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Autopsy of the Primaries: The only Democratic Candidate who can lose the General Election; the only Republican one who can win it.
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Both Obama and McCain have pulled off the once unthinkable. The former dethroned some 16 year of Clintonian political hegemony by the sheer force of personality and charisma, when initially all the hierarchy and political machinery were against him. The latter by sheer force of will, stubbornness, and a certain courage, never gave up when most had written him off, and simply out toughed his opponents.
There is a certain irony here. In a year that for historical and contemporary reasons should be a Democratic shoo-in, the Democrats have nominated about the only candidate who can lose in November, the Republicans the only one of their own who can still win it.
Obama
The Chicago Past
Obama either out of misplaced loyalty or because of 20 years of Chicago racial politics, simply cannot deal with the continuing embarrassments of Wright, Pfleiger, Trinity, et al. He either gets defensive and blames the messenger of the latest embarrassment, or makes silly announcements of support. They are followed by qualifiers, followed by eventual “disowning”—but always with a twist of pique. Wright’s madness was mischaracterized by unfair video “loops” and “snippets”—before he refuted Obama’s apologia by sickening America with the entire racist rant at the National Press Club.
But by now all of America fathoms the truth: Obama made a devil’s bargain with a number of racists to establish his own street credentials in the rough and tumble world of Chicago politics. He now finds that what started his career could well end it. Bottom line: the voters will have to decide whether these skeletons are the usual embarrassments that all candidates deal with as they evolve beyond their diehard bases, or instead disturbing proof that Obama himself got a certain psychological high from hearing ministers and congregation members routinely trash whites and the so-called establishment, as attested by his attendance at and subsidies to the Wright ministry.
Rule One for Obama’s campaign: Don’t let Obama rush to the defense of any dubious character in his past, since he inevitably will have to disown him sooner or later. The impression that Obama inevitably changes his storyline (while a Wright or Pfleger remains absolutely predictable and consistent) is beginning to tire the American people.
Gaffes Galore
Anyone who lived his first 18 years out of the continental United States, and then attended politically-correct Ivy League schools before jumping into Chicago politics might not have a broad view of American demography and indeed, U.S. history—much less the sociology of the United States.
But the number of Obama’s slips are staggering. They range from geographical ignorance (Arkansas is not contiguous with Kentucky, but is with Illinois), to US history (there are 50 states in the Union; the US army did not liberate Auschwitz) to foreign affairs (the election of Hugo Chavez predated George Bush) to simple political ignorance (you don’t trash the lower white middle class to San Francisco elites) and common decency (you don’t put your own grandmother on the same moral plane as the racist Wright, or a U.S senator in the same category as the terrorist Ayers.)
Rule Two: Get Obama back on a script. He may sound catchy and smug in repartee and ex tempore give and take; but he has already made candidate George Bush’s much caricatured inability to identify a Pakistani president seem like a very tiny Dan Quayle proverbial potato.
Michelle
Michelle, as America learned, cannot give a speech without either (1) claiming that her husband is a saint and a genius, and we are all lucky to have him; (2) whining about the unexpected “raise the bar” pressures on the young urban yuppie careerist couple; (3) trashing the United States; or (4) defining world or national problems in terms of herself or her kids.
Rule Three: Do not confuse her ability to wade boldly out into audience in the manner of Phil Donahue with either savvy, wit, humor, or enlightenment. One or two more performances of the tired Princeton-Harvard-Reverend-Wright take on contemporary America—and the campaign is over. All the talk about whether she is a “legitimate” target will be about as relevant as whether a woman who joins the military will sometimes be in harm’s way in wartime.
The Agenda
Obama’s team must not confuse Republican problems of the economy, war, fuel, and 8 years of an unpopular candidate with voter lust for a liberal agenda. Who wants vast increases in payroll, income, and inheritance taxes—not to pay down the debt but to fund billions in new entitlements that will only create greater dependency and stifle initiative? Or who wishes to throw away all that was won in Iraq by quitting now, when a slow withdrawal won by victory is within our grasp? And who wishes hyper-liberal judges and appointees, more “oppression studies” in our schools, or the same old, same old on’t drill, mine, or use nuclear power, while enriching our enemies and singing sonnets to wind and solar?
Rule Four: Keep talking about Lord Hope and Saint Change and Holy Possibility—and don’t get into specifics. Jimmy Carter didn’t and it worked in 1976 for him. The problem is not that Obama simply talks in platitudes, but rather that he must—given the most leftwing agenda in modern memory.
McCain.
The Base and the Extra twist
John McCain can hold his base—if he resists the extra twist of the dagger. The rumors of his flirtation in 2000 with independents were probably based in fact. His Ace in the Hole is the Democratic attack machine that calls him hypocritical in moving right, and serially trashes his moderate views as reactionary.
Rule One. Resist the temptation to show outrage at some right-winger he finds too gung-ho. Silence is golden. Go on Limbaugh sometime in October. Find a way to appeal to the middle by not gratuitously slandering the base as protectionists, nativists, or religious zealots.
Energy
I don’t see how opposing ANWR helps anyone other than empowering those in the Middle East who intend us no good. If McCain won’t drill here at home, then he should push nuclear power and coal as transitions to the next generation of clean, renewable fuels. So far, the energy issue is wide-open since the voter doesn’t have a candidate who is clearly pro-production.
Rule Two. Find a way to branch off from Obama on the energy. Americans will support drilling off our coasts, in Alaska, burning clean coal, using nuclear, and developing hydro—if all that is balanced by calls for more conservation, and support for alternative fuels.
Age
How a 71-year old cancer survivor makes it through 20 hr. campaign days 24/7, I don’t know. I am returning from two weeks in Europe, co-leading a tour of 65. And the 18-hour days, jet lag, occasional kidney stones (McCain has them, no doubt to a worse degree) at 54 is a real task. I don’t plan to be doing this if I make it to 71. No wonder McCain shows the wear and tear—and he will have five more months of this.
Rule Three: Each time Obama hits him with the age issue, McCain must remind us that he at least knows how many states there are in the Union or the difference between Memorial and Veterans Day. And McCain should learn from Reagan—smile, relax and take two days a week off.
The War
So far the reminders of his support for the surge are salutary, especially as things continue to improve and may soon devolve into a Kosovo sort of policing. At this point there is no loner a need to demonize Rumsfeld for the 2003-6 troubles, or all the old generals like Franks, Sanchez, and Casey who played McClellan and Hooker to Petraeus’ Grant and Sherman. Talk of the future, not the past.
Rule Four. Keep reminding Americans that this is 2008, not 2003, and Obama’s claim the surge won’t work or Iraq is lost or we must get out now is simply not based on fact—and by October will blow up in his face.
Bush
It is hard for any incumbent party to continue a regnum for three terms. George Bush, Sr. did it, but even he sort of distanced himself from Reagan (“kinder, gentler nation”), or at least for a while. McCain has an advantage should he seek such distance, since Bush has for now far fewer defenders than did Reagan, despite coming off Iran-Contra. But McCain must be careful: should the economy continue to avoid recession, should gas prices fall, and the war seem won, then we may see Bush’s numbers go up a bit. For now he has about the right distance, any more and he will seem small and petty, especially if he must backtrack a bit by October. On the key issue of our times—Iraq—McCain has fashioned an interesting position: for the war, and so much so that his theories about the surge won over George Bush himself.
Bottom line?
If things continue as they are Obama will come close perhaps in the popular vote, but lose the electoral vote by a wide margin. Why? I just don’t see how such an inexperienced candidate can rein in his wife, curb his own slips, monitor all of his past dubious role models, and avoid the growing divide between utopian rhetoric and pretty down-to-earth tactics and embarrassing past associations. And I don’t think he has yet to figure out that unhappiness with Bush’s spending, appointments, and inability to articulate a message, and defend himself does not really equate to a desire for billions in new taxes and unworkable new programs.
Riiight, in your bizarro world Iran is going for nuclear capacity solely for defensive purposes.
Meanwhile, please lsit the instances of the "rapture right" televising beheadings and killing 2.00 in terrorist attacks
Are you a Ward Churchill fan?
Now Billary is whining about a vast left wing conspiracy ( MoveOn )
Paranoia lives on- it's never their actions that cause problems- that would involve responsibility- it's always a conspiracy
The way the law is written, there was no way he could have gotten a conviction
The bigger point is the he knew that it was Armitage who was the leaker before the whole prosecution proceeded- therefore, the whole thing was a colossal waste of taxpayer money
Nice try with the sidetrack attempting to form a moral equivalence between all "religious nuts"
Remind me again of the current armed faction of Christianity who have inflicted casualties ( many AQ terrorist acts kill fellow on fellow Muslims ) on innocent non believers and have plans for world domination through force.
Would Ahmadinejad apocolyptic view preclude him helping things along when he develops nuclear force?
DO you attend Pflegers church?
Ahmadinejad says Israel will soon disappear
Jun 2 08:43 AM US/Eastern
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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted on Monday that Muslims would uproot "satanic powers" and repeated his controversial belief that Israel will soon disappear, the Mehr news agency reported.
"I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene," he said.
"Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started."
Since taking the presidency in August 2005, Ahmadinejad has repeatedly provoked international outrage by predicting Israel is doomed to disappear.
"I tell you that with the unity and awareness of all the Islamic countries all the satanic powers will soon be destroyed," he said to a group of foreign visitors ahead of the 19th anniversary of the death of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Ahmadinejad also again expressed his apocalyptic vision that tyranny in the world be abolished by the return to earth of the Mahdi, the 12th imam of Shiite Islam, alongside great religious figures including Jesus Christ.
"With the appearance of the promised saviour... and his companions such as Jesus Christ, tyranny will be soon be eradicated in the world."
Ahmadinejad has always been a devotee of the Mahdi, who Shiites believe disappeared more than a thousand years ago and who will return one day to usher in a new era of peace and harmony.
His emphasis on the Mahdi has been a cause of controversy inside Iran with critics saying he would be better solving bread-and-butter domestic problems rather than talking about Iran's divine responsibility.
Poor guy is just soooo misunderstood
McCain on Iran: Obama still doesn’t know the history
posted at 9:30 am on June 2, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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John McCain will address AIPAC’s Policy Conference today, speaking on the subjects of Israel, Iran, and Iraq, and laying out his views on the most critical foreign-policy issues facing the next administration. His speech will reassure the pro-Israeli lobby that he sees the ties between the US and Israel as “the most natural” of alliances, based on mutual respect for freedom and democracy, and acknowledge the singular nature of both in the Middle East. In doing so, he will reflect back on his first introduction to Israel, courtesy of a Democrat who would find it difficult to fit into today’s party:
The cause of Israel, and of our common security, has always depended on men and women of courage, and I’ve been lucky enough to know quite a few of them. I think often of one in particular, the late Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. I got to know Senator Jackson when I was the Navy liaison to the Senate. In 1979, I traveled with him to Israel, where I knew he was considered a hero. But I had no idea just how admired he was until we landed in Tel Aviv, to find a crowd of seven or eight hundred Israelis calling out his name, waving signs that read “God Bless you, Scoop” and “Senator Jackson, thank you.” Scoop Jackson had the special respect of the Jewish people, the kind of respect accorded to brave and faithful friends. He was and remains the model of what an American statesman should be.
In discussing Iran, McCain refers once again to Democrats, only in this case showing the vapidity of current posturing by Barack Obama. McCain doesn’t refer to Obama by name in this speech, but it’s clear to whom he refers in this passage that also notes that Obama suggests nothing new:
The Iranians have spent years working toward a nuclear program. And the idea that they now seek nuclear weapons because we refuse to engage in presidential-level talks is a serious misreading of history. In reality, a series of administrations have tried to talk to Iran, and none tried harder than the Clinton administration. In 1998, the secretary of state made a public overture to the Iranians, laid out a roadmap to normal relations, and for two years tried to engage. The Clinton administration even lifted some sanctions, and Secretary Albright apologized for American actions going back to the 1950s. But even under President Khatami – a man by all accounts less radical than the current president – Iran rejected these overtures.
Even so, we hear talk of a meeting with the Iranian leadership offered up as if it were some sudden inspiration, a bold new idea that somehow nobody has ever thought of before. Yet it’s hard to see what such a summit with President Ahmadinejad would actually gain, except an earful of anti-Semitic rants, and a worldwide audience for a man who denies one Holocaust and talks before frenzied crowds about starting another. Such a spectacle would harm Iranian moderates and dissidents, as the radicals and hardliners strengthen their position and suddenly acquire the appearance of respectability.
This is part of the history that Barack Obama ignores. Ten years ago, the Clinton administration took some political risk in making these overtures to a supposedly reformist Iranian president. It resulted in no progress whatsoever. Obama says now that he will meet with the Iranians only after some “preparation”. What preparations will he offer that goes beyond the Clinton administration’s efforts to open diplomatic relations?
Barack Obama probably knows little of these efforts. His shifting explanations on “without preconditions” but with “preparations” has revealed nothing about what he would do with direct presidential diplomacy that the efforts of the US and Europe has not accomplished. It reminds one of John Kerry’s “secret” plan on Iraq — a trial balloon with nothing but hot air to keep it aloft.
McCain will continue to exploit this opening all the way to the general election. Unless Obama can explain his own secret plan on Iran, he will continue to look naive and unprepared to conduct foreign policy for the United States.
No Liberation
Barack Obama can run, but his ties to Trinity and its radical political and theology roots are deep.
By Stanley Kurtz
Having now left Trinity United Church of Christ, can Barack Obama escape responsibility for his decades-long ties to Michael Pfleger and Jeremiah Wright? No, he cannot. Obama’s connections to the radical-left politics espoused by Pfleger and Wright are broad and deep. The real reason Obama bound himself to Wright and Pfleger in the first place is that he largely approved of their political-theological outlooks.
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Obama shared Wright’s rejection of black “assimilation.” Obama also shared Wright’s suspicion of the traditional American ethos of individual self-improvement and the pursuit of “middle-classness.” In common with Wright, Obama had deep misgivings about America’s criminal justice system. And with the exception of their direct attacks on whites, Obama largely approved of his preacher-friends’ fiery rhetoric. Obama’s goal was not to repudiate religious radicalism but to channel its fervor into an effective and permanent activist organization. How do we know all this? We know it because Obama himself has told us.
A Revealing Profile
Although it’s been discussed before (because it confirms that Obama attended Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March), a 1995 background piece on Obama from the Chicago Reader has received far too little attention. Careful consideration of this important profile makes it clear that Obama’s long-standing ties to Chicago’s most rabidly radical preachers call into question far more than Obama’s judgment and character (although they certainly do that, as well). Obama’s two-decades at Trinity open a critically important window onto his radical-left political leanings. No mere change of church membership can erase that truth.
By providing us with an in-depth picture of Obama’s political worldview on the eve of his elective career, Hank De Zutter’s, “What Makes Obama Run?” lives up to its title. The first thing to note here is that Obama presents his political hopes for the black community as a third way between two inadequate alternatives. First, Obama rejects, “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation — which helps a few upwardly mobile blacks to ‘move up, get rich, and move out. . . . ’ ” This statement might surprise many Obama supporters, who seem to think of him as the epitome of integrationism. Yet Obama’s repudiation of integrationist upward mobility is fully consistent with his career as a community organizer, his general sympathy for leftist critics of the American “system,” and of course his membership at Trinity. Obama, we are told, “quickly learned that integration was a one-way street, with blacks expected to assimilate into a white world that never gave ground.” Compare these statements by Obama with some of the remarks in Jeremiah Wright’s Trumpet, and the resemblance is clear.
Having disposed of assimilation, Obama goes on to criticize “the politics of black rage and black nationalism” — although less on substance than on tactics. Obama upbraids the politics of black power for lacking a practical strategy. Instead of diffusing black rage by diverting it to the traditional American path of assimilation and middle-class achievement, Obama wants to capture the intensity of black anger and use it to power an effective political organization. Obama says, “he’s tired of seeing the moral fervor of black folks whipped up — at the speaker’s rostrum and from the pulpit — and then allowed to dissipate because there’s no agenda, no concrete program for change.” The problem is not fiery rhetoric from the pulpit, but merely the wasted anger it so usefully stirs.
Obama’s Network
De Zutter gives us a clear glimpse of Obama’s radicalism. Obama is called “progressive,” of course, and is said to yearn for “massive economic change.” That could simply mean an end to widespread poverty, rather than social restructuring. Yet Obama is also described as holding “a worldview well beyond” his mother’s “New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” De Zutter lays out Obama’s ties to radical groups like Chicago Acorn, as Acorn’s lead organizer, Madeleine Talbott, is quoted affirming that: “Barack has proven himself among our members . . . we accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer.” In “Inside Obama’s Acorn,” I explore Obama’s links to this radical group, and to Talbott, who practices the sort of intimidating and often illegal “direct action” Acorn is famous for. (For more on Talbott’s affinity for “direct action,” see “Where Do We Begin?”)
De Zutter also touches on some other key elements of Obama’s network. Obama’s early organizing work for the Developing Communities Project was “funded by south-side Catholic churches.” Clearly, this early work cemented Obama’s close ties to Father Pfleger, whose support formed a critical component of Obama’s grassroots network. Precisely because of this early link, Pfleger threw his considerable support behind Obama’s failed 2000 bid for Congress. By the way, Pfleger’s political influence in Chicago is such that Mayor Richard Daley actually declared his 2002 candidacy for a fourth full term as mayor at Pfleger’s St. Sabina church. In “Inside Obama’s Acorn,” I explore the possibility that Obama’s seat on the boards of a couple liberal Chicago foundations may have allowed him to direct funds to groups that served as his de facto political base. De Zutter quotes Woods Fund executive director, Jean Rudd, praising Obama for “being among the most hard-nosed board members in wanting to see results. He wants to see our grants make change happen — not just pay salaries.” No doubt, Obama was sincerely supportive of the sort of leftist organizations favored by the Woods Fund. However, if Obama was in fact looking to some of the groups supported by the Woods Fund as a personal political base, his unusually active board service would make all the more sense.
The threads of this political network are pulled tighter as Obama turns to a “favorite topic,” “the lack of collective action among black churches.” Obama is sharply critical of churches that try to help their communities merely through “food pantries and community service programs.” Today, Obama rationalizes his ties to Wright’s Trinity Church by citing its community service programs. Yet in 1995, Obama was highly critical of churches that focused exclusively on such services, while neglecting the sort of politically visionary sermons, local king-making, and political alliance-building favored by Pfleger and Wright. Obama rejects the strictly community-service approach of apolitical churches as part of America’s unfortunate “bias” toward “individual action.” Obama believes that what he derogates as “John Wayne” thinking and the old, “right wing...individualistic bootstrap myth” needs to be replaced: “We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.”
Obama sees the black church as the key to his plan for collective social and political action: “Obama . . . spoke of the need to mobilize and organize the economic power and moral fervor of black churches. He also argued that as a state senator he might help bring this about faster than as a community organizer or civil rights lawyer.” Says Obama, “We have some wonderful preachers in town — preachers who continue to inspire me — preachers who are magnificent at articulating a vision of the world as it should be.” Obama continues, “But as soon as church lets out, the energy dissipates. We must find ways to channel all this energy into community building.” Obama seems to be holding up people like Wright, Pfleger, and James Meeks (who he has listed as his key religious allies) as positive models for the wider black church — in both their rhetoric, and in their willingness to play a direct political role. If anything, Obama would like to see the political visions of Wright and Pfleger given greater weight and substance by connecting them to secular leftist political networks like Acorn.
End Run
By the end of De Zutter’s piece, Obama’s distinctive vision comes clear. While in his years as a Chicago organizer and attorney, Obama took care to maintain friendly ties to the Daley administration, in Obama’s campaign for state senate, he specifically avoided asking the mayor or the mayor’s closest allies for support. Obama’s plan was to make an end-run around Chicago’s governing Democratic political network, by building a coalition of left-leaning black churches and radical secular organizations like Acorn (perhaps with de facto help from liberal foundation money as well). This coalition would provide Obama with the flexibility to play out a political career some distance to the left of conventional Illinois democratic politics. And sure enough, Obama’s extremely liberal record in Illinois vindicated his strategy.
The De Zutter story sheds considerable light on the debate over the significance of Obama’s ties to Pfleger and Wright. For the most part, that debate plays out with a relatively apolitical notion of church membership in mind. Obama’s defenders say that he should not be held responsible for the occasional political excesses of his preacher. Critics point out that the extremism of Wright and Pfleger is long-standing and well known. At some point, this line of thinking goes, the radicalism of such preachers ought to become intolerable. And what does it say about Obama’s judgement that he actually built his own national reputation by pointing to his appreciation of Wright’s sermons? Obama’s critics also see his decision to join Wright’s church as an opportunistic move by a politically ambitious secular humanist in search of a respectable religious home.
I agree with all of these criticisms of Obama. Yet De Zutter’s article shows us that the full story of Obama’s ties to Pfleger and Wright is both more disturbing and more politically relevant than we’ve realized up to now. On Obama’s own account, the rhetoric and vision of Chicago’s most politically radical black churches are exactly what he wants to see more of. True, when discussing Louis Farrakhan with De Zutter, Obama makes a point of repudiating anti-white, anti-Semitic, and anti-Asian sermons. Yet having laid down that proviso, Obama seems to relish the radicalism of preachers like Pfleger and Wright. In 1995, Obama didn’t want Trinity’s political show to stop. His plan was to spread it to other black churches, and harness its power to an alliance of leftist groups and sympathetic elected officials.
So Obama’s political interest in Trinity went far beyond merely gaining a respectable public Christian identity. On his own account, Obama hoped to use the untapped power of the black church to supercharge hard-left politics in Chicago, creating a personal and institutional political base that would be free to part with conventional Democratic politics. By his own testimony, Obama would seem to have allied himself with Wright and Pfleger, not in spite of, but precisely because of their radical left-wing politics. It follows that Obama’s ties to Trinity reflect on far more than his judgment and character (although they certainly implicate that). Contrary to common wisdom, then, Obama’s religious history has everything to do with his political values and policy positions, since it confirms his affinity for leftist radicalism.
Sense of Mission
It could be argued that the new and supposedly moderate, “bipartisan” Obama of 2008 is the real Obama. Unfortunately, that argument is unconvincing. Again and again, De Zutter reports that Obama’s true passion, deepest calling, and most authentic sense of mission is to be found in his early community organizing work. Obama’s own vision for himself as a legislator is as a kind of super-organizer/activist, extending the “progressive” quest for “social justice” to society as a whole.
I see no reason to doubt Obama’s self-account, and many reasons to accept it. As De Zutter notes, Obama gave up a near-certain Supreme Court clerkship to come to Chicago and do community organizing. It’s also easy to imagine Obama joining one of the many other less radical black churches on the south side of Chicago, if that was all he needed to launch a political career. Clearly, given his good relations with the Daley administration, Obama could have asked for its support in his bid for the Illinois State Senate. Yet at every turn, Obama took a riskier path. That suggests he was operating from conviction. Trouble is, the conviction in question was apparently Obama’s belief in the sort of radical social and economic views held by groups like Acorn and preachers like Wright and Pfleger.
Obama was certainly more rhetorically smooth, and no doubt less personally embittered than some of his mentors. Yet what stands out after a consideration of Obama’s larger personal and political history is the general convergence of political orientation between Wright, Pfleger, Acorn, Chicago’s “progressive” foundations, and Obama himself. Obama in Chicago was a man of the Left, doing his level-best to assemble a coalition free from the constraints of conventional, middle-ground Democratic politics.
Obama Speaks
If there is any doubt about the accuracy of De Zutter’s detailed account, we get the same message from this too-little discussed but revealing and important piece by Obama himself. This chapter from a 1990 book called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois was originally published in 1988, just after Obama joined Trinity. The piece is called, “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City,” and it shows exactly what Obama hoped to make of his association with Pfleger and Wright.
Obama begins by rejecting the false dichotomy between radicalism and moderation:
The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches.
Of course, even James Cone, the radical founder of black-liberation theology, sees himself as synthesizing the moderation of Martin Luther King Jr. with the radicalism of Malcolm X. Obama here seems to be calling for an inside/outside strategy like the one he would have learned working with Chicago Acorn. Note Obama’s reference to the controversial tradition of “direct action” favored by Acorn (and earlier by Saul Alinsky, whose tradition of radicalism the book is meant to carry on). Obama offers radicalism with a moderate face.
Obama sketches out a vision in which a politically awakened black church would ally with “community organizers” (like Obama and his friends from Acorn), thereby radicalizing the politics of America’s cities:
Nowhere is the promise of organizing more apparent than in the traditional black churches. Possessing tremendous financial resources, membership and — most importantly — values and biblical traditions that call for empowerment and liberation, the black church is clearly a slumbering giant in the political and economic landscape of cities like Chicago.
After expressing disappointment with apolitical black churches focused only on traditional community services, Obama goes on to point in a more activist direction:
Over the past few years, however, more and more young and forward-thinking pastors have begun to look at community organizations such as the Developing Communities Project in the far south side [where Obama himself worked, and first encountered Pfleger, SK]...as a powerful tool for living the social gospel, one which can educate and empower entire congregations and not just serve as a platform for a few prophetic leaders. Should a mere 50 prominent black churches, out of thousands that exist in cities like Chicago, decide to collaborate with a trained and organized staff, enormous positive changes could be wrought....
Give me 50 Pflegers or 50 Wrights, Obama is saying, tie them to a network of grassroots activists like my companions from Acorn, and we can revolutionize urban politics.
Mystery Solved
So it would appear that Obama’s own writings solve the mystery of why he stayed at Trinity for 20 years. Obama’s long-held and decidedly audacious hope has been to spread Wright’s radical spirit by linking it to a viable, left-leaning political program, with Obama himself at the center. The revolutionizing power of a politically awakened black church is not some side issue, or merely a personal matter, but has been the signature theme of Obama’s grand political strategy.
Lucky for Obama, this political background is unfamiliar to most Americans. There are others who share Obama’s approach, however. Take a look at this piece by Manhattan Institute scholar Steven Malanga on “The Rise of the Religious Left,” and you will see exactly where Obama is coming from. Malanga ends his account by noting that religious-left activists often partner with groups like MoveOn.org and attend gatherings featuring speakers like Michael Moore. After the 2004 election, there was some talk of the Democratic party “purging” MoveOn and Moore. Far from purging its radical Left, however, the Democratic party is now just inches away from placing it in the driver’s seat. That is the real meaning of the fiasco at Trinity Church.
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Shocker: Pfleger hates America, too!
posted at 7:45 am on June 2, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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How many coincidences can people buy about Barack Obama’s circle of friends? First we have Jeremiah Wright sermonizing that God should “damn America”. Next, we find out that Obama worked with and for William Ayers, the unrepentant domestic terrorist, who believes along with his wife Bernadine Dohrn that America is a “monster”. Now another member of his Chicago circle. Father Michael Pfleger, thinks that “America is the greatest sin against God”:
Let’s see Bernadine Dohrn from last November once again:
And here’s Ayers in 2001, doing the Old Glory Boogie:
And the original Jeremiah Wright version:
Having one “crazy uncle”, as Obama noted in March, might be enough to excuse anti-American ravings, even if that “crazy uncle” was the pastor of the church to which Obama belonged for over 20 years. But the four people with which Obama chose to associate in Chicago all have the same diagnosis: anti-Americanism. For all of them, America is the greatest evil in the world, and for Dohrn and Ayers, an enemy to be destroyed. Four data points stops being a coincidence and starts being a pattern.
Pfleger’s latest rant also shows that Trinity United hasn’t gotten a bad rap. Listen to this audience cheer Pfleger when he calls America the “greatest sin against God”. They completely buy into that assessment, which belies any rationalization Obama gives for remaining a member of this church for most of his adult life. He’s backing away from TUCC at warp speed now, but Obama cannot escape the years that he associated himself enthusiastically with America-haters of the most vicious stripe.
And how closely did Obama and Pfleger get? ABC’s Jake Tapper reports:
But Obama’s relationship with Pfleger — who is the priest at a different, Catholic, church — spans decades.
In September, the Obama campaign brought Pfleger to Iowa to host one of several interfaith forums for the campaign. Pfleger has given money to Obama’s campaigns and Obama as a state legislator directed at least $225,000 towards social programs at St. Sabina’s, according to the Chicago Tribune. Pfleger appears to have been scrubbed from the Obama campaign’s page that features the testimony of faith leaders, but you can see the cached version HERE.
Obama liked Pfleger enough to make him part of his presidential campaign, and to put hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars in his pocket to fund this kind of America-hating rhetoric. That says volumes about Obama’s own radicalism, if people bother to listen.
Blowback
Iraq and the General War on Terror [Victor Davis Hanson]
How odd (or to be expected) that suddenly intelligence agencies, analysts, journalists, and terrorists themselves are attesting that al-Qaeda is in near ruins, that ideologically radical Islam is losing its appeal, and that terrorist incidents against Americans at home and abroad outside the war zones are at an all-time low—and yet few associate the radical change in fortune in Iraq as a contributory cause to our success.
But surely the US military contributed a great deal to the humiliation of al-Qaedists and the bankruptcy of their cause, since it has (1) killed thousands of generic jihadists, and to such a degree that the former Middle East romance of going to Iraq to fight the weak crusaders is now synonymous with a death sentence and defeat; (2) provided the window of security necessary for the growing confidence of the Maliki government whose success is absolutely destroying the Islamist canard that the U.S. backs only dictatorships. Indeed, al-Qaeda's greatest fear is successful Arab constitutional government; something still caricatured here at home as a neocon pipe dream.
In addition, the grotesque tactics that al-Qaeda in duress developed in Iraq weakened its case throughout the Middle East; while the Americans learned just the opposite lesson under Gen. Petraeus—how to win hearts and mind while mastering the elements of counter-insurgency. In contrast, the terrorists learned how to lose a war while alienating the Muslim population.
I would expect the Maliki government to gain greater respect abroad, and maybe it will cease to be the punching bag here at home, given its recent accomplishments—made possible by the efforts of the U.S. military. There is an odd feeling that the more books come out damning the Iraq war, and the more politicians write it off as a fiasco, the more Iraqis are showing the world that a constitutional government can survive the enormous odds set against it. Final note. I think this May may have been the lowest month for American military fatalities (19) since the war started in March 2003.
06/01 05:47 PM
It Sounded Right to Them
One of the several reasons why the mainstream media have consistently underestimated the significance of the Trinity/Wright/Pfleger story is that, to a considerable degree, conventional reporters and editors tend to agree with Rev. Wright's critique of America. When Wright said, "God damn America," reporters thought he'd gone a little too far but didn't necessarily disagree with the underlying sentiment.
A good illustration of this was the New York Times's article on black liberation theology in which the paper endorsed as true Wright's claim that the United States has used biological warfare against other nations. (This was cited to explain that the idea of the federal government inventing the AIDS virus in order to exterminate African-Americans was not so far-fetched.)
What on earth could the Times reporter have had in mind? Maybe the old canard about smallpox and the Indians; I can't think of any other candidates. In any event, this morning's Times corrects the error:
An article on May 4 about black liberation theology and the debate surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr, Senator Barack Obama’s former minister, erroneously confirmed a statement by Mr. Wright that the United States has used biological weapons against other countries. There is no evidence that the United States ever did so.
Note, though, that the paper is keeping its options open. Who knows, maybe the evidence will turn up someday.
This usually-unacknowledged sympathy with Rev. Wright's anti-Americanism is, I think, part of the reason why the mainstream press misreported the Wright controversy from the beginning.
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Get me from the church on time
Barack Obama gave his "More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia on March 18 to tamp down the furor caused by the release of video excerpts of his pastor's sermons. Obama himself had proclaimed the importance of his pastor to his life over the past twenty years in books and interviews. Both circumstantial and direct evidence demonstrated Obama's knowledge of Reverend Wright's sick and indefensible views.
Rather than forthrightly condemn them in his Philadelphia speech, Obama chose to give the appearance of transcending them. Obama reviewed American history going back to the founding, provided autobiographical reflections, and presented himself as the man come to redeem racial relations in the United States. Obama denied familiarity with the statements whose revelation gave rise to his speech and suggested that they unfairly represented the man. Obama's speech provided the larger context for understanding Wright. Here is the key passage:
Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way
But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.
In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:
"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."
That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. 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. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother...
Obama's speech was hailed as a master stroke by members of the mainstream media and other left-wing partisans. Here, for example, is the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan:
This was a testing; and he did not merely pass it by uttering safe bromides. He addressed the intimate, painful love he has for an imperfect and sometimes embittered man. And how that love enables him to see that man's faults and pain as well as his promise. This is what my faith is about. It is what the Gospels are about. This is a candidate who does not merely speak as a Christian. He acts like a Christian.
Here, for another example, is Time's Joe Klein:
The rhetorical magic of the speech—what made it extraordinary—was that it was, at once, both unequivocal and healing. There were no weasel words, no Bushian platitudes or Clintonian verb-parsing. Obama was unequivocal in his candor about black anger and white resentment—sentiments that few mainstream politicians acknowledge (although demagogues of both races have consistently exploited them). And he was unequivocal in his refusal to disown Wright. Cynics and political opponents quickly noted that Obama used a forest of verbiage to camouflage a correction—the fact that he was aware of Wright's views, that he had heard such sermons from the pulpit, after first denying that he had. And that may have been politics as usual. But the speech wasn't.
It was a grand demonstration of the largely unfulfilled promise of Obama's candidacy: the possibility that, given his eloquence and intelligence, he will be able to create a new sense of national unity—not by smoothing over problems but by confronting them candidly and with civility.
Yet this and its like elsewhere in the mainstream media were not enough for Garry Wills (and the New York Review of Books). For Wills, Obama's speech stood with Abraham Lincoln's 1860 Cooper Union Speech. Lincoln's speech was a remarkable work of original scholarship reconstructing the views of the founding fathers on slavery. Obama's speech was a Clintonian triangulation seeking to negotiate his way through an inconvenient personal controversy, and not very honestly at that. Wills presented himself as the voice of moderation in the media hosannas over Obama's Philadelphia speech:
Obama's speech has been widely praised—compared with JFK's speech to Protestant ministers, or FDR's First Inaugural, even to the Gettysburg Address. Those are exaggerations. But the comparison with the Cooper Union address is both more realistic and more enlightening.
Lincoln's Cooper Union speech is still looking good 150 years later. Obama's Philadelphia speech didn't last 150 days. It failed upon the reeentry of Wright to reiterate the views that had prompted Obama to give the Philadelphia speech in the first place. Thus Obama's press conference on April 29.
At his press conference repudiating Wright, Obama ignored Wright's racist speech to the NAACP in Detroit. Rather, he framed his remarks as a response to Wright's appearance at the National Press Club the following day. In this appearance Wright reiterated what Obama had previously dismissed as "snippets of those sermons" on 9/11 as America's just deserts, AIDS as a product of the United States government, and Louis Farrakhan as a great man. The Wright on display at the National Press Club, however, was a person unrecognizable to Obama. Indeed, he was a person who could be disowned. Moving on from Clintonian triangulation in his Philadelphia speech, Obama had become Nixonian at his press conference. In the immortal formulation of Ron Ziegler, Obama's March 18 Philadelphia speech had by April 29 been rendered "inoperative."
This past Sunday Father Michael Pfleger engaged in merciless racial mockery of Sen. Clinton from the pulpit of Obama's church in Chicago. Although Obama has known Pfleger for some 20 years and Pfleger has been involved in Obama's campaign, Obama professed himself "deeply disapointed" in Pfleger's tirade. Obama conveyed the impression that that he was surprised by the remarks and that they were somehow out of character for Pfleger.
Pfleger's appearance at Trinity United Church was introduced on the pulpit by Pastor Otis Moss. Moss praised Pfleger effusively before his remarks. After Pfleger's remarks, Moss pronounced himself satisfied. Speaking from the pulpit, he said: "We thank God for the message, and we thank God for the messenger." He added: "We thank God for Father Michael Pfleger, we thank God for Father Mike." In his April 29 press conference on Jeremiah Wright, to explain his continuing allegiance to the church, Obama described Moss as TUC's "wonderful young pastor."
Yesterday Obama announced his withdrawal from Trinity United Church. He rendered both his testimony praising Moss and his inalterable allegiance to Trinity United Church "inoperative." Obama portrayed his resignation from the church both as an act taken to shield himself from having church-related remarks imputed to him, and to shield the church from the scrutiny it had been under. The tenor of his remarks suggest that both he and his church have been the victims of a frenzy.
Obama also vaguely referred to “a cultural and a stylistic gap” as a source of the problem. Perhaps the entire saga is little more than a tribute to the incomprehension of unsophisticated outsiders. Such outsiders lack the tools necessary to understand the reflections of Reverend Wright and his ilk in churches espousing black liberation theology. As in "Cool Hand Luke," according to Obama, what we have here is failure to communicate. Unfortunately, not a single member of the press sought further elaboration from Obama on that point.
Every installment of this saga reveals Obama to be a deeply opportunistic politician, ready to beat a hasty retreat from yesterday's statement of cherished principle in order to fight another day. Each installment of the saga also reveals the organs of the mainstream media to be Obama's handmaidens. From March 18 forward they have cheered on Obama's every step, even when Obama's succeeding steps proved them fools.
In the aftermath of this saga, it should begin to dawn on attentive observers that Barack Obama represents a type that flourishes on many college campuses. The technical term that applies to Obama is b.s. artist. Obama is an overaged example of the phenomenon, but his skills in the art have brought him great success and he's not giving it up now. (This post draws on my own "Wright's wrong" and "Does Barack Obama know his friends?")
powerline
Rasmussen: McCain winning the trust of voters
posted at 11:30 am on June 1, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Rasmussen’s latest polling shows John McCain maintaining voter trust on the key issues of the upcoming presidential campaign despite getting much less earned-media coverage than his likely opponent, Barack Obama. On economics, national security, and especially on Iraq, McCain has kept ahead of Obama:
When it comes to the economy, 47% of voters trust John McCain more than Barack Obama. Obama is trusted more by 41%. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey also found that, when it comes to the War in Iraq, McCain is trusted more by 49% of voters. Obama is preferred by 37%. McCain has an even larger edge—53% to 31%–on the broader topic of National Security. These results are little changed from a month ago.
Obama enjoys a 43% to 39% advantage when it comes to government ethics and reducing corruption. McCain has a 44% to 38% advantage on taxes.
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. As Rasmussen notes, a majority of voters oppose tax increases, and almost two-thirds oppose an increase in capital-gains tax rates. Both positions have been the central policy of the Obama campaign. With that in mind, the Democrats have a built-in disadvantage in November.
More surprising is the gap on Iraq. The war is not popular, and Obama seems to be on the favored side. However, Americans do not favor an immediate withdrawal and apparently don’t trust Obama to get that correct. The 12-point gap on Iraq and the 22-point gap on national security shows McCain how he can defeat Obama, and it shows why the McCain campaign has emphasized Obama’s lack of effort on both Iraq and Afghanistan to get his own information rather than just pandering to MoveOn.
Now that Obama has broken with Trinity United, it will call his judgment into question yet again. If Obama couldn’t figure out that Trinity was radical and objectionable after sitting in its pews for 20 years and only reacted after everyone else had rightly diagnosed TUCC’s demagoguery and hatred, how adept would a President Obama be at diagnosing foreign crises? Acknowledging TUCC’s issues this late underscores the growing notion that Obama is something of a dilettante, someone who goes through the motions without doing any of his own work in determining truth. Those gaps on national security will not shrink in those circumstances.
Obama and the Democrats have a big problem against McCain. Will the superdelegates start considering it, or will they surrender to the media narrative?
SHOCKER-- Obama Finally Gives Up Membership to Anti-White Church!!!
It looks like it's getting crowded under that bus.
Obama Leaves Trinity United Church of Christ!
The likely Democratic nominee finally leaves his toxic church after news broke on the vile hateful preaching coming from its ministers and guests.
When even the Associated Press notices the racism and standing ovations at Obama's church it became a problem:
After this week's latest outrageous racist outburst at the alter of Trinity United Church of Christ Barack Obama has finally decided to leave the church.
It's already being called a wimp out.
FOX News just confirmed the story.
Gee, do you think this is a political move by Obama?
Barack Obama was pictured on the cover of the church's Trumpet Magazine several times and has attended the church for over 20 years.
Just like he did with Jeremiah Wright, it took another outburst at the alter before Obama decided to distance himself from the racist church.
Politico reports on the story.
UPDATE: Obama is answering questions after his Trinity speech.
He is basically grouping all churches into the same category as his hateful church in Chicago. He says he is comfortable with finding a church that he can be comfortable with.
Obama just denied that he joined the church as a political move. He is offended by the suggestion. This was an argument by his defenders saying that he only sat in the church because it was a good political move.
Obama claims this was a personal move and not a political one-- That's why he waited until this latest story broke to quit the church.
Obama says this is one (issue) he didn't see coming-- That's why he did not invite his controversial pastor to his initial announcement that he was running for president.
Obama sent the letter on Friday but CNN was going to leak the letter so he decided to give a press conference. Obama said he was not going to make political theater out of it.
Obama says he didn't want his church experience to be a political circus(?)
Obama is not denouncing the church- "It is not a church worthy of denouncing!!"
here's the video:
Unbelievable!
Obama says there is an urgency in lots of churches to speak out against racism or inequality.
Obama assumes God will lead him to a place where he can do His work.
Amen.
Obama says the Christian Church is not a place to avoid the problems in the world.
He hopes to find a pastor who can speak out on those issues.
UPDATE: Trinity Church releases a statement saying they understand his decision.
Pajamas Media is following the developments.
More... Kate adds-- "There goes that historic, transcendent, life-changing, not since the Gettysburg Address, "I have a dream," must-be-taught-in-every-school race speech. It didn't hold up three months, let alone the time it would take to print up new textbooks."
Let Freedom Ring wonders-- "A truly post-racial, postpartisan politician would’ve left long before the YouTube videos appeared."
Even funnier is that Soros- who had been a major funder of dem operations- is a big holder of Carlyle
Didn't her husband- Tim Robbins say the same thing before Bush was elected?
More liberal hypocrisy
Top advisor lies about Obama’s pre-surge position
posted at 6:44 pm on May 30, 2008 by Allahpundit
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Via the Standard, a sweet piece of oppo research. January 2007: You can throw 30,000 troops at the problem and it won’t make a difference. May 2008: No one ever said it wouldn’t make a difference if you threw 30,000 troops at the problem. The spin here will be the same old feeble leftist crap, that Obama merely meant there’s no military solution to Iraq’s problem, which is both true and almost entirely beside the point. Yes, of course, for Iraq to become a functioning state it needs both security and a working political process, and that political process isn’t where we need it to be. But why should the deficiencies of the latter completely obscure the tremendous gains of the former? It’s not that there’s no military solution to Iraq’s problem; it’s that there’s no military or political solution to Iraq’s problem if either one or the other are lacking. Both are necessary, neither is sufficient. Theoretically, if you take the left seriously on this point, reducing violence in the country to absolute zero wouldn’t matter a whit so long as the Iraqi parliament remained paralyzed. That’s the kind of “reality-based” military judgment we can look forward to before too long.
The other favored spin when this subject comes up is to admit the security gains and accept that, yes, they have had some salutary effect, but naturally only the tiniest portion of that is owed to the surge. It’s another example, like minimizing the role of Al Qaeda in Iraq in the civil war, of the left building the facts to fit its narrative, the cardinal rule of which is that no move Bush makes, under any circumstances, can have any merit. That’s how you end up with the sort of cretinous, willfully disingenuous idiocy Pelosi displayed in crediting Iran’s “goodwill” with the recent quiet among the militias. So let’s follow our standard M.O. and ask H.R. McMaster what he thinks. Any connection between the surge and the nascent political solution inside the country, General?
So what’s changed? Iraq’s communities have largely stopped shooting at each other. That has been an achievement of the physical security efforts of our forces and I would highlight very courageous and determined Iraqi security forces who took extraordinary risk to make that happen and have fought in a determined way to make that happen. What we have seen is a result of people stopping shooting each other, which is the first step in getting people to talk to each other, I guess. There has been some real bottom up movement toward the political accommodation I mentioned just a moment ago.
And what we are seeing now I think is some top down movement toward political accommodation as well and we could talk specifically about how some of the political dynamics over the last couple of months have created a condition from maybe movement toward political accommodation at the national level. But what has happened and I think we can see this now in retrospect is that political accommodation at the local level has placed some social pressure on the Iraqi government to move in the same direction or key actors within the Iraqi government who represent portions of the communities who were fighting each other.
And now you’re properly prepared for the clip. Remember, Obama’s alleged infallibility in judgments about the war is the very core of his foreign policy credentials; he’s the man who knew knew knew the surge wouldn’t matter, and if we put him in a position to influence events, doubtless he’ll prove himself right. Oh, and after you watch, be sure to skim this very quickly to see who else appeared on Face the Nation the same day he did when he made these comments and what that other guest had to say.
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/05/30/video-top-advisor-lies-shamelessly-about-obamas-pre-surge-position/
LOL, so Vietnam loved the US, but was a communist nation that was using Soviet weaponry to kill our troops
Jsut another example of the extremes some libs will go to to rationalize their way to blissful ignorance
Kinda like all those screeds from IRan that keep on coming out that are continually mistranslated so that love and peace comes out " We want to annhilate the Israeli scum "
Yep, the mullahs are just fun loving responsible citizens and the fight in Vietnam wasn't a proxy for the cold war.
Sure there were plenty of communistic countries who preferred the US over the USSR
Wal Mart - just as bad as big oil
Posted by: McQ
As most know, Wal-Mart is the company the left loves to hate.
But consider who Wal-Mart really serves. It serves Americans who have to make every penny count and then some. It helps families who may be living on the edge to at least stay on the edge instead of falling off.
So I have to wonder what a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would have to say about Wal-Mart's present attempt to keep its grocery prices low by using its purchasing power to lean on its suppliers to absorb some of the cost increases they've undergone due to fuel, commodity and other price increases?
Because of its size it has been able to do some innovative things which, you'd think, the left would find to be wonderful. For instance:
Shrink the goods. Ever wonder why that cereal box is only two-thirds full? Foodmakers love big boxes because they serve as billboards on store shelves. Wal-Mart has been working to change that by promising suppliers that their shelf space won't shrink even if their boxes do. As a result, some of its vendors have reengineered their packaging. General Mills' (GIS, Fortune 500) Hamburger Helper is now made with denser pasta shapes, allowing the same amount of food to fit into a 20% smaller box at the same price. The change has saved 890,000 pounds of paper fiber and eliminated 500 trucks from the road, giving General Mills a cushion to absorb some of the rising costs.
Almost a million pounds of packaging saved. The 500 trucks necessary to haul that packaging eliminated. Fuel saved, pollution avoided - what's not to love?
Cut out the middleman. Wal-Mart typically buys its brand-name coffee from a supplier, which buys from a cooperative of growers, which works with a roaster - which means "there are a whole bunch of people muddled in the middle," says Wal-Mart spokeswoman Tara Raddohl. In April the chain began buying directly from a cooperative of Brazilian coffee farmers for its Sam's Choice brand, cutting three or four steps out of the supply chain.
And all of that in the middle does what? Add cost. Eliminate the costs in the middle and pass on the savings to the consumer. Sounds like another thing over which the left should swoon (well, unless, of course, those folks in the middle are union members, and then its back to Wal Mart being the great Satan).
Go locovore. Wal-Mart has been going green, but not entirely for the reasons you might think. By sourcing more produce locally - it now sells Wisconsin-grown yellow corn in 56 stores in or near Wisconsin - it is able to cut shipping costs. "We are looking at how to reduce the number of miles our suppliers' trucks travel," says Kohn. Marc Turner, whose Bushwick Potato Co. supplies Wal-Mart stores in the Northeast, says the cost of shipping one truck of spuds from his farm in Maine to local Wal-Mart stores costs less than $1,000, compared with several thousand dollars for a big rig from Idaho. Last year his shipments to Wal-Mart grew 13%.
Wow. By from local growers, save on shipping, pass the savings on to your customers. Seems to me that's just what the doctor ordered.
As the article points out, while the small suppliers are feeling some pain from the Wal Mart "pushback", imagine the pain for the poorer consumer having trouble paying $3.80 a gallon for milk if Wal Mart wasn't pushing back.
This is great, isn't it? A seller trying to do what it can to keep its prices low?
Oh, wait. Their profits increased by what amount?
During the first quarter, which ended April 30, Wal-Mart's profit increased 6.9 percent, to $3.02 billion, or 76 cents a share.
6.9%?
Forget everything I said. I'm sure the Democrats will be intoducing legislation soon to tax their windfall profits or put them before the "Reasonable Profits Board".
6.9%
Shameful.
Interesting how the North was fighting to preserve " their " form of government and the country is now flourishing because it's become a capitalistic country
Why is it the left can't comprehend that during that period of time the Soviet Union was an imperialistic nation with a goal of world domination. Witness it's forays into Africa and South and Central America
Obama, Pfleger, and Earmarks
By Erick
Barack Obama has thrown Rev. Michael Pfleger under the bus. Pfleger took Hillary to task, claiming she felt she should win over a black man.
CBS News notes that Pfleger is "another pastor friend."
But he's much more than that. Pfleger and Obama have had a long relationship. Pfleger backed Obama against Bobby Rush when Obama ran in 2000 for Congress.
Already by that time, Pfleger was on record supporting radicals like Louis Farrakhan.
Pfleger is a campaign contributor to Obama, in addition to being yet another "spiritual mentor," and Obama got a $225,000.00 earmark for Pfleger's church when Obama was in the state legislature in Illinois.
Obama's strategist, lobbyist David Axelrod, told the New York Times
that Father Pfleger was “remaking the face” of Chicago’s South Side and that all of Mr. Obama’s earmarks went to worthy programs like his.
Great, so not only is Obama associating with far left hate filled preachers, he's getting them tax dollars too.
These associations will make Barry unelectable. I know it's a surprise to the posters here, but the speech of Wright and Pfleger are way off the scale for most Americans- especially whites. Barry has no experience to tout so , as he's said, his judgement us his main plus
Aligning with racists who hate America- especially white America is not a good campaign strategy
This will not go away
Meanwhile, Back at Trinity United
By JAMES TARANTO
May 29, 2008
Since repudiating his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., at an April 29 news conference, Barack Obama has done everything in his power to minimize the nature of his relationship with Wright. Supposedly, Obama found Wright’s recent and controversial remarks at the National Press Club shocking, unfamiliar, and out-of-character. In fact, we now know that Wright’s controversial remarks were entirely in character, and that regular church attendance, and even limited familiarity with church publications, would have made Wright’s radical views entirely evident. Indeed, a bit of digging now turns up information that makes it next-to-impossible not to conclude that Obama has long been familiar with Wright’s radicalism.
As Obama himself notes in a 2004 newspaper interview, within the constraints of his schedule, he regularly attended weekly services at Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ. In that interview, Obama characterized his relationship with Wright as that of a “close confidant.” We know that the doctrines of “black-liberation theology” are included in new-member packets, and are taught in new-member classes, which Obama and his wife attended. It now emerges that over the years, Obama has worked closely with Wright on a number of political projects. Finally, we can now conclude that Obama had to have had knowledge of Wright’s radical and highly political church magazine, since Obama himself was interviewed for a 2007 cover story for that publication.
It is clear Obama was aware of Wright’s views; indeed, the specifically political character of Wright’s liberation theology is what drew Obama to Christianity.
Further, a careful reading of the 2007 run of Trumpet Newsmagazine — a church newspaper (and later a slick, nationally distributed magazine) that Wright founded in 1982 to “preach a message of social justice to those who might not hear it in worship service” — suggests that Wright’s theology and politics have more in common with black-nationalist sources (both Christian and Muslim) than with those of conventional Christianity. In particular, Wright is closely allied with a radical and highly controversial Catholic priest named Michael Pfleger, and with Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan. While his specific ties (if any) to Farrakhan are unclear, Barack Obama appears to be very much a part of the broader Wright/Pfleger/Farrakhan theological-political nexus.
Coming to Christianity
In 2006, Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at a conference sponsored by Jim Wallis and the “religious left” magazine Sojourners. Obama spoke of his early sense of personal isolation in the absence of membership in a community of faith. “If not for the particular attributes of the historically black church, I may have accepted that fate,” said Obama. The specifically political character of his new church is what drew Obama out of his skeptical isolation and into religion:
But as the months passed in Chicago, I found myself drawn to the church.
For one thing, I believed and still believe in the power of African-American religious tradition to spur social change. . . . the black church understands in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and challenge the powers and principalities. . . . I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; it is an active, palpable agent in the world. It is a source of hope. . . .
It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and affirm my Christian faith.
In other words, Obama’s membership at Trinity UCC resulted from his familiarity with Wright’s political views. Even Obama’s phrase “challenge the powers and principalities” is a particular favorite of black-liberation theologists.
Working Together
We know from Obama’s own account in Dreams From My Father that Wright personally warned him, from the time of their first meeting, that many considered Wright too politically radical. Yet Obama not only joined the church, but also cooperated with Wright on political matters. In November of 2001, according to the Chicago Defender, Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. was marshaling supporters to block two bills in the Illinois state legislature. Among others, Obama and Wright joined Jackson to present a united front against the bills.
Three years later, the same publication described the choice of Kwame Raoul to fill Obama’s seat in the Illinois General Assembly, after Obama’s election to the U.S. Senate — like Obama, Raoul is a member of Trinity UCC, and while Obama stayed formally neutral in the race, there is a strong implication in the article that Obama kept to the background while allowing Wright to help manage Raoul’s appointment. Raoul told the Defender, “Barack stayed out of the competition for his old seat. We are fellow members of Trinity United Church of Christ, and he had a good conversation with my pastor Saturday.”
↓
The article pointedly ends, “Raoul has a lot of work ahead of him and lots of people to thank, including his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. . . .” It seems clear that Wright is a local kingmaker, and that Obama and Wright freely consult on political projects of mutual interest.
In the course of their close, 20-year-long partnership, Obama and Wright must have had chances to meet and converse on a great many occasions. A recent one we know of came in late February or early March of 2007, when Obama and his wife, Michelle, were honored guests at “Legacy of a Liberating Legend,” a gala in tribute to the career and retirement of Jeremiah Wright. The gala is described in the “Teesee’s Town” column in the Chicago Defender of March 5/March 6, and is pictured in a feature story in the May issue of Trumpet. According to the Defender, Obama halted campaigning to celebrate with his “mentor,” Wright.
Apparently, a lot of folks have missed a lot of memos, like the ones about Wright not being Obama’s mentor, Obama rarely attending Sunday services at Trinity, and Obama not conferring with Wright on political issues.
Trumpeting Obama
And even if all those memos were true, they couldn’t explain Trumpet Newsmagazine: Obama himself has appeared on numerous Trumpet covers, is featured in many stories, and was personally interviewed by a Trumpet reporter. The radical doctrines of black-liberation theology pervade this publication, just as they shape Wright’s sermons.
Trumpet frequently discusses the works of James Cone, the founder of black-liberation theology, who considers Wright and Trinity UCC to be the premiere exemplars of his system. (In the print edition of NR, I described Cone’s radical views and explained how the history and theology of Trinity UCC embody them. Some of this ground is also covered in an extended Investors Business Daily editorial; according to IBD, Obama “refuses to respond to even written questions about Cone and black-liberation theology.”)
The nature and status of this kind of Christianity is complex and controversial. There is a profound difference between “black-liberation theology” and Christianity as conventionally understood. Trinity itself recognizes this difference, to the point where Wright, his followers, and his theological mentors often present conventional American Christianity as both false and evil.
In “Jeremiah Wright’s ‘Trumpet’” (based on a reading of the 2006 run of Trumpet), I showed that Obama must surely have known about Wright’s politics from this magazine, which was specifically created to bring across Wright’s political views to those who could not attend his every sermon. Trumpet reveals Wright and his entire Trinity organization to be thoroughly political, and every bit as radical as those infamous YouTube sermon-segments indicate. A reading of the newly obtained 2007 run of Trumpet brings the same points across, and just as dramatically.
Barack Obama comes up repeatedly in this volume, nowhere more strikingly than in Wright’s essay for the April issue, “Facing the Rising Sun.” Here, in honor of Easter, Wright speaks of the resurrecting power of God. Having read through two years’ worth of Trumpet, I was genuinely shocked by the optimistic tone of this essay. Wright is generally at pains to be negative about the United States, particularly to puncture any claims of racial progress. So it was truly uncharacteristic for Wright to begin his Easter reflections speaking about America’s progress since the desegregation battle of 40 years ago, as a wonderful “new day.” The reality of such progress may seem obvious and elementary to most readers, but in Wright’s worldview, it is not.
When Wright finally extends his Easter metaphor to Obama, the reason for his optimism becomes clear:
God raised Barack from a dead political career to the United States Senate. Then, as Jesus ascended into Heaven, God made a way for Barack to ascend to the pinnacle of politics. . . . We are truly in a “new day.”
Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of Michelle Obama’s comment that her husband’s presidential campaign was the first time she’d been really proud of her country. Wright is essentially making the same point.
It’s also clear that, in 2007, Wright was convinced that Obama would be a strong force in favor of Wright’s basic political agenda. In the ascent of politicians like Obama, Wright argued, “God has shown me that Uncle Toms do not have the last word.” For Wright, Uncle Toms include not only black conservatives like Clarence Thomas, but all blacks who forswear leftist politics. So Wright is expressing faith in Obama’s underlying sympathy with the hard-left agenda.
Wright echoes his positive assessment in the Obama cover story in Trumpet’s March 2007 issue. The interview with Obama is not particularly revealing, focusing as it does on Obama’s family (Michelle balances his idealism, his daughters think they’ll get a dog if he’s elected president). Yet the article does quote Wright claiming that if Obama won, he would “really do some powerful things in that office.”
The Trumpet interview removes all doubt (if any was possible) concerning Obama’s knowledge of the publication.
True/False Religion
Other articles on Obama are dotted throughout Trumpet. A piece in the May 2007 issue praises Obama for “his ability to help the hapless Democrats talk about religion and values.” Yet a reading of Trumpet can’t help but raise questions about how the Christianity Obama imbibed at Trinity UCC relates to Christianity as conventionally understood. From the standpoint of the black-liberation theology that informs Trinity’s worship, there is a yawning gulf between authentic, liberating Christianity and conventional American Christianity. According to the black-liberation theology’s founder, James Cone, Christianity as commonly practiced in the United States is actually the false Christianity of the racist Antichrist. Any Christianity not imbued with “liberating” leftist revolutionary zeal is dismissed by Cone as the work of “white devil oppressors.” While that sort of radicalism may seem an outdated relic of the late Sixties, a reading of Trumpet 2007 shows that, for Wright and his followers, little has changed since then.
Wright’s magazine is chock full of denunciations of common Christianity. Certainly, those who support conservative political candidates or causes are dismissed as false Christians, and worse. In the April 2007 Trumpet, black-liberation theologian Dr. Obery M. Hendricks Jr. attacks conservative Christians as “emulating those who killed Jesus, rather than following the practice of Jesus himself.” According to Hendricks, “many good church-going folk have been deluded into behaving like modern-day Pharisees and Sadducees when they think they’re really being good Christians.” Unwittingly, Hendricks says, these apparent Christians have actually become “like the false prophets of Ba’al.” Hendricks adds, “George Bush and his unwitting prophets of Ba’al may well prove to be the foremost distorters of the true practice of Jesus’ Gospel of peace, liberation, and love ever seen in modern times.”
In the August 2007 issue, taking a leaf from Cone’s book, Wright himself goes after traditional Christianity with a vengeance: “How do I tell my children about the African Jesus who is not the guy they see in the picture of the blond-haired, blue-eyed guy in their Bible or the figment of white supremacists [sic] imagination that they see in Mel Gibson’s movies?” Authentic, politically liberating Christianity, says Wright, “is far more than the litmus test given by some Gospel music singers and much more than the cosmetic facade of make-pretend white Christianity.”
But if Wright is tough on white Christians, he is equally hard on the many black Christians who fail to share his vision. In fact, it’s clear from Trumpet, and from the broader literature of black-liberation theology, that Cone’s and Wright’s radical religion appeals to only a tiny minority within the black community. Wright bitterly denounces unliberated, non-Africentric, “‘colored preachers’ who hate themselves, who hate Black people, who desperately want to be white and who write and say stupid things in public to make ‘Masa’ feel safer.”
So Wright (like Cone) sees his own form of Christianity as profoundly different from Christianity as typically practiced by most American whites and blacks. For religious allies, Wright looks not so much to Christians, but to those of any religious persuasion who share his politics.
Also, while James Cone sharply dismisses even white liberals as unhelpful devils, Cone did hold out a legitimate place within black-liberation theology for white revolutionary radicals. Cone’s gauntlet has been boldly taken up by Catholic Father Michael Pfleger, a true Christian in Wright’s view.
Obama’s ties to the priest are clear. During his 2004 senate race, Cathleen Falsani of the Chicao Sun-Times interviewed Obama about his religious views (it is this article that revealed Obama’s as-often-as-possible attendance at Trinity, and called Wright a “close confidant”). According to Falsani, the future presidential candidate cited “the Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church in the Auburn-Gresham community on the South Side, who has known Obama for the better part of 20 years,” as a key source of spiritual guidance. The piece also includes words from Pfleger himself, praising Obama.
Michael Pfleger
Pfleger is just as far as Wright is from the majority of American Christians. Although Pfleger is white, he heads a largely black congregation on Chicago’s South Side. Like Wright, Pfleger follows the black-liberation theology of James Cone. As the June/July 2007 Trumpet cover story opens, Pfleger is preaching a guest sermon at Wright’s Trinity UCC. Pfleger compares the average American Christian to the criminals who were crucified alongside Jesus.
As the story continues, we read: “And drum roll please. [Pfleger] also manages to weave into the midday homily at Trinity . . . his deep and abiding dislike for President George W. Bush. And with this mostly African American congregation, Pfleger is in good company.” In light of this, Trumpet author Rhoda McKinney Jones calls Pfleger “Afrocentric to the core.”
Trumpet goes on to highlight the politics of this “radical and revolutionary priest.” Not only has Pfleger pored over James Cone’s books, but, Pfleger affirms, “I got very educated by the [Black] Panthers — very educated.” According to Trumpet, Pfleger “counts the mighty as close confidants and friends,” especially Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, the Hon. Minister Louis Farrakhan, and Sen. Barack Obama. Trumpet also quotes Wright expressing his confidence in Pfleger.
The story goes on to highlight Pfleger’s chronic problems with the Catholic Church, which seems always on the verge of removing Pfleger from his congregation. Pfleger’s invitations to Louis Farrakhan to speak at St. Sabina, for example, have roiled the church. Jones relishes Pfleger’s attacks on Catholicism as commonly practiced. Pfleger is quoted describing the community of his birth as “in-bred, white, Catholic, democratic . . . and a bubble of fantasyland.” According to Pfleger, the Catholic Church has lost its way. He also rails against “prosperity-pimping” and “all this crazy and perverted theology that people are buying into.”
Unholy Trinity?
As Trumpet notes, Pfleger does in fact work closely with Farrakhan, Wright, and Obama. Pfleger and Wright are key partners in the Chicago crusade against Wal-Mart. Wright’s first public appearance after the “God damn America” scandal was in Pfleger’s church. Pfleger has repeatedly rejected criticism and hosted Louis Farrakhan at St. Sabina. Recently, Pfleger sharply defended the deeply controversial appointment of Farrakhan follower Sister Claudette Marie Muhammad to the Illinois Governor’s Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes. (Muhammad’s appointment led to a series of resignations from the commission.)
↓
During the same period, Trumpet ran a highly positive feature article on Sister Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan. In fact, over and above the famous “Empowerment Award” Wright bestowed on Farrakhan, Trumpet regularly features positive mentions of Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam. There is a kind of informal nexus between Wright, Farrakhan, and Pfleger, each of whom are bound by an allegiance to black-liberation theology, or to the black Muslim nationalism that inspired James Cone to create black-liberation theology to begin with.
Obama was a part of this nexus. Despite current attempts to rewrite history, Obama was close to Wright for years, and fully entangled with him, both theologically and politically. Pfleger’s influence over Obama, whose work as a “community organizer” had him in frequent contact with South Chicago’s churches, is second only to that of Wright. Obama has worked on a great many political causes with Pfleger, and Pfleger was a key early backer of Obama’s failed 2000 bid for a seat in Congress.
Despite Obama’s distancing efforts, Farrakhan has expressed strong support for Obama. Obama was apparently at Farrakhan’s Million Man March, although his precise attitude toward the march is in dispute. Jeremiah Wright co-wrote a book (based on a series of sermons) in defense of the Million Man March, and constantly speaks highly of his regard for Farrakhan. So whatever his own relation (or lack thereof) to Farrakhan, Obama was not discouraged by the fact that his two key religious mentors and political supporters were arguably Farrakhan’s closest Chicago allies.
The full story of Barack Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright has yet to be told. It is already evident, however, that Obama’s recent attempts to minimize that relationship are smoke and mirrors. Obama leans left — far left. He is not the moderate, bipartisan figure he claims to be. That is what his history reveals. The mentors who knew Obama best supported him because of their confidence that, given the inevitable political constraints, Obama’s success would best advance their shared hard-left agenda.
— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
Meanwhile, Back at Trinity United
By JAMES TARANTO
May 29, 2008
Blogger Armando Llorens of the pro-Clinton site TalkLeft.com has an eye-opening video from the Trinity United Church of Christ, which remains Barack Obama's church. The video was uploaded to YouTube this past Sunday, though it is unclear if it was shot then or earlier. But to judge by the subject matter, it is quite recent.
The video features Father Michael Pfleger, with an introduction by the Rev. Otis Moss, Jeremiah Wright's successor at Trinity United. As we noted last month, the Democratic presidential front-runner described Moss as a "wonderful young pastor" after Obama renounced Wright.
Blogress Michelle Malkin has transcribed the video, in which Pfleger, described by Moss as "a friend of Trinity . . . a brother beloved . . . a preacher par excellence . . . a prophetic, powerful pulpiteer . . . our friend . . . our brother," delivers a hateful rant against Hillary Clinton:
When Hillary was crying [gesturing tears, uproarious laughter from audience]--and people said that was put-on--I really don't believe it was put-on.
I really believe that she just always thought "This is mine" [laughter, hoots]. "I'm Bill's wife. I'm white. And this is mine. And I jus' gotta get up. And step into the plate." And then out of nowhere came, "Hey, I'm Barack Obama." And she said: "Oh, damn! Where did you come from!?!?!" [Crowd going nuts, Pfleger screaming]. "I'm white! I'm entitled! There's a black man stealing my show." [Sobs.] She wasn't the only one crying! There was a whole lotta white people cryin'!
Who is Michael Pfleger? As we noted last month, he is a strong supporter of Louis Farrakhan and has been described as a "spiritual adviser" to Obama. He also publicly threatened the life of a Chicago businessman and, according to one report, "is known for climbing ladders to deface liquor billboards."
In his Trinity United oration, Pfleger asserted that white people have a moral obligation to surrender their assets, which, he suggested, properly belong to blacks (the video clip begins in midsentence):
--honest enough to address the one who says, "Well, don't hold me responsible [gesticulating] for what my ancestors did." But you have enjoyed the benefits of what your ancestors did and unless you are ready to give up the benefits [voice rising], throw away your 401 fund, throw away your trust fund, throw away all the money you put into the company you walked into because yo' daddy and yo' granddaddy and yo' greatgranddaddy--[screaming at the top of his lungs]--unless you're willing to give up the benefits, then you must be responsible for what was done in your generation 'cuz you are the beneficiary of this insurance policy!
Pfleger is white. Many Illinois taxpayers are black. The New York Times reported earlier this month that the latter have been forced to subsidize the former, through the good offices of one state Sen. Barack Obama:
Mr. Obama more eagerly met the demands for spending earmarks for churches and community groups in his district, said State Senator Donne E. Trotter, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. "I know this firsthand, because the community groups in his district stopped coming to me," Mr. Trotter said.
Typical of Mr. Obama's earmarks was a $100,000 grant for a youth center at a Catholic church run by the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a controversial priest who was one of the few South Side clergymen to back Mr. Obama against [Rep. Bobby] Rush.
Father Pfleger has long worked with South Side political leaders to reduce crime and improve the community. But he has drawn fire from some quarters for defending the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and inviting him to speak at his church. Father Pfleger, who did not return calls for comment, is one of the religious leaders whose "faith testimonials" Mr. Obama has posted on his presidential campaign Web site.
We searched the Obama Web site in vain for Pfleger's endorsement. It appears the campaign has suppressed it, although a copy appears on the Michelle Malkin page linked above.
Llorens, the TalkLeft blogger who posted the video, says twice in his short post that "this has nothing to do with Barack Obama." It seems to us Llorens is quite wrong about this, although possibly he is being ironic. For one thing, it raises serious questions about Obama's moral judgment that he not only attends but sends his two young daughters to a church whose pulpit regularly features such hatred.
It also renders doubtful one of the most frequent arguments for an Obama presidency: that he would diminish anti-American sentiment around the world through his conciliatory mien and tough diplomacy. His response to the political crisis over his spiritual advisers has been vacillatory, not conciliatory: first he stood by them, then he distanced himself from them. Now he pretends they don't exist--which differs from the putative Bush administration approach to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad & Co. how exactly?
Obama does not appear to have succeeded in diminishing anti-American sentiment in his own church, from religious leaders who fervently support him. The danger is that he would show similar weakness on the world stage, and that America's enemies would find such weakness provocative rather than meliorative.
Obama “disappointed,” Pfleger “deeply sorry” for comments about Hillary; Update: Hillary’s camp rips Pfleger
posted at 6:34 pm on May 29, 2008 by Allahpundit
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Wouldn’t you know it, not only is Obama surprised to find his friend of 20 years spouting the sort of rhetoric for which he’s famous in Chicago for spouting, but Pfleger himself sounds surprised. Amazing how much he and his circle of confidants managed to miss about their own behavior over the past few, er, decades.
“As I have traveled this country, I’ve been impressed not by what divides us, but by all that that unites us. That is why I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger’s divisive, backward-looking rhetoric, which doesn’t reflect the country I see or the desire of people across America to come together in common cause,” Obama said in a statement…
Response of Rev. Michael L. Pfleger of statements made during a sermon on Sunday, May 25, 2008[:]
“I regret the words I chose on Sunday. These words are inconsistent with Senator Obama’s life and message, and I am deeply sorry if they offended Senator Clinton or anyone else who saw them.”
I wonder if either of them even read those statements before they were put out. This little kerfuffle provides us with the first evidence I’ve seen, incidentally, of pro-Hillary lefties softening a bit on Obama. Check out the refrain at Talk Left about how Pfleger, whose endorsement until recently was featured on Barry O’s “faith” webpage, “has nothing to do with Barack Obama.” Exit question: Does the following clip have nothing to do with him either? It’s Pfleger again, at Trinity again a few months ago, lying through his teeth in vintage Team Obama fashion about what Bill Clinton meant with his “fairy tale” comment and then proceeding to offer the same defense of Wright — that the soundbites don’t represent the real man — that Obama himself once did. Before, that is, he figured out that they do. “Surprise” again.
Update: Carpe diem, Howard Wolfson.
“Divisive and hateful language like that is totally counterproductive in our efforts to bring our party together and have no place at the pulpit or in our politics. We are disappointed that Senator Obama didn’t specifically reject Father’s Pflegler’s dispicable [sic] comments about Senator Clinton, and assume he will do so.”
Blowback
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/05/29/obama-deeply-disappointed-pfleger-deeply-sorry-for-comments-about-hillary/
Link has video of the "preacher"
A Message Even the Senate Can’t Ignore
By Newt Gingrich Posted in Energy — Comments (6) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Vote No On Higher Gas Prices
And Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less
The United States Senate keeps finding new and exciting ways to prove it lives in a world completely disconnected from the lives of normal Americans.
Next week, the Senate is set to begin debate on the Boxer-Warner-Lieberman “Send Jobs to China and India” global warming bill. With gas now topping $4 a gallon, it boggles the mind why politicians – of any party – would even consider legislation that will raise the cost of gas for our cars, diesel for our trucks, food for our families, airline travel for our work and leisure, and electricity for our homes.
The last time the Senate tried to pass legislation so completely at odds with the mood of the country was last summer’s amnesty bill. Perhaps there is something about summer in Washington, DC that makes politicians forget where they came from and the needs of the American people.
The American people want LOWER energy prices, not the higher gas, diesel, air, electricity and food prices that Boxer-Warner-Lieberman guarantees.
Fortunately, we all remember how the amnesty bill worked out and I’m confident if the American people get sufficiently mobilized, we can defeat the Boxer-Warner-Lieberman “Send Jobs to China and India” bill as well. And maybe we can even redirect the energy of the Congress towards lowering gas prices, not raising them.
There are two things we can do now. . . .
The first is to call your Senators and tell them to vote “no” on Boxer-Warner-Lieberman – ‘no’ on raising the cost of going to work, heating your home, and feeding your family.
Once you’ve called, email your friends and family to do the same. Last summer the Senate switchboard crashed due to all the incoming phone calls from Americans opposed to the amnesty bill. Let’s see if we can do it again.
The second is to go to www.americansolutions.com/drillnow and sign the “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” petition. The petition is simple:
We, therefore, the undersigned citizens of the United States, petition the U.S. Congress to act immediately to lower gasoline prices by authorizing the exploration of proven energy reserves to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources from unstable countries.
Two days ago, American Solutions set a goal of 100,000 names by next week. Amazingly, American Solutions reached that goal last night. Let’s see if we can help American Solutions make it 200,000.
Go to www.americansolutions.com/drillnow to sign the petition and then send it to your friends as well.
Next week, just as the Senate is starting to debate Warner-Lieberman, American Solutions will deliver to Congress the names of everyone who signed the petition. This will send a powerful message about just how confused the priorities of the Senate are, and push them toward lowering gas prices by drilling here and drilling now so we can all pay less at the pump.
Go to www.americansolutions.com/drillnow
Yet another of Barry's nut job preachers:
Pfleger at Trinity: Hillary cried after Iowa because of “white entitlement”; Update: Pfleger on Farrakhan
posted at 12:11 pm on May 29, 2008 by Allahpundit
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Bob Owens e-mailed yesterday wondering why Fr. Michael “We’re going to find you and snuff you out” Pfleger had disappeared from Obama’s faith testimonials page after having once been featured there. (See the end of MM’s post from March for a screencap.) Here’s one possible answer. The YouTube description says it was shot May 25; I can’t find anything on the wires to confirm that but you can tell from the crowd behind him that this is from a different appearance than the one where he defended Wright and Farrakhan. Another case, a la McCain and Hagee/Parsley, of a politician not having vetted a colorful preacher thoroughly enough before touting his endorsement? Nope: According to this CSM piece from last year, Barry O’s known Pfleger since his early days in Chicago. Funny how these longtime acquaintances of his keep “surprising” him with incendiary racial rhetoric.
Update: Here’s older video, via Patrick Ishmael, of Pfleger paying tribute to the right reverend Louis Farrakhan.
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/05/29/pfleger-at-trinity-hillary-cried-after-iowa-because-of-white-entitlement/
Pro-life=Sexist [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
Misguided youth with a liberal fascist instinct:
In response to a series of controversies over abortion debates on Canadian campuses, the student government of York University in Toronto has tabled an outright ban on student clubs that are opposed to abortion.
Gilary Massa, vice-president external of the York Federation of Students, said student clubs will be free to discuss abortion in student space, as long as they do it "within a pro-choice realm," and that all clubs will be investigated to ensure compliance.
"You have to recognize that a woman has a choice over her own body," Ms. Massa said. "We think that these pro-life, these anti-choice groups, they're sexist in nature ... The way that they speak about women who decide to have abortions is demoralizing. They call them murderers, all of them do ... Is this an issue of free speech? No, this is an issue of women's rights."
but did happen to have the world's 3rd largest potential oil supply.
Ah, yes one of the Pegbot's all time faves
I'm sure you've noticed when you fill up your car that Iraqi oil isn't being stolen by Bush
They are in control of their own oil supply
Please supply your analysis, with links , showing how we've taken over their oil output
TIATIA
What does that have to do with anything??
Do you still deny that conditions have improved markedly in Iraq??
The reason Barry didn't want to go was that he would have to confront the improved conditions and would then be bound not to cut and run and allow the progress to go down the drain
You'll jsut ahve to get used to the fact that regardless of his campaign promises, Barry will not be able to have out troops out of Iraq according to his timetable
Can't wait for those foreign policy debates that Barry was hoping for. It's become more clear as Barry speaks w/o a script that he's a lightweight in over his head
Surprise: Obama suddenly considering trip to Iraq
posted at 9:20 pm on May 28, 2008 by Allahpundit
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That was fast.
Senator Barack Obama said today that he is considering visiting American troops and commanders in Iraq this summer. He declined an invitation from Senator John McCain to take a joint trip to Iraq, saying: “I just don’t want to be involved in a political stunt.”
In a brief interview here, Mr. Obama said his campaign was considering taking a foreign trip after he secures the Democratic presidential nomination. No details have been set, he said, but added: “Iraq would obviously be at the top of the list of stops.”…
“I think that if I’m going to Iraq, then I’m there to talk to troops and talk to commanders, I’m not there to try to score political points or perform,” Mr. Obama said. “The work they’re doing there is too important.”
Just so we’re clear, a “political stunt” would be letting McCain cow him into a joint trip to Iraq. Letting McCain cow him into a solo trip? Not a stunt. It’s amazing how a townhall meeting carried across the dial on cable news can concentrate the mind, I guess. He’s doing the right thing so I’ll resist the hackiest spin on this (”if he’s this much of a pushover for McCain, what will he be like against…”), but I am sincerely surprised that he’d bow to this sort of pressure so quickly. His flag-pin stance is stupid but there’s a certain ballsiness to it if he’s willing to stick with it and absorb the political consequences because he believes in it. Which … he isn’t. Same here with him backing down after initially objecting to an Iraq trip, same with his ballyhooed speech on race, which could have been given any time after declaring his candidacy last year had he felt deeply about the subject but wasn’t delivered until the Wright thing had become so toxic that he had to do it to try to save his own ass. It’s the Clintons whose every move is supposed to be calculated for political effect; as we’re learning, Obama can beat them at that game, too. Exit question: How high will the RNC counter go?
Barack Obama: He'll Meet With Ahmadinejad, But Not With the Troops in Iraq
By Erick Posted in 2008 | Ahmadinejad | Barack Obama | Iran | Iraq | John McCain | Political Stunts — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Barack Obama has not been to Iraq since 2006, when he took a *two day* tour. In fact, for all of Obama's alleged globe trotting, he has pretty much decided to form his foreign policy by reading the editorial page of the New York Times and listening to leftists in Hyde Park, instead of taking field trips to check out the scene for himself.
John McCain has invited Barack Obama to go to Iraq together. But no, Obama will not go. He'll gladly participate in a Townhall meeting with John McCain, but actually going to meet with the commanders in the field is too much.
As Jim Geraghty notes, Obama has rejected the offer calling it a "political stunt." Let's back up to the last paragraph: he'll join McCain in townhall meetings on the campaign trail, but doing so with the troops in Iraq is a political stunt.
The man who has said he would meet unconditionally with Ahmadinejad will not go meet with our soldiers in Iraq. And, as Jim says, that's fine if he thinks it's a political stunt and he does not want to go together. But Obama, thus far, *has chosen to not go at all.*
Even the media's narrative on Iraq has changed more than Obama's. The surge has had a positive impact. The media has acknowledged as much. Not only will Obama not acknowledge that, he'd rather close his eyes and not see the success.
And it's not just the troops in Iraq and General Petraeus that Obama is refusing to meet with. He won't even meet with soldiers from Illinois.
A lot of the left claims to support our soldiers, but not the war. Obama apparently cannot even muster support for our soldiers and sailors.
He's too busy planning his unconditional meetings with American enemies.
Obama abandons US economy ... for the Teamsters?
By Soren Dayton
The Wall Street Journal trashes Barack Obama's abysmal trade rhetoric:
Here's one "change" presidential candidate Barack Obama apparently believes in: higher prices. Witness his letter last week urging President George W. Bush not to submit the U.S.-South Korea free-trade agreement to Congress for ratification.
Heritage notes that this would have an impact on trade by lowering the trade deficit by between $3b and $4.5b.:
The U.S. International Trade Commission has estimated it would increase annual U.S. exports to South Korea by between $10 billion and $11 billion, and increase imports from the longtime Asian ally by between $6.4 billion and $6.9 billion.
But Obama opposes it...:
On the record so far, Mr. Obama is the most protectionist U.S. presidential candidate in decades. In February he inserted a statement opposing the Korean trade deal into the Congressional record only days before securing the endorsement of the powerful Teamsters union.
This is the same union that he also wants to end federal oversight of, even though he knows they are corrupt.
How does that help American workers or the Teamsters members who would ship those goods?
You're such an idiot
Why exactly is Bush "taking shots at Iran"
I guess you belong with Sortaqueen who believes that Iran started it's nuclear program to protect themselves against the Evil Empire?
I guess you're blithely unaware that there have been ongoing public and back channel talks w/ Iran for years?? Europe has been talking with them for decades. And still they fund Hezbollah in Lebanon. You whine about the US intruding in the politics of another country- why no outrage about what's going on in Lebanon?
Won't even mention that Iranian weapons are being used against our soldiers in Iraq
Do you deny the quote from the article, "Every U.S. administration in the past 30 years, from Jimmy Carter's to George W. Bush's, has tried to engage in dialogue with Iran's leaders. They've all failed. "?
Obama, Black Liberation Theology, and Karl Marx
By Kyle-Anne Shiver
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.
Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time."
- Karl Marx; essay, The Jewish Question; 1844
Not having a theology degree, nor even a Ph.D., and being, too, a bit naïve regarding matters of high-brow philosophical currents throughout the ages, I have to admit that when I first read Karl Marx' essay, The Jewish Question, I was actually stunned by its contents.
First off, my rather cursory education in various philosophies and in Marxism, particularly, did not prepare me for the bitter thrust of old Karl's potent anti-Semitism. In fact, until reading this particular essay, I would have never, in a million years, connected much of anything whatsoever Marxian with Jew hate.
Who would?
After all, Karl Marx, himself, was a Jew. Hitler and many others blamed the Jews for Communism, thanks to the number of Jews who played prominent roles in the Russian Revolution. I naturally associated twentieth century Anti-Semitism with Adolph Hitler and the Nazis.
Ironically, if Karl Marx had still been alive and residing in Germany or any of the Nazi-occupied countries during WWII, he would have perished along with his brethren, despite his own "self-loathing-Jew" status.
Marx envisioned a society "which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering," because this classless society "would make the Jew impossible."
Personally, I find the opinion of some that Marx was a genius, to be downright laughable. Regarding his opinions on the Jews, one is left to ponderously consider which ones were dumb, and which were dumber.
Evidently Karl Marx was as utterly ignorant of the true tenets of Judaism (Self-sufficiency does not equate to "huckstering.") as he was of the diabolical possibilities inherent in his own words, once they were in the hands of one Adolph Hitler.
This atrocious irony might be merely a historical oddity if old Karl's words were not still bouncing around in the heads of those who wish to lead new revolutions based upon them. But Marx' words still dominate much of what happens on the world stage today, even in our own republic.
The word emphasis has changed a bit. The industrial proletariat is no longer the focus. But as a newly prominent American politician is wont to remind us: words do matter.
Yes, of course, words matter, as many leaders of ambitious movements have mightily declared.
...the power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time to immemorial been the magic of power of the spoken word, and that alone.
Particularly the broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.
- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf.
The Oppressed Vs. the Oppressors
Just words.
But where do they come from, and what do they mean in America today?
I might never have delved into the subject of the oppressed vs. the oppressors if I had not gone to Chicago in January seeking answers about a man who would be president.
When I visited Obama's church, still under the directorship of Jeremiah Wright, I came away with far more questions than answers, and one thing leading to another, have spent the last several months trying to fathom how Marxist political philosophy wound up emblazoned with a cross and a pulpit, and pretending to rely on the Bible for its authority.
It is somewhat difficult to imagine a more contorted blasphemy, with the single possible exception of Hitler himself claiming to be acting by divine decree in the interests of Christianity. Which is precisely what Hitler did do, while hoodwinking the German people into electing him Chancellor.
Hitler sprinkled Mein Kampf with Christian language, most likely to fit with the predominantly Christian German population, and appealed to voters on the strength of his Christian "calling":
"I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.."
As most junior-high Sunday schoolers know, however, a Christian is judged on actions, not words, and Hitler was no Christian. He was a bamboozler of the lowest imaginable order.
Jeremiah Wright is the tiny tip of Obama's spiritual iceberg
The phenomenon that raised so many questions for me in January, when I visited Trinity United Church of Christ, was not Jeremiah Wright's sermon, which turned out to be just a call for all good congregants to support Barack Obama for President. It wasn't the sermon that caught me off guard; I was prepared for that. I had watched video of Wright, giving five of his fiery sermons.
The thing that really got me to thinking, reading and searching for answers was the church bookstore.
Having been a practicing Christian for more than 40 years now, and a practicing Catholic for 26 of those years, I have visited perhaps 100 various Christian bookstores, both Protestant and Catholic. In all of those places, one thing tied together the books for sale: Christianity.
Not so in Obama's church bookstore.
I spent more than an hour perusing available books, and found as many claiming to represent Muslim thought as those representing Christian thought. Black Muslim thought, to be specific.
And the books claiming to support Christianity were surprisingly of a more political than religious nature. The books by James H. Cone, Wright's own mentor, were prominent and numerous.
Now that I have read a number of the books that presumably Wright's congregants (including Barack Obama) have also read, I can only conclude that the thing tying these volumes together is not Christianity, nor any real religion, but the political philosophy of Karl Marx.
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
"Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." (emphasis mine)
- Marx and Engels; The Communist Manifesto; 1848
If Marxism can be summed up in only a couple of phrases, now familiar to nearly every modern person, they would be "class struggle" and "oppressed vs. oppressors."
James H. Cone, the unquestioned modern-day mentor of all the black power preachers, claims to have created a new theology, uniting the Muslim black power tenets of Malcolm X and the Christian foundations of Martin Luther King, Jr.
All he has really done, in my opinion, is take original liberation theology from Latin America, developed in the early 1960s by Catholic priests, and painted it black.
Liberation Theology vs. Traditional Christianity
The teaching authorities of the Catholic Church, have for more than 20 years now, been attempting to stamp out these heretical liberation theologies, denouncing them as vehemently antithetical to the Catholic Christian faith, and have been strenuously combating this Marxist counterfeit Christianity on many fronts within the Church herself.
Of course, the Medieval, iron-fisted clamp of the Catholic Church's authority, even within the Church herself, is routinely overstated, and there are renegade priests all over the place (more on another of Obama's spiritual mentors, a liberation theology Catholic priest in Chicago, in Part Two next week).
Not to mention the fact that the Catholic Church has no authority whatsoever over those claiming to represent protestant interpretations of the Christian faith, such as Cone and Wright.
But it is important to note here that liberation theology, including black liberation theology, has not gone unnoticed by the learned biblical scholars within the Vatican, and liberation theology has been roundly denounced as both heretical and dangerous, not only to the authentic Christian faith, but even more so to the societies which come to embrace it.
Just one nugget from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation':
"...it would be illusory and dangerous to ignore the intimate bond which radically unites them (liberation theologies), and to accept elements of the marxist analysis without recognizing its connections with the (Marxist) ideology, or to enter into the practice of the class-struggle and of its marxist interpretation while failing to see the kind of totalitarian society to which this process slowly leads."
- (Author: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect, now Pope Benedict XVI; written in 1984)
Understanding that black liberation theology is Marxism dressed up to look like Christianity helps explain why there is no conflict between Cone's "Christianity" and Farrakhan's "Nation of Islam." They are two prophets in the same philosophical (Marxist) pod, merely using different religions as backdrops for their black-power aims.
As Cone himself writes in his 1997 preface to a new edition of his 1969 book, Black Theology and Black Power:
"As in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God's reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom. Life-giving power for the poor and the oppressed is the primary criterion that we must use to judge the adequacy of our theology, not abstract concepts. As Malcolm X put it: ‘I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion'." (p. xii; emphases mine)
And, to drive his Marxist emphasis even further, Cone again quotes Malcolm X:
"The point that I would like to impress upon every Afro-American leader is that there is no kind of action in this country ever going to bear fruit unless that action is tied in with the overall international (class) struggle." (p. xiii)
(Ironically, considering the formal Church teaching regarding liberation theologies, this book of Cone's was published by Orbis, owned and managed by The Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, a Maryknoll religious entity. So much for the totalitarianism of the Catholic Church.)
It is this subjugation of genuine Christianity to the supremacy of the Marxist class struggle, which marks the true delineation between traditional Christianity and black liberation theology, as Pope Benedict XVI (writing in 1984 as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) sums up thusly:
"For the marxist, the truth is a truth of class: there is no truth but the truth in the struggle of the revolutionary class."
Which is precisely why Cone and his disciples are able to boldly proclaim that if the Jesus of traditional Christianity is not united with them in the Marxist class struggle, then he is a "white Jesus," and they must "kill him." (Cone; A Black Theology of Liberation; p. 111)
And Cone brings it all the way home with this proclamation of liberation from traditional Christianity itself:
"The appearance of black theology means that the black community is now ready to do something about he white Jesus, so that he cannot get in the way of our revolution."
Move over Jesus and make way for Cone, Wright and Obama.
The revolution is at hand.
And presto-chango, once we've followed Marx, Cone, Wright and Obama down the yellow brick road to revolution, Christianity as we've known it for millennia ceases to exist.
Obama was raised by his mother, the agnostic anthropologist, to regard religion as "an expression of human culture...not its wellspring, just one of the many ways -- and not necessarily the best way -- that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives." (Audacity of Hope; p. 204)
However, when Barack Obama met Jeremiah Wright in the mid-eighties, between his years at Columbia and Harvard Law, he found a "faith" perfectly accommodating to his already well-formed worldview.
From The Audacity of Hope:
"In the history of these (African people's) struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world." (p. 207)
As Obama explains further, it was Wright's (and presumably Cone's, as required of new members at Trinity) peculiar form of Christianity that Obama found palatable:
"It was because of these newfound understandings (at Trinity under Wright) -- that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice...that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity...and be baptized."
Wright's vision of Christianity was perfectly appetizing to Barack Obama; he didn't need to change a thing.
Liberation Theology and the New Order of Things
James Cone devotes many words in all of his books to instructing his disciples to beware of those resistant to the necessary change in the power structure, warning that,
"those who would cast their lot with the victims must not forget that the existing structures are powerful and complex...Oppressors want people to think that change is impossible." (James H. Cone; Speaking the Truth; p. 49)
Pope Benedict XVI (writing as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) give an equally stringent message to Catholics about liberation theology regarding the perversion of the Christian understanding of the "poor":
"In its positive meaning the Church of the poor signifies the preference given to the poor, without exclusion, whatever the form of their poverty, because they are preferred by God...But the theologies of liberation...go on to a disastrous confusion between the poor of the Scripture and the proletariat of Marx. In this way they pervert the Christian meaning of the poor, and they transform the fight for the rights of the poor into a class fight within the ideological perspective of the class struggle."
According to Pope Benedict's instruction on liberation theology, our understanding of the virtues, faith, hope and charity are subjugated to the new Marxist order:
Faith becomes "fidelity to history."
We are the ones we've been waiting for, to bring about the final fruition of the class struggle.
Hope becomes "confidence in the future."
Yes, we can change the world; we don't need God. Our collective redemption comes when we engage in the Marxist class struggle.
Charity becomes "option for the poor."
All are not created equal. Special political privilege for the oppressed, socialism, will set us free.
It's the dawn of a new age.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at commonsenseregained.com/.
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The Problem With Talking to Iran
By AMIR TAHERI
May 28, 2008
In a report released this week, the International Atomic Energy Agency expressed "serious concern" that the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to conceal details of its nuclear weapons program, even as it defies U.N. demands to suspend its uranium enrichment program.
Meanwhile, presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama – in lieu of a policy for dealing with the growing threat posed by the Islamic Republic – repeats what has become a familiar refrain within his party: Let's talk to Iran.
[The Problem With Talking to Iran]
AP
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a ceremony in Iran's nuclear enrichment facility in Natanz, April 2007.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting to talk to an adversary. But Mr. Obama and his supporters should not pretend this is "change" in any real sense. Every U.S. administration in the past 30 years, from Jimmy Carter's to George W. Bush's, has tried to engage in dialogue with Iran's leaders. They've all failed.
Just two years ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proffered an invitation to the Islamic Republic for talks, backed by promises of what one of her advisers described as "juicy carrots" with not a shadow of a stick. At the time, I happened to be in Washington. Early one morning, one of Ms. Rice's assistants read the text of her statement (which was to be issued a few hours later) to me over the phone, asking my opinion. I said the move won't work, but insisted that the statement should mention U.S. concern for human- rights violations in Iran.
"We don't wish to set preconditions," was the answer. "We could raise all issues once they have agreed to talk." I suppose Ms. Rice is still waiting for Iran's mullahs to accept her invitation, even while Mr. Obama castigates her for not wanting to talk.
The Europeans invented the phrase "critical dialogue" to describe their approach to Iran. They negotiated with Tehran for more than two decades, achieving nothing.
The Arabs, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have been negotiating with the mullahs for years – the Egyptians over restoring diplomatic ties cut off by Tehran, and the Saudis on measures to stop Shiite-Sunni killings in the Muslim world – with nothing to show for it. Since 1993, the Russians have tried to achieve agreement on the status of the Caspian Sea through talks with Tehran, again without results.
The reason is that Iran is gripped by a typical crisis of identity that afflicts most nations that pass through a revolutionary experience. The Islamic Republic does not know how to behave: as a nation-state, or as the embodiment of a revolution with universal messianic pretensions. Is it a country or a cause?
A nation-state wants concrete things such as demarcated borders, markets, access to natural resources, security, influence, and, of course, stability – all things that could be negotiated with other nation-states. A revolution, on the other hand, doesn't want anything in particular because it wants everything.
In 1802, when Bonaparte embarked on his campaign of world conquest, the threat did not come from France as a nation-state but from the French Revolution in its Napoleonic reincarnation. In 1933, it was Germany as a cause, the Nazi cause, that threatened the world. Under communism, the Soviet Union was a cause and thus a threat. Having ceased to be a cause and re-emerged a nation-state, Russia no longer poses an existential threat to others.
The problem that the world, including the U.S., has today is not with Iran as a nation-state but with the Islamic Republic as a revolutionary cause bent on world conquest under the guidance of the "Hidden Imam." The following statement by the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the "Supreme leader" of the Islamic Republic – who Mr. Obama admits has ultimate power in Iran -- exposes the futility of the very talks Mr. Obama proposes: "You have nothing to say to us. We object. We do not agree to a relationship with you! We are not prepared to establish relations with powerful world devourers like you! The Iranian nation has no need of the United States, nor is the Iranian nation afraid of the United States. We . . . do not accept your behavior, your oppression and intervention in various parts of the world."
So, how should one deal with a regime of this nature? The challenge for the U.S. and the world is finding a way to help Iran absorb its revolutionary experience, stop being a cause, and re-emerge as a nation-state.
Whenever Iran has appeared as a nation-state, others have been able to negotiate with it, occasionally with good results. In Iraq, for example, Iran has successfully negotiated a range of issues with both the Iraqi government and the U.S. Agreement has been reached on conditions under which millions of Iranians visit Iraq each year for pilgrimage. An accord has been worked out to dredge the Shatt al-Arab waterway of three decades of war debris, thus enabling both neighbors to reopen their biggest ports. Again acting as a nation-state, Iran has secured permission for its citizens to invest in Iraq.
When it comes to Iran behaving as the embodiment of a revolutionary cause, however, no agreement is possible. There will be no compromise on Iranian smuggling of weapons into Iraq. Nor will the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps agree to stop training Hezbollah-style terrorists in Shiite parts of Iraq. Iraq and its allies should not allow the mullahs of Tehran to export their sick ideology to the newly liberated country through violence and terror.
As a nation-state, Iran is not concerned with the Palestinian issue and has no reason to be Israel's enemy. As a revolutionary cause, however, Iran must pose as Israel's arch-foe to sell the Khomeinist regime's claim of leadership to the Arabs.
As a nation, Iranians are among the few in the world that still like the U.S. As a revolution, however, Iran is the principal bastion of anti-Americanism. Last month, Tehran hosted an international conference titled "A World Without America." Indeed, since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, Iran has returned to a more acute state of revolutionary hysteria. Mr. Ahmadinejad seems to truly believe the "Hidden Imam" is coming to conquer the world for his brand of Islam. He does not appear to be interested in the kind of "carrots" that Secretary Rice was offering two years ago and Mr. Obama is hinting at today.
Mr. Ahmadinejad is talking about changing the destiny of mankind, while Mr. Obama and his foreign policy experts offer spare parts for Boeings or membership in the World Trade Organization. Perhaps Mr. Obama is unaware that one of Mr. Ahmadinejad's first acts was to freeze Tehran's efforts for securing WTO membership because he regards the outfit as "a nest of conspiracies by Zionists and Americans."
Mr. Obama wavers back and forth over whether he will talk directly to Mr. Ahmadinejad or some other representative of the Islamic Republic, including the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Moreover, he does not make it clear which of the two Irans – the nation-state or the revolutionary cause – he wishes to "engage." A misstep could legitimize the Khomeinist system and help it crush Iranians' hope of return as a nation-state.
The Islamic Republic might welcome unconditional talks, but only if the U.S. signals readiness for unconditional surrender. Talk about talking to Iran and engaging Mr. Ahmadinejad cannot hide the fact that, three decades after Khomeinist thugs raided the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, America does not understand what is really happening in Iran.
Mr. Taheri's new book, "The Persian Night: Iran From Khomeini to Ahmadinejad," will be published later this year by Encounter Books.
I assume it's because you couldn't have found a berth far enough out of harms way.
LOL, stated by the hero who was a file clerk during his tour of duty
Stop hallucinating
My original post said nothing about "haters" nor did it mention the administration. Why, it's almost as if your response had been preprogrammed and at the mention of Israel, you just botted it out
The problem with Jimmeh's statement is that he might have been disclosing classified to Israels enemies- not to "us"
You have to factor in his meeting with the terrorist organization , Hamas and he came out today and urged the European nations to circumvent our blockade of Gaza even though Hamas still continues to agree to a cease fire
No response to you ridiculous Lebanon comment? I'm sure you do know that Hezbollah are merely Iran's proxy, right?
Jeez, the article points out the origins of anti Jewish sentiment ( in the Koran ).
For the past 8yrs the US has encouraged this mentality
What mentality is that?? Doing research to illuminate the depth and long standing anti Jewish sentiment in the mid east?
The article/book says nothing about Israeli actions- much less the US
Are you saying that Israel is exaggerating the threats to it's existence from neighboring states??
You mention Lebanon in 2006 as if it was the Israelis who captured a Lebanese soldier and was raining rockets down on Lebanon
You either have no memory or are being disingenuous or dumb or most probably all 3
Obama Takes All Sides on Chavez
Inexperienced and Naïve on Foreign Policy, Good at Campaigning
By Mark I Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | foreign policy | Hugo Chavez | Liberals | Obamafiles — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Another day, another position on Hugo Chavez from Sen. Barack Obama. Last week, he told the Orlando Sentinel that he favored meeting with the Venezuelan Marxist dictator He even went so far as to say that Chavez could set the agenda. But the very next day, he told a Miami audience that Chavez’s support for the FARC narco-terrorist rebel group in Colombia disqualified Venezuela from such a meeting. Speaking to the Cuban American National Foundation, Obama said the following.
"We will shine a light on any support for the FARC that comes from neighboring governments. This behavior must be exposed to international condemnation, regional isolation, and -- if need be -- strong sanctions. It must not stand."
Thank God for the qualifier. Strong sanctions? Whoa! hold on there big guy. You’re inexperienced in foreign affairs and all, but you just can’t go around threatening sanctions, especially strong ones without months and years of delays, negotiations, aggressive diplomacy, and Security Council debates. You don’t want to blow all your options in one fell swoop.
Mocking aside, there are a couple of bigger points to make from this.
Read on...
First, Obama has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to Venezuela. He just knows that Hugo Chavez has complaints, and in Obama’s default worldview, that necessitates fault on the part of the United States. Hence his desire to meet with any and every tin-pot dictator and tinfoil hat crazy with a gripe.
Second, note where Obama made his “strong” comments against Chavez and where he made his overtures to negotiations. When speaking to the Orlando Sentinel, a paper that reaches Florida’s critical I-4 corridor, a more moderate area of the state, Obama espouses negotiation. But in front of an audience with less tolerance for dictators, the Miami Cuban ethnic and expatriate community, Obama says, without naming him, that Chavez should be isolated. He picks his position based on his audience. Obama is suitably faux-tough when facing a crowd not inclined to suffer coddling dictators gladly, and properly nuanced and open-minded when attempting to reach an audience that he thinks will accept that line more readily. Obama is pandering. That’s very old-politics.
Obama’s variant positions on meeting with Chavez recall another Democratic nominee’s attempt to explain his way out of an apparent contradiction: Obama was for meeting with Chavez, before he was against it. Many believed that John Kerry was the worst nominee from a major political party since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Though rhetorically more gifted, Obama seems to be giving them both a run for their money.
Islam & Antisemitism [Andy McCarthy]
A couple of years back, Dr. Andrew Bostom published The Legacy of Jihad, which was an invaluable compendium drawn from Islamic scripture and analyses by scholars and experts through the centuries. Andy has now done it again with his new book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism (Prometheus Books). This anthology meticulously traces today's currents of virulent Islamic Jew-hatred straight back to Mohammed and the Quran and smashes the myth of a Golden Age of Islamic tolerance. It is a tremendous contribution to our understanding.
For a taste of what you will learn from the new collection, consider Bostom's recent Hudson Institute lecture, reprinted by FPM here. Most alarming for me continues to be this passage:
[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61/ 3:112], corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness…only a minority of the Jews keep their word….[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims {Koran 3:113], the bad ones do not.
It's not the sentiments — this and worse can be found without difficulty. It's whose sentiments these are. The passage was written by Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi in 1986. Tantawi is now the Grand Imam of al-Azhar University in Egypt, the seat of Sunni learning. Tantawi is as influential as Muslim clerics get, and, far from repudiating these remarks, he has since reaffirmed them. They illustrate, as Bostom observes, "the prevalence and depth of sacralized, 'normative' Jew hatred in the contemporary Muslim world."
05/27 12:00 PM
while the US jumps up and down about Iran's desires?
So, you attempt to set up a moral equivalence between Israel and Iran. The difference is that Iran has publicly stated they want to eliminate the state of Israel. Israel has had nuclear ability for decades, and in the face of constant provocation has never used them. Somehow, in your dimness, you assume Iran would have the same self control despite their public statements calling for annihilation of Israel.
What's the problem with Israel letting their enemies know they're armed to the teeth
The problem is that should be Israels choice, not Jimmeh's. HE has made public info that he obtained while president that should remain classified
And you feel that I'm the stupid one- too funny