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March 22, 2008
"The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud"
Of all the editorials I've seen on Senator Barack Obama's recent speech, Charles Krauthammer's is the best. Writing on The Washington Post on Thursday:
The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which"controversial" remarks?
Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented HIV "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible for Sept. 11 -- "chickens coming home to roost" -- because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?) What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them?
Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?"But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave -- why doesn't he leave even today -- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.
His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence and (b) white guilt.
(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?
"I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was Grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus's time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.
Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?
(b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then he proceeds to do precisely that. What lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.
This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.
But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?
Exactly right.
Posted by Tom at March 22, 2008 9:08 AM
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Comments
I love Krauthammer's writing. He's one of the great contemporary neocons. I was a little upset last year when he started joining the other side, saying Iraq was a failure. He's redeeming himself recently, so that's good.
Nice posting!
Posted by: Americaneocon at March 22, 2008 8:31 PM
Not only is the accusation that the US government "invented" AIDS "as a means of genocide against people of color" - a bizarre overreach, he fact is that Obama OVERWHELMINGLY supports Planned Parenthood (as does the DNC) which factually known to be a eugenics-inspired effort by Margaret Sanger to curb minority births. Obama defended this in his debates with Dr. Alan Keyes - he firmly supports Planned Parenthood. PP cannot hide its ugly roots of working to abort babies of color - its open, its in the public domain, no conspiracy necessary. How about explaining that one to us, Senator?
Posted by: Johnny at March 22, 2008 8:34 PM
Tom--
Below is a link to an article in The American Conservative, March 26, 2007 issue, called "Obama's Identity Crisis".
http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_03_12/print/featureprint.html
People keep asking why he wouldn't leave the Trinity Church of Christ, and I think it is because of his search for an identity and the influence of his wife who was born and raised in South Side Chicago. He was dooing fine until he married her. Marriages often can sideline people.
Even though Obama and his wife have superlative minds and Obama inherited his father's penetrating intelligence, he is oonflicted. His own mother regected her race, and he worshiped his absent African father from afar. Both parents abandoned him.
As a minority I know how hard it is to stay away from your culture and its religion when some members won't assimilate. I imagine Obama finds it hard to separate himself completely now even though with one of the finest minds for a politician he, with his Hawaiian upbringing and Ivy League education must find many of those people in that church "uncultured blowhards".
I'm sure one goal of his is to try to work with ghetto blacks and get them to "focus on the opportunities...instead of the oppression of their ancestors" or discrimination they will continue to experience because of their color. It can be so frustrating to be passed over for promotions, etc. over and over again. It can make you angry and wallow in that anger or it can make you more determined to rise above it.
[Loop- if you see this--I too divorced myself from SH because instead of just editing my last comment, he rewrote it in his own words. He deleted it at my request].
Emilie
Port Orchard, WA
Posted by: Emilie at March 23, 2008 2:11 PM
When all else fails, throw Grandma under the train.
Posted by: Jane at March 23, 2008 4:20 PM
Emilie, from Port Orchard, WA
Behave Emilie!
If you are going to mention Snake Hunters on another weblog please give the entire story.
I repeatedly asked both You and Loop Garoo to be CONCISE, stay on the Subject Of Post, and you both totally ingored my wishes. S/K is my effort. Eight-Ten paragraphs of scatter-gun was a bit much! Then I warned Emilie not to give her long-winded personal statements and rude criticism, w/"Rules Governing Conduct". All to no avail!
It's still there for all to see. If this continues
here, I suspect Tom might ask you & Loop to take your distasteful behavior elsewhere, or at least
refrain from personal attacks in his domain.
Bloggers like courtesy too! reb
Posted by: Ralph E. at March 24, 2008 1:33 AM
I'm staying out of what happens at the Snake Hunters blog.
All I'll say here is that I would ask everyone to please refrain from commenting about what happens on other blogs here. Now that you've each said your piece that's it and any more discussion about it from anyone will be deleted.
Thank you,
Tom
Posted by: Tom the Redhunter at March 24, 2008 10:57 AM
Americaneocon, is that true about Krauthammer? I mean, that he said Iraq was a failure? I must admit I lost him on my radar for awhile.
As for Obama, from the moment when I first heard of him I thought he was a barbecued air salesman. I can't say though I am that happy with him losing his lead over Clinton, because if Clinton wins, she'll prove a much tougher adversary to McCain than Obama.
For the rest: a Happy Easter everyone!
Posted by: Outlaw Mike at March 25, 2008 6:46 AM
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE...
is foreseeable in the wild emotional dash to elect a 'minority' Commander-In-Chief without any thought given to the personal views of that individual regarding Israel. This fuzzy thinking
is hugely problematic!
Dare we risk setting our setting our Future Middle Eastern Policy on the whims and intolerent
notions of an "Uncle" Jeremiah Wright or a Louis Farrakahn? To what degree have these two radicals impacted the long-held private viewpoint of Barack Obama? reb
Posted by: Ralph E. at March 25, 2008 1:53 PM
Tom,
Here's the unequivocal connection from Obama
to Rev Wright, to Rev Louie Farrakhan...
hold yer nose. reb
http://www.peacefaq.com/noi.html
Posted by: Ralph E. at March 26, 2008 4:09 PM
