Excuse me?! By: shep

by shep

Mainstream Republicans can spew all kinds of toxic shit about liberals committing treason, Democrats appeasing terrorists, all of them hating America, Islam is a religion of violence, evolution is only a theory, global warming a) doesn’t exist, b) isn’t a problem, or c) isn’t man’s problem but this, said by the pastor of Obama’s church is somehow unacceptable?:

“That’s when Wright blamed the “arrogance” of the “United States of White America” for much of the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks.”

“Young African-American men” were “dying for nothing.” The “illegal war,” he shouted, was “based on Bush’s lies” and is being “fought for oil money.”

“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, not God bless America, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. ... God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.”

I’m not sure what’s even arguable about those statements. They obviously make white people (deservedly) uncomfortable but they are the words of an African-American preacher to a (mostly) African-American congregation who understand firsthand the unquestionable truth of that rhetoric.

Barack Obama’s politic mistake wasn’t attending that church or listening to Pastor Wright. Think for moment of all of the abominable shit we sit and listen too, much of it called entertainment, and we pay money to hear it. Obama hasn’t saddled up to evangelical icons who say, homosexually goes with Satanism or can ”kill you spiritually” He didn’t go to a bookstore and buy a book that says, “liberals are always against America,” or that puts a Hitler mustache on a smiley face under the title “Liberal Fascism” and includes the quote, "The white male is the Jew of Liberal Fascism".

Obama should be asking the hypocritical gasbags in the Village Press whether George Bush and John McCain should be to made to repudiate all of their supporter’s hateful and bat-shit crazy rhetoric or are they applying a double-standard to him. Instead, he repudiated Rev. Wright and his sentiments. That was his political mistake:

”Obama seems to have seen, early in his career, the utility of joining a prominent church that would help him establish political roots in the community in which he lives. Now he sees the utility of distancing himself from that church.”
--Bill Kristol

That is point of this entire exercise, to make the Democrat look like the one thing no Democrat can afford to appear: weak and afraid. When Democrats learn not to be cowed by the outrageously hypocritical and disgusting right-wing smear machine, they will be able to beat Republicanism and the conservative movement thinking back to the dank caves of the lizard-brained where they belong. Until then, here’s one more example of how it’s done:

“I didn’t hear Reverend Wright’s words firsthand but he expresses the upset at the way many African-Americans have been treated which is shared by many people, both black and white. I don’t think that white Christians or Jews shouldn’t be able to listen to their clergy express similar feelings about how those people may have suffered in the past. I understand that Reverend John Hagee has said some scurrilous things about Catholics, Muslims and gay people, does that mean that John McCain shouldn’t be able to stand with Reverend Hagee and say that he was proud to have his endorsement?”

End of sermon. You can wake up now.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]