We wasted another week on Rev Wright, hopefully the last one. No it didn't drag Obama down, though the right wing is spinning their wish that it would. If only. Keep dreaming.
Yes, Obama is a gifted politician, and that's why we like him. We need political leadership, we've done without it for the last four terms, sixteen years, and we hope that this guy really gets that the power is with us, that we pay the bills, fight the wars, and it's our hard work and innovation that drive the economy that makes America powerful when we are powerful.
Wright? He's a deer that got caught in a headlight none of us have ever been in, so we don't really have a right to judge him. He spun around looking for friends, and found he was radioactive, and it really wasn't his fault. He wasn't running for office, in a rhetorical way he totally did inhale and exhale and inhaled again, and again. The only people who really liked his radioactivity were people like Louis Farrakhan and his followers who want to disrupt the US political process.
So what to do with the Wright legacy? I feel sorry for him, but I hope he finds some good people who aren't out to destroy other good people and he skips writing the book, and he kicks back and lets the member of his flock take the leadership we want and need him to.
See also: Bill Moyers, yesterday, on Rev Wright.
You don't sit through 20 years of "sermons" from a man who is racsist and anti-American and not come away with some of the same values. It he doesn't subscribe to this line of thinking, then why did he stay in this church one day longer after he realized it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfqCyMU3mfo
please watch
The weirdest thing is the way people have reacted to this guy, like "Holy Cow, did you hear what he said?" And I keep waiting to hear what it is he said that is so bad. That racism has destroyed the lives of many people, led to murder and atrocities? That the U.S. murdered 2 million Vietnamese and 1 million Iraqis and nobody can come up with an explanation why except that some president wanted to have a war. That the government spread aids? Nobody has ever come up with a good explanation of how Aids was started, and how it was spread throughout Africa and only in select areas of this country. And even if you don't agree with him, so what? What ever happened to freedom of thought and expression?
The frightening assault on the Rev. Wright is remarkably the same as against other black men who spoke out in this country, no matter how soft or harsh the voice. This country usually kills them or frames and imprisons them. It appears that nothing at all has changed. Black people better keep their mouths shut in the U.S. of A.
You know this AIDS thing is not new to Wright. I did not grow up in the US and long before I came here(20 year ago) people in my country used to think that this epidemic was as a result of some mess that occurred in the US. They even thought that experiments were done in Haiti since they had the highest rate of HIV cases per capita in the Western world at that time.
So, of course, Wright merrily turned on Obama, thus forcing him to boldly (well, meekly) repudiate him. In other words, instead of minimizing the Wright damage, B.O. did everything possible to help it along. We're looking at a campaign that's going to last about five seconds when the Neocons start bombarding it in earnest. God help our party.
Of course, I'll vote for Obama, since it will be the closest thing to NOT voting for McCain....
But what I personally think is hardly the issue--the issue at hand is the damaging impact of Wright's statements and how poorly Obama has dealt with the situation. I didn't create the situation--I'm just reporting on it.
This would explain how Clinton lost the lead for the nomination. Clinton was bound to win using the Blue State strategy. Obama chose a fifty state strategy and is now winning. Sounds like planning to me.
If it had not been Wright, who is actually about as terrifying as most people's grandpa, it would have been something else. What made it difficult for Obama was that he would have to publicly dishonor a man for whom he has feelings in order to quell the notion that he somehow is under the thrall of Wright. And to assume that was the case, which the Right fervently hopes people do assume, you would have to completely discount the stature of Obama as a Constitutional scholar and his clear and principled stand on the separation of church and state.
If Obama, as president, were to allow his preacher to influence any aspect of his behavior, we would still be a country without a state church and without a religious test for office as administered by Congress.
That is to say, church-state separation would remain solidly in place.
This makes for some extremely weird ideas, such as those Rev. Wright has advanced in the apparent belief they are self-evident.
Rev. Wright's example reveals a key weakness in the American religious community. The idea that revealed "truths"-- in the sense that personal experience is divinely directed and trumps objective reality -- is a failure of intellect so profound that no good can possibly come from it. Rev. Wright's, and other's, mindset in this regard is anathema to a workable, humane approach to life and, in a very profound sense, is destructively delusional.
Obama screwed up. People do that, you know. He's only human, after all.
And we all know or have known someone just like that. God is trying to communicate with them in every way imaginable, voices in their heads to winning the lottery.
I am hard pressed to imagine there is any difference between a latter day preacher and a troglodyte witch doctor smearing himself with chicken entrails to garner divine favor. I mean so what if the guy believes the U.S. created AIDS to kill black men, he also probably believes the world was created in six days 6000 years ago and that Mary was a virgin. Religion is not conducive to questioning assumptions and therefore cannot lead to solid, tested, conclusions on any subject.
Clinging is just exactly the right description, if somewhat insensitive.
This behavior of the media makes one suspect a, in the words of Hillary Clinton, right wing conspiracy!
What is up with this media bias?
Ditto, I had to stop watching it. I just could not believe the attacks. No matter what the man does. Hillary and her husband has wretched havoc in this Country when he was President. The reason we do not have jobs starts with Bill and Hillary Clinton, promoting NAFTA, Columbia free trade and China.
Right no she is in Indiana talking about the factory where the jobs when to China. It was under her husband's watch that the factory was sold but she does not tell everyone about that. MSM does not really talk about it.
But the coverage of the nominations race has been a travesty from the get-go back in Iowa.