- Scott Miller
BO (aka Barack Obama), is rattled. His very close association with the so-called Rev. Jeremiah Wright may very well cost him the election. If not in the primary, in the general election.
Thursday morning, BO’s campaign was in circle-the-wagons mode. They didn’t feel they needed to make a statement about the anti-American, anti-Semite pastor of his… who, by the way, has been his pastor for 20 years, baptized his children, and married him and his wife. The circle-the-wagons mode only lasted a few hours as the scandal grew. This from Fox News:
In an interview Friday with FOX News, Obama said he personally never had heard the pastor’s controversial comments, though he joined his Trinity United Church of Christ nearly 20 years ago. He said the sermons now sparking controversy didn’t resemble the ones he remembers from Wright, which, Obama said, stuck to messages of faith, values and helping people in the community.
But Obama’s pastor long has been a lightning rod for controversy. For starters, Wright’s relationship with Louis Farrakhan, once described by Obama as a “close” relationship, has been of concern to many in the Jewish community.
And once Wright’s remarks were publicized last year, Obama backed out of plans to have Wright speak at his Feb. 10, 2007, presidential announcement.
Author Larry Elder said he doesn’t buy Obama’s new, firmer denunciation of Wright.
“How can Barack Obama dis-invite him … and now claim he had no idea that Jeremiah Wright made all these incendiary comments? It doesn’t work,” Elder told FOX News.
Three weeks ago, Obama spoke to the Cleveland Jewish Community Leaders group and was asked about Wright. Obama noted the pastor occasionally was known to “say controversial things,” adding most of those controversial statements were “directed at the African American community.”
Obama assured the Ohio Jewish leaders he never heard anything anti-Semitic, and said “he is like an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don’t agree with.”
Obama’s camp released a somewhat stronger statement Thursday after FOX News had reported more on Wright’s sermons — in one, he repeatedly said “God damn America,” while in others he blamed the United States for the spread of HIV and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and highlighted what he saw as a racial divide between Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Then Friday, Obama issued the written statement calling what he’s heard from Wright “inflammatory and appalling.”
Later Friday, Obama told FOX News that he could no longer lay low as he heard more of Wright’s remarks.
“Once I saw them I had to be very clear about the fact that these are not statements that I am comfortable with,” Obama said. “I reject them completely – they are not ones that reflect my values or my ideals or Michelle’s.
OK, give me a break. It is simply impossible to believe that Barack and Michelle were never in church when their pastor, of 20 years, went off on one of his notorious anti-American rants. In fact if you read Barack’s denial literally (ala Bill Clinton) maybe he didn’t really deny he was in church when Rev. Wright gave one of those speeches, he just said he wasn’t in the pews… maybe that means he was standing in an ailse.
All of a sudden we get some context to Michelle Obama’s “this is the first time in my adult life I am proud of America” comment. In fact Michelle Obama doesn’t really have much nice to say about her country. This from the New Yorker:
Earlier on the day that Obama visited the nursery school, she addressed a congregation at the Pee Dee Union Baptist Church, in Cheraw, a hamlet of about six thousand known as “The Prettiest Town in Dixie.” The church’s makeshift gravel parking lot, next to the Pee Dee Ice and Fuel Company and bounded by train tracks, was full. After an invocation by the Reverend Jerry Corbett and an introduction by the mayor of Cheraw, Obama came to the pulpit. “You all got up bright and early just for me?” she asked the mostly elderly, almost all-black crowd. “Yes!” they roared. Obama continued, “On behalf of my church home and my pastor, Reverend Wright, I bring greetings.
Obama begins with a broad assessment of life in America in 2008, and life is not good: we’re a divided country, we’re a country that is “just downright mean,” we are “guided by fear,” we’re a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents. “We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” she said, as heads bobbed in the pews. “Folks are just jammed up, and it’s gotten worse over my lifetime. And, doggone it, I’m young. Forty-four!”
We’re a country that “is just down right mean”? Bringing greetings from pastor Wright. She sounds quite a bit like her pastor. Are we to believe his venom filled sermons have had no affect on Michelle’s view of America? On Barack’s victimhood view of America? I have just one word left… incredible.
