4 May 2008: Obama on Meet the Press
Only two months ago, Tim Russert asked Barack Obama:
“What has the controversy over Reverend Jeremiah Wright done to your campaign?”
To which the junior Senator from Illinois said:
Well, obviously it’s distracted us. I mean, we ended up spending a lot of time talking about Reverend Wright instead of talking about gas prices and food prices and the situation in Iraq. And so it, it’s, it wasn’t welcome.
The attention that’s been paid to the issue of Jeremiah Wright is a function of how little we know about this man who presumes to seek the Presidency before his time. There’s no actual reason to suppose that Obama would have anything specific to say about energy or food inflation or a war he doesn’t understand, anyway, so where else should the country’s curiosity run?
But, you know, I think that the American people understand that when I joined Trinity United Church of Christ, I was committing not to Pastor Wright, I was committing to a church and I was committing to Christ.
I don’t know how to believe this statement. Where would one begin, Senator? The American People don’t “understand” anything about your religious choices because they don’t even know you. Do you understand that? The American People’s understanding of you as a religious person of any kind consists of watching you get busted belonging to a radical anti-American church and then —subsequent to Russert’s question here, having owned and disowned Wright— leaving that church altogether when it became too much of a “distraction.” What kind of man abandons his church for political gain? Why, the very same kind of man who would join a church for political gain.
And it is a wonderful church. It’s a member of the United Church of Christ, a denomination that dates back to the battles around abolition. It has lived out, I think the, the social gospel by dealing with poverty and providing shelter to the homeless and, and working on critical issues that make me very proud. And, as a consequence, when Reverend Wright, who married me and baptized our, our children, when he made those statements, or I learned of those statements that I found so objectionable, I, I felt that they didn’t define him.
“Or I learned of those statements”? This is a subliminal word-tool he’s using to provide a temporal space between all of the bigoted crap Wright was spewing and himself. See, he’s absolved of any responsibility for adhering to such rhetoric because he just happened to have become informed of these “objectionable” outbursts only later. Is this a lie that he really hopes to sustain? If it is ever shown that Obama was in attendance when Wright was holding forth on the evils of America —which would be pretty much any time, I suspect— then the baptist will have drowned his messiah right there on the Chicago River.
And so I spoke in Philadelphia about these issues and tried to construct, you know, a, a conversation about issues of race. But when I saw, this week, him come out and speak in a way that was just as divisive, that didn’t explain or apologize, but rather worsened some of the comments that he had made previously, I felt it was very important to make clear that that’s not who I am, that’s not who I stand for. I don’t think it represented well the church or the African-American church. And I had to make a clear statement. Hopefully we’ve been able to put it behind us.
Not a chance, gasbag. Then again, now that NBC’s integrity quotient has sustained a devastating loss, it’s possible that your abettors on that network —as well as similarly-minded hacks elsewhere in Big Media— will help to paper over your despicable lack of religious authenticity and keep marketing you as a religion unto yourself.
