Jeremiah was a bullfrog, was a good friend of mine

[Harlan Huckleby]

Obama, like Jeremiah Wright himself, is very intelligent and calculating. Membership in that church gives him entree into Chicago's powerful black caucus. Obama, in my opinion, doesn't share all of Wright's views

Every politician joins a church. Obama needed this more than most. A light-skinned Harvard boy looking to organize the peeps.

I believe Obama is a very good person. I don't mind that he is ambitious, I expect he did a lot of good for people along his way up the ladder.

I just don't like the phony posturing. "I didn't know that Reverand WRight was like this." "Michele meant she is proud now of our unity and new style politics." Gag me with a spoon.

It isn't Obama and it wasn't Wright who shocked me; it was the thousands in the congregation smiling, nodding, and laughing at his hateful words against white people and America.

In Barack's speech today, he dismissed The Bullfrog as a product of an older generation. Some truth to that, but you also have to recognize all the young people in the crowd cheering him on.

How do we move forward if the greivances of the past are constantly re-enforced in the segregated church?

White people who attend that church say they are treated with great warmth and affection. I believe it. I don't think Obama is stuck in the past, I think the things he says about unity and reconciliation are sincere. Yet there is all that negativity and backwardness in that church. So many contradictions.

[Joemailman]

You call it a segregated church, and then mention that the white people who attend there are treated with warmth and affection? What makes it segregated? Do they have separate drinking fountains? Do the white folks have to sit in the back, or give up their seat to the blacks?

[Harlan Huckleby]

You call it a segregated church, and then mention that the white people who attend there are treated with warmth and affection? What makes it segregated? Do they have separate drinking fountains? Do the white folks have to sit in the back, or give up their seat to the blacks?

If you look at the mission statement of the church, it is a church about and for Africans.

It's a black church. And it's not like a Greek Orthodox Church where there are a significant number of non-Greeks in attendance. I did not mean to suggest it is mean-spirited place, that's why I repeated what I've heard of how white people are treated there.

The reason why this is an issue is that Barack has presented himself as a white-black bridger. There's a contradiction, an all-black church is looking to the past.

[The Leaper]

Every politician joins a church. Obama needed this more than most. A light-skinned Harvard boy looking to organize the peeps.

I believe Obama is a very good person. I don't mind that he is ambitious, I expect he did a lot of good for people along his way up the ladder.

I just don't like the phony posturing. "I didn't know that Reverand WRight was like this." "Michele meant she is proud now of our unity and new style politics." Gag me with a spoon.

I agree with you. I do believe that Obama does not share Wright's viewpoint in most of these cases. Obama has a different life experience than Wright...and I think he has an appreciation for some things that Wright clearly does not.

My issue is that Obama used Wright's church for his own political purposes while looking the other way when these inflammatory and racist comments and thoughts were not just spoken at the pulpit...but when they were taught to HIS CHILDREN and SOLD TO THE PUBLIC. That is completely unacceptable to me for a presidential candidate in terms of judgment and leadership.

What SCARED me in his speech today? Obama threw his OWN GRANDMOTHER under the bus. He basically put his own grandmother's private thoughts and feelings on par with a spiritual leader's public rantings...he reduced his grandmother to the level of a man who less than 10% of the country views in any kind of positive light.

Obama is a careful, calculating politician who has little substance and even less experience on the world stage. He scares the hell out of me...and I think he would make a horrible president at this time.

[Harlan Huckleby]

Obama threw his OWN GRANDMOTHER under the bus.

I heard what he had to say, I would take issue with your characterization.

[swede]

Obama threw his OWN GRANDMOTHER under the bus.

I heard what he had to say, I would take issue with your characterization.

That's today's marching orders from the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

Every time we mention Obama today we have to say that he threw his own grandmother under the bus.

Word is that tomorrow the VRWC has ordered us to step it back and only say, "We realize it's not like he threw his own grandmother under the bus. We stand behind Obama's right to believe that the woman that raised him in his mother's absence was a racist."

[Harlan Huckleby]

Michael Gerson
March 19, 2008

Barack Obama has run a campaign based on a simple premise: that words of unity and hope matter to America. Now he has been forced by his charismatic, angry pastor to argue that words of hatred and division don't really matter as much as we thought.

Obama's speech in Philadelphia yesterday made this argument as well as it could be made. He condemned the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's views in strong language -- and embraced Wright as a wayward member of the family. He made Wright and his congregation a symbol of both the nobility and "shocking ignorance" of the African American experience -- and presented himself as a leader who transcends that conflicted legacy. The speech recognized the historical reasons for black anger -- and argued that the best response to those grievances is the adoption of Obama's own social and economic agenda.

It was one of the finest political performances under pressure since John F. Kennedy at the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960. It also fell short in significant ways.

The problem with Obama's argument is that Wright is not a symbol of the strengths and weaknesses of African Americans. He is a political extremist, holding views that are shocking to many Americans who wonder how any presidential candidate could be so closely associated with an adviser who refers to the "U.S. of KKK-A" and urges God to "damn" our country.

Obama's excellent and important speech on race in America did little to address his strange tolerance for the anti-Americanism of his spiritual mentor.

Take an issue that Obama did not specifically confront yesterday. In a 2003 sermon, Wright claimed, "The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color."

This accusation does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an "occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy." It makes Wright a dangerous man. He has casually accused America of one of the most monstrous crimes in history, perpetrated by a conspiracy of medical Mengeles. If Wright believes what he said, he should urge the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he views as guilty of unspeakable evil. If I believed Wright were correct, I would join him in that cause.

But Wright's accusation is batty, reflecting a sputtering, incoherent hatred for America. And his pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.

Obama's speech implied that these toxic views are somehow parallel to the stereotyping of black men by Obama's grandmother, which Obama said made him "cringe" -- both are the foibles of family. But while Grandma may have had some issues to work through, Wright is accusing the American government of trying to kill every member of a race. There is a difference.

Yet didn't George Bush and other Republican politicians accept the support of Jerry Falwell, who spouted hate of his own? Yes, but they didn't financially support his ministry and sit directly under his teaching for decades.

The better analogy is this: What if a Republican presidential candidate spent years in the pew of a theonomist church -- a fanatical fragment of Protestantism that teaches the modern political validity of ancient Hebrew law? What if the church's pastor attacked the U.S. government as illegitimate and accepted the stoning of homosexuals and recalcitrant children as appropriate legal penalties (which some theonomists see as biblical requirements)? Surely we would conclude, at the very least, that the candidate attending this church lacked judgment and that his donations were subsidizing hatred. And we would be right.

In Philadelphia, Obama attempted to explain Wright's anger as typical of the civil rights generation, with its "memories of humiliation and doubt and fear." But Wright has the opposite problem: He ignored the message of Martin Luther King Jr. and introduced a new generation to the politics of hatred.

King drew a different lesson from the oppression he experienced: "I've seen too much hate to want to hate myself; hate is too great a burden to bear. I've seen it on the faces of too many sheriffs of the South. . . . Hate distorts the personality. . . . The man who hates can't think straight; the man who hates can't reason right; the man who hates can't see right; the man who hates can't walk right."

Barack Obama is not a man who hates -- but he chose to walk with a man who does.

[The Leaper]

I heard what he had to say, I would take issue with your characterization.

How so?

The guy basically said "Wright is no biggie because I've heard Grams speak about being scared of a blackie."

The bottom line is that the two situations aren't comparable. Speaking PRIVATELY about your thoughts and feelings is one thing...speaking PUBLICALLY as a SPIRITUAL LEADER, which carries a very high responsibility in the Bible that Obama supposedly champions, is quite another.

Being scared or unsure of cultures/people you don't know is one thing...claiming that America is the cause of the AIDS virus and that our government is to blame for the drug culture, not individuals dealing and doing drugs, is quite another.

Somehow, I don't see his grandmother thrusting her pelvis around talking about "riding dirty" in church or praising a bigot and racist like Louis F or a terrorist like Khadafi either...but maybe that's just me.

[Harlan Huckleby]

I was watching Tavis Smiley interview Henry Lewis Gates, black Harvard professor. Also listened to NPR reporter who surveyed black ministers in Chicago about Jeremiah Wright.

The strong feedback is that Jeremiah Wright's views are mainstream for black churches. His severe opinions aren't necessarily adopted by all, but are common expressions in black churches. The professor and Tavis both say what is shocking is the disconnect between whites and blacks.

Wait a second, if Jeremiah Wright is just par for the course, how is it possible that Obama is shocked, shocked, shocked to discover his views?

Speaking of , Clinton's lead in polls in Pennsylvania has gone from mid teens to +26 points.

[Harlan Huckleby]

Obama's odyssey on race - Once viewed skeptically by blacks; now hit by whites

This is interesting article. I believe that Obama is a racial healer.

But he's selectively honest, like all politicians.

[Harlan Huckleby]

The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 21, 2008

The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.

An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which"controversial" remarks?

Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented HIV "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible for Sept. 11 -- "chickens coming home to roost" -- because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?) What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them?

Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?"

But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave -- why doesn't he leave even today -- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, 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.

(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white 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." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?

"I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was Grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus's time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.

Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?

(b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then he proceeds to do precisely that. What lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.

This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.

But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

[The Leaper]

Speaking of , Clinton's lead in polls in Pennsylvania has gone from mid teens to +26 points.

Yep. Everyone who thinks Obama is a lock to earn the nomination are kidding themselves.

Clinton probably won't be able to close the nominee gap due to the stupid way they are parcelled out almost evenly unless you win by a major landslide.

However, Clinton DOES stand a good chance of potentially evening out or even forging ahead in the POPULAR VOTE. That is what could potentially crush the party.

What do the Dems do if Obama has more pledged delegates (say by 50 or 60) not counting the superdelegates...but Hillary has more votes in her favor by number? Currently, Obama leads both...so he could legitimately claim victory and the SDs would have a strong case to not override the voters. But if the delegate lead and popular vote lead are split, that strong case is no longer available for Obama.

Hillary is likely to score huge wins in PA and IN...Obama has to have a signficant voter edge in NC, or the popular vote lead could swing to Hillary even if the nominee lead can't.

[The Leaper]

Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?"

But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church?

Those seem to be the exact same question to me.

My questions are:

If this kind of hatred toward America is the norm for black churches, how is it redeeming or helpful to the cause of blacks so that it should be accepted and tolerated as Obama did?

If Obama chose to tolerate this kind of bigotry in his church and failed to have any understanding of his pastor's viewpoints, how can we trust him when given the responsibility of understanding and interacting with world leaders, some of which are equally driven by hate and bigotry?

I know why Obama didn't leave the church...he was a guy raised by a white family who went to an Ivy League school and had ZERO CONNECTION to the black community if he had not kept his butt on those pews.

[Harlan Huckleby]

However, Clinton DOES stand a good chance of potentially evening out or even forging ahead in the POPULAR VOTE. That is what could potentially crush the party.

Obama closed-off the popular vote threat by blocking revotes in MI & FL.
The Democratic Party appears to be trying to rally behind Obama. An idea for a June SuperDelegate primary was floated, an obvious attempt to coronate Obama.

Democrats are between a rock and hard place. Obama actively killed revote in MI, passively avoided revote in FL. His nomination is going to carry a heavy stench. FL, OH, MI and PA are going to be tough sells for him in the fall.

[Harlan Huckleby]

I don't agree with this guy's comment that "it's been a great week for Hillary Clinton", but I think he makes valid point about Obama's problem with voters next fall.


Adres Martinez

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/stumped/?hpid=opinionsbox1

I am not sure when you tuned into our long-running American soap opera. But if you joined us this election cycle, you will remember that, "one-drop rule" aside, early on there was a lot of hand-wringing about whether Barack Obama was sufficiently "black" to win over loyal Democratic African-American voters fond of the Clintons. There was a feeling initially that the Illinois senator was too multicultural, too much of an immigrant, too Harvard Law Review, to count on overwhelming black support.

The good news for Obama is that African-Americans have definitely come to see him as the black candidate, and he is winning such a large share of the African-American vote that you'd think Hillary Clinton is a conservative Republican. The bad news for Obama is that he is coming to be seen as the black candidate by everyone else too.

To some degree, this was inevitable. Obama's life history -- and his mindset -- transcend simplistic black-white notions of race relations, as he reminded voters this week with his speech on race. But presidential races don't occur in a vacuum, and his candidacy was bound to be hijacked and affected by classic racial politics, from South Carolina to Los Angeles. With every passing contest, his ability to be all things to all voters frays a little more, and of course the recent controversy over his close ties to preacher Jeremiah Wright has come close to accomplishing what Bill Clinton so clumsily tried to do before the South Carolina primary: For the first time, Obama risks being identified with that strain of grievance-nursing, embittered African-American political tradition that many white blue-collar Democratic voters find so off-putting.

It's been a great week, in other words, for Hillary Clinton. No matter how many superlatives pundits and intellectuals deploy in describing Obama's nuanced discourse on race, it's never a good week for Obama when he is forced to define himself as a candidate who is all about race.

He was eloquent and thoughtful in talking about race relations in America, but the entire exercise still ended up feeling a bit evasive. What prompted the speech, after all, were pointed questions about why Obama would befriend a pastor who preached a message of bitter division and anti-Americanism. Obama didn't squarely address that issue. It was the equivalent of responding to a missed date with your girlfriend with a sweeping disquisition on the history of the relations between the sexes.

Obama's speech got a big thumbs up from the intelligentsia. (I never know if I am one of them ... but a columnist can aspire!) I suspect, however, that it will get a big thumbs down from blue-collar white voters in Pennsylvania. College students may well be reading Obama's speech years from now in U.S. history textbooks, and discussing its structure and nuance in class. But I don't think the speech will do Obama much good with voters in 2008.