How Can Obama Square These? [Update by Larry Johnson]
By SusanUnPC on March 14, 2008 at 9:12 PM in Barack Obama, Current Affairs, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., William Ayers
Can Obama square these facts so that the mainstream American voters — the voters he would need to gain the trust of to win a presidential contest — will be able to support him and vote for him November? I think not. Here are some reasons why:
(1) Square this MSNBC story with a Politico report by Ben Smith:
(A) MSNBC First Read, Friday, March 14, 2008, 3:28 PM: “The Obama campaign says they have no plans to ask the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to step down from a campaign spiritual advisory committee [the African American Religious Leadership Committee] because it “was a laundry list of people associated with the campaign and didn’t really do anything” [the typical "minimization" we're used to from the Obama campaign].
(B) Ben Smith, Politico.com, March 14, 2008, 7:26 PM: “Wright leaves Obama campaign — Spokesman Tommy Vietor emails: ‘Rev. Wright is no longer serving on the African American Religious Leadership Committee’” [how convenient -- just in time for the Keith Olbermann interview at 8:00 PM.]
(2) Square the statements of his pastor Jeremiah Wright with the statements of Obama supporter and fellow board member William Ayers published on the front page of the New York Times on September 11, 2001?
(A) Jeremiah Wright gave a sermon in which he said that “9’11 was a wake-up call for white America”?
(B) Unrepentant terrorist and former Weatherman William Ayers, a regular campaign supporter and fellow board member for the Woods Fund of Chicago, told the New York Times — in a story published on September 11, 2001 — that ”I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel we didn’t do enough.” (The NYTimes story, on the front page that fateful day, was titled, “No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen.”
For more on Ayers, see Larry Johnson’s article here, “Obama Tries to Hide Ayers Tie.”
Read that title again: “Obama Tries to Hide Ayers Tie.”
There’s a pattern, isn’t there.
Obama dissembles, minimizes and then shoves aside his longtime affiliations with extremists like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers.
The pattern includes him first minimizing the associations, or quite unbelievably saying he just didn’t know they expressed hatred for the United States of America.
Then, when pressure builds, he disavows them, and pushes them off a cliff.
Besides dumping Wright tonight from his committee, there’s also the odd coincidence that Wright retired from the pulpit at the beginning of 2008. Some television commentators wonder about the timing.
For more on these two extremists associated with Obama — he and Jeremiah Wright have been close for 20 years, and he and Ayers have been close for at least 12 years — see our stories here on Ayers and Wright.
UPDATE FROM LARRY JOHNSON: Just to get my two cents in. This is the great bamboozle, the okie doke, the hoodwinking of the American voter. Barack Obama wants to pretend that the comments of Reverend Wright are irrelevant to his quest for the Presidency. However, Reverend Wright is not just some passing acquaintance of Obama. I have a question for folks who have gotten married in a church or synagogue. Did you care you performed your wedding ceremony? I know in my case that my wife and I wanted someone we viewed as a spiritual leader. Someone we respected. Someone who reflected our values.
Are we supposed to believe that Barack and Michelle Obama are different? That they just chose someone who was available? He had Wright baptize his daughters and trusts this guy to instruct his children. I don’t buy it.
And Senator Obama is having a tough time getting his story correct. According to Reverend Wright:
“Fifteen minutes before Shabbos I get a call from Barack,” Mr. Wright said in an interview on Monday, recalling that he was at an interfaith conference at the time. “One of his members had talked him into uninviting me,” Mr. Wright said, referring to Mr. Obama’s campaign advisers. . . .
Mr. Wright said that in the phone conversation in which Mr. Obama disinvited him from a role in the announcement, Mr. Obama cited an article in Rolling Stone, “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama.”
According to the pastor, Mr. Obama then told him, “You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.”
Yet, Obama wrote on the Huffington post just the other day:
Most importantly, Rev. Wright preached the gospel of Jesus, a gospel on which I base my life. In other words, he has never been my political advisor; he’s been my pastor. And the sermons I heard him preach always related to our obligation to love God and one another, to work on behalf of the poor, and to seek justice at every turn.
The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.
Obama wants us to believe that Wright’s statements are some aberration. Nonsense! The Reverend Wright has a long history of radical behavior and statements. Wright himself noted in the New York Times interview:
“When his enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli” to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Wright recalled, “with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.” Mr. Wright added that his trip implied no endorsement of either Louis Farrakhan‘s views or Qaddafi’s.
How completely clueless can the Senator from Illinois be? Wright is no Martin Luther King jr. that’s for sure. He does not preach a message of peace. He does not call on his congregation to turn the other cheek. He does not preach non-violence as the path of Jesus. Instead, he spreads the lie that Jesus was a black man and that the white race is bent on crucifying blacks. Was Barack asleep during the sermons? I think it is the big bamboozle.
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, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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