Barack Obama: “I Am Asking You To Believe”
By Duane Lester • Mar 19th, 2008 |
| Trinity United Church of Christ Religion New Service |
Barack Obama wants America to believe that he went to the Trinity United Church of Christ for twenty years, and while he found the good Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright to be an “occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy” and heard him “make remarks that could be considered controversial,” he never heard him make them in the church or in private conversation with him.
Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.
Let’s say that Barack was not there the day that the good Rev. Dr. Wright said, “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people.”
That seems to me to be a pretty outrageous statement. One would think that, as a member of the congregation, and the good Reverend’s acolyte, someone would have told Obama about that comment.
But Barack wants us to believe he never knew about it. All right. He didn’t know.
Maybe Barack wasn’t in church that particular Sunday that the good Rev. Dr. Wright preached his sermon on 9/11, where he said “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
If this kind of attitude wasn’t common or accepted in the church, it would be a hard to believe that the people would be cheering it. But they were. It is apparent that this perspective was not the exception, but the rule. If it wasn’t, don’t you think someone would talk to Barack about what was said in church the Sunday he missed?
But Barack wants us to believe he never knew about it. I guess that’s possible.
Maybe Barack wasn’t there when Wright described America as “the #1 killer in the world.” Maybe he wasn’t there when Wright said, “We started the AIDS virus . . . We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty. . . .” Maybe Barack never heard Wright say, “I said that dirty word again. Every time you say ‘Israel,’ Negroes get awfully quiet. Don’t be scared, don’t be scared. You don’t see a connection between 9/11/01 and the Israel-Palestinian [conflict]? Something wrong? You want to borrow my glasses?”
Maybe in the twenty years Barack attended this church, a time he says “…was the best education I ever had,” maybe during that time he didn’t know about any of these things before they came out recently.
So how do you explain his request that the good Rev. Dr. Wright not speak at his candidacy announcement? Top Obama adviser David Axelrod says it was because it was so cold…and the good Rev. Dr. is a controversial man who might detract from the moment.
Are we to believe then, that while Barack knew that Rev. Dr. Wright was someone who needed to be kept away from the spotlight, he didn’t know how bad it actually was? Are we supposed to believe that none of his advisors knew that Wright’s take on Natalie Holloway’s disappearance was:
Black women are being raped daily in Africa. One white girl from Alabama gets drunk at a graduation trip to Aruba, goes off and gives it up while in a foreign country and that stays in the news for months.”
Newsmax knew about it in August of 2007. They also knew Wright said:
- “White America got their wake-up call after 9/11. White America and the Western world came to realize people of color had not gone away, faded in the woodwork, or just disappeared as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”
- “The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for over 40 years now. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community and wake up Americans concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism.”
- “Young African-American men,” Wright thundered, were “dying for nothing.” The “illegal war,” he shouted, was “based on Bush’s lies” and is being “fought for oil money.”
In a sermon filled with profanity, Wright also blamed the war on “Bush administration bulls–t.”
Yet Barack wants the people of the “United States of White America,” the people of the “U. S. of K.K.K.A.” to believe that they never heard or knew of any of those things. That’s why Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright remained Barack’s spiritual mentor, his moral compass, his sounding board. That is why the Rev. Dr. was a member of Barack’s campaign until five days ago.
Five days ago.
And it not because they didn’t see this day coming. In an April, 2007 article in the New York Times, Rev. Dr. Wright said the following:
“If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me,” Mr. Wright said with a shrug. “I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.”
That was almost a year ago, and no one in the campaign thought to look into the reasons behind such a statement? No one thought, maybe we ought to get this guy away from Barack?
In a 2006 interview with BeliefNet.com, Barack referred to Rev. Dr. Wright as “one of the greatest preachers in the country.” This was right after the good Rev. Dr. said:
“Some argue that blacks should vote for Clinton “because her husband was good to us,” he continued.
“That’s not true,” he thundered. “He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky.”
The congregation loved it.
It seems that Barack Obama wants us to look at everything listed above, plus the events detailed across the Internet, and believe that he knew nothing about it. “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.”
After learning all you have learned about Barack and his pastor, Barack wants you to accept his position that he never heard these things. And to vote for hope…and change.
Who is treating who like Monica now?
