Right about Obama
EDITORIAL Right about Obama Last week’s highly entertaining episode of the Jeremiah Wright Show didn’t tell us anything new about the demagogic reverend. He stands by his sick notion that...
...It is anything but...
...It contradicts how I was raised and the setting in which I was raised...
...It contradicts what I’ve said in my books...
...There are only two possible answers...
...The difference between then and now is that Wright has “amplifi ed” those statements—thus inconveniencing Obama...
...The scales fell from his eyes...
...Didn’t that contradict how Obama was raised...
...The other answer is that Wright is correct...
...He stands by his sick notion that American foreign policy and jihadist terrorism are equivalent, his defense of Louis Farrakhan, and his wacky conspiracy theory that the AIDS virus was cooked up by the federal government...
...Worse, one of the main reasons for Obama’s unequivocal split from Wright had nothing to do with the reverend’s hateful ideology...
...He has defl ated the balloon that was Obamamania...
...Matthew Continetti, for the Editors...
...Indeed, during the fi rst sermon Obama ever heard Wright deliver, the reverend spoke of a planet where “white folks’ greed runs a world in need...
...Chicago Sun-Times, April 5, 2004) n “ ‘Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church.’ ” (Obama campaign statement reported in the New York Times, April 30, 2007) n “[Wright] is like an old uncle who sometimes will say things I don’t agree with...
...Go ahead and count the “I”s and “my”s in this passage from his news conference: In some ways, what Reverend Wright said yesterday directly contradicts everything that I’ve done during my life...
...Sunday service at Trinity . . . every week...
...It contradicts my decisions to pursue a career of public service...
...In 2007 Reverend Wright referred to the “United States of White America” in one sermon and later presented a lifetime achievement award to Farrakhan...
...In his own way, Wright has done his country a favor...
...What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciations of his remarks were somehow political posturing,” Obama said...
...Needless to say, this isn’t the best message for someone running on a platform of “change...
...You see, Wright had the temerity to suggest that Barack Obama is just another pol...
...March 18, 2008) n “I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday...
...It contradicts what I said in my convention speech in 2004...
...Talk about contradictions...
...It contradicts my announcement...
...But we did gain a new perspective on Wright’s former parishioner, Senator Barack Obama...
...Obama’s problem is that Reverend Wright is the same as he’s always been...
...It contradicts everything that I’ve been saying on the campaign trail...
...But at the press club, Wright was simply repeating things that have been on cable news for weeks—statements that Obama said previously were a “caricature” of an otherwise impressive man...
...What does that say about Obama’s “judgment,” on which he largely bases his claim to the presidency...
...It’s not Wright but Obama who has changed...
...Didn’t that run against “everything” that Obama had been saying on the campaign trail...
...This only confi rms Obama’s reputation for being thin-skinned and selfabsorbed...
...It took the Democratic frontrunner 20 years—and 50 days since videos surfaced of Wright’s incendiary sermons—to discover that the man who helped him become a Christian, offi ciated at his marriage, and baptized his two daughters is a conspiracy theory-loving self-publicizer...
...Now that association is undermining his presidential candidacy...
...Which is why Obama has called the Wright affair a “distraction...
...One is that Obama has had a revelation...
...It contradicts the issues that I’ve worked on politically...
...Yet that year the Obamas gave more than $25,000 to Wright’s church...
...Therefore it must end...
...Early on in Chicago, an association with Wright gave Obama cachet in the community...
...He says he gave Wright the “benefi t of the doubt” until he watched the April 28 performance at the National Press Club...
...April 29, 2008) What is going on here...
...The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago...
...Why wasn’t he “outraged” then...
...He has exploded the pretense that Barack Obama is somehow different from all the other talented, fl awed, ambitious, vainglorious men and women who have sought the presidency...
...February 25, 2008) n “I don’t think that my church is actually particularly controversial...
...That shocked his conscience...
...He has changed his position on his former friend time and time again: n “These days, [Obama] says, he attends the 11 a.m...
...March 2, 2008) n “I can no more disown [Wright] than I can disown the black community...
...Obama is doing whatever it takes to appeal to 51 percent of the population in any given place at any given time...
...His pastor, Wright, has become a close confi dant...
...And it’s not fl attering...
Vol. 13 • May 2008 • No. 33
