Category — Jeremiah Wright

From the moment Barack Obama announced his intentions to run for POTUS, I assumed that he would win.   The Clinton machine was worn out, and there were social forces and irrefutable facts that no “conservative” candidate could overcome.  Everything was in place when it came time to vote.  Briefly….

First, demographics:  Immigration and generational changes have eclipsed the Euro-centered, Post WWII electorate.  The young don’t care about Bill Ayers or radicalism any more than my generation cared about Tokyo Rose and Henry Wallace; the world of the young today is so bizarre and free-wheeling that nothing as tame as Jeremiah Wright can stand out and get serious attention.   Immigrants - most of whom have come here from despotic or chaotic countries - are seeking advantage through political power, and Barack Obama poses no threat to their conception of liberty.  They also don’t give a damn about Ben Franklin or Paul Revere, if you get my point.

Second, The Welfare State, or the same thing by other names:  Has grown in every administration since 1936, with a lapse during WWII.  All administrations have supported and expanded Human Resources and Defense ”superfunctions”, until it accounts for almost 62% of federal outlays since 1940 (adjusted for inflation). Everyone gets a piece, including those who call themselves conservatives.  Arguments about The Welfare State are window-dressing, because no faction or party seriously argues about its existence, and none attempt to define its sufficient size.

Third, popular conservatism itself, today, is a side show.   Buckley’s generation-long efforts to make conservatism respectable expired along with his sincerity, good sense and originality.  His heirs - like the bore George Will,  have made the essential muscularity of conservatism into a watery, disgusting gruel fit only for bow-tie wearing drama queens.   George W. Bush’s incoherence and government by passive silence has earned the detestation of almost every political perspective, especially the paleoconservatives.  Compassionate conservatism appeared to be ritualistic soul-cleansing, where things not belonging to you could be freely given to others.  Watch Barack Obama on this issue, too.

On the radio side, conservatism is dished up in the same old tropes, accompanied by country music, audio cuts of Ronald Reagan’s speeches and Wright’s squeals, and endless hammering on the anvils of American Exceptionalism and Rugged Individualism.  Together, their conclusions about why conservatism is moribund, is that voters dismayed by Republican cowardice and cupidity, punished them by voting for liberal Democrats.  Brilliant.   With analysis like this, we can win the T-Shirt slogan contest and forget the battle of ideas.

Speaking of ideas, that was McCain’s fatal problem.  He didn’t have any; he had a maverick personality, a biography, and expected us to generate ideas from there.  Obama projected plainly liquid and uncertain ideas, and his persona expanded like a Macy’s Parade balloon while McCain turned into a homunculus. Why this happened is unclear, and material for another post.

Right now I’m damned angry.   We’re exchanging one set of fools and poltroons who are clueless about the rationale, modes and aspirations of conservatism, for another set who are clueless about life, human nature, and the dangers in the world at large.  Great.

It was only a matter of time before Obama played the race card.  Question him or the people he associates with, and according to John Lewis, you’re “sowing the seeds of hatred and division”.  But that absurd statement isn’t enough for Lewis because he goes on to link McCain with George Wallace and church bombings.

All I can say is wow!  If Obama wins, it’s going to be a long 4 years.  Don’t like socialized healthcare?  You wouldn’t oppose it if Obama wasn’t black.  Higher taxes stifle the economy you say?  Whitey just doesn’t want black children to eat.

However, I’m not really that concerned about Lewis’ rant.  Anyone taking it seriously wasn’t voting for McCain anyway, and I think it’s a boon to McCain with independents.  Honestly, how hard is it to dismiss Lewis as a lunatic when he provides absolutely no evidence?

According to Lewis, McCain is the George Wallace of our time, but he can’t cite one example.  Is McCain associating with right-wing Jeremiah Wrights and Bill Ayers?  Nope.  And even if he was and we applied the Obama standard, he wouldn’t be responsible for his associations anyway.

Listen, I know a lot of people blame Bush and the Republicans (incorrectly in my opinion) for the financial meltdown, but let’s be careful here.  Is an inexperienced, left-wing moonbat the guy you want protecting us and leading us through the economic crisis?  That’s far too great a risk in my mind.

It is not often our electorate has this possibility.

Canadians prefer Obama over own leaders: poll

A new poll suggests Canadians would prefer to vote for Barack Obama rather cast a ballot for their own political leaders, while 45 per cent of Americans envy Canada’s health care system.

The bi-national survey, conducted by the Strategic Counsel for CTV and The Globe and Mail, showed that here in Canada, Obama was more admired than Prime Minister Stephen Harper — or any other national leader.

Lets send Obama AND that 45% of Americans up to Canada. I’ll cheerfully take the conservative Canadians in exchange.

Let’s make a Deal Canada, you can have what’s behind door #1, #2 and the Cookie jar too. Hell, we’ll toss in Jeremiah Wright, Farrakhan, plus your choice of Dirtbin, Pelosi, or Reid.

You can’t beat this with a big stick!

It’s hard to feel sorry for John McCain when he’s the victim of media bias. There’s no small amount of poetic justice in seeing him raked across the coals now after having been lauded by the same biased media when he was advancing liberal causes as a “maverick” Republican.

Here’s an example of his former NY Times “friends” blasting him for getting John Hagee’s endorsement. Now John McCain was never a member of Hagee’s church. His children weren’t baptized by Hagee. Hagee was not McCain’s mentor, friend, or spiritual adviser. Yet the Times blasts McCain while providing all the top cover it can for Barack Obama’s 20 year relationship with Jeremiah Wright.

This is only the start too. The media has the long knives out for McCain while doing everything they can to get Barack Obama elected.

Obama apparently has no advisors or campaign committee; or even friends, pastors, political associates or real estate buddies. His entire professional and personal life is a gossamer skein of loose and impermanent connections to people he doesn’t really know, people whose ideas are unknown to him, people who are free agents, vapors, without the slightest formal link to Barack Obama….like Samantha Power, Jerry Wright, Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, and now, Robert Malley.

In fact, one can say that Barack The Innocent is afflicted with Contingent Amnesia -that intermittent mental impairment, of politicians, which comes and goes depending upon the merit of the publicity connected to a person or issue. Get this: At the very time that Obama is condemning McCain as a senile fool for mentioning Obama’s popularity with Hamas, Obama’s mystery advisor is meeting with Hamas. Go figure. What a strange world. How ironic.

Obama is trying to put more distance between himself and Reverend Wright:

Sen. Obama characterized Rev. Wright’s recent speech as “a bunch of rants that aren’t grounded in truth.”

It took Barack 20 years to figure out what most Americans saw in about 2 minutes worth of video. That’s not real impressive for a man claiming the judgment and intelligence to be President of the United States.

Not long ago, Michele Obama was pointing to Barack’s Iowa win as evidence he could unite people.  As Michele so quaintly pointed out at the time, there “ain’t no black people in Iowa”. 

Now the worm has turned.  The “newly minted”, but always present populist message is being delivered by Barack to largely black communities with an “us versus them” class warfare mentality:

“We also know that times haven’t been too tough for everyone in our economy — because the top Wall Street CEOs have been doing just fine,” he continued. He referred to a new study that the top 50 CEOs were making over $15 million each. “Despite the fact that many of their companies were having a bad year. Think about that.”

You know who else is being helped by Wall Street during the downturn?  Barack Obama.  His campaign is raking in huge contributions from the same Wall Street fat cats he berates for not helping others.  

Having fumbled the Jeremiah Wright issue, Barack is returning to old Democratic themes by taking up the phony populist banner of John Edwards.

If John McCain was a 20 year member of a church where the pastor said African Americans invented AIDS to target white people, his political career would be over. People couldn’t run away from him fast enough, but Obama gets a “do over” with today’s speech on race relations.

The most amazing part of his speech was a quasidefense of Wright. According to Barack, we just don’t know the Pastor well enough, but give me a break. He wasn’t talking about affirmative action or reparations. He was pushing David Duke style racist conspiracy theories. It was ignorant, wrong, racist, and above all else indefensible.

Instead of clapping in your pew, you and Michelle, Harvard Law educated, 6 figure income earners who haven’t struggled too hard in life, had a duty to stand up for your country and your fellow citizens right then. If anyone knew the racially charged invective coming from the pulpit didn’t represent the absolute truth, it was the two of you. That’s where the real error in judgment came in and you’re compounding it by continuing to embrace the man today.

Barack wanted to discuss anything today but his judgment. He offered a history of race relations, a discussion on healthcare, and number of other red herrings to avoid the real issue. But his continued embrace of the crazy uncle tells me he’s definitely not the man you want on the other end of the phone when that call comes in at 3 AM in the morning.

What a mess Barack Obama finds himself in with Jeremiah Wright. When selling yourself as a “unificator”, having an Art Bell listener with strong racist overtones as your mentor doesn’t help the cause. It’s especially damaging when you don’t have anything else to sell, like those pesky accomplishment things, which no Obama supporter has detailed for us yet.

After initial spin control failed, nobody bought the “crazy uncle” story; Barack will address us from his celestial throne on the topic of race in America tomorrow. He gave a preview of the speech in a News Hour interview:

And I think it would have been naïve for me to think that I could run and end up with quasi-frontrunner status in a presidential election as potentially the first African-American president that issues, race wouldn’t come up any more than Senator Clinton could expect that gender issues might not come up.

The Obama campaign injects its best red herring into the discussion. He’d rather talk about slavery and racism when the question that needs answering is much simpler—why didn’t he walk out? If a pastor started talking about how the government created HIV to target African Americans, most people are walking out. Yet a man claiming the judgment necessary to be President of the United States sat in the pew for 20 years while the crazy uncle rambled on.

We don’t need a lecture, no matter how eloquent, about your bi-racial upbringing, racism in American, or how different generations view things differently. What we need to know is why you spent 20 years listening to a racist conspiracy theorist instead of walking out. Save the rest of your shtick for the adoring media who ignored this story until the reverend showed up on YouTube.

In all the broad commentary about Jeremiah Wright, and Barack Obama’s relationship with Uncle Jerry and Trinity Church, there’s a strain of falsehood, and it isn’t just on The Left.   We expect it from leftists, whose alternative universe is annoying to contemplate, and even sometimes funny to  see defended. 

But some pundits on The Right, who’ve already rotted the intellectual timbers of Conservatism/Libertarianism, are taking the view that Wright and his congregation have committed a social offense in the crime of being different (and ignorant, if not stupid) and, well, black nationalists…with a lot of lunatic assumptions about history (Tuskeegee isn’t among them) and the terms of the social contract which enables diverse societies to cohere and function.  I sense a spiritual malfunction in the entire business, but I only care insofar as one of theirs is aspiring to be President.

We can sweep away Obama’s dissembling about his association with Trinity with a common truth.  Obviously he knew about and shared both the pseudo-Christian, Cone-derived Black Liberation Theology liturgy at Trinity, and, through it,  Wright’s malignant ideas and personal manias.  To me, this disqualifies him from being President, but it doesn’t disqualify him from being an American citizen whose right to be blisteringly stupid is guaranteed by the right to dis-associate.  

The right to association was among the bedrock assumptions of the Civil Rights movement of the last century; it makes no practical sense without its companion right, which is personal sovereignty and the right to set oneself apart - which for me is the right to flip off authority, to disbelieve, to ridicule those who would rule us officially and unofficially, and to be a peaceful malcontent with a metaphorical bomb in my pocket.  I have no heroes, no abiding faith in the manswarm around me, but I like and trust people, and that’s all I need. 

No society is free which requires close association of thought or person as a legal matter, and which has no space for, and general indifference to,  invidious and insidious personal expression.  Certainly that devilish principle, The Social Contract, should require as an absolute minimum, the surrender of the right of be murderous, a scofflaw, a tax-evader, or even rude to others, among dozens of other things required in organized society.

It does NOT require uniformity of thought or perspicacity of anyone.  The effect of the right to disassociate is often, if not always, marginalization, personal failure, bitterness and dangers to the soul.  This is true of any group which sets a goal of separatism, but I, for one haven’t a single problem with it.   There is no free will without the power to be a jackass and a dysfunctional fool.  Uncle Jerry proves it.

Do you want some one who sits in a church for 20 years and has no clue to what the minister is preaching answering the phone in the White House at at ANY time?
I wouldn’t trust him near a phone to place the grocery order.

Obama Decries Racial Rhetoric

We have to come together,” he told a town-hall meeting at a high school.

Obama cited inflammatory remarks made by his pastor that are now being used as political ammunition against him—remarks that Obama has denounced.

“If all I knew were those statements I saw on television, I would be shocked,” Obama said.

Obama suggested that more and more is being made of racial divisions as his contest with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton heats up.

“The forces of division have begun to raise their ugly head again,” Obama said.

“It reminds me: We’ve got a tragic history when it comes to race in this country. A lot of pent-up anger and mistrust and bitterness. This country wants to move beyond these kinds of things.”

The Illinois senator’s comments came a day after he denounced statements appearing on television and on the Internet by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of the Chicago church Obama joined nearly 20 years ago.

Ferraro is right! If this guy was white, he wouldn’t be let into the convention.

This clown has the density of an aerostat.

Barack Obama has put his religion back into the headlines, trumpeting the power and salvation of faith and asking a church audience in South Carolina to help him become “an instrument of God” and join him in creating “a Kingdom right here on Earth.”

YES, headed by King Obama I of course.
Why not a crucifixion to start the creatin’.
You’re tight, I have no intention of making nice to these idiots and their putative godhead.

But the Democratic contender’s talk on Sunday of breaking down religious and political differences has some critics questioning the Illinois senator’s own beliefs — and those of the man identified as his spiritual adviser — and whether his messages of spiritual inclusion and tolerance have remained consistent. [snip]

Obama has written and spoken about being inspired by the preaching of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., and his calls to “spur social change.” [snip]

Baptized in Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama has been an active member for two decades, regularly attending services with his family under Wright’s spiritual mentorship. [snip]

“If Barack Obama has really submitted himself to his church like he’s claimed, why does he have a different expression of faith from his own pastor?” asks Anthony Bradley, theologian and research fellow at the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Aaahhh, because it’s convenient at the moment?

Presidential candidate condemns words but not ministry of former pastor

Translation: Don’t say this till after I’m elected.

In another sermon, delivered five days after the 9/11 attacks, Wright seems to imply that the United States had brought the terrorist violence on itself.

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York, and we never batted an eye,” Wright says. “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 brought right back in our own front yards.”

In a later sermon, Wright revisits the theme, declaring: “No, no, no, not God bless America — God damn America!”

This is what one gets from the politics of inclusion; all the assorted misfits and mental defectives in one coop.

                                         White Italians Killed Jesus

“Jesus was a poor black man who lived in a country, and who lived in a culture that was controlled by rich white people; The Romans were rich, the Romans were Italians, which means that they were Europeans, which means that they were white, and the Romans ran everything in Jesus’s country….it just came to me with…with…within the past few weeks, Y’all, why so many folks are hatin’ on Barack Obama.”

I wonder if this brain-starved bugwit ever heard of Herod.  Oh well, never mind.  It’s Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s spiritual advisor in a dead heat for the most poisonous, pathetic moron in a pulpit anywhere.