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| Obama's pastor disaster |
| 2008-03-16 |
| Jeremiah Wright is not exactly peripheral to Barack Obama's life. He married the Obamas and baptized their children. Those of us who made the mistake of buying the senator's latest book, "The Audacity Of Hope," and assumed the title was an ingeniously parodic distillation of the great sonorous banality of an entire genre of blandly uplifting political writing discovered circa page 127 that in fact the phrase comes from one of the Rev. Wright's sermons. Jeremiah Wright has been Barack Obama's pastor for 20 years – in other words, pretty much the senator's entire adult life. Did Obama consider "God Damn America" as a title for his book but it didn't focus-group so well? Ah, well, no, the senator told ABC News. The Rev. Wright is like "an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with." So did he agree with goofy old Uncle Jeremiah on Sept. 16, 2001? That Sunday morning, Uncle told his congregation that the United States brought the death and destruction of 9/11 on itself. "We nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," said the Rev. Wright. "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." Is that one of those "things I don't always agree with"? Well, Sen. Obama isn't saying, responding merely that he wasn't in church that morning. OK, fair enough, but what would he have done had he happened to have shown up on Sept. 16? Cried "Shame on you!" and stormed out? Or, if that's a little dramatic, whispered to Michelle that he didn't want their daughters hearing this kind of drivel while rescue workers were still sifting through the rubble and risen from his pew in a dignified manner and led his family to the exit? Or would he have just sat there with an inscrutable look on his face as those around him nodded? All Sen. Obama will say is that "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." Yet since his early twenties he's sat week after week, listening to the ravings of just another cookie-cutter race-huckster. The song the Rev. Wright won't sing is by Irving Berlin, a contemporary of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart, all the sophisticated rhymesters. But only Berlin could have written without embarrassment "God Bless America." He said it directly, unaffectedly, unashamedly – in seven words: "God Bless America Land that I love." Berlin was a Jew, and he suffered slights: He grew up in the poverty of New York's Lower East Side. When he made his name and fortune, his marriage to a Park Avenue heiress resulted in her expulsion from the Social Register. In the Thirties, her sister moved in with a Nazi diplomat and proudly flaunted her diamond swastika to Irving. But Berlin spent his infancy in Temun, Siberia (until the Cossacks rode in and razed his village), and he understood the great gift he'd been given: "God Bless America Land that I love." The Rev. Wright can't say those words. His shtick is: "God damn America Land that I loathe." |
| Posted by:Nimble Spemble |
| #4 BARACK tried to use a very selective scalpel of PCorrectness-Deniability during his FOX interview - unfortunately, the knife "didn't cut". |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2008-03-16 19:56 |
| #3 We nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye, Of course we did because those people were the same ones who devalued the lives of Chinese in Nanking and Filipinos [then still a territory of the United States] in the bloodbath of Manila. The same evil leadership that orders its own citizens to commit suicide rather than experience American occupation at Saipan and Okinawa and were just a willing to send same civilians in human wave attacks barely armed with nothing more than knife at the end of a pole if we step foot upon the Home Islands. Those bombs saved far more Japanese than hate mongers could even comprehend. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-03-16 18:18 |
| #2 It is just possible that the Wright controversy will make Senator Obama a better person. He probably believes in his own 'not black America, not white America but the United States of America' narrative (or at least he believes so with part of his mind). If so, he will have to confront himself with the Wright sermons and decide why and how sermons like this produce hallelujahs and why and how people should put a stop to them. |
| Posted by: mhw 2008-03-16 18:13 |
| #1 I knew it was Steyn without checking - on the mark as usual |
| Posted by: Frank G 2008-03-16 17:22 |