WTF is wrong with Rev. Wright?

[Ramo]

I'm aware of that, but that certainly doesn't make my question "irrelevant." Are you going to answer it?

[Kidlicious]

My interest is in the fact that people get so outraged about Wright's comments. First, they were taken out of context and the wrong meaning was attached to them. Then even after a lot of people discover the context and learn more they still want to cling to their previous, wrong understanding of them.

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Ramo
I'm aware of that, but that certainly doesn't make my question "irrelevant." Are you going to answer it?

No, he's just going to dodge it.

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Kidicious
My interest is in the fact that people get so outraged about Wright's comments. First, they were taken out of context and the wrong meaning was attached to them. Then even after a lot of people discover the context and learn more they still want to cling to their previous, wrong understanding of them.

After seeing Wright's performance, it's really hard to take him seriously at all.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Shelby Steele has been dead nuts on re:Obama

From defining Obama as a 'bargainer' to ultimately once exposed either alienating the 'challengers' or the whites looking for a nonthreatening magic black man.

Mr. Obama's broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama's genius to understand this. Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed -- an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.

How to turn one's blackness to advantage?

The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

Race helps Mr. Obama in another way -- it lifts his political campaign to the level of allegory, making it the stuff of a far higher drama than budget deficits and education reform. His dark skin, with its powerful evocations of America's tortured racial past, frames the political contest as a morality play. Will his victory mean America's redemption from its racist past? Will his defeat show an America morally unevolved? Is his campaign a story of black overcoming, an echo of the civil rights movement? Or is it a passing-of-the-torch story, of one generation displacing another?

Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans -- black and white -- Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America's very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."

hus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?

...No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by DaShi
After seeing Wright's performance, it's really hard to take him seriously at all.

That's a choice you are making. I think it's a bad one. He definitely believes in what he preaches.

[DaShi]

But who cares? There are a lot of racist preachers out there. Should we start rounding them up?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

History has so many examples of people believing in things that are beyond objectionable that strength of conviction should not be a reason to take a persons beliefs seriously.

(Wow almost Godwinized it.)

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Ramo
I'm aware of that, but that certainly doesn't make my question "irrelevant." Are you going to answer it?

I'll let Obama answer the question:

WALLACE: Question: Do you think that Reverend Wright is just the victim here?

OBAMA: No. I think that people were legitimately offended by some of the comments that he had made in the past. The fact he's my former pastor I think makes it a legitimate political issue. So I understand that.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,352785,00.html

“His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church,” Mr. Obama said, his voice welling with anger.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/us/politics/30obama.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

I kinda like this statement from the church though as I hadn't heard it before:
Bulletins from Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ in 2007 include comments -- reprinted from other sources -- that maintain South Africa and Israel worked on "an ethnic bomb that kills blacks and Arabs." They also quote a historian who said that "what the Zionist Jews did to the Palestinians is worse than what the Nazis did to the Jews."

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/28/obama.pastor/

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
Shelby Steele has been dead nuts on re:Obama

"And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?"

Because it wasn't understood by Obama to be anti-white vitriol and it wasn't. Now he's saying in was. He's lying and betraying the church.

[asleepathewheel]

Kidicious-

Do you now think that Obama is a "typical politician"?

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by asleepathewheel
Kidicious-

Do you now think that Obama is a "typical politician"?

I always doubted him and I never promised to vote for him. Now I have decided that I will definitely not vote for him.

To answer your question, yes.

[SpencerH]

Originally posted by Ogie Oglethorpe
Shelby Steele has been dead nuts on re:Obama

From defining Obama as a 'bargainer' to ultimately once exposed either alienating the 'challengers' or the whites looking for a nonthreatening magic black man.

Aside from not knowing Oprah's politics, I think the quotes are dead on target. I expected the truth of Obama-mania to eventually surface. Its why I picked McCain to crush Obama in Reaganesque fashion in the general election (assuming it comes to that).

[Aeson]

Originally posted by Kidicious
Aren't you reading Wright's mind there Aeson.

I'm reading what he said. "Political posturing". Nice way of saying "liar".

Now if you could site (other than your crystal ball) where Obama has said he joined the church for political reasons, you can claim the same.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Aeson
I'm reading what he said. "Political posturing". Nice way of saying "liar".

Ummm... Yes very nice way indeed. In fact, one shouldn't consider it offensive at all considering the context.

And saying someone is political posturing is not saying that you are ending a friendship or withdrawing political support for them. In no way is it like what Obama did. Serously, I'm amazed that you assert such a thing.

Now if you could site (other than your crystal ball) where Obama has said he joined the church for political reasons, you can claim the same.

Claim what? Are you drunk?!