As Jonah Goldberg and others point out today, Barack Obama's "spiritual advisor" Jeremiah Wright has obliterated any claim that his previous anti-American statements were "taken out of context:"
After Barack Obama gave his big race speech in mid-March, many critics noted that the Illinois senator had thrown his own grandmother under the bus to defend his controversial pastor. Well, Wright proved over the last few days that he would not be outdone. He not only threw Obama under the bus, he chucked much of the liberal and mainstream media under there with him. If this keeps up, to paraphrase Roy Scheider in "Jaws," he's gonna need a bigger bus.
For six weeks, Obama's biggest supporters have diligently argued that to so much as mention Wright is in effect racist. When Hillary Rodham Clinton said that Wright wouldn't have been her pastor, Andrew Sullivan gasped on his Atlantic blog that this was "a new low" in the election. When Lanny J. Davis, Clinton's consummate spinner, defended her on CNN by describing what Wright actually said, CNN's Anderson Cooper lambasted Davis for daring to even repeat Wright's comments. Newsweek's Joe Klein chimed in, "You're spreading the poison right now."
Obama and his defenders have repeatedly insisted that the bits from Wright's sermons that got wide circulation last month had been taken "out of context." His infamous sound bites were grounded in concrete theological or factual foundations, they claim. He was quoting other people. He's done good things. Nothing to see here, folks.
And so God bless Wright because he's left all of these folks holding a giant, steaming bag of ... well, let's just call it a bag of "context."
Let's start with the news out of his speeches Sunday and Monday: Wright, Obama's mentor and former pastor, is worse than we thought. He's a bigot, at least by the standards usually reserved for white people such as former Harvard President Lawrence Summers or "The Bell Curve" author Charles Murray.
On Sunday in Detroit, he explained to 10,000 people at the Fight for Freedom Fund dinner of the NAACP -- an organization adept at taking offense at far less racist comments from nonblacks -- that whites have an inherent "left-brain cognitive, object-oriented learning style. Logical and analytical," while blacks "learn not from an object but from a subject. They are right-brain, subject-oriented in their learning style. That means creative and intuitive. The two worlds have different ways of learning."
Blacks even have better rhythm, Wright explained.
CNN carried the speech live, and news anchor Soledad O'Brien reported from the scene that it was "a home run."
Then, Monday morning at the National Press Club, Wright attempted to clear the air about all of the supposedly deceptive sound bites he's been reduced to.
So, does he stand by his "God damn America" statement?
Well, yeah. He explained that until American leaders apologize to Japan for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as to black Americans for slavery and racism, we will remain a damnable nation.
What about that bit about America's chickens coming home to roost on 9/11? Yep, we heard him right. "You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it not to come back on you; those are biblical principles," he explained.
Asked whether he stood by his assertion that the U.S. government created HIV as part of a genocidal program to wipe out the black race, Wright mostly dodged but ultimately offered this nondenial denial: "I believe our government is capable of doing anything." He also offered a zesty defense of Louis Farrakhan -- "one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century" -- and dismissed criticism of Farrakhan as an anti-Semite.
To cap it off, Wright threw Obama under the bus. First, the pastor explained, Obama himself had taken Wright out of context. Moreover, Obama neither denounced nor distanced himself from Wright. And, besides, anything that Obama says on such matters is just stuff "politicians say." They "do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls." So much for Obama's new politics.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has taken Barack Obama’s critically acclaimed race speech in Philadelphia, ripped it into bits, and tossed it in the air to serve as confetti for his parade through the media.
In that speech, Obama said Wright had been taken out of context, a defense the pastor has made himself. If only we knew the true Wright, Obama complained, instead of just “the snippets of those sermons that have run on an endless loop on the television and YouTube.” In his interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Wright said the playing of his sound bites was “unfair,” “unjust” and “untrue.”Then cometh the good reverend to step all over the out-of-context defense in a speech at the National Press Club. He defended his “chickens come home to roost” statement about 9/11 in exactly the same terms as in his original sermon: “You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you.” He stood by his damnation of America and his contention that the U.S. government had created AIDS: “I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”
For good measure, he dishonestly denied Louis Farrakhan’s infamous denunciation of Judaism as a “gutter religion” and called him “one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century.” The more Wright talked, the more he sounded like a Christian Farrakhan.
By the way. that raises another question in my mind. Why was Jeremiah Wright, a Christian minister, using bodyguards from the Nation of Islam at the National Press Club?
Rev. Wright is described as a "former" Muslim. Is he really? What is he doing with Muslim bodyguards? Are there no Christians willing to guard the Rev. Wright, assuming that he needs guarding? Can you picture the Pope being surrounded by Muslim bodyguards? Is Rev. Wright really a former Muslim, or is he a Christian in Name Only?
Wright volunteered at the National Press Club that he -- or was it Obama? -- won't tolerate questions about his momma's religious tradition or his daddy's religious tradition, but will he answer questions about his own religious tradition, or where he stands today?
I haven't listened to Wright's sermons, so let's assume for sake of discussion that, aside from the parts we've heard, they are all sweetness and light, 100% Chrisian and biblically based. Even in that case, Wright is at best religiously bipolar. His pronouncements are often difficult to distinguish from those of the angry Muslim Louis Farrakhan.
And this is Barack Obama's spiritual mentor -- the sort of man that Obama might turn to at moments of personal or national crisis in the White House. Could he have picked a worse one?
Comments