Obama and the Rev. Wright....

[midlifecrisis]

Am I the only one who gets the feeling that the Rev. Wright is feeling slighted by Mr. Obama of late? He certainly did Obama no favors at his recent press club performance. It was almost as if he was trying to fan the flames. Funny stuff.....this guy is a lunatic. Of that much Im certain. But you know how these guys work. If they see thier star beginning to fade, they always know how to bring the cameras and spotlight back onto themselves. I dont think he intends on going out as just "Obamas pastor". I think he is seeing TV deals, book deals, etc. That American dream aint so bad afterall eh Rev?




Wright says criticism is attack on black church

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 17 minutes ago



WASHINGTON - In a defiant appearance before the Washington media, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright said Monday that criticism surrounding his fiery sermons is an attack on the black church and he rejected those who have labeled him unpatriotic.

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"I served six years in the military," Barack Obama's longtime pastor said. "Does that make me patriotic? How many years did (Vice President Dick) Cheney serve?"

Wright spoke at the National Press Club before reporters and a supportive audience of black church leaders beginning a two-day symposium. He said the black church tradition is not bombastic or controversial, but different and misunderstood by the "dominant culture" in the United States.

He said his Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago has a long history of liberating the oppressed by feeding the hungry, supporting recovery for the addicted and helping senior citizens in need. He said congregants have fought in the military, including in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"My goddaughter's unit just arrived in Iraq this week while those who call me unpatriotic have used their positions of privilege to avoid military service while sending over 4,000 American boys and girls to die over a lie," he said.

Wright seemed to relish the chance to speak out after weeks of being derided in the press. He reveled in his retorts, high-fiving an audience member, pointing and winking at his supporters and mocking descriptions of him as Obama's spiritual mentor.

"I'm a pastor, he's a member. I'm not a spiritual mentor. Voodoo," he said, leaning into the microphone and wiggling his fingers in the air like he was conducting a seance.

Wright has been Obama's pastor for more than 20 years. Wright brought Obama to Christianity, inspired the title of his book "The Audacity of Hope," officiated at his wedding and baptized his daughters. Wright also told reporters Monday that he prayed privately with the family right before Obama announced he was running for president, although he didn't appear with them publicly.

Obama has said he disagreed at times with Wright, but video clips of some of the preacher's most controversial remarks have widely been distributed on television and the Internet and been damaging to Obama's campaign.

In a sermon days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Wright said "America's chickens are coming home to roost" after the United States. Asked what he meant by that, Wright challenged the reporter questioning him.

"Have you heard the whole sermon?" he responded. "No. You haven't heard the whole sermon. That nullifies that question."

He said criticism comes from people who only have heard sound bites playing repeatedly on television and have never listened to his entire sermons.

Wright said he's told Obama that if he is elected in November and is inaugurated in January, "I'm coming after you." He said that's because his differences are not with the American people, but U.S. policies.

"Whether he gets elected or not, I'm still going to have to be answerable to God on November 5 and January 21," Wright said. But he rejected the suggestion that Obama was denouncing him or distancing himself. "He had to distance himself because he's a politician," Wright said.

Wright said he hopes the controversy will spark an honest dialogue about race in America. Wright says black church traditions are unknown to many Americans, as they have been throughout the country's history. He said he hopes the controversy "just might mean that the reality of the African-American church will no longer be invisible."

"It is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright — it's an attack on the black church," he said to applause.

Wright's appearance was his third in four days, keeping alive a story that continues to dog Obama's campaign and at points creating further controversy.

At the press club, he jokingly offered himself as Obama's running mate and embraced Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan even though he said he doesn't always agree with him. He criticized the U.S. government as imperialist and stood by his suggestion that the U.S. invented the HIV virus as a means of genocide against minorities. "Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything," he said.

"God damns some practices and there's no excuse for the things that the government, not the American people, have done," he said. "That doesn't make me not like America or unpatriotic."

[solidspine]

Obama & Wright a couple of fast talking jive hustlers, One selling insincerity and the other selling pretension.They both could be selling stolen shoes on 3rd and Kedize,
Good Ole South Side Chicago.

[solidspine]

Actually on the radio, they act the part, but could never replace Amos and Andy.

[solidspine]

Something serious I have noted in Obama’s campaign and it is really, a disappointment


Michele, seems to be gaining weight, I mean forget it, she is almost as big as Hillary, who needs that on TV all the time,

At least McCain’s wife is about 40 years younger then him.

[PDOGGY]

One thing is for sure, this year (2008) for me professionally and personally, is one where people's true color's are coming out. People ain't shit, in my opinion.

I get criticized for saying that most people really aren't shit, but I can't find where I've been too wrong as of late.

As far as this BO and JW situation - it will pass. It's more shit - but on a grander scale.

A very simple statement that I think that most people, from what I've observed, just haven't gotten yet..is the one where JW said that he does what Pastors (are supposed to) do and BO does what politicians do.

And I think that non-white people need to admit that they have fallen asleep in thinking that BO was anything more than a politician.

The rest of the racial stuff and JW stuff and "transcending race" (which NO ONE CAN DO)stuff is another matter entirely. 99% of people (Americans included) are woefully spiritually and emotionally mature and conflicted when confronted on how to truly treat and regard their fellow human being.. so you put racial issues in the mix, it all results in one thing - disappointment.

This is the one thing I've noticed when just reading the blogs and the commentary not only from the authors, but of the people. There are some dirty, skank, and foul people in our midst no matter where we go, and it's sad.

It makes me grateful for the circle of friends I've had in the past 16 years who are not only very mature, hardworking, spiritually devout, and JUST people. To that end, I'm extremely satisfied with having them in my life (the non-white ones AND white ones) because I'm really not sure if its that people are getting worse, or (like their true colors) have always had these pathologies - which only needed to be brought out in times like this.

JW was never BO's spiritual mentor, Father, sage, guru, or any such thing. He was the man's Pastor. JW wasn't the boss of BO and BO wasn't the boss of JW. They fell for a big bag of bullshit, and appear to have fallen out over NOTHING. Absolutely NOTHING.

And thus BEHOLD THE DOUBLE STANDARD: The Wrath of the Terrible Simplifiers

Check out what Bill Moyers (a TRUE journalist) had to say about this matter (I bolded some things for my own emphasis)

I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam, "Who's telling the truth over there?" Everyone he said. Everyone sees what's happening through the lens of their own experience." That's how people see Jeremiah Wright. In my conversation with him on this broadcast a week ago and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. Over 2000 of you have written me about him, and your opinions vary widely. Some sting: "Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American hating radical," one viewer wrote. A "nut case," said another. Others were far more were sympathetic to him.

Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright's transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I'm not a psychologist. Many black preachers I've known - scholarly, smart, and gentle in person -- uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course I've known many white preachers like that, too.

But where I grew up in the south, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else; a safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed. I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great grandfather had been but three -fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed, "We the people." Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Connor, and Jesse Helms. Even so, the anger of black preachers I've known and heard about and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic.

That's not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances this week. What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle — forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy. Hardly anyone took the "chickens come home to roost" remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences. My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright's absurd charge that the united states deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being. But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated, while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test. Does this excuse Wright's anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You'll have to decide or yourself. At least it helps me to understand the why of them.

But in this multimedia age the pulpit isn't only available on Sunday mornings. There's round the clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who for their own reasons set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn't running for president with the man in the pew who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee's delusions, or thinks AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God's judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of a preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Jon Stewart recently played a tape from the Nixon white house in which Billy Graham talks in the oval office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy and wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren't.

Which means it is all about race, isn't it? Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn't fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. Politics often exposes us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen anything like this — this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said "beware the terrible simplifiers".

Bill Moyers Journal . Transcripts | PBS

[TheSuaveOne]

Originally Posted by PDOGGY

Check out what Bill Moyers (a TRUE journalist)

ROFL.

[PDOGGY]

Would it not have been funny if he were less charitable about Jeremiah Wright? I would guess not.

[Ulter]

The All-White Elephant in the Room

BORED by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive.
What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.

Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video — far from the only one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious networks, including twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.

Since then, Mr. McCain has been shocked to learn that his clerical ally has made many other outrageous statements. Mr. Hagee, it’s true, did not blame the American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, particularly a scheduled “homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came.”

Mr. Hagee didn’t make that claim in obscure circumstances, either. He broadcast it on one of America’s most widely heard radio programs, “Fresh Air” on NPR, back in September 2006. He reaffirmed it in a radio interview less than two weeks ago. Only after a reporter asked Mr. McCain about this Katrina homily on April 24 did the candidate brand it as “nonsense” and the preacher retract it.

Mr. McCain says he does not endorse any of Mr. Hagee’s calumnies, any more than Barack Obama endorses Mr. Wright’s. But those who try to give Mr. McCain a pass for his embrace of a problematic preacher have a thin case. It boils down to this: Mr. McCain was not a parishioner for 20 years at Mr. Hagee’s church.

That defense implies, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain was a passive recipient of this bigot’s endorsement. In fact, by his own account, Mr. McCain sought out Mr. Hagee, who is perhaps best known for trying to drum up a pre-emptive “holy war” with Iran. (This preacher’s rantings may tell us more about Mr. McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell us about Mr. Obama’s.) Even after Mr. Hagee’s Catholic bashing bubbled up in the mainstream media, Mr. McCain still did not reject and denounce him, as Mr. Obama did an unsolicited endorser, Louis Farrakhan, at the urging of Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton. Mr. McCain instead told George Stephanopoulos two Sundays ago that while he condemns any “anti-anything” remarks by Mr. Hagee, he is still “glad to have his endorsement.”

I wonder if Mr. McCain would have given the same answer had Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted him with the graphic video of the pastor in full “Great Whore” glory. But Mr. McCain didn’t have to fear so rude a transgression. Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

Perhaps that’s why virtually no one has rebroadcast the highly relevant prototype for Mr. Wright’s fiery claim that 9/11 was America’s chickens “coming home to roost.” That would be the Sept. 13, 2001, televised exchange between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who blamed the attacks on America’s abortionists, feminists, gays and A.C.L.U. lawyers. (Mr. Wright blamed the attacks on America’s foreign policy.) Had that video re-emerged in the frenzied cable-news rotation, Mr. McCain might have been asked to explain why he no longer calls these preachers “agents of intolerance” and chose to cozy up to Mr. Falwell by speaking at his Liberty University in 2006.

None of this is to say that two wacky white preachers make a Wright right. It is entirely fair for any voter to weigh Mr. Obama’s long relationship with his pastor in assessing his fitness for office. It is also fair to weigh Mr. Obama’s judgment in handling this personal and political crisis as it has repeatedly boiled over. But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to pretend that there isn’t a double standard operating here. If we’re to judge black candidates on their most controversial associates — and how quickly, sternly and completely they disown them — we must judge white politicians by the same yardstick.

When Rudy Giuliani, still a viable candidate, successfully courted Pat Robertson for an endorsement last year, few replayed Mr. Robertson’s greatest past insanities. Among them is his best-selling 1991 tome, “The New World Order,” which peddled some of the same old dark conspiracy theories about “European bankers” (who just happened to be named Warburg, Schiff and Rothschild) that Mr. Farrakhan has trafficked in. Nor was Mr. Giuliani ever seriously pressed to explain why his cronies on the payroll at Giuliani Partners included a priest barred from the ministry by his Long Island diocese in 2002 following allegations of sexual abuse. Much as Mr. Wright officiated at the Obamas’ wedding, so this priest officiated at (one of) Mr. Giuliani’s. Did you even hear about it?

There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at play in too much of the news media and political establishment, but there is also a glaring double standard for our political parties. The Clintons and Mr. Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should be, but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, but, as we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.

A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is quite an achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction in their own house. In our mainstream political culture, this de facto apartheid is simply accepted as an intractable given, unworthy of notice, and just too embarrassing to mention aloud in polite Beltway company. Those who dare are instantly accused of “political correctness” or “reverse racism.”

An all-white Congressional delegation doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the Southern strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr. McCain, whose own adopted daughter of color was the subject of a vicious smear in his party’s South Carolina primary of 2000.

This year Mr. McCain has called for a respectful (i.e., non-race-baiting) campaign and has gone so far as to criticize (ineffectually) North Carolina’s Republican Party for running a Wright-demonizing ad in that state’s current primary. Mr. McCain has been posing (awkwardly) with black people in his tour of “forgotten” America. Speaking of Katrina in New Orleans, he promised that “never again” would a federal recovery effort be botched on so grand a scale.

This is all surely sincere, and a big improvement over Mitt Romney’s dreams of his father marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Up to a point. Here, too, there’s a double standard. Mr. McCain is graded on a curve because the G.O.P. bar is set so low. But at a time when the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows that President Bush is an even greater drag on his popularity than Mr. Wright is on Mr. Obama’s, Mr. McCain’s New Orleans visit is more about the self-interested politics of distancing himself from Mr. Bush than the recalibration of policy.

Mr. McCain took his party’s stingier line on Katrina aid and twice opposed an independent commission to investigate the failed government response. Asked on his tour what should happen to the Ninth Ward now, he called for “a conversation” about whether anyone should “rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is.” Whatever, whenever, never mind.

For all this primary season’s obsession with the single (and declining) demographic of white working-class men in Rust Belt states, America is changing rapidly across all racial, generational and ethnic lines. The Census Bureau announced last week that half the country’s population growth since 2000 is due to Hispanics, another group understandably alienated from the G.O.P.

Anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a white-minority nation in three to four decades. Yet if there’s any coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid conversation on race has yet to begin.

[TheSuaveOne]

Oh look, the NYT going after John McCain. LOL.

[Ulter]

That wasn't written by the NYT. And I don't think Rich is going after McCain in that piece. I think he's saying there should be a level playing field but you're too narrow minded to see that. Because instead of just reading the article you google and put up an empty post.

[TheSuaveOne]

Maybe next time you could provide the author and the link to the original story.

[cipherkingtoo]

Originally Posted by Ulter

too narrow minded to see that. Because instead of just reading the article you google and put up an empty post.

thats the problem with this country ulter everyone is very narrow minded. I truely dont understand it.

[Ulter]

Originally Posted by TheSuaveOne

Maybe next time you could provide the author and the link to the original story.

You're right. I didn't even notice that the byline was missing. When I copied it I was deleting all the ads and must have pulled that out.

[midlifecrisis]

Getting an endorsement from some whacko isnt even close to the relationship between Wright and Obama. Another false comparison that means nothing.

The feeling I had in the thread starter has come to fruition. Obama has since increased his anti-Wright rhetoric and is condemning him on many of his views. Pure BS of course, nothing but political maneuvering, and the voters know it.