Posted by
Cary Wesberry on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 3:26:46 PM
From Dean Barnett at The Weekly Standard:
THE QUESTION of the day is how Obama fared with his major address. Many are hailing his call for racial reconciliation. Some analysts, including conservatives like Charles Murray, found it "flat-out brilliant" and thought it captured "a lot of nuance about race in American." For the twin purposes of brevity and avoiding arguing over meaningless topics, I'll stipulate that Obama gave a lovely statement on racial matters.
In doing so, Obama brilliantly answered a question that virtually no one is asking. With the country's attitude floating somewhere between grave concern and panic over the economy, Barack Obama has positioned himself as the candidate of racial reconciliation. With the body politic bitterly divided over the war in Iraq, Barack Obama has adopted racial reconciliation as his signature issue.
While answering a question that no one is asking, Obama dodged the question that everyone is asking, namely how exactly did a healing figure like Obama spend 20 years listening to the hateful ramblings of a man like Jeremiah Wright. In dodging that question, Obama showed an unbecoming slipperiness. At one point, Obama intoned:
It has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.
On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.
Note how the passage above suggests that Jeremiah Wright let loose his incendiary language during the past couple of weeks at the same time that Geraldine Ferraro was engaging in her unpleasant foolishness. Of course, Wright has been "incendiary" for the entire two decades that he and Barack Obama have enjoyed such a close relationship.
I know I said earlier that I would stipulate that Obama had delivered a brilliant albeit irrelevant address, but I have to offer one caveat--his delivery was oddly flat. There were virtually no applause lines. Obama spoke in an odd monotone for much of the speech. His normal cadences, which are so brilliant and inspiring to so many people, were absent. It seemed like Obama had no interest in standing before a crowd giving that particular speech.
Understandably enough. Barack Obama is an exceptionally intelligent man and an extremely gifted politician, but he seems to understand that his relationship with Jeremiah Wright is one circle that can't easily be squared. Jeremiah Wright is a man who less than a week after 9/11 gave a sermon that sadistically rejoiced how America's chickens had come home to roost. Five days earlier, Americans (of all colors, incidentally) had leapt from the World Trade Center to escape the flames. The fact is, Barack Obama opted to remain in this minister's company for more than six years after that sermon until partially distancing himself just last week in the heat of a presidential race. As gifted a speaker and writer as Obama is, there's still no way he can make such a circumstance palatable to most Americans.
What the analysts who are gushing over Obama's sentiments regarding race relations are missing is not only did Obama fail to accomplish the mission he needed to, he didn't even really try. He made no attempt to explain his relationship with Wright and why he hung around a man who habitually offered such hateful rhetoric. Obama instead offered a non-sequitur on race relations.
Follow the link above to read all of Dean's column published earlier today. Brilliant analysis as usual Dean. The burning question of his twenty-year-long relationship with an America-hating racist was not answered; the one reason for even giving the speech in the first place.
I've heard it espoused from more than just Obama that Wright was a father-figure and that there are many people in our country and elsewhere who don't share the same views as their parents. The difference however between all those people and B. Hussein Obama is that he chose Jeremiah Wright as a father-figure. While there are indeed many people raised by parents they obviously didn't choose; Obama is not one of them. His biological father was a dead-beat dad and little Barack was raised by his white mother and white grandmother. A grandmother, by the way, which he completely threw under the bus in his lovely speech yesterday. The point is that Obama could have chosen any number of people to replace what his real father did not give him. He chose Jeremiah Wright above everyone else.
Now, Obama has every right to do just that and to choose whichever father-figure or join whatever church he wants. He even has the right to lie about all of it if he wants. What he should not get away with is living a racist America-hating life for two decades and not be answerable to American voters when he decides to run for President of the United States. I won't go through, yet again, the lengthy and hateful list of abominable words spewed from Obama's mentor for the past twenty years. If you haven't read it or heard it by now then scroll back through the entries on this site and enlighten yourself. Regardless, what you as a voter have duty in is to be a responsible American and not allow a racist, hateful, and brainwashed man to become the Leader of the Free World.