Hmmm. Jeremiah Wright:

• He's cozy with Quadaffi.
• In a kind of reverse minstrel show, publicly mocked how white people talk.
• "God damn America."
• "Hillary 'aint no nigger."
• "Racism is how this country was founded."
• "In comparing African-American children and European-American children, we were comparing apples and rocks."
• "We're the same as al-Qaeda."
• "The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied."

Uh huh. Just like the Wolf Tones. Peggy Noonan is on drugs.

Krauthammer's take on Obama's recent excision of Wright:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/01/AR2008050102900.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Guess it's time to disown Granny, if Obama's famous Philadelphia "race" speech is to be believed. Of course, the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union.

...Obama has now decided that the man he simply could not banish because he had become part of Obama himself is, mirabile dictu, surgically excised.

At a news conference in North Carolina, Obama explained why he finally decided to do the deed. Apparently, Wright's latest comments -- Obama cited three in particular -- were so shockingly "divisive and destructive" that he had to renounce the man, not just the words.

What were Obama's three citations? Wright's claim that AIDS was invented by the U.S. government to commit genocide. His praise of Louis Farrakhan as a great man. And his blaming Sept. 11 on American "terrorism."

But these comments are not new. These were precisely the outrages that prompted the initial furor when the Wright tapes emerged seven weeks ago. Obama decided to cut off Wright not because Wright's words or character or views had suddenly changed. The only thing that changed was the venue in which Wright chose to display them -- live on national TV at the National Press Club. That unfortunate choice destroyed Obama's Philadelphia pretense that this "endless loop" of sermon excerpts being shown on "television sets and YouTube" had been taken out of context.

Krauthammer's take is pretty rough, unless you realize that Obama is a politician who needs to do things for political reasons (i.e., if you aren't a kool-aid drinker who thinks he is the second coming, these things shouldn't shock you).

I thought this recent CBS news poll was informative:

Concerning Rev. Wright's coverage in the media the new poll sites that according to registered voters polled the attention paid has been:

Too Much.....56% Too Little.......5% About Right...34%

I think Noonan is onto something here.

One thing to remember about this, and the only thing that makes wright an issue:

"Tell me who you spend your time with, and I'll tell you who you are."

Consider the nature of Wright's utterances.

These cannot have been new to Mr. Obama.

Which is not to say I think he believes every word of it...but a 20 year relationship with an egotistical, self righteous, antiAmerican, howling bigot, ought to give any sane voter pause at least.

Does anyone know how far (if at all) Wright is connected to the Illinois power brokers behind Obama's climb?

While it is true you can't judge a man by one friend, I think people are failing to look at the BIG picture with Obama. You can discount one little piece of him at a time, but when you look at everything together, you get a real clear picture of who he is.

If you read his book, he goes into great detail about the problems he has with white people. When he first moved to Chicago, the people who he sought out to associate with were radical left wing, anti-American, even marxists and terrorists. (Both he and Hillary were big fans of the marxist Saul Allinsky. She did her thesis on him but Obama was also a big fan.) He activly supported radical left wing political groups in college. His own wife can't speak five sentences without insulting this country.

Then he joined a church that preached Black Liberation Theology. Am I assuming too much to interpet the phrase "Black Liberation Theology" as an ideology that exposes the conflict with and defeat of non-black people? In my personal opinion, BLT is not a real religion, they talk about Jesus, but in their belief, Jesus was a black man who had no use for white people. There still is the same story about the gospels and all that but they see Jesus as being the saviour to black people. At the same time, they preach politics slamming Jews and white devils. And no, you're not going to find that on their website, not now. BLT allows muslims in their church. Why, because there are a lot of paralells between BLT and Islam. They bond in their hatred of Jews and europeans. Obama knew this and he knew it well. He spoke of Rev Wright as his mentor many times. NOBODY has a mentor that they don't know anything about. He sat in that church for twenty years listening to hate speech and first claimed he never heard anything like that. Then when he gets caught, he says, oh yeah, I heard him say a few things that I objected to but I wanted to stay with the church. Now he openly denounces Wright when he figures out that white people are figuring out that he is nothing but a black bigot. Obama is as phoney as they get. He is a radical left wing marxist white and Jew hating bigot and the more people figure that out, the more his numbers tank. That's why a lot of people say he is unelectable. As more and more of this comes out, he will just sink further. I think they are right.

> Krauthammer's take is pretty
> rough, unless you realize that
> Obama is a politician who needs
> to do things for political reasons

I keep rereading that, and don't know what you'd want to say it. Define your terms!

Whaddya mean, "rough"? Is there some judgment call that coulda gone either way, where K chose to be a meany? Is K wrong for noting that these quotations are the same rhetoric, and only the context of their reception has changed? I think K has --in this instance-- been a rocklike, non-reactive observer.

And who doesn't know (or believe) that "Obama is a politician who needs to do things for political reasons"?

I don't see what you're getting at, and fear I disagree anyway. Back when cartoonist Garry Trudeau was young and interesting, he was interviewed in the preface to one of his collections. It was noted that he (in those days) wasn't interested in hobnobbing with the powerful people in Washington, or hearing them make the case for their positions in intimate contexts. Paraphrasing: 'I'm not interested in reading their tea leaves or getting personal insight. I only do post-mortems. I respond to the things they say in public... What could be more fair than that?'

That's how I feel about Obama, and the people he's claimed as his leaders. I don't ever want to bother with triangulating what a candidate says in some intricate, chesslike paradigm of subtle pandering across cultures. Why can't I just hold him accountable for what he says?

Doing so allows me to hate Hillary in good conscience.

Why you'd want to say it

etc

Crid, what I mean is that Krauthammer is feigning surprise that Obama tried to split the difference on Wright (distance from the words and not the man) and then when his hand was forced by Wright's recent remarks, disavowing the man, too. This is the sort of things politicians do all the time. Obama is a politician. Anyone who acts surprised about this is being disingenuous.

No; Krauthammer's annoyance is not a pose. Again, I think we need not forgive these people for being odious as a minor additional fee for their service.

No; Krauthammer's annoyance is not a pose.

It certainly is a pose - Krauthammer's paid to be a Republican attack dog. He's a good one, too.

Oh, that's horseshit. Justin, you're flirting with madness here. We just can't see into other people's skulls that clearly.

A few years ago, America had an option with David Duke: We could sympathetically acknowledge that an attractive young politician in his corner of the South needed to form alliances with certain less-attractive social enterprises in order further a career of good public service. Or, we could presume that his hideous, primitive rhetoric portended just as much violence as it seemed to at first hearing. I think we made the right call.

When people say things, it's best to assume they mean them, and let the delicate ballet of their interior motivations be their own beeswax.