Jeremiah Wright apparently felt disrespected and angry at Barack Obama when he didn't stand 100% behind him during the controversy that erupted just over a month ago. And so he has spent the past month carefully planning how to get back, and now he has.
Bob Herbert has a very insightful column about Jeremiah Wright and his outbursts this weekend and today.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright went to Washington on Monday not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him...
Feeling dissed by Senator Obama, Mr. Wright gets revenge on his former follower while bathed in a spotlight brighter than any he could ever have imagined. He’s living a narcissist’s dream. At long last, his 15 minutes have arrived...
So it’s not like he’s naïve politically. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Forget the gibberish about responding to attacks on the black church. That is not what the reverend’s appearance before the press club was about. He was responding to what he perceives as an attack on him.
Add in all the things he said this weekend, and it's pretty clear that after a few weeks of careful consideration, Reverend Wright is going out of his way to do the worst he can of proving the critics right. It is certainly true that the clips we've all seen were taken as small snippets of much larger sermons. But this weekend, the snippets were the sermons as he seemed to go out of his way to project the bogeyman that the Senator Obama's opponents have portrayed Wright as. There is no way he could have in just a weekend said extemporaneously so many of the things thich have bothered people, if he hadn't thought out well in advance how to say all of them.
Apparently Wright feels betrayed by Obama's failure to stand by him, including his sermons, when the story first appeared. So he's doing everything he can to hurt Obama now. He is being the caricature that was first put out there by Obama's political opponents. And he's not a stupid man at all, I'm sure he knows good and well what he's doing this week.
A window into his thinking was revealed in the Bill Moyers interview which started off this weekend of wall-to-wall veiled criticism of Obama mixed with outrageous outbursts. He said that Obama had responded to the intial criticism 'as a politician, and not as a man.' Apparently Wright felt then that Obama had not 'kept the faith' with him.
During his speech to the NAACP, Wright paid Obama a left-handed compliment, suggesting that his middle name (which Wright repeated at least twice at that point) is a function of language, and that there are Arabic speakers of all religions. What that did was to remind voters of Obama's alleged (though completely unfounded) ties to Islamists, and of course to remind them once again of Saddam Hussein (the first person most people associate with the name) and subliminally link Obama to him.
Obama in the end did the only thing he can do now-- he repudiated and rejected Wright completely, something he refused to do in his Philadelphia speech on race.
But let's make this clear for what it is. Jeremiah Wright, for personal reasons, wanted to do everything he could to harm Barack Obama. And now Obama has turned off the pipeline back to him, so whatever Wright says from now on won't have anything at all to do with Obama.
Showing posts with label Jeremiah Wright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jeremiah Wright. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
I wonder if any of these preachers will be covered as well as Reverend Wright?
We've heard over and over the statements by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's pastor played on TV, in which he says, "Not God bless America. God damn America! It's in the Bible, for killing innocent people."
Now, I agree with Barack Obama when he said today that those statements are wrong and he does not agree with him. But when asking why Obama still attends that church, I wonder whether they are taking the time to ask whether the parishoners who continue to attend churches where ministers have made hateful statements about abortion, homosexuality and other perceived 'sins,' including that God will punish America for them, still attend those churches.
To cite just one group of examples, consider a few of the statements in 1998 by pastors who blamed the death and destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina on God, as damnation for 'killing innocent people' (which they defined as abortion) and other similar reasons.
*--Steve Lefemine credited God: "In my belief, God judged New Orleans for the sin of shedding innocent blood through abortion [...] Providence punishes national sins by national calamities, [...] Greater divine judgment is coming upon America unless we repent of the national sin of abortion."
*--Reverend Bill Shanks credits God; God's reasons: Abortion, debauchery, homosexuals, witchcraft...
"New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion -- it's free of all of those things now, [...] God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there -- and now we're going to start over again.
*--Rev. Dwight McKissic, the senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas said "New Orleans flaunts sin in a way that no other places do. They call it the Big Easy. There are 10 abortion clinics in Louisiana; five of those are in New Orleans. They have a Southern Decadence parade every year and they call it gay pride. When you study Scripture, it's not out of the boundaries of God to punish a nation for sin and because of sin. When I look at our country, at what's happening, and what's happening in New Orleans in particular, it's not beyond the realm of possibility."
*-- [Reverend] Fred Phelps credited Katrina as God's retribution for homosexuals: "New Orleans, symbol of America, seen for what it is: a putrid, toxic, stinking cesspool of fag fecal matter. [...] Pray for more dead bodies floating on the fag-semen-rancid waters of New Orleans."
Doesn't sound to me like anything that Rev. Wright said is any more hateful (in fact not as hateful) compared to what some of these 'men of the cloth' were preaching. But I guarantee you that many of them will be sought out for their political support by the GOP (as they have been in the past) come November.
As far as Obama is concerned, it has been smear after smear after smear. Just to prove the point, there is one good thing about all the Rev. Wright controversy. At least the rumor that was being peddled about even a couple of weeks ago that Obama is actually a muslim who gets his world view from the Koran won't fly anymore.
Now, I agree with Barack Obama when he said today that those statements are wrong and he does not agree with him. But when asking why Obama still attends that church, I wonder whether they are taking the time to ask whether the parishoners who continue to attend churches where ministers have made hateful statements about abortion, homosexuality and other perceived 'sins,' including that God will punish America for them, still attend those churches.
To cite just one group of examples, consider a few of the statements in 1998 by pastors who blamed the death and destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina on God, as damnation for 'killing innocent people' (which they defined as abortion) and other similar reasons.
*--Steve Lefemine credited God: "In my belief, God judged New Orleans for the sin of shedding innocent blood through abortion [...] Providence punishes national sins by national calamities, [...] Greater divine judgment is coming upon America unless we repent of the national sin of abortion."
*--Reverend Bill Shanks credits God; God's reasons: Abortion, debauchery, homosexuals, witchcraft...
"New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion -- it's free of all of those things now, [...] God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there -- and now we're going to start over again.
*--Rev. Dwight McKissic, the senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas said "New Orleans flaunts sin in a way that no other places do. They call it the Big Easy. There are 10 abortion clinics in Louisiana; five of those are in New Orleans. They have a Southern Decadence parade every year and they call it gay pride. When you study Scripture, it's not out of the boundaries of God to punish a nation for sin and because of sin. When I look at our country, at what's happening, and what's happening in New Orleans in particular, it's not beyond the realm of possibility."
*-- [Reverend] Fred Phelps credited Katrina as God's retribution for homosexuals: "New Orleans, symbol of America, seen for what it is: a putrid, toxic, stinking cesspool of fag fecal matter. [...] Pray for more dead bodies floating on the fag-semen-rancid waters of New Orleans."
Doesn't sound to me like anything that Rev. Wright said is any more hateful (in fact not as hateful) compared to what some of these 'men of the cloth' were preaching. But I guarantee you that many of them will be sought out for their political support by the GOP (as they have been in the past) come November.
As far as Obama is concerned, it has been smear after smear after smear. Just to prove the point, there is one good thing about all the Rev. Wright controversy. At least the rumor that was being peddled about even a couple of weeks ago that Obama is actually a muslim who gets his world view from the Koran won't fly anymore.
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