An intellectual infatuation between a man and a woman is the beginning of lies. Big, throbbing, mind-wandering, 3-D rendering lies. Is such a dynamic tenable? Of course not. But it is a test of a man’s character to act on what is right in every respect and to abide by that standard at the moment of truth.
At this point, all I can hope for is that hubris will destroy Obama Soter:
Senator John McCain’s trip to Iraq last March was a low-key affair: With a small retinue of reporters chasing him abroad, the NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported on Mr. McCain’s visit there from New York, including it in the “in other political news” portion of his newscast.
But when Senator Barack Obama heads for Iraq and other places overseas this summer, Mr. Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two network evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Mr. Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Mr. Obama on successive nights.
And while the anchors are jockeying for interviews with Mr. Obama at stops along his route, the regulars on the Obama campaign plane will have new seatmates: star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines who are flocking to catch Mr. Obama’s first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee. A “Meet the Press” interview is also being planned.
Mind you, this is the New York Times, so don’t laugh too much at this:
But the coverage also feeds into concerns in Mr. McCain’s campaign, and among Republicans in general, that the news media are imbalanced in their coverage of the candidates, just as aides to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton felt during the primary season.
There are many quick and simple tests to know if you’re dealing with a goddamned idiot. The surest of them is this: if the person arguing with you claims that there’s no pro-Democrat bias in Big Media, then you’ll know that the person you’re arguing with is a goddamned idiot.
By saying that the now-infamous New Yorker magazine cover depicting him and his wife as Muslim terrorists is offensive to Muslims, isn’t Barack Obama basically calling for a jihad against the infidel? Muslim terrorists and their Leftist sympathizers have a difficult time with ironic cartoons, so what he is doing is reckless.
I still don’t understand how people can say Obama is any more a Christian than a Muslim. He obviously had no real connection to Christianity prior to making the purely political choice of joining the ultra-racist Trinity United Church of Christ, so how is it wrong to doubt his word? His word has become worthless on dozens of major issues, so what is the deal here? Because he was baptized? So what? I was baptized, too, but I would never lie to the people around me and claim to be something I am not.
Obama should never have reminded Muslim nutjobs that they should be offended because now they —and the stupid hippies who support this absurd campaign of his— will turn to violence.
I caught the last few minutes of Sean Hannity’s radio interview today with James Dobson, a well-known fundamentalist Christian preacher. Dobson has picked a fight with Obama over some passages from the Bible, and was wondering aloud to Hannity about Obama’s bona fides. I neither know nor care about the merits of the argument since I don’t believe in hyperliteralism as a philosophy, but what I do care about is whether this is the way Dobson will take to opposing Obama in November. Because, if it is, I think it’s a valuable rationalization that Dobson can make that will ultimately benefit McCain. Dobson doesn’t have to like McCain, but if he can make the kinds of theological arguments that will draw out Obama’s many weaknesses on the issue of The Church, it will help the others who think like him (i.e., dislike McCain) to vote against Obama, anyway. Surely they won’t stand idly by while someone with Obama’s potential for causing such great and lasting harm moves ever closer to the Presidency. These people need to scrounge up enough Biblical anger to paint this man as something malevolent and beyond the pale. The Christian Right needs to supernaturalize Obama in a way his acolytes haven’t even considered yet.
I don’t think Obama is a Christian in any meaningful sense. Any man who would abandon his spiritual adviser and mentor —and then the only church he ever knew— for such obviously false reasons isn’t really a Christian, but a user of his ecclesiastical community and a hypocrite. When I left my mother’s church as a young boy and professed my atheism, you may be sure that I damned well had a reason.
So why is Obama getting a pass on this? Maybe America is too secular to care. Maybe Obama’s allies in Big Media don’t want to scrutinize his religious associations. Maybe the church Obama belonged to is not amenable to race-neutral deconstructions. But, as Dobson and other unapologetically Christian Christians continue building an alternative —theological— basis for rallying the reluctant fundamentalist base to McCain’s side, I simply smile and hope for the best.
When was the last time America elected a President who was not a formal member of an organized church?
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.
I posted this elsewhere, but I am too lazy tonight to do much more than cannibalize myself:
Romney is to polygamy what Obama is to Islam, which is also a polygamist religion. And Obama should know that, as he is the product of polygamy himself, as is Romney.
McCain would make a good choice choosing Mitt Romney. The polygamy slur would certainly punish the bigot who would make it.
Jonah Goldberg has some very interesting thoughts on Black Liberation Theology and the meaning(s) of Progressivism. About Obama, he writes:
He may use the phrase Social Gospel the same way he (and so many others) uses the word “progressive,” i.e. in near total ignorance or indifference to its actual historical connotations. For example, when Obama held a rally at the University of Wisconsin, Madison he proclaimed “where better to affirm our ideals than here in Wisconsin, where a century ago the Progressive movement was born?” Obama seemed not to know or to care that the University of Wisconsin Progressives were almost all racists and eugenicists who might have thought — at minimum — that his parents should have been barred from having children.
I often remark to the so-called “progressives” I come across that they are abusing the term. The Progressives of the Twentieth (and, now, the Twenty-first) Century may both be Big Government socialists at heart —but you can’t marry these people today to what the former group believed in: White Protestant Civilization and American exceptionalism. Progressives today are secular humanists who despise the “Christianists” and are repulsed by patriotism or excessive caucasoidalism. So why are they recycling progressive? Is it really so bad to be thought of as a liberal?
Lynn Sweet’s got the goods in this transcript of reporters asking Obama about his resignation from Trinity United Church of Christ yesterday (emphasis mine):
Q: Do you think it will be possible for you to join a black church, or a historically black church, or do you think as matter of, do you think that political correctness is going to be an issue in this election and that will be a factor in the racial mix of the church that you join?
BO: It’s an interesting question. I do think that — I said this earlier, that there is a different religious tradition or a worshipping style in some of the historically African American churches and other churches. But I am confident that we are going to be able to find a church we feel comfortable with and that will reflect our concerns and values. But I do think there is a cultural and a stylistic gap that has come into play in this issue.
What a tin ear this man has for religion in America! Barack Obama may think of himself as a Christian, but most American Christians do not —and will not— recognize the kind of race-based conspiracism and outright segregationism of the Black liberation theology he’s been wallowing in for most of his adult life. Is there any clearer evidence of his insularity from normal American life than his clumsy defense —and then abandonment— of his pastor and his church? What sort of man of faith allows politics to dictate where his worship turns?
It is almost fascinating to me that this supposedly brilliant man should have so little sense of how offensive his church is in the eyes and ears of most Americans —and, moreover, how stupid he must think people are to expect them to ignore his serial capitulations on the question of faith.
And is there any promise he’s kept from his “legendary” race speech? He has disowned Wright and now he has disowned his church. What’s next? It doesn’t really matter because these choices of church and spirituality are a question of “style.” Never mind that the substance of what is preached in these places is anti-American, anti-white, and classist; in Obama’s mind, it’s really more a question of how it’s seen by others than it is of genuine religious fidelity.
Barack Obama is a user of religion and a hypocrite. As an atheist with a clear conscience and a sound moral structure, I reject him utterly.
Word on the street is that Obama has resigned his membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ. I suppose this is a demonstration of his superior judgement? After consorting with vile Black Nationalist and neo-Marxist garbagemen for almost half his life, this guy thinks he can just walk away from it without a question? Pretty audacious. I wonder if there’s any so-called reporter worth his salt who has the balls to ask Obama why he is leaving such a pit of racist nonsense now.
The Big Media propagandists are already thinking of ways to suppress this.
