In March 2008 we discovered (thanks to a combination of old and new media)
something very sad - what Obama's church is like.
Obama was meant to be something new and fresh.
A modern, colour-blind, post-racist man.
But it turns out that for 20 years he has been attending
a radical, race-obsessed, anti-American church,
where the most appalling hard-left, black separatist, political vitriol against America
has been spewed from the pulpit on a regular basis.
In my opinion,
no one who attends Wright's church is fit to be US President.
Sadly, most Americans did not agree.
Clips of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's appalling sermons.
More from the appalling
Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Obama's church
The preacher at Obama's radical anti-American church,
Rev. Jeremiah Wright
(and search),
who married him, baptised his children,
who seems to have brought him to Christianity in the first place,
and who he has credited many times
in print
and in
speeches
as an inspiration,
turns out to be a nasty, hard-left, America-hating fanatic.
Wright says the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill black people.
"The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color."
He says the U.S. government sells the drugs that destroy black communities.
He says the U.S. had 9/11 coming
because of its terrorist policies.
"and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
He says America is responsible for world terror, wars and poverty:
"America is still the No. 1 killer in the world".
"We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty."
He says the U.S. and Al Qaeda are the same thing"under a different color flag".
He says the U.S. government knew Pearl Harbor was going to happen.
He calls the USA "an oppressive society" against blacks.
He tells his audience (including children) to regard the police as corrupt.
And on and on, with endless grievance against the whites,
as if Obama isn't richer than most of the whites in the world
(Obama is far richer than me,
for example).
Wright himself
drives a Porsche
and is moving into a
10,000 square foot mansion.
Wright says about America:
"Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body."
Rather ignoring:
(a) that Obama is being seriously considered for president,
and: (b) that the Republicans appointed
a black woman
as Secretary of State.
Apart from all the anti-white whining,
Wright is just so obviously stupid and poorly read
it makes you wonder about the intelligence of anyone who would follow him.
It is very sad.
Obama was meant to be the post-racist candidate,
the one who was over the past and wanted to move on.
The one who was grateful for his privileged
Ivy League
education
and his wealthy millionaire
status.
The one who had no interest in the whining grievance culture, victim mentality
and race confrontation
of previous black Democrat candidates like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
And now we discover that Obama's mentor is exactly that type of person.
And Obama exposes his family to precisely that type of mentality week after week.
God Bless New Media
- Libertas on the breaking of the
Obama preacher story.
"Anyone old enough to remember life under the regime of ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, and CNN knows how frustrating it was to watch the liberal media continually circle the tanks for left-wing candidates and causes.
...
Today, the media's finally been democratized by blogs, cable news, and talk radio
- and listen to the left howl."
Now,
"the Obama/Wright story exploded, Obama's chances of becoming President took a dramatic hit, and Anderson Cooper was forced to do practically a full-hour examining the story ... But none of this would've happened 15 years-ago. None of this would've happened without New Media. Without New Media John Kerry would probably be President and Dan Rather still a network anchor with a notch on his gun for taking down George W. Bush."
Criticism of Obama
Mark Steyn
(and here)
is unimpressed by Obama's denials that he knew about the
America-hating sermons of his long-term pastor and mentor.
As Steyn says:
"It seems hard to believe you could spend 20 minutes in this pastor's company, never mind 20 years (as the Obamas have), without figuring he's a race-baiting loon."
Comment:
"Obama is going to go on national TV tomorrow and ask US ( US here specifically ) to believe that after 20 years being a member of Rev Wright's church, WE knew before he did that his Rev is an ignorant, bigoted, racist. Yeah a man with that kind of judgement is just who I want with his finger on the button!"
The Dishonesty of Hope, Rich Lowry, March 18, 2008.
"Are we to believe that the Rev. Wright had the ushers scan the crowd at every service and, if Barack Obama and his family were present, reverted to a mainstream Christianity and colorblind calls for love and mercy? ...
When Wright loosed his broadsides against the United States, members of the congregation didn't look at each other awkwardly because their pastor had said something uncharacteristic and embarrassing. Instead, they erupted in paroxysms of affirmation; they were used to such statements and enjoyed them."
And if you think I, and the writers above, are just "racists",
read the black conservative
Thomas Sowell:
"The bad news is that Barack Obama has been leading .. a double life
...
Equality means that a black demagogue who has been exposed as a phony deserves exactly the same treatment as a white demagogue who has been exposed as a phony."
Amy Holmes:
"What this may actually prove is the old, pre-Obama conventional wisdom that the first black president will more likely be a conservative - someone who has already grappled with, and rejected, victim based politics. Can you picture Michael Steele, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, John McWhorter, Condoleezza Rice or any number of thoughtful black conservatives listening to Pastor Wright's sermonizing for one afternoon let alone years on end?"
"A More Perfect Union"
(and here),
Barack Obama, Mar 18th, 2008 - Obama's vague, dodgy, platitudinous speech
tries to weasel out of his long association with Rev. Wright. (Well what else could he do?)
"Did I ever hear him make remarks that
could be considered controversial
while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed."
As if any normal American ever
hears such anti-American hatred spewed in their church or synagogue.
Criticism of Obama's dreadful speech:
Charles Krauthammer:
"The question is why didn't he leave that church?
...
Obama's 5,000-word speech ... 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."
Mark Steyn:
"The Reverend Wright believes that AIDS was created by the government of the United States ... for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens.
...
Does he really believe this? If so, he's crazy,
and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years."
Comment:
"After twenty years in that church what positive affect did Obama have on the thinking of parishioners, on the bigoted pastor? The answer is - none. So why should we believe he would help heal our country?"
And another:
"If Obama cannot ask a bigoted preacher whom he's known for donkeys' years to change his views what is he going to do when dealing with people like Putin and all of the other bullies he'll face?"
Newt Gingrich destroys Obama's speech:
Obama compares his own grandmother to a racist:
About Wright, Obama says:
"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can
my white grandmother
- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman 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."
Amazing. He compares the vile Rev. Wright, with his rants of hatred against America,
with his loving, elderly white grandmother, who raised him and loved him
after his black father abandoned him.
Obama is a fraud. It's very sad.
Because I initially thought he wasn't.
The real story about his grandmother:
"isn't it amazing that Mr. Obama is happy to call his sainted grandmother who raised him a racist, but he still can't bring himself to say that Mr. Wright is one?"
Melanie Phillips:
"Yes, Obama is a person who would trash his own grandmother to gain the American presidency!"
Mark Steyn
on Obama's unworthy remarks about his grandmother:
"When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: "Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life."
...
Asked about the sin of racism beating within Gran'ma's breast, Obama said on TV that "she's a typical white person."
Which doesn't sound like the sort of thing the supposed "post-racial" candidate ought to be saying, but let that pass. How "typically white" is Obama's grandmother? She is the woman who raised him - that's to say, she brought up a black grandchild and loved him unconditionally. Burning deep down inside, she may nurse a secret desire to be
Simon Legree
or Bull Connor, but it doesn't seem very likely."
Christopher Hitchens:
"You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed
...
Mark my words: This disappointment is only the first of many that are still to come."
Obama's book
Dreams from My Father
(1995) shows that
he has some serious identity issues.
He writes an entire book dedicated to his useless black father,
who abandoned him when he was age 2,
saw him once at age 10,
and never saw him again before he died.
It is clear as day that his father had no interest in the boy.
Victor Davis Hanson says Obama writing
about his useless, disinterested father seems to miss the point:
"Just imagine had Obama written "Dreams From My Grandmother" about a working-class white woman who moved to Hawaii sacrificing her all, stressing integration, conciliation, character, and hard work (all true), rather than future-career-in-mind idealization and myth-making about a polygamist, alcoholic and absentee Marxist father? Had he done the former, he would have gotten a small advance, few sales - and now bankable proof of his character, rather than money, sales
- and an embarrassing revelation of his PC credentials."
As Hanson says, one good thing about Obama is that he is not like his father.
He is in contrast a good father and husband.
Victor Davis Hanson, March 24, 2008:
"For some bizarre reason, Obama aimed his speech at winning praise from National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Harvard, and solidifying an already 90-percent solid African-American base - while apparently insulting the intelligence of everyone else.
...
Over the past four days, I asked seven or eight random
.. Americans in southern California what they thought of Obama's candidacy ... The answers, without exception, were essentially: "Forget the speech. I would never vote for Obama after listening to Wright.""
He thinks the Democrats are heading towards a situation where they will be explaining
"all autumn long that the party masthead really does not like Rev. Wright, whose massive corpus of buffoonery no doubt is still to be mined."
Like John Kerry and the Swift Boat veterans,
this issue is not going to go away.
Too late.
Way too late.
After defending him in March
("I can no more disown him than .."),
after listening to him for 20 years,
Obama only finally acts once it becomes clear Wright could end his run for president.
But it's too late.
Nothing Obama does now can save this situation.
This issue will never end.
This issue will (and rightly so) end his run for president.
Blog:
"Obama claims he found Wright's racial rhetoric "appalling" and "that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate." For some reason it took the man who would be Messiah 20 years to figure out what it took the rest of us 20 seconds to figure out."
Richard Baehr:
"Many Americans did not have to wait for Wright's talk to the National Press Club to have taken offense. In fact, there is nothing the Reverend said Monday or with Bill Moyers on PBS, or at the NAACP dinner in Detroit (to thunderous ovations) that was in any substantive way different from what he has been saying over and over again for decades (to thunderous applause among the thousands packing Trinity Church). We had already heard about the US government bringing AIDS into the black community, and how Louis Farrakhan was a great American.
So why did this particular performance by Wright finally create the need for Obama to speak up more forcefully? That answer is simple: falling poll numbers in Indiana, North Carolina and nationally, and to that, we can safely conclude, Barack Obama takes great offense."
The 'Race' Speech Revisited, Charles Krauthammer, May 2, 2008,
is amused that Obama, having said he never would, now disowns Wright.
"Obama decided to cut off Wright not because Wright's words or character or views had suddenly changed. The only thing that changed was the venue in which Wright chose to display them -- live on national TV at the National Press Club. That unfortunate choice destroyed Obama's Philadelphia pretense that this "endless loop" of sermon excerpts being shown on "television sets and YouTube" had been taken out of context."
The bottom line remains that this story is hugely important, and will never end:
"This 20-year association with Wright calls into question everything about Obama: his truthfulness in his serially adjusted stories of what he knew and when he knew it; his judgment in choosing as his mentor, pastor and great friend a man he just now realizes is a purveyor of racial hatred; and the central premise of his campaign, that he is the bringer of a 'new politics' "
Obama leaves the church, May 2008.
After 20 years!
After 20 years you only leave this church when the rest of us attack it!
After donating thousands of dollars to it!
Do you really suddenly disagree with this stuff?
Or is this just a cynical, tactical, sleazy political move?
See his resignation letter.
Aftermath - McCain loses anyway
McCain's supporters on the Internet constructed many attack ads for him,
but McCain refused to run them:
Incredibly, McCain refused to use the Wright issue,
for fear of appearing "racist".
Proposed 30 second ad:
"What does Barack Obama really believe in? His spiritual teacher for 20 years has been Jeremiah Wright. Wright wedded Obama & his wife. Obama named his book from a sermon of Wright's. [Insert video of favorable comment about Wright by Obama]. What has Jeremiah Wright taught Obama? [Insert rabid clip of Wright capped by "God Damn America!! God Damn America!!"] We need a solid patriot to lead our nation. Someone we can trust. Vote John McCain 2008."
Some Republicans ran attack ads on Wright:
but McCain disowned them.
The Wright ad that McCain's own people drew up:
but McCain refused to run.
He seemed happy to lose.
He wanted to be an "honourable" loser.
Only Palin seemed like she actually wanted to win.
Black pastor
Joseph Lowery
gave the benediction at Obama's inauguration.
And he too seems to be a lot like Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Campaigning for Obama in
Oct 2012,
he used the word "nigger" about blacks who don't vote for Obama:
"I don't know what kind of a nigger wouldn't vote with a black man running.
All that he did with the stimulus was genius. Nobody intelligent would risk this country with Romney."
He said white people are going to hell:
"Lowery said that when he was a young militant, he used to say all white folks were going to hell. Then he mellowed and just said most of them were. Now, he said, he is back to where he was."
Obama on the cover of his own church's
(Rev. Jeremiah Wright's)
appalling
Trumpet magazine, Mar 2007.
See
extracts
from this radical, hard left magazine.
Image from here.
See full size.
Nation of Islam
crackpot and hate-monger
Louis Farrakhan
on the cover of Trumpet, 2007.
See full size.
Image from
this roundup of covers,
which says:
"Besides Wright himself ... I found only one person who put in as many cover appearances as Obama in the bulletins I currently have available. ... That person would be 'The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan' "
Hate-monger
Al Sharpton
also
appeared on the cover
in October 2006.