I love this. Great concept and great execution. 
Tag Archive for 'jeremiah wright'
According to Fox News, Barack Obama responded to the Tony Rezko conviction today in statement with “I’m saddened by today’s verdict. This isn’t the Tony Rezko I knew…” Of course this has become a pattern for Obama of having to issue this statement about the individuals that he chose to use in order to climb to the top of Chicago politics as an outsider to the windy city.
This is the man who has already had to denounce his spiritual mentor and pastor of 20 years in Jeremiah Wright, a Catholic priest, Michael Pfleger, who Obama has known well for decades, and now the man convicted today. According to ABC news, Tony Rezko and his wife were instrumental in Obama ability to purchase his Chicago mansion:
In sharp contrast to his tough talk about ethics reform in government, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., approached a well-known Illinois political fixer under active federal investigation, Antoin “Tony” Rezko, for “advice” as he sought to find a way to buy a house shortly after being elected to the United States Senate.
The parcel included an adjacent lot which Obama told the Chicago Tribune he could not afford because “it was already a stretch to buy the house.”
On the same day Obama closed on his house, Rezko’s wife bought the adjacent empty lot, meeting the condition of the seller who wanted to sell both properties at the same time.
And the Chicago Sun Times has the following on Obama buying a portion of the adjacent lot from Rezko’s wife to expand his yard:
A few months after Obama became a U.S. senator, he and Rezko’s wife, Rita, bought adjacent pieces of property from a doctor in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood — a deal that has dogged Obama the last two years. The doctor sold the mansion to Obama for $1.65 million — $300,000 below the asking price. Rezko’s wife paid full price — $625,000 — for the adjacent vacant lot. The deals closed in June 2005. Six months later, Obama paid Rezko’s wife $104,500 for a strip of her land, so he could have a bigger yard. At the time, it had been widely reported that Tony Rezko was under federal investigation. Questioned later about the timing of the Rezko deal, Obama called it “boneheaded” because people might think the Rezkos had done him a favor.
Why the need for so many denouncements Senator Obama over your close associates?
Power Line addresses the Obama statement in a posting titled “The Most Wildly Inappropriate Statement Ever?” And Michelle Malkin has also weighed in on the pathetic statement.
I was scanning my radio on the way home last night and stumbled across an interview with Bill Moyers on the “progressive” radio show, Democracy Now!, hosted by Amy Goodman.
Bill Moyers is the poster boy for the type of liberal activist “journalist” that your hard earned tax money has been squandered on by Public Broadcasting. Appearing on the independent news program Democracy Now!, Bill Moyers had the following to say about Jeremiah Wright Moyers whom he interviewed before Wright forced Obama to denounce him with more inflammatory rhetoric before the NAACP and the National Press Club:
And it was a reasonable, interesting, revealing conversation. I’m not a very adversarial fellow. I’m not a gotcha kind of journalist. Mike Wallace can do that much better than I can. And it was a very reasonable interview. But I think that the pent-up frustration of how he was being treated in the mainstream media and the fact that he was being taken out of context—the remark about chickens come home to roost, he wasn’t saying that 9/11 was done because—as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said, because God wanted it to happen, but that there are consequences to actions.
The remark about HIV, I didn’t get to ask him that on the show. We ran out of time. But, you know, in the black community, where I’ve reported, done documentaries on black churches, black community organizers, in the black community, they’re still haunted by the fact, what is a historical fact, that the United States government used black men at Tuskegee Institute who think they were being treated for syphilis, when they were being allowed to die for a scientific test. That anger has been building up. I understand that. It’s unfortunate it gets in the mainstream media and Obama has to do what he did.
Surprisingly and to Amy Goodman’s credit she pressed Moyers on criticism that he didn’t actually ask any tough questions or show any journalistic integrity by actually pressing Wright on the opinions that he was presenting on PBS:
AMY GOODMAN: On the interview, the PBS ombudsman commented about it. He wrote a column critical of your questioning. Michael Getler wrote, “There were not enough questions asked and some that were asked came across as too reserved and too soft, considering the volatility of the charges. […] Statements that Moyers himself laid out at the top of the program went largely unchallenged and those that did come up didn’t really get addressed until well into the hour-long program.” Your response to that?
To which Mr. Moyers just punted. He was just going to rely on others to actually practice journalism:
BILL MOYERS: Well, that’s true. I didn’t get to ask all the questions I wanted to ask. It was a forty-minute interview. And I was much more interested—I knew what was going to happen when he went to the National Press Club on Monday morning. I knew that they were going to be asking all of these questions. I leave that to those people whose job it is for the commercial media.
[Update #1: 5/8/2008]
I’m listening to Mark Levin’s show from yesterday online and he has great coverage of this. You can download the program from here.
It appears that Obama is going to stick with Trinity and its new Pastor, Otis Moss III. As Gateway Pundit points out, Tim Russert asked him directly about this on Meet the Press:
MR. RUSSERT: You’re still a member of the church?
SEN. OBAMA: I am.
and later
SEN. OBAMA: Right. Well, my commitment, as I said, Tim, is to the church, not to a pastor. And I think that’s shared by millions of people who are going to church this morning. You, you join a church community, and Reverend Wright helped build a wonderful church community, one that has been a pillar of good works in Chicago, and, you know, I feel a great loyalty to that church. Reverend Wright was going to be retiring in a year, and I thought it was important for me to maintain my commitment to that church.
Apparently, Senator Obama has been too busy on the campaign trail to learn about Wright’s hand picked successor, Otis Moss III. Maybe he should read the coverage over at World Net Daily that claims that Moss accepts the same arguments that Wright made and affirmed at the NAACP. These are the same whacky arguments that forced Obama to publicly denounce Wright not once but twice. In the article titled “Uh-oh, here we go again: Meet Obama’s new pastor“, we learn the following:
The man slated to become chief pastor at the Trinity United Church of Christ has called blacks “lepers” with a “skin disease,” claimed U.S. entertainment corporations operate with “disdain” for black people, and in a fiery sermon claimed retired pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright was “lynched” by the media and compared the embattled pastor to Jesus.
Otis Moss III, lauded this week by Obama as a “wonderful young pastor,” also recently refused to deny claims by Wright that the U.S. government was involved in distributing illegal drugs to minorities or spreading the AIDS virus to blacks.
But wasn’t it the rookie senators who implied that he would have left Trinity over Wright’s strong beliefs about AIDS being invented by the US government to target certain groups and his insensitive remarks about the terrorists coming home to roost among others if the pastor hadn’t retired. On CNN, Obama gave the following answer:
“Had the reverend not retired and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable staying there at the church,” the senator said.
But certainly, this same policy holds for Trinity’s new minister? Senator Obama is that true?
It seems informative to ask why did Obama join Trinity in the first place. For that answer, we can look at a blog entry at “Top of the Ticket” today in the LA Times. Gateway Pundit has a link to this, but I wanted to provide a brief quote:
Why Oprah quit Jeremiah Wright’s church and Barack Obama didn’t
Early in the 1980s rising television star Oprah Winfrey was looking for a local church in Chicago. Not surprisingly, she like many blacks including four years later a community organizer named Barack Obama, was attracted to Trinity United Church of Christ and its dynamic, outspoken pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
That South Side church was THE place for upwardly mobile Windy City blacks to connect and it had an aggressive community ouDaytime TV diva Oprah Winfrey’s support of Illinois Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his wife Michelle turns out to have cost her perhaps more than she helped him. Winfrey abandoned the Trinity United Church of Christ run by the controversial pastor Rev Jeremiah Wright over concern for his inflammatory sermons while Obama remainedtreach program. And attendance continued Winfrey’s childhood connection with black churches and their shared sense of community and support.
As The Ticket noted Sunday morning, the same reasons caused other black clergy to steer the young Obama there, saying he’d have more luck connecting with black churches in his urban organizing efforts if he actually belonged to one himself. Obama’s friends later added that alighting at Trinity with its forceful male leader was also part of the mixed-race Obama’s exploration of his black identity in the absence of his father.
It’s an insightful article that looks at for the reasons why Obama sought out Trinity, entrance into the political world of Chicago, and why unlike Oprah Winfrey he chose to stay. We still must ask why did Obama only choose to denounce Wright when it was politically required and not earlier like when he decided to not have him appear at his campaign kickoff announcement.
It looks like the freshman senator from Illinois finally got the idea that Wright is doing him political damage. So now, when Wright has resurfaces and it is apparent that Obama’s speech in Philly on race wouldn’t cut it with the public, the rookie senator has finally decided to more strongly denounce Wright’s hateful anti-American rhetoric.
Mike Glover writing for the A.P. in his article titled “Obama says he’s outraged by former pastor’s comments” clearly indicates that Obama has denounced Wright’s comments in a much more forceful manner than previously. He writes:
Obama said he heard that Wright had given “a performance” and when he watched tapes, he realized that it more than just a case of the former pastor defending himself.
“What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for,” Obama said.
In a highly publicized speech last month, Obama sharply condemned Wright’s remarks. But he did not leave the church or repudiate the minister himself, who he said was like a family member.
On Tuesday, Obama sought to distance himself further from Wright.
“I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia explaining that he’s done enormous good. … But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS. … There are no excuses. They offended me. They rightly offend all Americans and they should be denounced.”
So how complete is this break between Obama and Wright? Don Frederick, a political editor in the Washington bureau of the L.A. Times, writes on his blog for the LA Times thinks so:
He could hardly have distanced himself farther from the man who officiated at his wedding ceremony and baptized his two children.
Obama described himself as “outraged” by many of Wright’s remarks and “saddened” by what he termed “the spectacle of what we saw yesterday.”
He characterized as “ridiculous” Wright’s notion that the AIDS epidemic may have been a conspiracy inflicted on blacks by the federal government and that Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan should be considered a leading voice in modern times.
Such views …
“offend me. They rightly offend all Americans. They should be denounced.”
But on the surface, Wright’s crazy statements aren’t different than the one’s he gave in sermons years ago. Maybe, Wright is right about one thing, Obama is doing what politicians do. Obama is specifically trying to separate himself from this divisive figure because it is politically wise to do so.
[Update #1 4/29/2008]
Watch Obama’s press conference for yourself:
[Update #2 4/29/2008]
John McCormack over at the Weekly Standard looks at a passage from Obama’s book and questions really how different is Wright at all from what Obama witnessed in the past.
In his column today, George Will calls Jeremiah Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s spiritual mentor of 20 years, “a gift determined to keep on giving.” Unfortunately for the rookie senator from Illinois, Wright’s rhetoric is actually helping Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate for president. In “The Gift That Keeps on Giving“, George Will writes:
Because Wright is a gift determined to keep on giving, this question arises: Can persons opposed to Barack Obama’s candidacy justly make use of Wright’s invariably interesting interventions in the campaign? The answer is: Certainly, because Wright’s paranoias tell us something — exactly what remains to be explored — about his 20-year parishioner.
In Monday’s speech at the National Press Club, Wright repeated — decorously, by his standards, but clearly — his accusation, made the Sunday after 9/11, that America got what it deserved. His Monday answer to a question about that accusation was: “Whatsoever you sow, that you also shall reap” and “you cannot do terrorism on other people and expect them never to come back on you.”
Will goes on to call Wright on his speech given to the NAACP on Sunday night:
On Monday, Wright also espoused the racialist doctrine that blacks have “different” learning styles than do others. This doctrine of racially different brains, or of an unalterably different black culture, is a doctrine today used to justify various soft bigotries of low expectations regarding blacks, and especially black children. It has a long pedigree as a rationalization for injustices. Slaveholders and, later, segregationists loved it.
It will be interesting what Obama chooses to do about this latest controversy surrounding the man that married him to his wife and who provided the title for one of the Senator’s books.
Michelle Malkin yesterday pointed out that Wright’s security is provided by the Nation of Islam. This only serves to strengthen the public impression that Wright is aligned with Luis Farrakhan bringing that anti-Semitic hate monger closer to Obama in the public’s perception.
PowerLine has a Wright article likening Wright’s relationship with Obama to Thomas Eagleton’s relationship with George McGovern. In the article, the following is written:
In his widely lauded Philadelphia speech, Barack Obama declared of Reverend Jeremiah Wright: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.” It wasn’t quiite up to George McGovern’s expression of “1,000 percent” support for Thomas Eagleton as his running mate after revelations of his shock therapy, but it left Obama and Wright closely joined. Something about the revelation of Eagleton’s shock therapy made his ultimate dumping by McGovern inevitable. Something about Wright’s frank racism, among other things, now calls for some further response by Obama.
Unfortunately, for the rookie senator, it will be harder to disassociate himself from the pastor that he chose to take his family (including his young daughters) to hear “preach” — this recent media outburst by Wright keeps the public’s attention on the dubious choices that Obama made about his closest spiritual adviser.
[Update #1: 4/29/2008]
According to Politico, Obama has announced that he will be holding a “big press conference” to address his relationship with this divisive individual.
Despite being Senator Obama’s spiritual mentor for 20 years, Jeremiah Wright has to be the absolute last person that the senator would like to see go on a self-serving media tour. Obama is slumping in the polls today, and Wright’s appearances serve to provide Obama’s detractors, a group that includes yours truly, with additional material on the man who had served as Obama’s pastor for the past twenty years. This is the man who baptized his daughters and married Obama and his wife. On Friday, PBS aired an exclusive interview of Wright by Bill Moyers, last night, Wright spoke at a NAACP event, and this morning, Wright spoke at the National Press Club in Washington.
Barack Obama was sworn into his first term as a US Senator on January 4, 2005. Barely three years later during his rookie term, Obama is the front runner in the Democratic race for the presidential nomination. He has been dogged with questions of whether or not he can deliver the working class voter in order to win important swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, and Texas.
Bad news for Obama supporters, so far he is 0-4 in those states. If Senator Hillary Clinton of New York manages to beat Obama in Indiana, she will have a compelling argument to make to superdelegates that Obama is unelectable in a general election against Senator John McCain. She can argue that Obama has failed to win support from the white working class vote and that Obama’s delegate lead has been built with a clever strategy to focus on states that will most certainly go to Republicans in the fall. While it is a strategy that may win Obama more delegates, it is ultimately a strategy that is doomed to fail in November.
Obama has had already to deal with Wright by delivering a politically motivated speech on race out of necessity, he has had to deal with his association with Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers in a nationally televised network debate on ABC, and possibly most damaging he has had to try to spin his elitist remarks indicating that small town Americans cling to religion and their second amendment rights out of bitterness. Those remarks were made at a private fund raiser held at a mansion in San Francisco where he had every reason to believe that his comments would not be leaked in the media.
Despite spending three times what Clinton spent in Pennsylvania, Obama still lost the closed primary by nearly 10 points.
So now we have Wright again. This is almost too good to be true for those of us who believe that Obama is woefully unprepared to serve as the United States President and Commander in Chief. The transcipt of Wrights speech at the NAACP event can be read here.
At the NAACP event, Wright’s rhetoric once again proved to be divisive. This time he chooses to divide America’s children. Instead of focusing on the problems shared by all children, he focused on the teachings of Dr. Janice Hale based off of her research conducted during the 1970’s over 30 years ago. In his speech, Wright states the following:
Dr. Hale’s research led her to stop comparing African-American children with European-American children and she started comparing the pedagogical methodologies of African-American children to African children and European-American children to European children. And bingo, she discovered that the two different worlds have two different ways of learning. European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style and the entire educational learning system in the United States of America. Back in the early ’70s, when Dr. Hale did her research was based on left brained cognitive object oriented learning style. Let me help you with fifty cent words.
Left brain is logical and analytical. Object oriented means the student learns from an object. From the solitude of the cradle with objects being hung over his or her head to help them determine colors and shape to the solitude in a carol in a PhD program stuffed off somewhere in a corner in absolute quietness to absorb from the object. From a block to a book, an object. That is one way of learning, but it is only one way of learning.
African and African-American children have a different way of learning.
They are right brained, subject oriented in their learning style. Right brain that means creative and intuitive. Subject oriented means they learn from a subject, not an object. They learn from a person. Some of you are old enough, I see your hair color, to remember when the NAACP won that tremendous desegregation case back in 1954 and when the schools were desegregated. They were never integrated. When they were desegregated in Philadelphia, several of the white teachers in my school freaked out. Why? Because black kids wouldn’t stay in their place. Over there behind the desk, black kids climbed up all on them.
Because they learn from a subject, not from an object. Tell me a story. They have a different way of learning. Those same children who have difficulty reading from an object and who are labeled EMH, DMH and ADD. Those children can say every word from every song on every hip hop radio station half of who’s words the average adult here tonight cannot understand. Why? Because they come from a right-brained creative oral culture like the (greos) in Africa who can go for two or three days as oral repositories of a people’s history and like the oral tradition which passed down the first five book in our Jewish bible, our Christian Bible, our Hebrew bible long before there was a written Hebrew script or alphabet. And repeat incredulously long passages like Psalm 119 using mnemonic devices using eight line stanzas. Each stanza starting with a different letter of the alphabet. That is a different way of learning. It’s not deficient, it is just different. Somebody say different. I believe that a change is going to come because many of us are committed to changing how we see other people who are different.
How easy for Wright to be able to lump all black children in one category and all white children in another category. How about Asian American children? How about American children of middle eastern descent? How about children of mixed ethnicity? Furthermore, isn’t Barack Obama himself proof against this divisive theory?
Then this morning, Wright was defiant and combative. In an AP article titled “Analysis: Wright does Obama little good“, Nedra Pickler writes the following:
“If Sen. Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected. Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls,” Wright said. “Preachers say what they say because they’re pastors, they have a different person to whom they’re accountable. Whether he gets elected or not, I’m still going to have to be answerable to God November 5th.”
Although many of the clips of Wright that have been dogging Obama’s campaign were from sermons that were several years old, the pastor repeated some of the same ideas for television cameras Monday.
He criticized the U.S. government as imperialist and stood by his suggestion that the United States 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 Monday.
Jeremiah Wright apparently questions the honesty of Obama’s denouncement of Wrights anti-American rhetoric as primarily being out of political necessity. We are also reminded of the anti-American and racially charged sermons that were delivered by Wright and the fact that he stands by his hateful statements. That makes it just as relevant today to ask, why would Barack Obama spend twenty years sitting at Trinity listening to Wright and as a parent, why would he subject his family including his two young impressionable daughters to this man? These are questions that Obama has not answered completely, and they will dog him for the remainder of the primary season and into the fall if he becomes the Democrat nominee.
Of the three major party candidates remaining for President, Senator John McCain is clearly my first choice despite his less than conservative record on many issues. With that said, if McCain were to lose in the fall, a Clinton administration is a far less scary proposition in my opinion given how little we know about Obama today.
Michelle Malkin has coverage of protesters at the National Press Club here.
Eric Scheie has coverage of the Wright debacle over at Pajama’s Media in his article titled “Pastor Wright’s Fantasy World of Hyperbole.” In it he writes:
Earlier today, however, I was asked by Pajamas Media to write about this morning’s appearance by Reverend Wright at the National Press Club. Fortunately (so I thought), I didn’t see the email until after the event was over, so I replied that I’d missed it, although I did venture that if I could find the video online I’d watch it and write a piece if it wasn’t too late.
As it happens, it didn’t take me long to find the Wright event on video in six YouTube segments.
Er, now that I’ve watched them all, I should say, six sickening YouTube segments .
20 minutes in, I was just about ready to throw up. The more I watch this malignant man, the less I want to watch. For starters, I find myself unable to stand Jeremiah Wright’s smarmy, sing-songy voice. Now, lest I be accused of racism in the way some have been accused of sexism for not liking Hillary Clinton’s voice, let me say that one of the things I most like about Barack Obama is his voice. He has a pleasant speaking manner, in stark contrast to Hillary’s screechy braying.
I’m no Hillary fan, and I may regret saying this lest it sound favorable to her, but Wright makes Hillary Clinton’s screeching and braying sound almost pleasant.
His supercilious insincerity, and mocking, deriding tone — all while he spews hateful and vindictive far left claptrap — belongs on Berkeley’s Communist controlled KPFA radio, if it even belongs there.
I’ve included the 6 YouTube videos below (after the break) — you may want to wait at least 30 minutes after eating before watching. This is megalomania personified!
Continue reading ‘The return of Jeremiah Wright, “The Megalomaniac”’
