Obama And The Crazies

Barack Obama strikes me as being rather intelligent. I wonder why it has taken him so long to notice the "crazies"?

Do you remember the Jeremiah Wright controversy I think this was the first time that Obama had the opportunity to confront the "crazies", but instead it seems that he "went down to the crossroads" and sold his "soul" in order to be elected president. I don't understand why the truth is controversial. In my opinion Jeremiah Wright was simply speaking the truth back in 2008. Even though I am not a fan of politics in the pulpit, we still have freedom of speech. I also think that discourse is extremely important, and that sometimes the most important things to listen to are those that you disagree with.

Back in 2008 Obama was "outraged" by what Wright had said and Obama resigned his membership in Wright's church. To me this was a bad sign for someone about to swear an oath to “...solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Now, I know that freedom of speech is a two-way street. You may have an opinion or thought about something, and my opinion may be completely the opposite of yours. However, we both have the right to express ourselves, so technically Obama did nothing wrong, except metaphorically stab his pastor in the back for his own gain. So much for "hope" and "change". Jeremiah Wright's position back in 2008 was basically anti-war. It was a position shared by many leftists, liberals and progressives. Barack Obama chose to take the side of the war-mongering right wing "crazies" in order to be elected.

If only Obama had been feeling "feisty" back in 2008...

Double Standard

I wish I was a better writer. I wish it were easier for me sometimes. I’ve had the idea for this post for some time now, but I’ve found it to be a difficult one to actually write. So I hope that there is at least a modicum of clarity in what follows.

Barack Obama’s selection of Rick Warren to say the invocation at the inauguration infuriates me. Why does Obama want to reach out to someone as intolerant as Rick Warren? But more importantly, why is Barack Obama himself demonstrating intolerance?

Obama talks very often about wanting to be all inclusive and wanting to listen to all sides, even the far right. This might be a good thing. I have my doubts about it and only time will tell if it will be a good thing. However, Obama is off to a bad start. He talks about being all inclusive, but he is not. Obama goes out of his way to reach out to the far right, but he has not demonstrated the same courtesy to the far left. In fact, he has gone one step further and denounced at least one spokesperson for the far left. Progressives, along with the non-religious are being ignored and banished while people like Rick Warren are being elevated to positions of stature, both real and symbolic. Just looking at how Obama has treated two very politically different people demonstrates the point I am trying to make. Obama has severed all ties to Jeremiah Wright and fallen over backwards to embrace Rick Warren. You would think that Obama was George W. Bush here. The politics of Jeremiah Wright are actually quite close to the politics of Noam Chomsky, and to my own. Why has Obama chosen to ostracize this part of the political dialog? Obama is a liar. Every time he says something like “I will listen to you when we disagree. And most importantly, I will open the doors of government and ask you to be involved in your own democracy again" he is lying. He slammed the door shut on Jeremiah Wright and locked it. He has locked out progressive and non-religious thought. Hell, he has even locked out religious progressive thought. Will he ever listen to the ideas of someone like Noam Chomsky? Rick Warren is no progressive. His politics are very far to the right. Obama is a hypocrite. He is too much of a right leaning centrist. He places the game of politics before all else. Unfortunately, this is probably the only way he could have been elected. I don’t imagine he would have won if he had not denounced Jeremiah Wright. Embracing Rick Warren, however, is simply going too far.

If there is one thing that infuriates me, it is exclusion. The politics of Bush/Cheney is all about exclusion. Their great efforts at secrecy prove this. Their great efforts on the part of the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class are also strikingly exclusionary. The religious politics of Rick Warren is all about exclusion, even though he is supposed to be the prince of inclusion. His efforts to diminish the civil rights of gay people proves this. Jeremiah Wright did not exclude gays from his church while he was pastor. Exclusion hampers and suppresses equality. I thought the United States was supposed to be all about equality. The fact that Obama has excluded Jeremiah Wright simply so that Obama could have political gain infuriates me. How can Obama exclude the extreme left, embrace the extreme right, and then claim that he wants to wants to listen to all sides? Hypocrite!

Where is the "change" that Obama talks about? Who exactly is he referring to when he says “I will listen to you when we disagree.”? It certainly is not Jeremiah Wright. Like so many other politicians Obama doesn’t seem to want to listen to gays, atheists, and progressives. Where is the "change" in that?

Why is Obama “outraged” and “saddened” by Jeremiah Wright and not “outraged” and “saddened” by Rick Warren?

Noam Chomsky and Jeremiah Wright talk about things that most Americans don’t want to hear about. They talk about our imperfections, things that desperately need fixing, things that too many Americans either don’t know about, or don’t want to know about. We desperately need this kind of dissent and criticism. I am “outraged” and “saddened” by Barack Obama.

Obama may be better than Bush, but don't we deserve more than that?

Eleven O'clock On Sunday Morning

From Obama & the Black Church by Darryl Pinckney:

My parents, old NAACP activists, live in front of CNN, and back in April I happened to be with them in Indianapolis the week before the Indiana primary, when the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy returned to embarrass Senator Barack Obama's campaign. To my mother, passionately pro-Obama, nothing justified what she saw as Wright's weekend of self-promotion: his speech to the Detroit NAACP and his performance at the National Press Club. "He's clowning for the white folks," she said.

My father, ferociously pro-Clinton because he doesn't believe that even a moderate black man can be elected president in such a racist society, said that Obama had been wrong to repudiate his pastor. He should have stood by him in his North Carolina press conference as he had in his Philadelphia speech when he refused to strip Wright of his historical context as a man who "contains within him the contradictions...of the [black] community." Black people wouldn't like it, because they always took their pastor's side. My mother countered that, on the contrary, black congregations were forever dumping their pastors. I wondered how much of this kind of back and forth was going on in black homes across the country. My parents did agree, however, that because of the Wright story the Supreme Court's decision to uphold Indiana's law requiring voters to have valid photo identification was not being debated enough.

Read the rest here.

Darryl Pinckney is the author of Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature.

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind, Out Of Our Minds

From Forget About It by Dennis Perrin:

I was nudged into these thoughts by a recent AP story about mass graves being unearthed in South Korea, showing that in 1950-51, the US-backed South regime slaughtered untold thousands of citizens, many of whom, women and children included, were killed execution-style, then dumped into trenches. It's the kind of human rights nightmare that, had it been attributed to Saddam or Milosevic, would be denounced as fascist terrorism. Yet so far I've seen no serious American commentary about what these mass graves mean, given that the US was in charge of the South Korean military that committed the massacres. Of course, defenders could point out that South Korea was at war with the North, and that grisly actions were bound to occur. But Saddam and Milosevic used the same reasoning to explain their killing fields, and I don't recall many stateside commentators who accepted that as a reasonable defense.

Mr. Perrin then goes on to explain what the United States did in Korea:

Mass executions are indeed savage, but even in this awful case, these killings were hardly the "most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War." US air strikes went far beyond shooting someone in the back of the head. The US firebombed Korean villages and towns into smoldering graves, dropping hundreds of tons of napalm in the effort, killing millions. On top of all that, the Truman administration seriously debated using nuclear weapons in Korea (the insane Douglas MacArthur, who proposed that the US drop up to 30 nuclear bombs, was thankfully kept outside of the inner-policy debates). As I put it in "Savage Mules": "In the end, nuclear weapons were not used, and really weren’t necessary. Destruction of the Korean peninsula, North and South, was so vast, the death toll so high, that all nukes would have added was a radioactive exclamation point."

This aerial destruction built upon the firebombing of Japanese cities at the end of World War II, and set the stage for the murderous assaults on Vietnam.

Mr. Perrin rightly points out that many Americans are ignorant of this and other savage parts of our history. This ignorance is upsetting enough, but what truly upsets and confounds me are the people who are informed of this side of our history and see it as necessary and just. With their support, and the tacit approval of the ignorant, the United States continues to commit atrocities all over the globe. The people calling for an end to this are marginalized, mocked, and labeled as kooks. Dennis Kucinich, Jeremiah Wright, and Noam Chomsky come to mind, off the top of my head. The main message of Kucinich, Wright, and Chomsky is one of peace. One of stopping all the killing. Yet they are generally considered to be nuts. Why? It is sickening to me to see them not be taken seriously. Who would choose war over peace, killing and destruction over not killing and destroying? Who would choose the insanity of massacre over the logic of negotiation? American history is filled with examples of us choosing the violent way. We are out of our minds.

Imperial Hubris

From Rev. Wright and Reinhold Niebuhr by Omar Hossino:

Over 60 years ago, following the emergence of an American superpower after the Second World War, Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps the greatest American Christian theologian of modern times, warned the United States of its potential for immense injustice. Niebuhr wrote in an essay entitled "The Anglo-Saxon Destiny and Responsibility" that America's virtues may deceive it into believing that it is favored by God and on a divine mission. A self-righteous and arrogant America may attempt to run the world and thus be led to great evil. Niebuhr argued instead that America must acknowledge its faults and sins. If America did not do this, he warned, "woe be unto us."

Defying The Assumption Of Destiny

From The People vs. Jeremiah Wright by Megan Garber:

But from journalism’s wider role in our civic discourse—to the extent that journalists in the aggregate are charged not just with reporting hard news, but with filtering it and explaining it and finding meaning in it—there’s much more to be said about Wright than his now-severed relationship with candidate Obama. The conversation journalists were going to lead us in, the one that was going to start us on a new path to racial reconciliation—and such a conversation can certainly still be had—is rooted in Wright’s cultural identity. And engaging in it will require us to admit that the basic premise of Wright’s discourse is true: the American government has a shameful history when it comes to race.

English-speaking White Men

In his review of the book Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea by Richard Kluger, Alan Taylor writes about an influential essay by an American historian: "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" by Frederick Jackson Turner which was published in 1893.

From The Old Frontiers by Alan Taylor:

Later in that century, powerful critics emerged to challenge almost every element of the "frontier thesis." They faulted Turner for treating the American land as a howling wilderness free for the taking because it was thinly inhabited and virtually unaltered by Indians, who posed scant obstacle to American destiny. Treated as doomed, Indians vanished from Turner's vision of history once they became constricted within reservations. Turner also paid little attention to the continent's Hispanic and French colonists -- and he slighted African Americans and Asian Americans as participants in North America's transformation. Like almost all other historians of his race, class, and generation, Turner thought of the American people as fundamentally white and English-speaking. Narrating American history as an east-to-west story of expansion by Anglo-Americans, he and his disciples scanted the south-to-north story of Hispanic colonization in Texas, New Mexico, and California. They also had little to say about the French enclaves around the Great Lakes and along the Mississippi -- and nothing about the Russian colonial advance into Alaska.

Turner's sharpest and most resourceful modern critic, Patricia Nelson Limerick, has asserted that "Turner was, to put it mildly, ethnocentric and nationalist. English-speaking white men were the stars of his story; Indians, Hispanics, French Canadians, and Asians were at best supporting actors and at worst invisible." Turner's critics also faulted his claim that America's frontier experience created a uniquely democratic society. They pointed to other frontier colonial regions -- Argentina, South Africa, Canada, and Australia -- which were slower to develop an egalitarian individualism and democratic politics. On the other hand, the twentieth century brought democracies to India and western Europe: places without Turner's version of a frontier as "free land."

And yet today we have many white American males who are baffled and afraid of Jeremiah Wright and anyone who doesn’t look, sound, or think like them. I wonder where they could have possibly learned to think that way.

McCain’s Ties To Bush

From Reality check: More Americans worried about McCain’s connection to Bush than Obama’s connection to Wright by Arlen Parsa:

Ha! You have to assume that a lot of the “major problems” that people have with Obama’s connection with Wright have to do with the media playing it up so much. But the media hasn’t played up McCain’s connection to Bush at all. When (will) the media stop giving them a free pass? McCain and Bush have many more political connections than Obama and Wright ever had.

Students At Howard University Talk About Wright

Howard University students respond to Rev. Jeremiah Wright's controversial comments:

What Is Wrong With This Wright? Part Two

From Like the Man Said, Read the Whole Thing by Kathy:

Of course, the National Press Club speech was followed by questions from the press, which had been given to a moderator in advance, and the questions therefore had nothing to do with what Rev. Wright had spoken about. The questions were all the same stupid questions Wright has been getting for weeks, about the Malcolm X quote, about the “God damn America” quote, etc., etc. Nobody from the media present at the event even bothered to mention the substance of the speech, as far as I could tell, and the speech was exquisite. It was an eloquent and moving exegesis of the historic role of the black church in the United States, and of the direct line between the theology of liberation preached in many black churches and biblical teachings — especially Isaiah 61:

The prophetic tradition of the black church has its roots in Isaiah, the 61st chapter, where God says the prophet is to preach the gospel to the poor and to set at liberty those who are held captive. Liberating the captives also liberates who are holding them captive.

It frees the captives and it frees the captors. It frees the oppressed and it frees the oppressors.

The prophetic theology of the black church, during the days of chattel slavery, was a theology of liberation. It was preached to set free those who were held in bondage spiritually, psychologically, and sometimes physically. And it was practiced to set the slaveholders free from the notion that they could define other human beings or confine a soul set free by the power of the gospel.

The prophetic theology of the black church during the days of segregation, Jim Crow, lynching, and the separate-but-equal fantasy was a theology of liberation.

It was preached to set African-Americans free from the notion of second-class citizenship, which was the law of the land. And it was practiced to set free misguided and miseducated Americans from the notion that they were actually superior to other Americans based on the color of their skin.

The prophetic theology of the black church in our day is preached to set African-Americans and all other Americans free from the misconceived notion that different means deficient.

Being different does not mean one is deficient. It simply means one is different, like snowflakes, like the diversity that God loves. Black music is different from European and European music. It is not deficient; it is just different.

Unbalanced Unfairness

From Media complicit in making Wright look bad by Kenneth F. Bunting:

Barack Obama's forceful denunciation and disavowal of his former pastor doesn't change the fact that it is an irrelevant distraction entirely created by cable television pundits using out-of-context and skewed sound bites.

Moyers' illuminating interview with Wright didn't fit the narrative that portrays Wright as an unpatriotic hatemonger with outrageous views. Moyers played longer excerpts of the very same sermons of which the seconds-long snippets had been aired over and over.

Wright, responding in the Moyers interview in a conversational style, came across as a reasonable man, hurt by what he felt were unfair portrayals, but not immodest. He and Moyers talked about his scholarly influences and his impressive 36-year ministry at the Chicago church where he met Obama.

At the end of it, I wondered if the pundits who had been so obsessed with Wright and so determined to define him had watched it and how they would treat it. For the next 30 hours I flipped repeatedly between CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

Nothing. It was as if Wright's first extended interview hadn't taken place. Even on networks that had teased the Moyers interview repeatedly, using excerpts from the two-minutes of it that PBS had posted in advance on its Web site, there was no comment, no analysis, no report about what had been said in the interview.

Fair and balanced, indeed.

And the best that Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich can come up with is to call Bill Moyers names. How mature of them. Unlike them, Bill Moyers deserves our respect. He has earned it.

Michael Moore Is A White Guy

John McCain is Four More Years of George W. Bush:

It's Easy To Paint Them As Nutters

Some observations on Wrightgate from across the pond.

From The victim mentality by Sunny Hundal:

This is what made Martin Luther King so compelling. He spoke of black people lifting themselves, not by denigrating white people but by speaking to both communities in a language whites and blacks could identify with. We have a modern Martin Luther King in the form of Barack Obama, but he’s being dragged down by the us versus them politics that has become so ingrained.

There is a serious point to be made here. Freedom of speech is a bit useless if you’re not willing to hear what the other has to say, and why. We have to understand each other’s language and motivations otherwise all we get is a series of confrontations.

Five Years Later

From Thursday Morning Open Thread by Joe Sudbay:

Five years ago today, the pundits were in a lather as our fearless leader flew onto an aircraft carrier to declare: Mission Accomplished.

The Bush administration lied to the American people. But, the traditional media accepted those lies -- and fell for the photo ops. That same media today is obsessed about Rev. Wright, instead of the fact that we just finished the most deadly month in Iraq since August. It was sickening then and it's even worse now.

Five years later.

Obama And Wright

Barack Obama talks about the way things could be. Jeremiah Wright talks about the way things are and the way things used to be. Both are right to talk about these things. Are our brains so tiny that we can’t hold both viewpoints in our head at the same time?

Wright says some things that are correct and some things that are incorrect. His incorrect statements do not make the correct ones any less true. Wright can be odd and flamboyant. His behavior does not make his correct statements any less true. Are our brains so tiny that we can’t sort out the difference?

Obama is a politician, Wright is a preacher; I don’t trust either of them. However, I think that my brain is big enough to sort out the truth from the bullshit. If you’d like help with the sorting, here’s a suggestion: go to Bill Moyers for the truth on Wright, go to Sean Hannity for the bullshit.

Dave Winer On Moyers-Wright

From Why Is It So Quiet After the Moyers-Wright Interview? by Dave Winer:

I expected a roaring debate in the political blogosphere this morning, and on cable news after the Friday night Bill Moyers interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Instead, there's eerie quiet.

The most I could find was this post on Protein Wisdom saying that Moyers didn't play hardball with Wright. It's true, he didn't. Instead he did what I wish more journalists would, he interviewed him in a way that helped us get to know the person. He let him speak his piece, so we could listen.

There's so much to admire about Rev. Wright, but first, the shame of the professional media, who hounded not only Wright, but members of his congregation, including a woman in a hospice, to try to uncover more dirt about Wright and thereby embarrass Barack Obama.

How Many Years Did Cheney Serve?

From Stuffing Wright Vs. The Right Stuff:

With Reverend Wright's mug curently blanketing the media, one picture I don't expect to see making the rounds is this one.

Presented by Bill Moyers during his extended interview with the Reverend earlier this week, the photo shows six-year veteran and Naval cardiopulmonary technician, Jeremiah Wright (beyond the I.V. stand), monitoring President Johnson's heart as he recovers from gall bladder surgery at Bethesda.

Sorry if I'm unable to join the media parade, impugning Wright as an angry black malcontent in a daishikis, or just completely tossing him in a more "pragmatic" way, as simply a hopeless egomaniac or a strategic liability to the Obama campaign.

The photograph referred to above is here.

The Secret Black Radical Trojan Horse Agenda

From Rev. Wright: 15 minutes of illuminating fame by Pam Spaulding:

Wright’s litany of grievances — including a perceived attack on the black church, the conspiracy theories about the government and 9/11, or inflicting AIDS on blacks (referencing the Tuskegee experiment) — reveal a very real thread of beliefs in a segment of the black community of a certain generation who lived under the thumb of Jim Crow and in-your-face bluntly institutionalized white privilege.

Making light of this kind of thinking diminishes the fact that it comes from an element of truth, and that white privilege, though not as boldly naked as in generations past, is alive and well. It also illuminates the lack of black cultural competence in the dominant culture. This is exemplified by those disturbed by Wright’s earlier remarks (and delivery) in the first place — and generated the fear of what I call the Secret Black Radical Trojan Horse Agenda entering the White House through the vessel of the pleasant, benign Barack Obama. You could read between the lines in the commentary — people were musing, wondering how prevalent is Wright’s belief - the bizarre mix of fact and fiction — in the black community.

This is all crazy making? Not really. Our desperate need to discuss race honestly and openly (and SANELY), is not simply a difficult exercise. Remember, we have people who will not vote for Barack Obama under any circumstances because he is black. No one wants to really discuss those conservative white blue collar workers who fall into this category — the current demo prized by Senator Clinton. They see a “Rev. Wright eruption” and automatically see the Secret Black Radical Trojan Horse Agenda.

Tim "Know-It-All" Russert Talks About Obama And Wright

The question about Jeremiah Wright should be: Why has he struck a nerve in the American psyche?” There must be some substance to what he has said. Why are we and Obama ignoring the substance of what Wright has said? Why are we just talking about the horse race again and how Wrightgate affects Obama’s campaign.



Racism is ugly and we would rather just ignore it and hope that it goes away. It will never go away unless we confront it. This is what Wright is doing. Obama refuses to do so. He is pretending it doesn’t exist.

Believe it or not, as long as I don’t have to listen to Jeremiah Wright preach about religion, I would rather listen to him than to Tim Russert. At least Wright isn’t a corporate and political shill.

What Is Wrong With This Wright?

I saw a video clip on last Fridays Bill Moyers Journal of Jeremiah Wright saying this during one of his sermons:

We have no right to take a life whether as a gang banger living the thug life, or as a President lying about leading a nation into war. We have no right to take a life! Whether through the immorality of a slave trade, or the immorality of refusing HIV/AIDS money to countries or agencies who do not tow your political line! We have no right to take a life! Turn to your neighbors and say we have no right to take a life!

Why isn’t Sean Hannity playing this particular video clip over and over and over…?