Obama’s phony denunciation of Wright

This quote has been discussed below, but here it is again. Obama said in his press conference yesterday:

[Wright’s] comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church. They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs….

I’m outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday. I find these comments appalling. It contradicts everything that I’m about and who I am.

Obama has devoutly followed Wright for 20 years as his spiritual guide. He’s been a regular attendee at his church, his church that explicitly follows the black liberation theology of James Cone which says that white America is the anti-Christ.

For Obama to claim that these statements of Wright’s are new or shocking to him makes Obama a manifest liar whose lies stink to heaven.

William Clinton, previously the biggest liar in American history, never told a lie of this scale. Clinton lied (and lies) incessantly about particular facts and incidents. Obama is lying about his whole life. He’s the Manchurian Candidate of theological black racism.

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And let us not forget that just one year ago the New York Times quoted Wright saying:

If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.

Seen in light of this week’s events, Obama’s comment to Wright in spring 2007 (assuming he made it) indicates that he fully knew then the depth of the Wright problem. His present denunciation of Wright seems to be a script written a year ago.

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I have to qualify the above. Clearly Obama did not expect Wright to go to the vicious extremes he has gone to in the last few days, including insulting Obama and calling him a liar and acting out crude racist pantomime on national television (though, to speak honestly, we don’t know if Jeremiah W. had never done such pantomime at the pulpit of his church), thus forcing Obama to end his relationship with him. When I say that Obama is a liar, I’m not referring to his responses to those specific, over-the-top behaviors of Wright’s (I think Obama is probably genuinely hurt by Wright’s obvious attempt to sabotage his campaign), but to the core black racist teaching of Trinity Church that Wright has expounded for the last several decades and that Obama still claims never crossed the threshold of his ears and eyes.

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Spencer Warren writes:

Yes to your above qualification.

Last evening Hannity & Colmes had a distinguished black pastor from Boston who has known Wright for many years (decades I think), and he has known Wright to be as we have seen all that time. Wright has been “doing his thing,” the pastor said. This pastor was very, very critical of Wright, accusing him of being all ego and out for his 15 minutes of Hollywood, as I recall he put it.

He said Wright is not representative of most black churches. He also said he thinks Obama needed Wright as a father figure to whom he went and found faith as part of his identity crisis. This explains his reluctance to repudiate Wright and why he may have turned the other way when he heard the ranting. Even Hannity said it was the first sensible defense he heard of Obama on this matter. [LA replies: I wrote a similar, and not unsympathetic, explanation of Obama’s motives in March.]

The pastor further said he thinks Wright has long taken advantage of Obama, that he saw in the up and coming Obama someone he could use for his own ends.

We don’t know how widespread Wright’s “thinking” is in the black community and it is a typical journalistic failure that they don’t seem to be exploring this.

This was the most important interview they’ve done on this topic, they gave the man only five minutes (half of which was Hannity interrupting), and it is not included on their website, so I can’t check his name. How dumb these TV people are!

Finally, tonight O’Reilly will have a story on Wright’s lavish life style. He drives a Mercedes and is moving into a mansion in a wealthy white area that I think the church helped pay for!

Mr. Warren continues:

What you added in your qualification is perhaps most plausible. My last e-mail reflects my effort to bend over backwards to give Obama the benefit of the doubt. In a broader sense, however, in what this whole affair demonstrates about the broad social situation today, it doesn’t really matter how guilty Obama himself is, in my opinion.

A right-wing reader writes:

I don’t think Obama was lying in his April 29 press conference. I read the entire text of his remarks, including his answers to questions, and I think he was eloquent in his repudiation of Wright and genuinely surprised at the extent to which Wright got carried away with himself in his self-centered, self-regarding fury at everything.

I do believe Obama allowed himself to look away from the bad in Wright because he thought he saw a lot of good. Also, he equated a lot of Wright’s rhetoric with a kind of social gospel and he thought that it could be useful for people to see that such feelings do exist among blacks. No sense looking away from them, causing them to fester more. That was his idea. Many black people do still feel that America must do more for them. Not everyone agrees but it’s not an outrageous idea. President Bush just signed some kind of legislation to help black men when they get out of prison. Many find there is little opportunity for them when they get out and they wind up back inside. If we are talking about that kind of thing, we can see that it’s not outrageous to think that the country might do more to help underclass blacks. That’s the kind of thing Obama felt Wright stood for, I’ll bet. However, when he heard the full bore idiocy, viciousness, and derangement of the remarks at the National Press Club, the scales fell from his eyes and he realized he was dealing with a toxic person, and he responded accordingly.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 30, 2008 02:32 PM | Send