The Thomas Chronicles

I listened attentively to Obama’s speech earlier this week. It was in the early morning hours for me when Obama began his speech. I was sipping black Folgers coffee and trying to down a bowl of maple sugar oatmeal. Normally, I would go about this mechanically, half awake, but not that day.

Barack Obama was to give the speech of his political life in response to the controversy surrounding the racist, inflammatory statements of his pastor and his relationship with him. In a word, this speech could make or break him as a political figure in America.

As he gave the speech, I was uplifted in his soaring eloquence. This man can make the most mundane of statements full of profundity. I thought to myself, “You know, perhaps this is what America needs. A black man to bridge the partisanship and the vindictiveness of these past few years. Who knows?” I was riding high on the flowery words of this man, by his seemly candor and the gravity of his hypnotic voice.

And then I listened to the content of his speech. I paused. I paused again.

The longer I listened, and the more I thought about it afterward, the more angry I became. Not because of the injustice and the eloquence with which he described race relations in America, but because I found his speech deplorable and outrageous. And I wasn’t appalled and angry about just one of the things he said earlier this week. Indeed, much of what I found utterly offensive had a layered, a compound nature.

Gosh, where do I begin? Perhaps, I can begin with where this controversy began. At feet of Pastor Wright. Here is an assortment of offensive statements from this pastor.

In response to Pastor Wright’s bigoted statements being splashed all across the Internet and on TV, Obama made gave this interview at MSNBC:

Apparently, Obama’s stumbling half-hearted response at MSNBC wasn’t enough to quell the growing controversy. In fact, it fueled the controversy as it increased in circulation around the net and on TV. Obama’s polling numbers plummeted double digits in less than a week. Politically, Obama had to do something or else he’s sunk.

Barack Obama enters the stage Tuesday morning and gives his “Race Speech”.

Let me be the first to say that I am also minority. I am a Vietnamese-American man, and if I heard my priest or preacher say these kinds of remarks, I’d get up and leave at the very least. This is a hot button issue with me. I have lost good friends over these issues of race and anti-American hatred.

There is no excuse for it. Period. Any rationalizations to excuse this sort of venom could be, if I were generous, at best self-serving.

I have to admit, though. The man has audacity, but he does not offer much hope. He basically stood on stage for roughly forty-five minutes and lectured America like a schoolmaster to a bunch of grubby children.

This is simply outrageous!

Obama has befriended a pastor and has attended a church who has spilled bigotry and racism for the twenty years and he has the audacity to lecture America on the issue of race? Even as he has been caught in a boldfaced LIE?

As the video above clearly shows, Obama said he has never heard Wright say these inflammatory, racist remarks either personally or in the pews. He repeated this statement on at least one of his stump speeches. However, in his speech on race, he admitted to hearing Pastor Wright say these things.

“Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely — just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”

Not only did he just freely confess he lied to his supporters, to the Democratic Party and to the entire nation, he went on to contradict himself again in the same speech by reasserting his original lie. He said:

Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

But in his legalistic, lawyerly mannerisms, he phrased it to where people can rationalize his double contradictions away.

He said, “Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes.”

Note that he didn’t delineate what “controversial” was. Was it Wright’s hatred of America? Was it Wright’s assertion that America created AIDS to commit genocide against Blacks? Was it his statement that America deserved 9/11? Was it All Of The Above? Given that Wright has made incredible accusations against white people and is well-known for his extremist tirades, one must come to only a few possible conclusions about Obama’s statements.

Either Obama is so woefully ignorant of what his pastor has consistently said for the past twenty years that his blindness is comparable to having rose-colored glasses super-glued to his eyes— which disqualifies him for the Presidency off the top since good judgment is his sole basis for running— or, Obama is lying through his teeth to America.

In my estimate, man who graduated from Harvard Law School, who served in the Illinois Legislature, who has served in the US Senate and whose political acumen is shrewd enough to best the Clinton Machine in most of the primaries thus far— it is improbable that a man with all these qualities should be so blind to what his intimate friend says from the pulpit. It’s possible he didn’t know. But either way, this should disqualify him from the Presidency.

There are just so much arrogance and mendacity and duplicity in what he said Tuesday morning. Many bloggers and pundits noted the ease in which he chucked his white grandma under the train when it became politically expedient to do so.

No, actually throwing her under the train wasn’t political expedient in the sense that she became a liability to his campaign. It was worse. He equated his grandmother with Jeremiah Wright and his racist tirades simply because he knew her and she happened to be white. How else was he going to make pastor Wright’s statements morally equivalent?

He said, “I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman 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 as Steve Sailer pointed out on his blog, according to Senator Barack Obama’s own words, his reference to his grandma was… well, misleading.

Well, no, according to Obama’s 1995 book, it is not at all true that she “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.” Instead, she once confessed her fear of one aggressive black beggar who didn’t pass by her but instead confronted her, demanded money, and then gave her — an intelligent, level-headed woman who had worked her way up to a mid-level corporate management position — good reason to believe he would have violently mugged her if her bus hadn’t pulled up.

If this was some doofus politician like Bush or Biden who retold the story in a misleading fashion, you might view it as just their usual struggle with using the English language to get across what they really kind of, sort of mean. But Obama is so superb with words that it’s perfectly reasonable to hold him accountable for choosing to slander his own living grandmother for his political advantage.

So, in responding to the new controversy, not over what Wright said but what he said about his grandmother, Obama said this:

“The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity, but that she is a typical white person. If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know - there’s a reaction in her that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away and sometimes come out in the wrong way and that’s just the nature of race in our society. We have to break through it. What makes me optimistic is you see each generation feeling less like that. And that’s pretty powerful stuff.”

So, on Tuesday she was the grandmother “who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe,” and on Thursday she’s not racist (unlike his pastor) and doesn’t hold any “racial animosity”. Nope, according to him, she’s just ” typical white person”.

Surely Obama didn’t mean that a “typical white person” was a person who “on more than one occasion” would “utter racial or ethnic stereotypes” that’s just plain embarrassing, right?

(For the full audio clip, click here.)

Listening to Barack Obama talk is like trying to see through squid ink. He piles contradictions upon contradictions; asserting one thing now, then asserting it’s opposite later. And if someone quotes one statement or its contradiction, he’s accused of “cherry picking” his comments, and once that accusation is lodged, he’ll frame the whole issue in another way. Thus, you have three different stances from Obama. And you’re not allowed to quote any of them without fear of being charged a racist.

For instance, he’s called the attention going to his pastor’s comments “a distraction”. Days later in his speech on race, he said, “race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.” (Of course, not. How else is he going to play the race card?) Maybe tomorrow, he’ll assert once again that while race is an important issue, it’s a distraction from his policies on health care, the war, etc, etc.

When you explicate all his flowery language and excise all his pseudo-heroic stances behind the podium, when you take his speech in total, what you’re left with is a man telling the American people that the hatred of black extremists against America is legitimate. Obama made it clear that he disagrees with “God Damn America” (To what degree, he didn’t really say, and disagree is a very soft, ambiguous term, isn’t it?), but he also rationalized such hatred, and insisted that we must find its roots.

He said, “to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

This is psychobabble hogwash.

Hatred is hatred. Bigotry is bigotry. Neither I nor anyone has the obligation in life to understand another person’s hatred and bigotry, and we certainly don’t have the obligation to vivisect another person’s psychological makeup in order to treat them as an immortal being made in the image of God.

And what about the person doing the hating? Does he get a pass because we are being asked to look at his “roots” and not what he does and says?

Others blogging about this topic:

Bookworm Room
Michelle Malkin
Shrinkwrapped
Neo-neocon
Dr. Sanity

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