In the movie
"The Long, Hot Summer," Ben Quick tells Clara Varner, "You can run away. You can change your name. You can dye your hair, and maybe
-- just maybe -- you'll get away from me."
After last week's Preacher-Man-Afrocentrist-Mystery-Tour, Barack Obama
must fear there's no way to escape the specter of his former minister and spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.
The whack-job cleric was everywhere, basking in the national media spotlight.
His Friday to Monday schedule included an interview by Bill Moyers on PBS, a speech at an NAACP dinner in Detroit (broadcast on CNN) and holding forth at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
In the course of his media blitz, Obama's pastor of 20 years discoursed on the differences between
"African music" and "European-American music" (Fats Waller vs. Lawrence Welk?), said he'd only apologize for his anti-Americanism if the United States apologized to Japan for fighting back after Pearl Harbor, and delivered a lecture on the differences between Caucasian brains ("object-oriented learning style, Logical and analytical") and black consciousness ("subject-oriented,"
"creative and
intuitive") that sounded like it came from a Nation of Islam biology textbook.
His own brain? As Igor says in
"Young Frankenstein" -- "Abby Normal."
Rev. Wright Live-and-in-Concert was meant to overcome the media caricature of the man, supposedly woven of sound-bytes from his sermons taken out of context. Here, at last, we were to meet the
"real" Jeremiah Wright: warm, funny and articulate, as well as a thoughtful critic of political developments and social trends.
Except this Rev. Wright sounded every bit as ignorant, bigoted, paranoid and anti-American as the Jeremiah Wright allegedly fabricated by the media and conservative talk-show hosts (working in concert for the first time in history).
The real Jeremiah Wright confirmed his earlier judgment of Louis Farrakhan as
"one of the most important voices of the 20th
century." The Nazi of Islam leader called "Zionism" -- not Judaism -- a
"gutter religion," the Rev. informed us. (Laughably false.) Farrakhan's rabidly anti-Israel rhetoric was/is
"the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that Jimmy Carter is being vilified for." (There he has a point.)
His post-9/11, chickens-coming-home-to-roost-God-damn-America raving -- where he charged the U.S. has been practicing terrorism for most of its history -- was
"Biblical," we were told. Wright: "God damns some practices. And there's no excuse for the things that the government, not the American people have done. That doesn't make me not like America or unpatriotic." Not only does it make him unpatriotic, but a smug ignoramus who mindlessly parrots leftwing propaganda.
Why do people expect him to apologize for his stupid, racist remarks ("white folks' greed runs a world in need"), when America's leaders have yet to apologize for slavery (more than once a day), and when we haven't said ah-so-sorry for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (which probably saved more than a million American and Japanese lives)? Presumably, Wright would also like us to apologize for the Revolution, the Civil War (a conflict in which 600,000 white men died, in a struggle to end the
institution of slavery), not to mention the Spanish-American War, The War of
Jenkins' Ear and the War of Austrian Succession.
When asked whether the United States government created the AIDS virus as part of a genocidal conspiracy to annihilate the black race (as he had previously charged), Wright solemnly intoned,
"I believe our government is capable of doing anything," and cited the Tuskegee experiments
-- in which, popular mythology notwithstanding, public health officials did not infect black men with syphilis or withhold treatment from those who were infected.
Wright claimed America (the government, not the people who elected the government) sent
"over 4,000 American boys and girls to die over a lie," and "spent billions fighting an unjust war in Iraq" while
"cutting food stamps." For the left, America can never be defended as long as any social need, real or imagined, goes unmet. How can we justify America fighting the Third Reich when we didn't have Aid to Families With Dependent Children or federally subsidized day care?
Perhaps Jeremiah's most absurd contention was that his screwball sermons were just the way black ministers preached and so criticism of him was an attack on the
"black church." That's right, walk into any black church, anywhere in the country on a given Sunday, and -- between hymns -- you'll hear the preacher raving about the
"U.S. of KK A," proclaiming that Israel is an apartheid state that practices "terrorism" against the Palestinians, and reminding congregants that the United States
"cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you" -- to a chorus of
"hallelujahs" and "amens."
After months of equivocating and comparing Wright to his white granny (who once was startled by a black man on the street), Obama now professed to be
"shocked and surprised" (not to mention "outraged," "saddened" and "appalled') by the latest evidence of the Rev. Jeremiah's mental
state -- especially coming as it did less than a week after Obama lost the Pennsylvania primary.
"The person that I saw yesterday (at the National Press Club) was not the person I met 20 years ago"
-- or the person he heard speaking from the pulpit for the last two decades --
Obama insisted.
Apparently, kindly old
"Uncle" Jeremiah was kidnapped by aliens, who replaced him with an evil clone with
half a brain, or so Obama would have us believe.
Why, the candidate had no idea that the minister he described as
"like family to me" harbored views both "divisive and destructive," which "give
comfort to those who prey on hate."
The man Obama says brought him to Christianity, married Barack and his wife Michelle and baptized his two daughters, and whose church the Obamas donated $26,000 to in one year -- the preacher who prayed with the Senator in a hotel room just prior to the announcement of his presidential candidacy
and who
was described in a 2004
Chicago Sun
Times
article as a 'close confident' to the Senator
-- apparently was a complete stranger to Barack Obama.
Either Obama is a pathological liar to put Bill Clinton to shame
-- or so out of touch with reality that he might as well be in a coma.
And let us not forget the months of hesitation, equivocation, rationalizations and attempts to shrug off the scandal as a manufactured crisis.
Formerly, Obama insisted that the Rev's remarks were taken out of context. His more vituperative comments were
"the snippets of those sermons that have run on an endless loop on the television and YouTube." Wright was misrepresented and misunderstood. He was a victim, damn it all!
That evolved into the position enunciated in Obama's celebrated Philadelphia speech:
"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons (which the Senator never heard, he assures us) is
... that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made."
Thus, Wright's dementia became a mere miscalculation. ("Poor Rev. Wright, when he said
'God damn America' within days of the worst attack on American soil -- that left 3,000 of us dead --
he hadn't taken into account the progress we've made with Affirmative Action and minority set-asides.")
Still, the Senator declared,
"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community." Just as Wright equated himself with the black church, Obama equated his pastor with the black community (at least at that point in time). Are whites allowed to say,
"I can no more disavow
Jeffrey Dahmer than I can disown the Caucasian community"?
Apparently, what really got Obama was Wright's suggestion at the press conference that the candidate's past criticism of him was all an act. Wright:
"Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based
on sound bytes, based on polls."
The great fear of the Obama campaign is that the public will come to accept this explanation
-- that the Senator's denunciation of Wright was for show.
However much he now denies it, voters will begin to suspect that the slickly packaged, bring-us-all-together Obama has the same jaundiced view of America as his mentor. Given Obama's other associations (including former Weather Underground terrorists Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers), his wife's permanent chip on her shoulder when it comes to America, and his own condescension toward working-class whites ("they get bitter, they
cling to guns or religion ... or anti-immigrant sentiment") -- this really isn't much of a stretch.
A New York Times/CBS News poll released on Monday confirms the depth of Obama's Wright problem. In the survey, while 24% of
voters
said Wright would matter
"a lot or some" to them in the fall, 44% said it would matter to the same degree to
"most people" they knew.
For Obama, Wright is the 2004 Swift Boat issue grown to the size of a battleship.
While the election-year drama plays itself out, Rev. Wright prepares for a cushy retirement. Grateful congregants at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ are building him a 10,400 sq. ft. mansion in the almost exclusively white, gated community of Tinley Park.
Wright's new "crib" will include four bedrooms, a circular driveway and four-car
garage, an exercise room, whirlpool, elevator and butler's pantry -- said
opulence courtesy of a church whose creed calls on members to disavow "the
pursuit of 'Middleclassness.'" Upper-Middleclassness is OK.
All of the guys who lost limbs defending this country, while Wright spent 37 years bad-mouthing America, should be so lucky. For many of them, it's a bed in a VA hospital
-- the Motel 6 of medical care.
Patriotism doesn't pay as well as treason. If it's any comfort, on Election Day, voters will have a chance to reject Obama's application to occupy a property on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.
