Mark Bazer's column in Friday's Chicago Tribune:
By Mark Bazer
Who is the real Barack Obama? Undoubtedly, he is a brilliant writer, an eloquent speaker, a rock star of a candidate. But, setting aside Sen. Obama's charisma and lofty oratory about "hope" and "change," do any of us know what the man actually stands for -- if anything?????
Yes, we do know that Obama opposed the Iraq war from the beginning and that he now favors diplomacy with Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. And that, if elected, he'd advocate allotting $2 billion or more to help Iraqi refugees. And, oh right, that he'd withdraw one or two U.S. combat brigades each month, with the goal of bringing all combat brigades home within 16 months -- though keeping a residual force to protect American diplomats and target al-Qaida. But do we know the senator's stance on how to construct a working public-library system in Baghdad? What about his views on establishing an off-track betting site in Kirkuk? And can any of us pretend to know how Obama plans to get Sunnis, Shias and Kurds to agree on a recycling program?
For that matter, can anyone decipher Obama's ideas on environmentalism here at home? Sure, the senator may discuss a "market-based cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions" by "80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050." And that he wants to institute a new National Low Carbon Fuel Standard, increase funding for the Conservation Security Program, eliminate traditional incandescent light bulbs by 2014, create a Green Jobs Corps, fight for a 25 percent federal Renewable Portfolio Standard and blah, blah, blah. All well and good, but what does Sen. Obama believe should be allowed in the American people's blue bins? He has been curiously mum about glossy paper.
But let's not talk about Al Gore-created issues, but about real ones. Like race in America. Turns out Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has said some pretty awful things about this country. How can we be certain Sen. Obama doesn't feel the same as Wright does? Has Obama done anything whatsoever to repudiate Wright's sermons and articulate his own ideas? Anything at all? Something along the lines of a well-crafted, from-the-heart 40-minute, 5,000-word speech, perhaps? I've been working nonstop on this piece the last three days, but I'll check after I hand it into my editor.
And how about more bread-and-butter campaign issues. Like abortion. We may know Obama believes in upholding a woman's right to choose. But think of all we don't know. For instance: Has Obama ever performed an abortion? Has he ever needed one himself? And, comb through his record all you want, but I defy you to find the senator's take on the abortion scene in "Dirty Dancing."
Then there is the issue of health care. Obama may have a "plan," and it may be "long," and it may on his "Web site," but could someone from the Obama camp please explain why the senator doesn't read the entire plan at every primary victory speech?
Indeed, how in the world are you supposed to know anything about Obama if you don't have access to the Internet (or do have a special Web browser that doesn't let you type "Obama and issues" into Google)? For the sake of argument, let's say you do have Internet access or know someone who does. Even then, how can you believe that what Barack Obama says he believes is actually what he believes and not something he wants us to believe -- and that, even if elected, he'd continue to espouse and act upon these so-called beliefs until his time in office were over and then, many years later, perhaps on his death bed, he'd reveal that, in fact, he all along believed something entirely different?
Sen. Obama, it's time to stop hiding. It's time to come over to my home and repeat to me everything you've ever said, written or thought. I'm dying to meet you!
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Post ‘Post-Racial Candidate’
Things get out-of-his-tree flown-the-coop nuts on the campaign trail.
By Mark Steyn
‘I’m sure,” said Barack Obama in that sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac, fries, and strawberry shake sound profound, “many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”
Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests, or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree flown-the-coop nuts. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose legions of “spiritual advisers” at the height of his Monica troubles outnumbered the U.S. diplomatic corps, Senator Obama has had just one spiritual adviser his entire adult life: the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, two-decade pastor to the president presumptive. The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”
Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years.
Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.
Before the speech, Slate’s Mickey Kaus advised Senator Obama to give us a Sister Souljah moment: “There are plenty of potential Souljahs still around: Race preferences. Out-of-wedlock births,” he wrote. “But most of all the victim mentality that tells African Americans (in the fashion of Rev. Wright’s most infamous sermons) that the important forces shaping their lives are the evil actions of others, of other races.” Indeed. It makes no difference to white folks when a black pastor inflicts kook genocide theories on his congregation: The victims are those in his audience who make the mistake of believing him. The Reverend Wright has a hugely popular church with over 8,000 members, and Senator Obama assures us that his pastor does good work by “reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDs.” But maybe he wouldn’t have to quite so much “reaching out” to do and maybe there wouldn’t be quite so many black Americans “suffering from HIV/AIDs” if the likes of Wright weren’t peddling lunatic conspiracy theories to his own community.
Nonetheless, last week, Barack Obama told America: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”
What is the plain meaning of that sentence? That the paranoid racist ravings of Jeremiah Wright are now part of the established cultural discourse in African-American life and thus must command our respect? Let us take the senator at his word when he says he chanced not to be present on AIDs Conspiracy Sunday, or God Damn America Sunday, or U.S. of KKKA Sunday, or the Post-9/11 America-Had-It-Coming Memorial Service. A conventional pol would have said he was shocked, shocked to discover Afrocentric black liberation theology going on at his church. But Obama did something far more audacious: Instead of distancing himself from his pastor, he attempted to close the gap between Wright and the rest of the country, arguing, in effect, that the guy is not just his crazy uncle but America’s, too.
To do this, he promoted a false equivalence. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother,” he continued. “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.” Well, according to the way he tells it in his book, it was one specific black man on her bus, and he wasn’t merely “passing by.” 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.” In Philadelphia, Senator Obama topped that: Greater love hath no man than to lay down his gran’ma for his life. In the days that followed, Obama’s interviewers seemed grateful for the introduction of a less complicated villain: Unlike the Reverend Wright, she doesn’t want God to damn America for being no better than al-Qaeda, but on the other hand she did once express her apprehension about a black man on the bus. It’s surely only a matter of days before Keith Olbermann on MSNBC names her his “Worst Person In The World.” 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. She does then, in her own flawed way, represent a post-racial America. But what of her equivalent (as Obama’s speech had it)? Is Jeremiah Wright a “typical black person”? One would hope not. A century and a half after the Civil War, two generations after the Civil Rights Act, the Reverend Wright promotes victimization theses more insane than anything promulgated at the height of slavery or the Jim Crow era. You can understand why Obama is so anxious to meet with President Ahmadinejad, a man who denies the last Holocaust even as he plans the next one. Such a summit would be easy listening after the more robust sermons of Jeremiah Wright.
But America is not Ahmadinejad’s Iran. Free societies live in truth, not in the fever swamps of Jeremiah Wright. The pastor is a fraud, a crock, a mountebank — for, if this truly were a country whose government invented a virus to kill black people, why would they leave him walking around to expose the truth? It is Barack Obama’s choice to entrust his daughters to the spiritual care of such a man for their entire lives, but in Philadelphia the senator attempted to universalize his peculiar judgment — to claim that, given America’s history, it would be unreasonable to expect black men of Jeremiah Wright’s generation not to peddle hateful and damaging lunacies. Isn’t that — what’s the word? — racist? So much for the post-racial candidate.
© 2008 Mark Steyn
Obama Lied About My Dad
By Michael Reagan
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, March 20, 2008
Most of the media and their fellow liberals were positively giddy over Barack Obama’s speech Tuesday, all but comparing it to the Sermon on the Mount.
I won’t deny it was a masterful piece of oratory -- the man can be spellbinding -- but when you stop to consider what Sen. Obama was really doing up there on the podium, invoking the specter of slavery and Jim Crow and the era of “whites only,” it becomes clear that it was a con job designed to make the voters as giddy as he knew his worshippers in the submissive media would be.
The speech was meant to be an explanation and expiation of his guilt for his years of remaining mute in the face of the outrageous anti-Americanism spewed by his pastor and bosom buddy, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Until Tuesday, Barack Obama (you can’t use his middle name, which has now become the “H-word,” allegedly a code word for anti-Muslim rhetoric) had steadfastly denied he ever heard his friend and pastor make his hateful remarks. In the speech, however, he just kind of mentioned that… well, yes … he guesses he was aware of the Reverend Wright’s offensive rhetoric after all. Mea Minima Culpa.
He then launched into a defense of his friendship with the man he credited for bringing him to Christianity, and helping to form his social and political philosophy and set him on the path to a life of public service. Admirably, while denouncing Wright’s extremism, he refused to denounce the man himself.
Nobody expected him to declare Wright anathema and cast him into the outer darkness where there is weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth -- one simply doesn’t do to that sort of thing to a longtime friend, benefactor and mentor even if he has been shown to have slipped the rails time after time.
What was not expected was Barack H. Obama’s use of a litany of America’s past racist offenses to justify not only Wright’s blatant hatred of white America but his suggestion that it was a sentiment shared by most African Americans. And that is simply not true.
Nor was it true, as Obama charged, that the Reagan coalition was created out of white resentment for affirmative action or forced busing.
He charged that “anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime… talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.”
Poppycock! These are not only outright falsehoods, but echoes of what Obama learned at the feet of Jeremiah Wright and now preaches as his own beliefs. He learned his lessons well.
When he suggested that my father’s coalition was based on anger over affirmative action and welfare he was peddling a blatant falsehood as egregious in its falsity as Wright’s charge that whites created AIDS to wipe out the black population.
Everything Obama said was directed at suggesting that while Rev. Wright should not have used such inflammatory language, he was somehow justified because of America’s white racism.
Try as he might, Barack Obama cannot claim the innocence of a lamb in his long years of worshipful association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. He was either fully aware of the seething racial hatred that motivated Wright, or something of a blithering idiot who can’t spot a racist hater when he spends years genuflecting at his feet.
Barack Obama is not an idiot. He is a brilliant orator who exudes charm and arouses near-worship from his host of giddy, hypnotized supporters. He is also a committed socialist and a talented salesman for his brand of Marxist snake oil.
Beware of camels bearing gifts, and politicians promising utopia.
TANANARIVE DUE
What a difference a week makes.
The Friday before Good Friday, I began my weekend with a sick feeling in my stomach that returned every time I switched on the news. Barack Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, was everywhere. The pastor's incendiary remarks were being played and replayed, and I knew instantly that of all the threats to Barack Obama's candidacy thus far, none had been so potent--nor so utterly personal.
What was Obama to do? Having attended black churches myself (and having been raised by civil rights activists), I understood the cultural context of his pastor's remarks--even those I did not agree with. Having read Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father, I had some knowledge of Wright's place in Obama's heart. Wright had guided Obama's path to Christianity. How can that relationship be put into words? How can you convincingly disavow someone who, despite his flaws, has meant so much to you?
Last weekend, my sleep was troubled. I had to turn off the news. All I could think about were the white Obama supporters I know, and have met, who have defied expectations by fueling Obama's campaign because so many of them consider Obama's race irrelevant. Suddenly, Barack Obama was BLACK. His race was no longer an accident of skin color; it now signified his membership in a community that some of his white supporters know little, or nothing, about.
"Well," I told my husband last weekend, "either Obama is the candidate we think he is, or he isn't."
I held on to my faith and waited to see how Obama would respond.
And I was shocked. More like bedazzled.
Instead of backing away and throwing up a fortress between himself and his own church, Obama shined a spotlight on the elephant in our living room. With nuance and intelligence rarely seen in American politics, Obama's speech, "A More Perfect Union," will be studied by future generations. New Mexico's governor Bill Richardson, who endorsed Obama Friday, cited Obama's speech as a significant moment for him personally. By the end of the week, a new CBS News poll reported that voters were also moved: Of those who had heard or read the speech, a whopping 71 percent thought Obama did a good job of explaining his relationship with Wright, and 69 percent thought he did a good job of explaining race relations. Sixty-three percent said they agreed with Obama's views.
So now, as a nation, we are not only talking about the things Obama's pastor said, or what Obama's grandmother might have said, but the remarks we overhear among our own friends and family. We're recalling the times we have been the voice of optimism among our more cynical elders, who suffered hardships and indignities our generation cannot imagine. We're recalling the times we have cringed in our own churches and synagogues.
Once I was attending a service at my own church, and a guest pastor railed against gay marriage. My cheeks burned. Before that point, I had never heard the subject come up at my church. There are several gay members of my church, and I'm sure they cringed too. I was only happy I had not chosen that Sunday to bring a gay white friend who was eager to attend a service after hearing me rave about my church. But I also know that a much larger proportion of the congregation would have been upset if the pastor had preached in favor of gay marriage. A congregation is not a consensus.
The controversy with Rev. Wright, for better or worse politically, strips away the fantasy some voters may have entertained that Barack Obama was just a white man in blackface, utterly isolated and insulated from the racial struggles of the nation where he spent most of his life. To some of those voters, that alone will give them reason to vote for a candidate who was lucky enough to be untouched by those racial struggles; perhaps a candidate whose church reminds them more of their own.
In many ways, the genius of Obama's campaign has been its ability to assemble a tent big enough for supporters who otherwise might not have anything to do with each other. They live in different neighborhoods. They attend different religious institutions. They sit at different tables at their school cafeterias, separated by race and ethnicity. There are no doubt Iowans who voted for Obama who have never known a black family. There are countless blacks supporting Obama who have never attended a public school with white students. Barack Obama didn't create that reality in American life. All he's done, somehow, is to ascend it.
In the past week, the supporters in Obama's tent have been asked to look at each other askance, to wonder how they would really feel about each other without an electrifying candidate to tether them. For some, there were probably feelings of doubt. When I made telephone calls supporting Obama before the Texas primary and caucus--encouraging Obama voters to return to vote in the evening caucus--I doubt that a single person I spoke to was black. And those Texans I spoke to had no idea what I looked like either.
Maybe, in some ways, coalition works better with the veil of anonymity. After all, our reasons for supporting Barack Obama are as varied as our American culture. The white college student worried about the environment has little in common with the elderly blacks who shed tears over the sight of whites voting for a black man. An Iraq war veteran eager to bring our troops home might not relate to a black father's struggle against unemployment. A single white mother and single black mother worried about health insurance have a great deal in common...but they probably don't attend the same church.
While we're sharing family secrets, here's one: There are also some black people who lock their car doors, or cross the street, when they see a black man, or teenager, approaching. Stereotypes are no one's exclusive domain. We are a nation divided. We are, all of us, flawed. That is no secret, or it shouldn't be.
And perhaps it's best that the "secret" of Obama's race is finally being acknowledged. People were bound to notice sooner or later. Barack Obama believes we can handle the truth of our communities' flaws and not turn against each other. He seems to believe, in fact, that we must.
Last week, my faith was tested. Given the polarized nature of our culture--and how miraculous it was that race hadn't become a divisive issue much sooner--I thought Obama's only hope to keep his coalition in the tent would be to distance himself from his pastor, his own church, and the black American experience, in language harsh enough to break his own heart.
Politicians, after all, rarely show us their human side. They think they can't afford to.
But Barack Obama did. He was ready to tell the truth, whether or not we are ready to hear it.
Polls go up and down, so it may take weeks or months to realize whether or not the flap over Obama's pastor will take a toll on his candidacy. I have heard voters say they feel more favorably about Obama because of his speech. But my gut tells me that some other potential supporters may not feel as comfortable in Obama's tent, unable to shake their fear that Obama, ultimately, is too different.
Never mind that different is what we've been asking for. Or that different is exactly what we need.
Last week, in a noteworthy demonstration of pure leadership, Barack Obama showed us how his different approach to politics only begins with his skin color. Political observers have also said that Obama's campaign has shifted the models for fundraising and volunteering so significantly that campaigns can never be the same. Where his other "differences" end, none of us can say.
He is the candidate I thought he was, and more.
Last weekend, I thought it would only be possible for Barack Obama to win the nomination, or the presidency, if he was willing to play political games I thought he would despise. He could win, but it would be at great personal and collective cost.
A week later, I am more convinced it is possible for Barack Obama to win the Democratic nomination, and the presidency beyond. Gov. Richards' endorsement on Friday only strengthens my faith. But there is a major difference: Instead of worrying that my candidate will diminish himself--a common and tragic practice when candidates are tested--I have seen Barack Obama stand even taller.
This is who I am, he proclaimed, when all political wisdom would have advised him to hope that no one would notice his race again. This is who WE are.
We as whites. We as blacks. We as Hispanics. We as Asians. We the People.
I'm still a realist. I know that there are voters who will not be able to forgive some of Rev. Wright's words, no matter what the cultural and historical context, and will feel forever convinced that Obama shares, or absorbed, his pastor's feelings. Cynical voters will see calculation. Weary voters will give up hope. The drumbeat of Fear has worked before, and it could always work again. For John McCain's party, and perhaps Hillary Clinton, the drumbeat of Fear is the best strategy.
But, like Obama, I believe we can rise above our fears. We can overcome the fears of our loved ones; and we can overcome our fears of strangers who live in a different neighborhood.
Last week, I experienced a renewal of faith in both my candidate and my nation's people. Yes, the Wright controversy caused me pain and concern as an Obama supporter. I now understand that there will be heartaches between now and November, and some of them will seem insurmountable. Sometimes, I'll have to turn off the news for a day or two and take a deep breath.
But this Easter weekend, I slept just fine.
STEVEN BARNES
The recent flap over Rev. Wright is sad, and understandable. Questioning Obama's judgment in attending the church is reasonable. One might wonder:
1) Did he agree with Wright?
2) Couldn't he have predicted that this would come back to haunt him?
3) Why was he attending a church where such attitudes existed?
These are reasonable, as I said. I would suggest that, were I Obama, based on what I have heard and read, my answers would be as follows:
1) No, I don't agree. But I understand his emotions, and they reflect the emotions of many blacks who consider themselves disenfranchised.
2) I don't make decisions in my personal life based upon their political impact.
3) One attends church not only for what you can get, but what you can give. If this is a congregation carrying such wounds that this rhetoric was an undercurrent, they need people like me to balance and contribute. Leaving would be self-serving: This is my community.
#####
I have heard multiple people express that they simply can't understand the emotions expressed. Note that agreeing with them, or approving of them, are very different from understanding them.
If you can't understand them, my personal position is:
1) You are in denial about the historical status and treatment of blacks in America.
2) You are in denial about the way human beings process emotions.
In other words, in some way you have concluded that black people are behaving in a different manner than whites would, given the same set of historical circumstances. Fine--you have the right to believe that. But you should state it clearly, so that we know where you are coming from.
Here are some questions I have heard during the last 24-hour period:
Q: Slavery happened hundreds of years ago. Why don't they just get over it?
A: Slavery ended about 150 years ago, but segregation wasn't abolished until the 1960s. That means that the majority of black people were raised by parents and grandparents who grew up in an America where they were legally second-class citizens.
Q: But it's over NOW! Why can't they get over it?
A: Right. People just "get over" the things that happened to them in childhood, and cultures forget their past. This is why we celebrate the birth of a Jewish carpenter thousands of years ago, why Jews celebrate Passover, why people raised during the Depression horde money, why countless people struggle through therapy trying to deal with abuse in their formative years. Clearly, cultures and human beings have a memory for things that happened to them. "Those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it." However painful it may be to remember, that cultural/genetic memory has a survival value.
Q: "God should Damn America"? How can you excuse that?
A: I don't excuse it--I understand it. There's a difference. That is a vomiting-up of centuries of pain and hurt. Once, saying something like that would get a black man killed. You can suppress that pain, but you can't destroy it. It has to be vented and processed.
Q: How do we know Obama doesn't feel the same way?
A: We don't, any more than we can "know" anything about what another human being feels. But if we take people at their word, and their words and actions, over time, tend to be in alignment, we can give the benefit of the doubt. Barack Obama's books detail a fantastic struggle toward self-discovery, one that resonated. I don't believe he was faking it. What seems to be true is that Obama has worked through an impressive amount of this pain, more than most white people can believe exists within blacks as a result of our time here. He has worked through more of it than Rev. Wright. If Obama turns his back on every black person who expresses anger, he would have to associate with no black people at all. And if he had to associate with no people who express anger, he would have no associates at all.
Q: What does Rev. Wright (or Spike Lee or other rich black folks) have to be upset about? They're doing great!
A: So...if you're doing fine, but your sister is being raped next door, you should be fine with that? If you're doing well, but your brother has been robbed and beaten, you'd be happy? Of course not. You might disagree that things are "bad," but you should grasp clearly that, if blacks believe things are "bad," they are likely to be upset.
Q: Why are they so angry?
A: Anger is a mask over fear. Ask rather: What do they have to be afraid of? For that answer, look at incarceration rates, violent death statistics, and so forth. Look at a history of lynching and all-white juries. Yes! Many things have changed, but many have not. Human beings have long, ugly memories, and it takes generations to heal. When 90% of the black people born before 1960 are dead, I think we'll be pretty much past it. Like white racism will be a marginalized issue by the time 90% of the white people born before 1950 are dead. Nothing personal.
Q: But are you blaming black-on-black crime, teen pregnancy, and drug addiction on white people?
A: No. I am saying that those disproportionate statistics are the result of differential history and social disruption. This was created by slavery and the subsequent century of oppression, yes. But black people must take responsibility for their communities and actions. This is very similar to the fact that, yes, child abuse can produce emotional dysfunction, but it is the responsibility of the individual to heal themselves and get on with life. Whites would not have done better under the same circumstances.
Q: But are you saying America is a terrible country?
A: Me personally? Hell, no! America is great--from my point of view, arguably the best country in the history of the world. But Americans are still the same jealous, bigoted, fearful human beings you find anywhere else, and you'd better believe that they can do terrible things and then say "Who, me?" just like everyone else. The more you've traveled, the more you study history and psychology, the more you realize that all of this strife is just the pale side of human nature.
Q: But black immigrants come over here and do better than American blacks. Doesn't that prove America isn't racist?
A: No. The descendants of slaves are not immigrants. People like Michael Savage routinely seem to forget this. We had our names, religion, lands, culture, leaders, personal power and language stripped away. What was left was a computer waiting for a program, and the program loaded into our memories was called "Three Quarters of a Human Being." We were domesticated, like turning a wolf into a dog. Any who resisted domestication were tortured or killed. Then, after three hundred years of brainwashing, we were turned loose with few resources and no compensation, into a hostile culture where even supportive white people tended to think we were...a little slow.
I counsel white people every week whose damaged and conflicted programming has resulted in obesity, drug addiction, troubled marriages, homelessness, and far more. As humans, we are awesomely vulnerable to that early programming. To be quite honest, I have to believe that whites who ask these questions about black anger have an underlying assumption: Black people are different. Without that pre-assumption, they would be forced to ask: "Under what circumstances would good, intelligent white people feel and behave in the same fashion?"
In my experience, liberals tend to ask "How have conditions been different for black people?" Conservatives tend to ask, "How are black people different from us?"
I know a thousand Reverend Wrights. My own family contains "Reverend Wrights": good, intelligent people who grew up being told to love a country that, rather obviously, did not love them as much as it loved its fair-haired, blue-eyed children. If you grew up in a family where you believed your parents lavished affection on one sibling while beating or depriving or denigrating you...how did it feel? What did it do to your life?
Extrapolate that out to cultures, and sub-cultures, and you may understand Rev. Wright's volatile sermon a bit better. Accurate? I think not. Understandable? Absolutely. And I honor Obama's refusal to throw him under the bus. And I do not think it was "bad judgment" for Obama to attend a church where, obviously, his presence would have been a healing influence. Bad judgment politically? Quite possibly.
I, for one, am glad that conventional politics aren't the most important thing to Barack Obama. It makes me all the happier to vote for him.
THROW GRANDMA UNDER THE BUS
ANN COULTER
Obama gave a nice speech, except for everything he said about race. He apparently believes we're not talking enough about race. This is like hearing Britney Spears say we're not talking enough about pop-tarts with substance-abuse problems.
By now, the country has spent more time talking about race than John Kerry has talked about Vietnam, John McCain has talked about being a POW, John Edwards has talked about his dead son, and Al Franken has talked about his USO tours.
But the "post-racial candidate" thinks we need to talk yet more about race. How much more? I had had my fill by around 1974. How long must we all marinate in the angry resentment of black people?
As an authentic post-racial American, I will not patronize blacks by pretending Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is anything other than a raving racist loon. If a white pastor had said what Rev. Wright said -- not about black people, but literally, the exact same things -- I think we'd notice that he's crazier than Ward Churchill and David Duke's love child. (Indeed, both Churchill and the Rev. Wright referred to the attacks of 9/11 as the chickens coming "home to roost.")
Imagine a white pastor saying: "Racism is the American way. Racism is how this country was founded, and how this country is still run. ... We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority. And believe it more than we believe in God."
Imagine a white pastor calling Condoleezza Rice, "Condoskeezza Rice."
Imagine a white pastor saying: "No, no, no, God damn America -- that's in the Bible for killing innocent people! God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human! God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme!"
We treat blacks like children, constantly talking about their temper tantrums right in front of them with airy phrases about black anger. I will not pat blacks on the head and say, "Isn't that cute?" As a post-racial American, I do not believe "the legacy of slavery" gives black people the right to be permanently ill-mannered.
Obama tried to justify Wright's deranged rants by explaining that "legalized discrimination" is the "reality in which Rev. Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up." He said that a "lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families."
That may accurately describe the libretto of "Porgy and Bess," but it has no connection to reality. By Rev. Wright's own account, he was 12 years old and was attending an integrated school in Philadelphia when Brown v. Board of Education was announced, ending "separate but equal" schooling.
Meanwhile, at least since the Supreme Court's decision in University of California v. Bakke in 1978 -- and obviously long before that, or there wouldn't have been a case or controversy for the court to consider -- it has been legal for the government to discriminate against whites on the basis of their race.
Consequently, any white person 30 years old or younger has lived, since the day he was born, in an America where it is legal to discriminate against white people. In many cases it's not just legal, but mandatory, for example, in education, in hiring and in Academy Award nominations.
So for half of Rev. Wright's 66 years, discrimination against blacks was legal -- though he never experienced it personally because it existed in a part of the country where he did not live. For the second half of Wright's life, discrimination against whites was legal throughout the land.
Discrimination has become so openly accepted that -- in a speech meant to tamp down his association with a black racist -- Obama felt perfectly comfortable throwing his white grandmother under the bus. He used her as the white racist counterpart to his black racist "old uncle," Rev. Wright.
First of all, Wright is not Obama's uncle. The only reason we indulge crazy uncles is that everyone understands that people don't choose their relatives the way they choose, for example, their pastors and mentors. No one quarrels with the idea that you can't be expected to publicly denounce your blood relatives.
But Wright is not a relative of Obama's at all. Yet Obama cravenly compared Wright's racist invective to his actual 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."
Rev. Wright accuses white people of inventing AIDS to kill black men, but Obama's grandmother -- who raised him, cooked his food, tucked him in at night, and paid for his clothes and books and private school -- has expressed the same feelings about passing black men on the street that Jesse Jackson has.
Unlike his "old uncle" -- who is not his uncle -- Obama had no excuses for his grandmother. Obama's grandmother never felt the lash of discrimination! Crazy grandma doesn't get the same pass as the crazy uncle; she's white. Denounce the racist!
Fine. Can we move on now?
No, of course, not. It never ends. To be fair, Obama hinted that we might have one way out: If we elect him president, then maybe, just maybe, we can stop talking about race.
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