Obama tries to explain away ties with "uncle" Jeremiah while embracing him
By Israel Insider staff March 18, 2008
Throw Grama off the Train: Obama accused his white grandmother of making racist remarks and being afraid of big black men. But she can rest easy: he won't disown her any more than he will disown his anti-American, anti-Israel hate-mongering bigot pastor.
In one of the more remarkable examples of understatement in American public life, Presidential wannabe Obama described his long-time pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright is 'an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy.'
This follows days in which Wright's tapes have been played on YouTube and the mainstream media with such gems as saying after September 11 that "America's chickens have come home to roost" or, in a clip released today, describing Israel as a "dirty word" and saying that you'd having to be blind not to see the connection between 9/11 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After 9/11, he also claimed "The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.
A full transcript of the speech was published here.
Seven years later Obama remains a member of the church, never criticized Wright, and just last year was still publicly praising him as a "great leader."
Obama disses Grama
Even now, despite Obama's occasional (not so fierce) criticism of Wright -- the harshest term he used against the pastor in his speech today was "divisive" -- the speech seemed primarily to whitewash the Wright stuff and stop the endless loop of Wright's hate-tapes that have been dominating the airwaves and diminishing the "audacity of hope" -- a phrase Obama took from Wright: "As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me.... 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," he told an audience at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
His insulting remarks about his grandma, apparently intended to create some equivalence between her and Wright, took on an odd tenor, as he added some detail about her alleged racism: "a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." One can only wonder whether Obama loves his grama if he can so callously accuse her and violate her confidence to score political points and equate his feelings for her with those of the hate-filled preacher.
The consensus of commentators appeared to be that it may be too late for Obama to run between the raindrops or, as one headline put it, attempt a double back-flip. The fact that he had not previously criticized his pastor after sixteen years of knowing him and listening to his vitriolic sermons -- so harshly critical of the United States and its allies -- may mark the death-knell for his candidacy, clashing so sharply with his claims to represent a new kind of unifying politics based on honestly confronting issues rather than trying to rationalize and explain away a "900 pound gorilla" like Reverend Wright.
For the Democrats it is a particularly vexing issue since Obama may be close to the threshhold of clinching the nomination, promising a divisive and bitter convention in the summer.
Obama's "Audacity of Hope" -- the title of his book, taken from a phrase of none other than Jeremiah Wright -- has collided full force with the anti-American pastor's "mendacity of hate."
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