Obama's Speech in Response to the Wright Controversy

If we are talking about judgement on the war keep in mind that Obama wasn't a US Senator when the authorization vote was taken and has said that he doesn't know how he would've voted had he been in the US Senate at the time.

Judgement on who you choose to associate yourself with does matter politically and the same applies to McCain, Clinton or any other politician. If association didn't matter then those pictures of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam in 1988 or GW Bush with Jeff Gannon wouldn't matter.

 

so if you say your grandmother is a typical Jewish lady - that's racist if she IS Jewish?????

Holy moly man. My parents are pretty typical for their race - i mean, very typical. Now I'm a racist?

Since when does the word "typical" carry so much negative conotation??? It's is like nappy headed hoe? Or Macaca?


Why does it seem here that people are looking for a way to bury the guy? He just gave one of the greatest speaches on race....no, the greatest speech on race that i've ever heard. I mean, he really does understand both sides. Well, maybe not your side but you can't please everyone, especially the ultra die hard Hillary supporters.

 

It all started in 1948, with the creation of the state of Isreal. As the US continued to fund Isreal, hatred began. Then, due to economic interests, the US set up bases in the holy lands of Saudi Arabia (at the invite of the Saudis). Once that happened, you started to see violence in Beirut, some airline hijackings, the Achille Lauro, etc etc.

The fact of the matter is that this started with our support of Isreal. It really got hot once we established a presence in the holy land (near Mecca). Unless we withdrew completely from the region (not just Iraq) and stop sending money to Isreal, it does not really solve much of anything.

 

There weren't any US bases or troops in Saudi until the First Gulf War.

 

Perhaps it was just the US business interests over there. The bottom line is...we have been seen as an enemy because we are aligned with the Isrealis.

 

Wait, he stole my favorite Faulkner quote. Bastardo!!! Oh well, for literally the most sophisticated and accurate hi-profile speech on race relations in US history, i guess he can have it.

Bastardo!

El Presidente!

 

So your timeline you laid down was totally shown to be in error. No response?

 

The Arabs were bloody violent upon their own people up until 9/11. It was the bin Laden led al Qaeda that decided to turn their frustration of failed revolutions upon authoritarian ME states upon the US because we were seen as the root of their power.

Interestingly, the attacks (Cole, Riyadh, African embassies) perpetuated by bin Laden weren't seen as great moves and it seemed like their movement would die in the caves of Afghanistan until 9/11.

 

Wright is coming to Houston. Some of you will finally get a chance to check him out!

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hotstories/5638817.html

March 21, 2008, 3:28PM
Controversial pastor coming to Wheeler Avenue Baptist

By ALLAN TURNER
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

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Just weeks after publicity over his controversial sermons rocked Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright will preach three guest sermons at Houston's Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church.

Wright, who until February was minister of Obama's church, Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, will preach Sunday, March 30.

Wheeler pastor, the Rev. Marcus Cosby, could not be reached for comment Friday.

A spokesman for the church said Wright, who has offered sermons at Wheeler annually for the past 15 years, had been scheduled as part of the church's regular speaker's program.

Widely publicized recorded excerpts from Wright's past sermons, in which he charged that U.S. actions prompted the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and that the government created HIV to target people of color and harassed blacks through "three strike" laws, prompted Obama to address race issues in a speech earlier this week.

Obama termed Wright's comments "divisive," but also suggested that the snippets were not representative of the clergyman he has known for more than two decades.

In Houston, the Rev. William Lawson, Wheeler's pastor emeritus, suggested Wright's comments had been publicized by Obama's opponents in the neck-and-neck raced with Sen. Hilary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Others in the black clergy noted that Wright's social commentary was part of the black church's "prophetic" tradition, which chastises society for its shortcomings.

Cosby is among African-American clergymen who are advising Obama on religious matters.

allan.turner@chron.com

 

Been a long week.

Just watched the speech.

Man, he nailed it.

Good job, President Obama.

 

The only part of my timeline that was shown to be in error was actual military bases in Saudi. The rest of it is in tact. And I did respond above.

Thanks for being snarky, jabroni.

 

And the Beirut bombings on the American embassy, etc were based upon our support of Israel.

Also, the hijacking of Pan-Am 103 in 1988 was perpetrated by either the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution or the Islamic Jihad. This would, of course, be in retaliation for our support of Israel.

The hijacking of the Achille Laruo in 1985 was accomplished by the Palestine Liberation Front to obtain the release of 50 Palestinian prisoners in jail in Israel. Abu Abbas, one of the hijackers, eluded capture until 2003 when US forces apprehended him in Iraq.

 

I believe that brand of terrorism diverged into a different animal, one the US came to know personally, after the first Gulf war. Sure they held resentment against us for tacitly supporting Israel. We went through a series of disastrous oil embargoes because of that stance, but terror groups in that time like the Muslim Brotherhood were more focused upon liberating their state against what they saw were soulless secular puppets, which those governments imprisoned and tortured their opposition in kind. The Iranian Revolution, in particular, was seen as success for a new theocratic paradigm to awaken the people.

I do think that we squandered opportunities for reforming the Israel Palestinian situation and that 9/11 has all but cemented that alliance to no return, but it was the peace beteen Israel with states like Egypt and Jordan that pissed off the Arab extremists to no end.

To the terrorists, they realize that governments stoking the anti-Israeli flames is just a show to capitalize public outrage outward instead of directing it inward to issues like civil liberties and reform in the political process. It's because these terrorist groups are essentially de facto opposition parties in that void. Talk about a rock and a hard place for the Middle Eastern people...

 

I love it more than you do.

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Plus a little Nobel speech action...

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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ab26ee84-f762-11dc-ac40-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1


Obama breaks the secret code

Towards the end of his speech about race on Tuesday, Barack Obama made an observation that was raw enough to knock any attentive American listener out of his chair.

Mr Obama was talking about one of his campaign volunteers, a white woman in her 20s, who as a girl had proclaimed that her favourite food was mustard sandwiches, in the hope of making her single mother feel less bad about being poor. This girl had kept her faith in other people, Mr Obama said, even though “perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work”.

All Americans have heard such talk; no recent politician has ever been remotely brave enough to allude to it, even when quoting a hypothetical third party. It is not clear whether Mr Obama’s 37-minute address will help or hinder him on his road to the White House. But it is potentially a great service to his country. For one morning at least, Mr Obama left off trying to inspire and chose instead to explain.

Sceptics would say that this is because Mr Obama had a lot of explaining to do. The pastor of the church he has attended for 20 years, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, has been captured on video preaching angry sermons, some of them true but impolitic (the US was built on ideas of “white supremacy and black inferiority”), some anti-American (the attacks of September 11 2001 were America’s “chickens coming home to roost”) and some nutty (the US developed the Aids virus as a means of curbing the black population).

No one has demonstrated any political affinity between the two men. Rev Wright described himself to the Christian Science Monitor last year as more a sparring partner than a mentor. Mr Obama has dropped Rev Wright from his campaign. Yet voters, with good reason, remain worried.

Mr Obama has chosen to reassure them not by minimising the meaning of Rev Wright’s anger but by maximising it, showing it to be part of a widespread subterranean current. “That anger,” Mr Obama says, “may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table.”

While attacking Rev Wright’s harsher sermons, Mr Obama defended him as a man, described him as “like family” and portrayed his views as the by-product of a broader social failure in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, one that afflicts both blacks and whites.

“I can no more disown him,” Mr Obama said, “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.”

This use of his own grandmother as a prop in a wider argument has led many to attack Mr Obama as simplistic and cynical. What is the equivalence between a grandmother’s fear of black crime, for which statistics give some grounds, and a preacher’s free-floating ideas that the US government is engaged in germ warfare against its own citizens?

But this is actually where the subtlety of Mr Obama’s argument lies. It explains why he chose to strip his speech of customary euphemisms. The cornerstone of all his policies on race has been that black progress, as he said on Tuesday, “means binding our particular grievances – for better healthcare, and better schools, and better jobs – to the larger aspirations of all Americans”.

Obviously, this means that blacks need to know what the aspirations of other Americans are.

Under the present system of race relations, that cannot happen. A very interesting book published this week shows why. In Racial Paranoia (Basic Books, $26/£15.99), the University of Pennsylvania anthropologist John L. Jackson Jr suggests that extravagant theories of white racism – from the widespread Aids rumour to Louis Farrakhan’s allegation that the US actually blew up the levees to cause the deadly New Orleans floods during Hurricane Katrina – have their roots in the decorous language that mostly white leaders have invented for talking about race.

The US has not managed to eliminate racism, Mr Jackson thinks, but it has succeeded in eliminating racist talk. Remarks the slightest bit “insensitive” draw draconian punishment. White people, because they feel thoroughly oppressed by this regime, assume that it must be some kind of “gift” to minorities, especially blacks.

It is not. It is more like a torment. It renders the power structure more opaque to blacks than it has ever been, leaving what Mr Jackson calls a “scary disconnect between the specifics of what gets said and the hazy possibilities of what kinds of things are truly meant”. If the historic enemies of your people suddenly began talking about you in what can fairly be called a secret code, how inclined would you be to trust in their protestations of generosity?

This is the core of the problem Mr Obama aims to address. Bringing subterranean racial narratives into the light of day, where they can be debated openly, is a risk. Although the early news coverage of his speech has been positive, polls appear show that what Americans most want from Mr Obama is a simple demonstration that he is not like Rev Wright.

That is not exactly what they got. But they did get something better: the offer of a more intimate relationship among the races, a less instrumental use of them by US politicians and a breaking of the monopoly on interracial dialogue that has until now been held by elite censors. Americans ought to take him up on it.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

 

Let's all make sure and not vote for Jeremiah Wright.

Meanwhile, props to Obama for talking about things nobody else has talked about. I'm impressed with his courage.

So much for those that have been trying to make the argument that he'll only say what he thinks people want to hear.

 

Wow, this is a pretty profound argument.

 

I think many of the most loyal Obama supporters continue to gloss over what is a real issue in his campaign. In twenty years of attending the church Obama would have had to have heard some of this rhetoric yet he continue to come back and donate large sums of money ($20,000+ 2 years ago). What is now a pretty big issue in the primaries is going to be a massive problem during the general election. Obama loyalists need to take the Wright controversy much more seriously if they hope to have their guy win the nomination and election.

 

I guess I don't see that as a problem. The church, and its mission seems worthwhile, and I don't have a problem with donating to it. Wright is retired from the church now.

I think as Obama said during his speech that people aren't really talking about the issues, and maybe this will actually cause them to discuss race relations as they stand now. I think a lot of Wright said was stupid, and wrong, but I hope some good comes out of it.

 

The problem is twofold:
1) Wright is an America-hating, racist bigot. He is also Obama's closest spiritual advisor. So that problem is what Wright has implanted in Obama's brain.
2) Obama should know (w)right from wrong. Associating with Wright, the bigot, hypocrite, and racist, for 20 years shows an extreme lack of judgment. For him to try to pussyfoot around the issue by saying he wasn't in church for those sermons, or hadn't heard about them is just pathetic. Own up to it. Be a man and level with Americans about the relationship. Don't try to dance around it with fancy footwork and flowery words.

The issue is cripping Obama in the polls. How then, can you not identify it as a problem? How can you not identify as a problem the fact that Obama has honored a racist and a bigot for 20 years? Obama has honored a man who honored Louis Farrakhan, an anti-semite. This is a huge problem for Obama. And it ain't goin' no where, libs.