PrintMarch 18, 2008
Is Obama Trying to Bamboozle Us with His Wright Denials?
"Some of my fellow clergy don't appreciate what we're about. They feel we're too radical."
Jeremiah Wright to Barack Obama (Very first face-to-face meeting -- Chicago, mid 1980's*)
I thought I might have entered one of those political twilight-zone moments when I read this statement made by Obama Saturday, in response to reports on his pastor of twenty years:
"I noticed over the last several weeks that the forces of division have started to raise their ugly heads again. And I'm not here to cast blame or point fingers because everybody, you know, senses that there's been this shift," Obama said.
Begging the Senator's pardon, but this condescending, schoolmarm admonition seems to me like the proverbial kettle calling the pot black.
Obama continues:
"If all I knew were those statements I saw on television, I would be shocked.
Giving the Senator the benefit of the doubt here, I don't think he means to imply with this statement that he knew an awful lot more, including the statements played in the videos in the press. Maybe that's not what he meant to say, but that's sure what it sounds like to me.
The fact of the matter remains that we journalists were not the ones sitting in Reverend Wright's pews for 20 years, listening to his racially divisive, anti-American rhetoric.
Oh, my. Obama actually contends he wasn't either.
So, what did he think Jeremiah Wright meant when he said that fellow African-American clergymen found him too radical for their understanding of the Christian faith?
What did Obama know and when did he know it?
Wright to Obama, in the same very first face-to-face meeting:
"Cops don't check my bank account when they pull me over and make me spread-eagle against the car. These mis-educated brothers, like that sociologist at the University of Chicago, talking about ‘the declining significance of race.' Now what country is he living in?" (Dreams from My Father; Barack Obama; p. 283)
Now, let's think just a minute here. Barack Obama has steadily maintained that he knew absolutely nothing about Reverend Wright's proclivity for mixing racial hatred and anti-American politics into his sermons at Trinity United Church of Christ.
Yet, incredibly, right there on page 293 of Obama's Dreams from My Father, when Barack is describing the wondrous event of his own conversion in Wright's church, he lets on otherwise.
"...Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House."
We know now Reverend Wright's opinion of Hiroshima and the Country who dropped that atomic bomb.
And apparently, Michelle Obama holds the same entirely negative opinion of America as her pastor.
Yet, Barack Obama maintains that even though his pastor and his wife have no pride in America, he himself has remained above all that division and strife, incredulously, because he never even knew about it.
And candidate Obama wants us to let him have a conversation with the Iranian president so they can work out something other than a big-bang solution for world peace.
I don't know about you, dear reader, but I'm getting a bit queasy at the thought of Barack Obama's tendency to know nothing about nothing when it comes to people and problems right under his nose. If he genuinely was not on to the racism of his own pastor, the guy who was like an "uncle" to him, how will he be able to see through the lying hypocrisy of IslamoFascists.
If even the heralded celebratory award his Church magazine gave to Louis Farrakhan, the infamous black Muslim and Nazi admirer, didn't open the eyes of Mr. Gullible, what on earth would?
When I visited Trinity United Church of Christ, I perused the titles in the church bookstore. Well, all of James H. Cone's books on black liberation theology were on prominent display, as were books by Malcolm X and black panther luminaries and Nation of Islam greats.
Does Obama also expect us to believe that he never knew there were books glorifying violence and black supremacy racism in his own church's bookstore, even though he was a prominent member there for more than 20 years.
Jeremiah Wright is the one who created this racially divisive can of worms.
We journalists merely opened it in the interest of providing voters with as much information about a candidate for president as could be found.
And no journalist has put any words in Jeremiah Wright's mouth.
Will the real racists please stand up.
Actually the very first citizens to inject racism into this presidential campaign were not white. Nor were they journalists or reporters.
They were black leaders who questioned whether Barack Obama's bi-racial genetic inheritance made him legitimately "black enough" to run as a black man.
And once he started winning, they claimed him, and stood front and center to rally African-American voters to one of their own. Many switched alliances mid-stream from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama.
That's fine. I didn't see a soul objecting.
But Obama has run his entire campaign on the idea that he possesses superior judgment in lieu of the experience he lacks. Then he has the temerity to label it racially divisive when citizens rightfully question his judgment.
It seems a terrific diversionary ploy for Obama to insinuate that reporters covering actual, factual, inflammatory, egregiously divisive remarks made by his pastor of twenty years somehow renders the reporters as the sowers of division. But I think this sort of tactic would only work with kindergartners.
And American voters are a whole lot wiser than that.
It doesn't take a genius to recognize the rants of Rev. Jeremiah Wright as racist, inflammatory and divisive.
Is Senator Obama suggesting that "we all come together" by burying the truth of his pastor's racism?
This would seem to represent a rather chilling call to censorship, albeit delivered in a soothing, kind-mannered voice.
The most salient point in all of this has been pointedly ignored by Senator Obama. The Senator has made repeated assertions that he was never, for one moment, aware of Wright's proclivity for anti-American, racially divisive rhetoric or opinions. Yet, every one of the sermons being aired by websites and networks appear on the church's own DVD of Wright's Greatest Sermons. Obama completely wiggles past, in his denials of knowledge, the fact that his own church members chose these very sermons as the best oratory of their pastor in his last year of service to the congregation.
Senator Obama's insistence that he shouldn't be held accountable for a 20-year, close association with Jeremiah Wright because he was never actually there to hear a single snippet of anti-American, racist diatribe is beginning to look a lot like all those "present" votes in the Illinois legislature.
He seems to be saying he wants to have his cake and eat it too.
And all I can say is if Barack Obama can't stand the heat of personal scrutiny, he really ought to do us all a favor and get out of the kitchen.
*Dreams of My Father; Barack Obama; p. 283.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at kyleanneshiver@yahoo.com.
