BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 03:15 PM

These clips give some perspective on the Rev Wright clips.

Rev Wright

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Little Hawk
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 03:05 PM

Well, Jack, he's not as slick as Bugs Bunny, I'll admit that. Nothing sticks to that wabbit.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: CarolC
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 03:02 PM

Heh... now that I think about it, I think DougR is a bit of a pinko himself. He supports big government. He used to work for the government, so he got his living paid for by the taxpayers. If he got his excellent health insurance from a government job, even his health care is paid for by the taxpayers. Yup. Sounds like a socialist to me.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 02:55 PM

Hawk,

To paraphrase a politician.

I know Bugs Bunny and DougR is no Bugs Bunny. Bugs didn't steal his lines from Limbaugh, Hannity and O'Reilly.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Amos
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 02:27 PM

Spawzer, given the general tenor of conservative epithets about Clinton, such as "slick willy: with iits crude sexual overtones, it should be plain that the invidious parallel Douggielad decided to draw with Obama was intended as defamatory, as well as being unintentionally delusory.


In case there is some question about what Obama actually stands for, here's a brief excerpt from his Convention Center Speech:

"This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign Ð to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together Ð unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction Ð towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story....".

I'd like to know what it is about this platform that Doug R thinks deserves ridicule.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Ebbie
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 02:01 PM

Correction: I aaid above that Obama had spoken in Massachusetts the other night- it, of course, was at the University of West Virginia.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Little Hawk
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 02:01 PM

"Very few rabbits pop their heads up to intentionally draw fire."

Bugs Bunny does! And that's who I'm comparing Doug to. He just can't resist popping his head up...and people just can't resist opening fire when he does.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: CarolC
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 02:00 PM

I don't know, catspaw. He supports the NeoCons and they're radicals who got to where they are by first being Socialists.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: catspaw49
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 01:55 PM

Actually Carol, Doug is over on the side of "Reactionary" which loosely means an Ultra Conservative.........Were he a bit moreso he would be very close to the same positions held by "Radicals" who might be thought of as Ultra Liberal. Both hold many very similar beliefs but they arrived there through different means.

I agree with you Hawk and I think Doug needs an award sometimes around here for not completely flying off the handle {;<))

Spaw---NASCAR Voter

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 01:53 PM

Very few rabbits pop their heads up to intentionally draw fire.

>>>Doug is like a rabbit on a firing range here, Spaw. Every time he sticks his fuzzy little conservative little out of his hole, wiggles his nose, and takes a look around, all hell breaks loose as a battalion of sneering Elmer Fudds take aim with every weapon at their disposal and blast away. ;-)<<<

If the rabbit were just looking around, I might agree with you. But no, he is throwing stink bombs and trying to draw attack.

I don't see the people who respond as Elmer Fudds any more than I would elevate Doug's tactics to the giddy rhetorical heights of Bugs Bunnydom.

DougR is afflicted with that all too common Internet syndrome I call Assburglar's, that is he steals lines from the Asses on talk radio and tosses them into Internet discussions as if they were his own.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: heric
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 01:36 PM

>Perhaps I haven't been listening hard enough or to the right things, but there doesn't seem to be much if anything in Rev Wright's preaching that sounds like racism. At any rate none of the picked up in those articles bruce cut and pasted would qualify.<

You can name it race baiting if you prefer, but telling your parishioners that the Federal government is using manufactured biological weapons to kill you (if you are a person of color) is a tad . . . what's the best word?

Looney?

(Barack addressed a near-impossible conundrum.)

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: CarolC
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 01:27 PM

DougR's not a conservative, LH. He's a radical.   ;-)

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Little Hawk
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 01:13 PM

Doug is like a rabbit on a firing range here, Spaw. Every time he sticks his fuzzy little conservative little out of his hole, wiggles his nose, and takes a look around, all hell breaks loose as a battalion of sneering Elmer Fudds take aim with every weapon at their disposal and blast away. ;-) It's like the first scene in "Saving Private Ryan". LOL!

This place needs a few isolated individuals like Doug, just so the mainstream here have someone to vent their inner rage upon. He gives us the catharsis we all secretly yearn for. That's my theory.

I thought Obama's speech was wonderful. The man truly impresses me. He's one of the very few politicians I've heard who seems to actually think about things deeply rather than just utter predictable slogans, and one of the very few who talks to an audience of Americans as if he were talking to mature adults.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: CarolC
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 01:12 PM

BTW, I'm not even a Democrat. I'm one of the independent voters (not Independent Party, but independent as in 'unafilliated') who votes my conscience rather than by party affiliation.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: CarolC
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 01:09 PM

I'm not an Obama supporter, but I just hate it when people try to dumb down political discourse by calling intelligent speech making 'slick'. And I hate smear politics.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Amos
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 01:03 PM

I think it would be wise to flood the internet with the most compassionate clips of Wright they could find.

M. Ted, I tolerate all kinds of people with all kids of perspectives. I do not like slanted, bitter jabs, covertly destructive remarks (even when mine) or irational assertions designed to manipulate people into shared bitterness.

Obama is not a perfect human being. But he is head and shoulders abetter human being than any of the other contenders on either side of the division.


ANd I think it is about time we had a better human being in charge.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Ron Davies
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 12:55 PM

M. Ted--

You show your own naivete. Of course "people" will still show that video. It's in their interest to do so---and they would have continued to do it no matter what Obama said, as I think you actually know.

And if there are people who now say they will not vote for Obama, there are also people who say he has won them over as a result of that speech.

If Obama has made an error, it seems to me, as I said before, that the error is neglecting to broadcast the examples of inclusive Christianity given other times by Wright--giving the lie to the widespread slander that sitting in that church was listening to 20 years of anti-American and anti-white diatribes.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: catspaw49
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 12:50 PM

Geeziz..............Sorry Doug. I don't agree with you myself but considering some of the other things said about Clinton and McCain around here I felt you were just throwing in the easy jab, perhaps even from a humrous angle????

Maybe someone could tell me how Doug's post was nasty and rude and all??????


Spaw---NASCAR Voter

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Azizi
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 12:35 PM

GUEST,Eyes on the Prize, here's that hyperlink:

http://ky.barackobama.com/KYmorevoicesvideo

-snip-

The video is about Barack Obama's community work in Chicago with Project Vote. That community project to register new voters occcurred just after Obama had graduated from Harvard's Law school.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: M.Ted
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 12:31 PM

Amos isn't going to tolerate anyone who doesn't shout Obama's praises from the rooftops, DougR-but you knew that;-)

Drew Western's article is the kind of after-the-fact political spin that would have offended Amos if it was about anyone but Obama-

The sad fact is, Obama failed to put the problem behind him, as evidenced by the fact that people are still talking about Wright, and showing those wonderful clips five days after Obama was supposed to put the issue to rest.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: GUEST,Hold On!!!
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 12:29 PM

Click for Barack

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Ron Davies
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 12:27 PM

Perhaps, Doug, you're not used to hearing a political figure who actually believes in something--other than figments of his own imaginations like "Evil Empires" and "welfare Cadillacs".

And who talks about issues in something above a bumper sticker approach. Sorry if it's too hard for you to grasp. Though that's not surprising.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: CarolC
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 12:14 PM

I knew Republican smear campaigners would use that 'Slick Willie' smear on Obama. To such people, if you're a Republican and you give good speeches, you're a great speaker (the Republican perception of Reagan, for instance). If you're a Democrat and you give good speeches, you're 'slick'. Smear tactics are slimy. People who use smear tactics are slimy.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Bobert
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 08:58 AM

Play nice, Dougie...

B;~)

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 07:57 AM

Wouldn't you agree, Doug, that we should never feel that because we disagree with someone's politics we should feel it necessary to despise them? Or conversely that just because we agree with someone's politics we should feel it necessary to admire them.

Maybe it would be interesting to have a thread in which we could list people we disagree with and admire, and people we agree with and despise.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Amos
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 01:36 AM

DougR:

Your defamation is -- IMHO -- an indication of your jaded fixed thinking; it is not up to simple recognition of a human being.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: DougR
Date: 22 Mar 08 - 01:32 AM

Obama is slicker than slick Willie. I don't think he will slide into the White House, however.

DougR

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Janie
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 08:35 PM

I agree, Ebbie. And if they don't, they are simply doing McCain's campaigning for him.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Ebbie
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 08:18 PM

Last night I watched a speech that Senator Obama made yesterday at a university in Massachusetts (?). It was a good one and well received. I was glad to see that he discussed McCain's positions far more than he did Senator Clinton's.

I think it's time for both Clinton and Obama to do that. Let us see what options we have.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Amos
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 07:14 PM

Amos and all others: Please observe the Copy and Paste suggestions in the FAQ. The political threads are especially bad right now. A tiny snip and your personal comments with the link only please.

Huffington Post:

Obama Offers a Progressive Vision of Patriotism
By Drew Westen, Huffington Post. Posted March 21, 2008.

Obama's brilliant discussion of race, class and patriotism shows substance unlike any politician in recent history.

I watched Barack Obama's speech Tuesday morning intently. The "pre-game show" of cable commentators predicted a somewhat grim outcome. What could Obama say that could possibly overcome his association with the words of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright? Would he throw his pastor on the train tracks? And even if he did, would he still suffer from guilt by association?

But then, for 45 minutes, I saw a man who for days had appeared somewhat at sea, buffeted by waves that relentlessly pushed him off course, seem to find his compass and chart a course directly into the eye of the storm. I saw a man with the inner confidence, and the steadiness of a captain who knew he was sailing on uncharted waters but needed to go there anyway, take the nation with him and land them safely on the shore.

The pundits were clearly stunned. They knew they had witnessed something extraordinary, a moment when time seemed to stand still and a politician in the midst of a withering electoral storm did the unspeakable: he spoke the truth. The unspoken, unspeakable truth. He told the nation that he understood what was happening in white barber shops and black barber shops, around white water coolers and black water coolers, and that we are neither free from our prejudices nor merely prejudiced in our respective grievances, and that in both our prejudices and our grievances, we have more in common than we know.

With the exception of commentators who pride themselves on their bigotry, the speech drew immediate, nearly universal acclaim, and I suspect that its lasting impact will mirror its initial impact. But as the great French sociologist Emil Durkheim described it, we live our lives in the realm of the profane, punctuated by moments of sanctity, only to return again to everyday life. And by nightfall, as I listened to reports of the speech on television, many of the talking heads had returned to the realm of the literal, the crass, and the profane: Did he distance himself enough from Reverend Wright? Did he condemn his former pastor enough to reassure white voters?

But the speech wasn't about Reverend Wright, even though the controversy surrounding pieces of his sermons was the impetus for it. Obama delivered a message that spoke to the conflicts and contradictions around race that have existed since the earliest days of this nation, and he delivered it in a personal way that spoke to his own history and his own complex response to his pastor's messages over many years. The speech brought to mind a passage written by the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson a half century ago in his psychobiography of Martin Luther, which could just as easily have been written last night. Erikson was describing that ineffable quality we call charisma, and the way an individual life history sometimes converges with the historical moment: "Now and again," Erikson wrote, "an individual is called upon (called upon by whom, only theologians claim to know, and by what only bad psychologists)," to lift his personal conflicts to the level of cultural conflicts, "and to try to solve for all what he could not solve for himself alone."

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: GUEST,Bob Ryszkiewicz
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 06:48 PM

Bill Richardson - "A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity for Our Nation..."
http://youtube.com/watch?v=smZGgzdNyA8&feature=bz303

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Charley Noble
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 03:44 PM

I seem to remember an old minister saying, "Well, I can walk on water but I'm not sure I can walk on so much beer."

Cheerily,
Charley Noble

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Don Firth
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 03:18 PM

I've known a lot of ministers, pastors, priests, and preachers, many of whom had a lot of good things to say, but I've never met one who could walk on water.

Well, I have heard tell of this one guy, but that was a while back.

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Amos
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 03:07 PM

From a CNN commentator, an excellent perspective:

"There is no doubt that a lot of Americans are angry and confused by Obama staying at Trinity United Church of Christ and not disowning his pastor.

Folks, that's just not what church folks do. I don't recall folks asking members of the Rev. Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson to leave their churches in droves. They knew their leaders are fallible and make mistakes. Should they be criticized for hateful and divisive comments? Absolutely. Disowned?

I would never say that.

This is an opportunity for us. Those of us in the media, as Obama said, can continue to run the same clips, but is that providing healing to America?

No.

What we can do is begin to show where communities are coming together, talking openly and honestly about their hurts, frustrations and pain. Will we get angry and upset because of the other person isn't fully getting what we are trying to say? Of course! But until we decide to look in that mirror, and confront our deep-seated fears of the other because of their race, religion and political affiliation, we'll remain a fractured nation.

The Bible says don't put new wine in old wine skins. So let's stop using the resentments and anger of the past against the people of today and the future.

So, what are YOU prepared to do?"


A

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Amos
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 02:17 PM

You make an excellent point, Little Hawk.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Little Hawk
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 02:00 PM

Yeah... ;-) It's THE word people in our society use to brand others when they wish to do them permanent damage. It's like calling someone a "witch" in Salem...or an "apostate" during the religious wars in medieval times. The target of such a branding word, even if they're completely innocent of the charge, becomes like someone thrown into quicksand...they harder they struggle, the faster they sink.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 01:44 PM

Perhaps I haven't been listening hard enough or to the right things, but there doesn't seem to be much if anything in Rev Wright's preaching that sounds like racism. At any rate none of the picked up in those articles bruce cut and pasted would qualify.

Some of the charges laid against the US government might be mistake or over the top, but what's racist about that? If a white preacher said that America was at fault in those ways, and did not deserve to be "blessed", would that be racist? And yet "racist" is the term being used, presumably because it is seen as the most damaging.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Don Firth
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 01:32 PM

Heard on NPR this morning (just a few minutes ago, in fact):

"A prominent politician (Obama), in his speech about racism, has just talked to the American public as if they were adults. This is a refreshing change."

Don Firth

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: GUEST,Bob Ryszkiewicz
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 12:16 PM

Obama: BBC Recap...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-ls64uNs4A&feature=related

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Amos
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 12:11 PM

What bothers, me, Bobert, is the raucous volume of the denial. It is like standing in the middle of Times Square at rush hour, trying to hear an apple blossom. The flogging of American ignorance and insensitivity is a national disgrace, and it has been forwarded by every channel of the MSM.

Oh, dear. IS this disillusionment with the Establishment raising its ugly head? I hope not. :D

I try to recognize that each instance of blindered obtuseness in the writing public, whether for MSN, WaPO, or some blog somewhere, is a matter of individual reactance. It's like rabid chipmunks or something. Once they start off being rabid, nothign else matters.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Bobert
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 11:37 AM

Make no mistake about it, Amos, ol' buddy... Everyone got it... Some are just in denial...

B~

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Little Hawk
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 11:36 AM

"he did not speak like a politician, but like an ordinary human grappling with the complexities of historical racism in America and what it has done to the American psyche."

That's exactly the impression I got too. That's what's so striking about Obama...he talks like a real human being, not like a politician. He talks like he is actually thinking seriously about the matter at hand rather than just trying to sink the next strategic shot (at someone else) and jack up his PR ratings.

This is so rare in the political scene that to see it happening is kind of breathtaking as far as I'm concerned.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Amos
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 11:27 AM

Comment by M. K. Asante, Professor, African American Studies, Temple U.

"Barack Obama at Constitution Center: A Historic Encounter with America - Mar 20, 2008

Obama's address at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia will take its place alongside the great addresses in American history. One thinks of Lincoln at Gettysburg, Frederick Douglass on the Fourth of July in Rochester, Booker T. Washington at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895, John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address, Martin Luther King in 1963, and perhaps five or six other speeches that have elevated the best instincts in the American nation, when one considers Barack Obama's address on the 18th of March, 2008. The speech was remarkable for its judicious and careful use of language and its perfect tone for the occasion. He not only answered questions regarding his relationship with his imperfect pastor, he told us of his own imperfection, and that of his grandmother whom he loves and admires. I am not so much struck by the fact that Obama spoke on the question of race; I am particularly astonished that he did not speak like a politician, but like an ordinary human grappling with the complexities of historical racism in America and what it has done to the American psyche. This was a courageous, audacious, and brilliant exposition of the type we have come not to expect of our politicians. Barack Obama raised the ante, exalted the thinking of the political arena and showed us what a presidential address could look like if a person was bold enough to tread and lead where others refused to go. I am sure that the Constitution Center speech will be studied, cited, and referred to for many years to come."

Looks like somebody got it, anyway.




A

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Little Hawk
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 11:11 AM

Good quote, DannyC.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: DannyC
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 10:34 AM

The Clintons and the GOP are merely different sides of the same coin. They have each demonstrated that they will quickly and coldly burn human flesh for their own selfish political gain.

The media continues to soldier on with its flogging of Barack Obama. I am beginning to be reminded of the words of Albert Camus regarding events of a separate age: "It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward. It is this, without doubt, which explains why so many men throughout the world regard the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy."

I'll continue to work and hope that - in our age - it won't be so...

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Amos
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 10:13 AM

Photo of the month -- Billy Meets Pastor Wright in WHite House.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: Amos
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 10:02 AM

Jeeze, what a windy exegesis; and as so often in such efforts, a complete miss. Talk about not getting the concept. Wow.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: beardedbruce
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 08:03 AM

And of course, one you can disagree with...

Washington Post:

The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 21, 2008; Page A17

The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.

An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which"controversial" remarks?

Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented HIV "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible for Sept. 11 -- "chickens coming home to roost" -- because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?) What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them?

Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?"

But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave -- why doesn't he leave even today -- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.

His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence and (b) white guilt.

(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "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." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?

"I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was Grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus's time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.

Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?

(b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then he proceeds to do precisely that. What lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.

This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.

But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: beardedbruce
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 08:00 AM

Another view, from the Washington Post:

Another Angry Black Preacher

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, March 21, 2008; Page A17

Let's ask the hard question about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright: Is he as far outside the African American mainstream as many of us would like to think?

Because Barack Obama's speech on race in America was so candid about both the legitimacy of black and white grievances -- and the flaws in those grievances -- it carried the risk of offending almost everyone.

A man who, by parentage, is half black and half white took it upon himself to explain each side's story to the other. Obama resembled no one so much as the conciliatory sibling in a large and boisterous family, shouting: "Please, please, will you listen to each other for a sec?"

One of the least remarked upon passages in Obama's speech is also one of the most important -- and the part most relevant to the Wright controversy. There is, Obama said, a powerful anger in the black community rooted in "memories of humiliation and doubt" that "may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends" but "does find voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or around the kitchen table. . . . And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews."

Yes, black people say things about our country and its injustices to each other that they don't say to those of us who are white. Whites also say things about blacks privately that they don't say in front of their black friends and associates.

One black leader who was capable of getting very angry indeed is the one now being invoked against Wright. His name was Martin Luther King Jr.

An important book on King's rhetoric by Barnard College professor Jonathan Rieder, due out next month, offers a more complex view of King than the sanitized version that is so popular, especially among conservative commentators. In "The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me," Rieder -- an admirer of King -- notes that the civil rights icon was "not just a crossover artist but a code switcher who switched in and out of idioms as he moved between black and white audiences."

Listen to what King said about the Vietnam War at his own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Feb. 4, 1968: "God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place." King then predicted this response from the Almighty: "And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."

If today's technology had existed then, I would imagine the media playing quotations of that sort over and over. Right-wing commentators would use the material to argue that King was anti-American and to discredit his call for racial and class justice. King certainly angered a lot of people at the time.

I cite King not to justify Wright's damnation of America or his lunatic and pernicious theories but to suggest that Obama's pastor and his church are not as far outside the African American mainstream as many would suggest. I would also ask my conservative friends who praise King so lavishly to search their consciences and wonder if they would have stood up for him in 1968.

These are realities that Obama has forced us to confront, and they are painful. Wright was operating within a long tradition of African American outrage, which is one reason Obama could not walk away from his old pastor in the name of political survival. Obama's personal closeness to Wright would have made such a move craven in any event.

I'm a liberal, and I loathe the anti-American things Wright said precisely because I believe that the genius of our country is its capacity for self-correction. Progressivism and, yes, hope itself depend on a belief that personal conversion and social change are possible, that flawed human beings are capable of transcending their pasts and their failings.

Obama understands the anger of whites as well as the anger of blacks, but he's placed a bet on the other side of King's legacy that converted rage into the search for a beloved community. This does not prove that Obama deserves to be president. It does mean that he deserves to be judged on his own terms and not by the ravings of an angry preacher.

Subject: RE: BS: Obama's Defining Moment Speech
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 21 Mar 08 - 06:48 AM

We like people who don't admit defeat, even when the odds, and polls, area against them

That's about determination and defiance, not about forced optimism. "We shall overcome" isn't about some notion of effortlessly crushing the opposition.

"Little man beats the big man every time, if he's in the right and keeps a-coming."