Right On The Right

Barack Obama failed to disown Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and tried to play it off as a non-racial issue because he couldn't disown his white grandmother who supposedly was afraid of black men who passed her on the street. As if Barack wasn't a gaffe machine already, he now says his grandmother is a "typical white person." Via Hot Air, here's the video:

I take offense to that comment, because I don't believe that the typical white person is inherently racist, I just don't. Also, Barack said that Trinity was a typical church in the black community, but members of that community don't think so exactly. Barack's the one making race the issue.

Over at RedState, California Yankee has a great post up about how race is dividing the Democrat Primary. In the midst of the Jeremiah Wright scandal, let's look at how the "tolerant and inclusive" party is doing when it comes to race. They wouldn't fall victim to identity politics, via Gallup, would they?

In my first post following Barack Obama's major address on race, I called him an apologist. I'm now going to get to the evidence, once again from the text, that he was simply trying to justify Wright's hatred. First off, his statement that's meant to offset what he was about to do:

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

He throws in the reference to Ferraro to try to make himself plausible for his coming defense of Wright. Half of the speech is about finding the "roots" of racism in the United States, so that he can blame the root cause and not blame his pastor himself. This goes against everything he said prior in the speech about Wright's comments. Here are some quotes from the speech chronicling the horrid justification:

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that weve never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American...

...A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for ones family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted...

...For the men and women of Reverend Wrights generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politicians own failings.

As witnessed above, Barack spent a considerable amount of time defending Wright, doing his best to camouflage his defense as an observant view of how we arrived at where we are. Barack is using the typical liberal tactic of blaming society for one man's failures, and later in the speech tries to off-play this tactic by saying that Wright pushed for individual responsibility. I emphasized a certain part of Barack's speech above, because he's just as guilty of playing to racial tendencies as anyone else. He blames the politicians, of which he is one.

I want to go ahead and point out a few of the things that Barack said about his own pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in the text of his speech today. Why would he refuse to disown a man who he described with the following terms?:

On the other end, weve 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...

That statement and the one I'm about to display are about the extent of the condemnation in this speech. I question his condemnation, given that he never condemned specific statements, but rather generalized saying the statements in question. He claims that Wright stood for more than the statements that have come out. How can he not disown someone whose comments he can describe with such harsh words:

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm werent simply controversial. They werent simply a religious leaders effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam

As such, Reverend Wrights comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems...

FOX News has put together a short list of some of Reverend Wright's controversial statements, and those are just a few of many. This is about more than Reverend Wright also, because per Bizzyblog, the church's bulletins were filled with the same hateful content. How can Barack look up to a man who made comments that he himself described as expressing "a profoundly distorted view of this country"? This is an issue of judgment.

Obama's speech on race was eloquent, well-delivered, and absolutely dishonest. I wanted to take a minute to share a video of him delivering the major line I referenced in my last post. He's eloquent, but he isn't really distancing himself from Wright, at all:

TRANSCRIPT: And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.