Jesus Shoulda Told Me There'd Be Weeks Like This

After all, aren't all messiahs supposed to stick together?

J-Ger does the encapsulating preface:

Monday was actually something of a good day, as Eliot Spitzer managed to remind everyone of the Lewinsky scandal, and removed himself as a superdelegate for Hillary Clinton.  But also that day, the New Republic reminded us of Michelle Obama's 2004 statement that all men put themselves first, ahead of their families and God.

On Tuesday....[c]overage of the Tony Rezko trial continued, and the question at the heart of the complicated mess became simpler: Who is this man who helped ensure Obama could buy his Chicago mansion?

Wednesday, outrage from Obama supporters forced the resignation of Geraldine Ferraro. This may seem like a victory for Team Obama, but one wonders if Hillary's demographics - white working class voters, the elderly, and Hispanics will see the event as the dismissal of a woman for making a statement that they find pretty obvious....

Thursday, video of Jeremiah Wright's sermons ran on ABC News and all over the Internet; the phrase "U.S. of KKK A" is usually one you don't want associated with a candidate's mentor.

Also Thursday, we learned that on Obama's list of earmark requests was $1 million for the hospital that employs his wife, that more than doubled her salary after he was elected to the Senate.

Let's take a few of these in order, shall we?

~  ~  ~

The Tony Rezko trial continued, and once again, the quantity of Rezko quatloos that ended up in Our Mr. Hussein's pocket ratcheted upward:

Indicted Chicago businessman Antoin “Tony” Rezko was a more significant fundraiser for presidential candidate Barack Obama’s earlier political campaigns than previously known. Rezko raised as much as $250,000 for the first three offices Obama sought, the senator told the Tribune on Friday.

Obama also said for the first time that his private real estate transactions with Rezko involved repeated lapses of judgment. The mistake, Obama said, was not simply that Rezko was under grand jury investigation at the time of their 2005 and 2006 dealings. “The mistake was he had been a contributor and somebody involved in politics,” he said.

Obama said that when he questioned Rezko about news reports of his questionable political dealings, his friend assured him there was nothing wrong. “My instinct was to believe him,” he said.

Ah, I get it - "Mistakes were made".  Haven't I been saying that Barack Hussein Obama and Bill Clinton have quite a lot in common?

Then again, competence was never a trait the Clintonoids ever tried to play up about their guy, other than in the amorphous sense of him being the second most brilliant hominid on the planet after his overbearing bulldyke of a wife.  Obama, by rather glaring contrast, is making his judgment a major campaign selling point.

In that sense, I can't top Ensign Ed:

Here’s Obama on why he’s the better candidate:

"In a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters."

And here’s Obama on his Rezko entanglement:

Obama also said for the first time that his private real estate transactions with Rezko involved repeated lapses of judgment.

I feel so much better now.

And this man wants to directly negotiate with every nuclear-armed rogue, nutcase, and tinpot on the planet?

Well, I guess he and Adolph Ahmadinejad could compare their respective auras.  One wonders if that will be before or after President Hussein pardons Rezko and then appoints him his Secretary of Commerce.

~  ~  ~

You know, Senator Obama and I do have a few things in common: species, gender, nationality, and we've both known and respected our respective pastors for upwards of twenty years.

My pastor is one of the godliest human beings I have ever known.  Possessed of a gentle self-deprecating wit that reveals his underlying Christ-like humility, he knows the calling to which God...er, called him.  Yes, he's a fellow conservative, and he'll take the occasional jab at Empress Hillary - but not from behind the pulpit.  When he preaches, it isn't politics, it's the Word of God.  Period.  If it had been otherwise, my wife's and my first visit would have been our last.

B.O.'s pastor is....

Well, d'ya remember how it came out not long ago that the "Reverend" Jeremiah Wright of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ was a big fan of Calypso Louis Farrakhan?  Let's just say that was a vast understatement:

As J-Ger points out:

Some may quibble with that description. Obama's mother was white, the Obamas' income hit $1.7 million in 2005 and $991,000 in 2006, and he went to Columbia University and Harvard Law School.

But despite all that "whiteness," Barack Obama is still really "black".  And anybody who points out his "white" traits are racists.  Right.

Also, for what it's worth, Jesus Christ, in His human nature, was an ethnic Jew, not black. 

As Clubber Lang said in Rocky III, "I gotta lotta more fo ya, I gotta lotta mo...."

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after September 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda's attacks because of its own terrorism.

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on September 16, 2001.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.

D'ya perhaps begin to see from where Senator Obama gets his Ameriphobia and insipient pacifism and compulsion to prostrate himself and the country before our enemies?  Perhaps once he's president he'll appoint Rev'rund Wright as his Secretary of Defense.

And still there's more:

[In a speech made at Howard University in January 2006] Mr. Wright thundered on: “America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole twenty-seven years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.”

His voice rising, Mr. Wright said, “We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic. . . . We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means. . . .”

Concluding, Mr. Wright said: “We started the AIDS virus . . . We are only able to maintain our level of living by making sure that Third World people live in grinding poverty. . . .”

Whereas in reality, a place in which Rev'rund Wright would evidently be a "stranger in a strange land," communism and Islamic Fundamentalism are the world's biggest killers, and would dearly love to kill every last American, including Rev'rund Wright; Democrats are all for drug importation; we didn't bomb Cambodia soon enough, and never did bomb Nicaragua; the South Africans imprisoned the communist terrorist Nelson Mandela, and even the left-leaning Amnesty International never once in those twenty-seven years classified Mandela as a political prisoner; and the apartheid regime was the lesser of two evils (the marxist African National Congress was the alternative, and Robert Mugabe's genocidal communist regime in Zimbabwe - the former Rhodesia - amply shows why).  Matter of fact, I seem to recall that when Mandela was on his post-release rock-star-like tour of the U.S. back in the early '90s, he extolled the virtues of Fidel Castro and Muammar Khadaffy and the Palestine Liberation Organization as well.  Oh, and the Bush Administration has done more than all its predecessors combined to fight the spread of AIDS in Africa.

Hmm; maybe Wright will be Obama's Secretary of State instead.

At this point you may be wondering where the future vice president of the United States was in all this.  I mean, it is true that he's not directly responsible for what his spiritual mentor (and, until a few hours ago, campaign advisor) says.  But, to employ a scatalogical metaphor, there's a reason why you wash your hands after wiping your ass: the act of doing the latter guarantees that you're going to get some of it on you, even if you can't actually see it.  And it is beyond the pale of plausibility to expect the American public to believe that Barack Obama wiped for that many years and never once had his pastor's fecal rhetoric attain visibility.

Yet that, in a progression very reminiscent of Trent Lott's tap-dance away from his Strom Thurmond comments five years ago, is essentially the excuse B.O. is trying to put over:

I am quite familiar with the expression "church family".  Perhaps that's the context in which Obama offered the aforequote.  But there is a difference between a church family and your own family: you don't have a choice about the latter; you do of the former.  And if you go to a church and hear a load of paranoid, racist, seditious, anti-Semitic bilge vomited from its pulpit on a weekly basis and don't agree with it, isn't it reasonable to assume that you would either go to the pastor and try to reason with him, or formally object, or simply - oh, I dunno - stop worshipping there?  And by venturing the opinion that he doesn't consider Rev'rund Wright's wrong rants to be "particularly controversial," isn't Obama as much as endorsing them?

And doesn't that bring us back to the "j" word?  Ensign Ed again:

Are we starting to see a pattern here? When Obama has an associate who proves to be an embarrassment, he says he simply didn’t know anything about their activities. I never heard those sermons. I never asked him about the rumors of his legal troubles.

This brings even Obama's public relations judgment into question.  How can a "man of the people" be so unempathetic, so tin-eared as to fail to grasp how his pastor's race-baiting and hate-mongering would sound to the public at large, even if he had no discernable problem with - or had long since become numbed to - it?

Well, somebody must have told him, because the initial "What's the big deal?" shrug didn't last for long.  Here was the first backstep:

In a statement to ABCNews.com, Obama's press spokesman Bill Burton said, "Senator Obama has said repeatedly that personal attacks such as this have no place in this campaign or our politics, whether they're offered from a platform at a rally or the pulpit of a church. Senator Obama does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms. Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Sen. Obama deeply disagrees. But now that he is retired, that doesn't detract from Sen. Obama's affection for Rev. Wright or his appreciation for the good works he has done."

What "personal attacks"?  Rev'rund Wright made no "personal attacks".  He attacked America, he attacked the very people whose votes his protege is trying to capture, and did it from behind a church pulpit - doesn't Senator Obama, as an orthodox secular liberal, believe in the separation of church and state?  Or is that yet another race-based special dispensation?  And how can Obama listen to those weekly left-wing political screeds and not "think of the pastor of his church in political terms" when "the pastor of his church" is defining himself in precisely that way?

Run the next B.O. quote...:

Obama's first answer reminds me of Captain Picard's apology to Commander Worf in Star Trek: First Contact for having earlier called the Klingon a "coward":

PICARD: Mr. Worf, I regret some of the things I said to you.

WORF (in a low growl): "Some"?

With just which of his pastor's "controversial statements" does Senator Obama disagree and with which does he concur?  That'd be a handy little piece of information to have when going into that voting booth, dontcha think?

Obama's second answer reminds me of a George Carlin etymology bit.  He's pointing out the absurdity of some everyday expressions and comes to "It's the quite guys you have to watch" (paraphrased):

If two guys come into a bar and the first one quietly sits down, orders a drink, and minds his own business, while the second one immediately starts hollering, "I'm gonna kill the next mother[bleep]er who comes in here!!!!!", who are you going to watch?

If your spiritual mentor makes a habit of using religion as a pretext for racist, leftist political agitating, can the simple act of pointing it out really be called "cherry-picking"?

How about this Obama quote from January 2007:

What I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice. He’s much more of a sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible and that I’m not losing myself in some of the hype and hoopla and stress that’s involved in national politics.

That in itself is a blatant contradiction.  A politician consulting somebody as a "sounding board" IS seeking their "day-to-day" political advice.  And given the bent of "Pastor" Wright's "moral" compass, if Obama made a habit of consulting it for his philosophical direction, that only makes his current backpedaling even more disingenuous.

Finally, B.O. arrived at as blunt and unequivocal a repudiation of his spiritual guru as he could muster:

Let me say at the outset that I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy. I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies. I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it’s on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue…

Notice how Obama's denunciation is unequivocal in general but equivocates like a madman when he zeroes in on Rev'rund Wright?  What happens when the next video clip emerges?  Will B.O. have to issue a statement for that one?  And the next one?  And the next one?  And the next one?  You know there has to be more of that raving where the thus-far disclosed stuff came from.

Rev. Wright preached the gospel of Jesus, a gospel on which I base my life. In other words, he has never been my political advisor; he’s been my pastor. And the sermons I heard him preach always related to our obligation to love God and one another, to work on behalf of the poor, and to seek justice at every turn.

Sorry, Senator, but I don't hear a whole lot of love coming from your pastor's pulpit.  And I've NEVER heard a minister of the Gospel go on a profanity spree as a vehicle for inculcating God's Word.  The LORD is "not willing that any should perish, but that all may have eternal life."  Wouldn't a sermon on II Chronicles 7:14 have been more appropriate than shouting, "God damn America!  God damn America!"  Perhaps if he was truly preaching of the Kingdom of God rather than trying to set it up for him through [*AHEM*] tools such as yourself, he might have been worthy of the calling you claim for him.

The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.

I guess Our Mr. Hussein is one of those dads with the cling-free sticking to the back of his sport coat who prefers to sit in the back pews so nobody will notice his snoring.

But let's give Mrs. Clinton's running mate the benefit of the doubt.  Let's swallow whole the notion that he could have been a close disciple of Jeremiah Wright for two decades, gotten married by this man, his kids baptized by this man, and yet had NO IDEA WHATSOGODDAMNAMERICAEVER that he was actually a crazed, bigoted lunatic.  Don't you think that when this little detail did come to Obama's attention, it would have shocked and disappointed him to such an extent that he'd have been morally compelled to leave Trinity United?  Or at the very least politically compelled, given that he had just announced his presidential candidacy?  Whether the ties-cutting was genuine or expedient, shouldn't it have come fifteen months ago?  What does it say about Barack Obama's [drumroll] judgment that it never occurred to him that his "crazy old uncle" just might become a gargantuan political liability?

Apparently some or all of this did occur to some of Obama's campaign tacticians.  Who knows, maybe the Obamanations leaked this, uh, Wright stuff themselves, reasoning that they already had a bad week last week and there's more than a month before the Pennsylvania primary for it to blow over, particularly with a [*ahem*] sympathetic media on their side, so it was a good time to get it out of the way.  Regardless, I have to question the decision not to leave Trinity United for a "less controversial" D.C. house of worship.  Even if doing so would have looked obviously cynical, politically-calculated, and raised the same questions about why he never bothered to walk away from Rev'rund Wright before, the distancing would still have been a net plus.

If doing so fifteen months ago would have been a stretch, doing so now is functionally impossible.  True, it's not the dire threat to the national body politic that Mitt Romney's mormonism would have been, but Barack Obama has gotten Wright's, er, stuff on him, and that's a PR stain that is never going to wash completely clean.

~  ~  ~

Gotta cover the earmark base.  J-Ger reports:

Dan Riehl notes, via Amanda Carpenter, that in the list of earmarks [Obama] requested, $1 million was requested for the construction of a new hospital pavilion at the University Of Chicago. The request was put in in 2006.

You know who works for the University of Chicago Hospital?

Michelle Obama. She's vice president of community affairs.

As Byron noted, "In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office."

Looks like that raise was worth it.

That "new politics" sure looks a lot like the old politics, doesn't it?

~  ~  ~

And last, but not least, the ebony JFK had his own loose canon subordinate go off:

A prominent gay adviser to the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama resigned Tuesday after reports surfaced that he wrote a blistering denunciation of rival presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton that brought up President Bill Clinton’s extra-marital affair with a White House intern.

Maxim Thorne, a member of the Obama campaign’s GLBT Leadership Council and former chief operating officer at the Human Rights Campaign, wrote that Hillary Clinton should disclose her whereabouts “when Monica was having sex with Bill.”

Why?  Should they have had a threesome instead?

A pity that Rev'rund Wright appears to have never preached on this passage (at least on the occasions when Senator Obama stayed awake).  If he had, the New Messiah might be having a better week.