Left or Right, the Brains Behind Obama Aren’t Doing Him Any Good

Spike Lee, who “loves” Obama and claims that “Obama will change everything,” spoke with the UK’s The Guardian today.

The filmmaker “hinted at a political conspiracy behind Wright’s recent, contentious attempts to justify his remarks.” Lee said, “It looks like he’s being paid to keep talking.”

“Jeremiah Wight needs to be quiet,” Lee said yesterday. “If he loves Obama he needs to shut up right now. It makes me question his motives for talking. I’m starting to wonder whether somebody has been contributing to the building funds of his church. Seriously.”

Of Wright’s sermon before a Dallas church on Sunday morning, before the evening Detroit NAACP dinner — in which Wright described his “public crucifixion” — the church’s minister told reporters that his congregants were thrilled to hear Wright again and enthusiastically supported his stands. So much for Spike’s conspiracy theory, although such “imaginative,” rationalizing explanations are common among Obamabots, and we do find them amusing.

Spike Lee is correct, however, that Wright should keep quiet (although we all know that Wright is so angry with Obama, he’s ready to do him in). Last night, Fox News anchor Brit Hume correctly noted that some truly shocking elements of the NAACP speech — including that black children’s brains work differently from white children’s brains, and that white college marching bands use “excellent European precision” — were overshadowed by the reporting of Wright’s Monday National Press Club Q&A. Therefore, Hume’s pundit panel discussed some of Wright’s Sunday NAACP speech — which, astonishingly, CNN “pundit” Roland Martin gave a “B” grade:

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Of note: We posted a four-part video of Wright’s NAACP speech in “Rev. Jeremiah Wright on PR Tour to Fight ‘Public Crucifixion’,” and CNN has a full transcript.

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A number of shocked experts have weighed in on the destructive, racist nonsense about left brain/right brain, including in this op-ed in the WSJ by Heather Mac Donald, a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute:

At the NAACP meeting, Mr. Wright proudly propounded the racist contention that blacks have inherently different “learning styles,” … [...]

How one learns from a teacher as “subject” by climbing on her, as opposed to learning from her as “object” — by listening to her words — is a mystery.

[O]ne thing is clear: Embracing the notion that blacks shouldn’t be expected to listen attentively to instruction is guaranteed to perpetuate into eternity the huge learning gap between blacks on the one hand, and whites and Asians on the other.

I can’t begin to describe how shocked I am by Wright’s racist differentiation between black and white children.

ALSO: It is clear, from the transcript of the NAACP speech, that these are theories that Wright has studied extensively, for years and years, and has SURELY spoken about before, probably countless times in his own sermons at Trinity — including sermons that both Barack and Michelle Obama had to have heard — and endorsed by their continuing presence, not to mention their many large donations to Wright’s church, the last in the amount of $26,000+ in 2007.

This portion of the Wall Street Journal article, “The Wright Side of the Brain” gets into Rev. Wright’s rationalizations for self-destructive behavior, crime, and the incarceration of blacks:

Approving of self-destructive behavior in school is just one part of the vast academic project to justify black underclass dysfunction. The academy has also singled out crime as authentically black, another poisonous idea that Mr. Wright appears to have embraced. In his NAACP speech, he mocked the tendency of “those of us who never got caught” to treat “those of us who are incarcerated” with disrespect. In other words, we all commit crime, but only some of us get nabbed for it.

This leveling argument recalls the bizarre doctrines of University of Pennsylvania law professor Regina Austin. In a widely reprinted California Law Review article from 1992, Ms. Austin asserted that the black community should embrace the criminals in its midst as a form of resistance to white oppression. People of color should view “hustling” as a “good middle ground between straightness and more extreme forms of lawbreaking.” Examples of hustling include “clerks in stores [who] cut their friends a break on merchandise, and pilfering employees [who] spread their contraband around the neighborhood.” It never occurs to Ms. Austin that these black thieves may have black employers who suffer the effects of crime — as do the larger neighborhoods of which they form the essential fabric. Officially incorporating crime into the black identity, as Ms. Austin and Mr. Wright do, is a pathetic admission of defeat and marginalization.

it was a shock, to me, to learn from Ms. Mac Donald that these nonsensical, racist, and divisive theories actually penetrate the mainstream, even the pages of the New York Times:

To understand how such ideas become mainstream, one need only read the front page of yesterday’s New York Times. There, television critic Alessandra Stanley thrills to the authentic voice of black America: Mr. Wright “went deep into context—a rich, stem-winding brew of black history, Scripture, hallelujahs and hermeneutics,” Ms. Stanley effuses. “Mr. Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor, was cocky, defiant, declamatory, inflammatory and mischievous.”

One might think that Mr. Wright’s promotion of the idea that black kids can’t sit still in class would raise some worries, even in a television critic. Surely Ms. Stanley would expect her own children to listen to their teachers. But the white elite’s desire to avoid charges of racism cancels out all reasonable reactions to dangerous nonsense when such nonsense comes out of black mouths. The coverage of Mr. Wright’s speeches beyond the Times has been just as silent about their crackpot Afrocentric pedagogy, meekly following the agenda that Mr. Wright set by asking instead whether the black church, and not Mr. Wright, was under attack.

Mr. Wright’s speeches have shown how quickly academic insanity becomes incorporated into practice. And now we may be on the verge of seeing such madness spread into the White House. The mainstream media have had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into questioning Mr. Obama’s affiliation with Mr. Wright. By now, Mr. Wright’s 9/11 and AIDS diatribes are well-worn — and Mr. Obama’s repudiation of them a no-brainer. It is imperative that someone ask Mr. Obama whether he, too, believes that the way to “fix the schools” is through Afrocentric curricula and double standards in student discipline, and whether he, too, believes that blacks only think with the “right side” of their brains. …

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Op-ed contributor Roland Nethaway wrote in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Wright’s point that the races are different, not deficient, brings up discredited theories of genetic differences among different races.

The American Anthropological Association declared years ago that all human beings are members of the same species, Homo sapiens, and that differentiating species into biologically defined “races” is a meaningless and unscientific way to explain differences and traits.

Nicholas Stojakovich wrote for Op-Ed News that “Rev. Wright’s remarks to NAACP on closer examination further polarize discussions of racism.”

Countless other experts have objected strenuously to Wright’s wild theories in his NAACP speech.

The core problem for us — as voters — is that Barack Obama, as well as his wife Michelle Obama, sat in that church for 20 years and listened to that gibberish and never saw fit to walk out.

I am left to conclude that — by their presence, their marriage by Wright, their children’s baptisms by Wright, the blessing of their $1.6M mansion by Wright, and their large financial gifts to Wright and his church — that the Obamas agreed with their pastor’s divisive, racist theories.

I am also left with the realization that Mr. Obama’s supporters have ready excuses for Obama’s active participation in such a racist, divisive culture.

Charles Krauthammer takes to task the “liberals” who’ve bought the various versions of Obama’s statements on Rev. Wright, and who make excuses for him:

On Tuesday, Obama declared that he himself was surprised at Wright’s outrages. But hadn’t Obama told us that surprise about Wright is a result of white ignorance of black churches brought on by America’s history of segregated services? How then to explain Obama’s own presumed ignorance? Surely he too was not sitting in those segregated white churches on those fateful Sundays when he conveniently missed all of Wright’s racist rants.

Obama’s turning surprise about Wright into something to be counted against whites– one of the more clever devices in that shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud in Philadelphia — now stands discredited by Obama’s own admission of surprise. But Obama’s liberal acolytes are not daunted. They were taken in by the first great statement on race: the Annunciation, the Chosen One comes to heal us in Philly. They now are taken in by the second: the Renunciation.

Obama’s newest attempt to save himself after Wright’s latest poisonous performance is now declared the new final word on the subject. Therefore, any future ads linking Obama and Wright are preemptively declared out of bounds, illegitimate, indeed “race-baiting” (a New York Times editorial, April 30).

“On what grounds?,” asks Krauthammer, echoing the common-sense reaction of most Americans.

This 20-year association with Wright calls into question everything about Obama: his truthfulness in his serially adjusted stories of what he knew and when he knew it; his judgment in choosing as his mentor, pastor and great friend a man he just now realizes is a purveyor of racial hatred; and the central premise of his campaign, that he is the bringer of a “new politics,” rising above the old Washington ways of expediency. It’s hard to think of an act more blatantly expedient than renouncing Wright when his show, once done from the press club instead of the pulpit, could no longer be “contextualized” as something whites could not understand and only Obama could explain in all its complexity.

There’s that word “expediency” again. And the American people get that too.