story is not a tempest in a teapot — and now that virtually every MSM outlet in the country is leading with headlines suggesting big trouble for the Obama campaign, now the Obamaniacs are getting it. Now they’re screaming, “OMG, Obama’s got to DO something! Obama’s got to completely, totally disown Wright, right NOW!”

How the band has changed its tune.

(The only thing that hasn’t changed: When one Obamanut expresses even a single, rational, independent thought, the rest of the Obamanuts eat their former comrade alive. But that’s the usual reaction when the collective cognitive dissonance of a cult is threatened.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual. In short, Wright did the unthinkable: he opened his mouth again. And this time, he may have sunk Barack Obama for good.

Reflects WaPo’s Dana Milbank:

Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama’s presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama’s longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered — and added lighter fuel.

Speaking before an audience that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam official Jamil Muhammad, Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks (”God damn America”) and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.

In front of 30 television cameras, Wright’s audience cheered him on as the minister mocked the media and, at one point, did a little victory dance on the podium. It seemed as if Wright, jokingly offering himself as Obama’s vice president, was actually trying to doom Obama; a member of the head table, American Urban Radio’s April Ryan, confirmed that Wright’s security was provided by bodyguards from Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.

Not that you haven’t heard Wright’s rantings about all these things (and worse, much worse) before, nor should it come as a surprise that he and Farrakhan are still the best-bestest of buddies. So what? So this: Just when you thought Wright couldn’t make things any worse for Obama, Wright dropped a bombshell, expressing what those of us not awash in ~~Jesus Juice~~ Obama-flavored Kool-Aid have been thinking, and saying, about Obama all along: Obama was forced to distance himself from Wright solely for the sake of politics, and if those Wright sermons hadn’t become public, Obama would still be calling Wright his “spiritual mentor”:

Wright suggested that Obama was insincere in distancing himself from his pastor. “He didn’t distance himself,” Wright announced. “He had to distance himself, because he’s a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American.”

Explaining further, Wright said friends had written to him and said, “We both know that if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.” The minister continued: “Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.”

Joe Fitzgerald of The Boston Herald picked up on something similar Wright said to Bill Moyers: “He [Obama] says what he has to say as a politican. I don’t talk to him about politics.”

Fitzgerald’s reaction (more valid than ever in light of Obama’s characteristically pitiful attempt at damage control during a “hastily gathered” press conference this morning):

Please. When a man spends 20 years absorbing another man’s sermons, it’s reasonable to conclude his beliefs and values will be informed and shaped by what he hears; if not, the man doing the preaching must be woefully ineffective.

So take your pick: Either Obama is showing the electorate a face that’s insincere, or Wright showed the viewers a leader who’s inept.

Is Wright trying to sink Barry? “Maybe,” muses Amy Sullivan of Time, “Barack Obama skimped on his contribution when the offering plate came past at Trinity United Church of Christ. Or perhaps he nodded off during one of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons. It’s hard to think of another reason why the Illinois Senator’s former pastor would put on the kind of performance this morning at the National Press Club that can only be described as a political disaster.”

Or maybe Wright’s ego is so swollen from the roaring cheers bouncing off the walls inside that echo chamber known as Trinity United Church of Christ, he thinks the outside world is no different from the insulated little cocoon he’s built around himself.

Sorry, Rev. Nobody who heard you this morning is shouting “Amen!” this time.

Per Jeff Greenfield of CBS:

If you had a chance to listen to Rev. Jeremiah Wright — at his NAACP appearance in Detroit, or in his talk at the National Press Club — you came away with two impressions: first, Rev. Wright is a learned, compelling, often hilarious speaker; second, he is a genuine threat to the presidential hopes of Barack Obama.

His NAACP speech was shaped around the theme that “different does not mean deficient.” He talked about how blacks and whites were “different” in everything from language to music to religious worship. He interposed his speech with snatches from speeches, songs — at one point, brilliantly imitating the sharply different styles of marching bands. Michigan State, he demonstrated, simply did not move on the field the way the Grambling Band did.

He also offered a highly inclusive vision of the change America needed — rejecting exclusionary thinking whether it was white vs. black, black vs. white, straight vs. gays, Christians vs. Jews. There was nothing in that part of the speech that was objectionable or offensive.

Now, wait a minute. Wright emphasizes how “different” blacks and whites are, then waxes poetic about “inclusion”? I thought the goal was to appreciate our differences, while focusing on how we’re really all the same under the skin — yet Wright, in his comparison of two marching bands, makes fun of the way white people can’t dance? Hm.

Or, as the hard-right National Review put it — which will give you a good idea of how well this Wright business is going over with the tighty-righties Obama thinks he’s going to win over — in a piece titled “Jeremiah Wright May Have Just Sunk Obama’s Campaign:

And since then, it’s gotten worse, even with a Bill Moyers interview that wasn’t softball so much as it was Nerf Tee-Ball. We’ve heard Wright compare the Roman Legions who punished Jesus to the U.S. Marines, we’ve heard him argue that the U.S. and al-Qaeda are doing the same acts under different flags, etc.

Now we hear Wright analyzing the differences between white and black brains (!)…

Back to Greenfield:

So what’s the problem for Senator Obama? In his National Pres Club speech, we saw another side of Rev. Wright — utterly unrepentant about any of the things he has said, and insistent that the wave of criticism aimed at him was really “an attack on the black church.”

That argument is familiar — even pervasive. When a visible member group that has suffered exclusion is challenged, that individual is frequently heard making that argument. Senator Huey Long argued that attacks on his honesty were really attacks on the poor for whom he spoke; Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton both argued that attempts to hold them accountable for misconduct were really attacks mounted by their political enemies.

No kidding. If I had a nickel for every time an Obamanut called me racist for criticizing what Obama says and does, or went into a mindless rage at Hillary Clinton for something Obama said or did (what, did she cast a spell over Barry to make stupid remarks fall out of his mouth?), I would have a lot of nickels.

In wrapping himself in such an argument, Rev. Wright never even seeks to confront the core of the criticism: What did you mean when you said what you said? Why tell your congregation that AIDS was a government conspiracy to commit genocide on African-Americans?

Jake Tapper of ABC caught that, too:

[Wright] didn’t distance himself from any of the sentiments underlying the clips shown on television. Indeed, the former pastor embraced the most controversial items he has said.

On his contention that the U.S. government had created AIDS as a method of committing genocide against African-Americans, Wright referred to a hotly-disputed 1996 book “Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola : Nature, Accident or Intentional?” by Leonard G Horowitz, which contends that AIDS and the Ebola viruses evolved during cancer experiments on monkeys.

He also referenced “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” by Harriet Washington, and said based on the Tuskegee experiment — in which the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a 40-year study on 400 poor black men in Alabama with syphilis whom they did not properly treat — “I believe our government is capable of anything.”

Greenfield again:

More broadly, Rev. Wright’s counterattack reframes the argument in starkly racial terms: “Attack me, attack the black church.” It is exactly the opposite what Senator Obama has been arguing throughout his campaign; that it is past time for the United States look beyond race. Indeed, Wright’s vision of this controversy strikes at the heart of Obama’s view.

Greenfield concludes — correctly — that Wright is stuck in a moribund mindset, seeming “not to believe that the United States has in any serious way come some considerable distance — and one of the surest signs of that is the plausible presidential candidacy that Wright’s comments have so seriously harmed.”

I’ve never dismissed the fact that racism still exists in this country — but Wright and his flock appear utterly unable — or unwilling — to process the fact that all whites are not stuck in the 19th-century.

Jeremiah Wright, however, is. He’s soaking in it. And for whatever unresolved personal issues he has with whites, his “ministry” appears to dedicated not to empowering disenfranchised African-Americans in any positive, progressive, forward-looking way, but to keeping the hate — and his own “us vs. them” mentality — alive.

Jeremiah Wright is not a stupid man, but one wonders if he suffers from some sort of incurable amnesia — and if he enjoys that amnesia, deliberately induced or not.

To wit (quoted from Tapper):

“Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy,” Wright said, since Farrakhan had not enslaved Africans and brought them in chains to the U.S.

Wright argued that his fiery nature was appropriate since the leaders of the U.S. have never apologized for slavery or racism.

Oh, really now? I know what President Bill Clinton said in 1998 — and it sure sounded like an apology to my ears:

“Surely every American knows that slavery was wrong, and we paid a terrible price for [it], and that we had to keep repairing that.

“And just to say that it’s wrong and that we are sorry about it is not a bad thing.

“That doesn’t weaken us.”

What does Wright want, for every U.S. president, past and present, to get down on his knees? (In Clinton’s case, yeah, probably.)

That’s just another example of Wright’s deliberate blindness and stubborn insistence to remain entrenched in a view of a United States that has long since progressed beyond Wright and his antiquated — and divisive, damaging, dangerous — ideas.

One last thing: In demanding an apology for slavery, Wright said: “Britain has apologized to Africans. But this country’s leaders have refused to apologize. So until that apology comes, I’m not going to keep stepping on your foot and asking you, does this hurt, do you forgive me for stepping on your foot, if I’m still stepping on your foot. Understand that? Capisce?”

Yeah, capisco, loud and clear. What’s funny is that Wright would stoop to using the language of us “garlic noses” to make his point.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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