Blog Round-up On Obama’s Speech

Man, these rotating shifts can be hard on a person, and sometimes they make you miss important events during the day. This time, I had to get my rest during Barack Obama’s speech on race. I wonder what people who saw it thought of it…

• Little Green Footballs: Amazingly, Obama is sticking with the “cherry-picking” defense.
• California Conservative: Actually, I’ve never had a strong disagreement with anything that my pastors have said. That’s because they’ve thought things through before they said anything from the pulpit. From what I’ve seen, it isn’t that Pastor J-Wright hasn’t thought things through. It’s a matter of his letting his violent emotions control him.

  That he’s allowed himself to act on these disgustingly ill-informed emotions is testament to his being unfit to be pastor of any congregation, much less of such a large congregation.

  It’s also worth noting that Sen. Obama has all but admitted that he’s heard Pastor Wright at his divisive worst. He tiptoed to the edge of doing that but stopped a step short of that. I’m not convinced that he didn’t hear some of these hateful, anti-American diatribes.

• Jihad Watch: So it’s not all about Israel, and there are perverse and hateful Islamic ideologies that are creating this present conflict.
• Roger Clegg: It’s hard to imagine how someone who listened to this speech, and who had followed at all the controversy of the last few days, could still view Obama as somehow transcending politics.
• Michael Graham: Was it just me, or did anyone else note that for the first half of the speech, Sen. Obama seemed annoyed, put out by having to give the speech in the first place?
• Power Line Blog: Although Obama’s speech is not without its evasions, I consider it a courageous one by usual political standards. He has refused to walk away from Wright’s black liberation theology when it might well have been expedient to do so. The rest of us now should have the courage to take Obama at his word and decide whether it is acceptable to elect as president of the United States someone who carries Rev. Wright around as part of him, and who takes his ranting seriously.

• Patterico’s Pontifications: Apparently he never heard Jeremiah Wright say a cross word about white people — you know, the same white people who (Wright thinks) deliberately gave black people AIDS. He is explaining about black churches and black anger, and how whites shouldn’t condemn expressions of black anger without understanding its roots.

  I’m not finding it inspirational in the slightest.

• Jay Reding: I will give the Senator this: this is a very well-crafted speech. Sen. Obama is a gifted wordsmith, and it seems like his words are more or less his own. The problem is that there’s no substance to his messages. To borrow from Cicero, he’s full of oratio, but he’s lacking in the ratio. He can generate much emotion, but he lacks in logic.
• Sweetness & Light: What sophistry.

One thing that I wonder that no one, as far as I have read, has touched on, is how long has he had this speech written? He had to know this day was coming, so did he write this recently, or did he have this one waiting in the wings, for when he needed it?