The Oreo Discourse

Evidently expectations for Barack Obama's race speech in Philadelphia today ran higher than the heavens in some quarters:

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

Ah, so Obama's finest speeches are rhetorically hallucinogenic?  They get you high, but they're neither informative nor inspirational?  Or is it the abnormally high yeast (or Sugar Twin) content in the funny brownies that get distributed to the crowd before Obama's every dissertation?  I understand they go great with Kool-Aid.  Ezra Klein sounds like he's had quite a few already.

Of course, not all Obamanations were as confident.  Some, like Andrew Sullivan, attempted to lower expectations by pre-emptive demonization of every heretic who didn't bow down on cue:

Today will be a crucial day. It will be a day when we will discover if America’s racial environment - and the emotions and feelings and anger and fears that it entails - can allow for a black man - with all that entails - to become president.

Why does a black man necessarily "entail" anything?  Why is he not an individual rather than another brick in the ethnic wall?  Why is wishing to view Barack Obama that way not "elevating"?

Because it's not up to us how we accept Barack Obama; nor is it up to us whether we accept him.  We are obligated to accept him - and elect him - and worship him - in the way that he offers himself - complete with nearly half a lifetime of racist inculcation by his angry spiritual mentor - or that "proves" that we're the racists.

There's nothing divisive about that attitude, now is there?  Nor the perpetuitous ethnic double-standard that AS grants:

And so there is a difference, pace Jonah, between a white charlatan like Robertson who chooses to demonize minorities in the name of Jesus and a pastor like Wright who vents rage against a majority that has, in the not-so-distant past, given African-Americans every reason to be angry. And there is a difference between a white politician (like Bush) who seeks to enjoy the support of a Robertson without ever challenging his ugly dimensions and a black politician who, while remaining in a congregation like Wright’s, nonetheless has written and spoken as movingly as anyone in my lifetime about the need for racial reconciliation and understanding.

Put more bluntly, it's unforgivable for a charlatan like Pat Robertson to "demonize minorities" (though I can't recall a single instance of his having done so - anybody with links to such denunciations feel free to send them to me), but it's perfectly okay for a charlatan like Jeremiah Wright to demonize whites, and especially Jews, because blacks are, and always will be, "official" victims.

Kinda makes me wonder when black supremacists like Our Mr. Hussein's "pastor" are going to start offering up the profuse gratitude they owe the old Confederacy and the institution of slavery that afflicted their ancestors.  Without that historic injustice as a vehicle for their "anger"-driven power-grabbing, justifying worse hatred, bigotry, and extremism than even the KKK ever dreamed of, where would sunny hucksters like Senator Obama be?

With all of that as the preface, let's take a look at what may well be the crossroads of Barack Obama's presidential bid.

Don't worry, I'm not going to parse it word by word.  Most of it is standard B.O. boilerplate we've heard countless times before.  Instead, I'll, uh, cherry-pick actionable excerpts.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

Translation: I'm only a black man by marriage, so I needed Uncle Jeremiah to make me "authentic".

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

Translation: P.T. Barnum was right - there IS a sucker born every minute.  Too bad I was damnfool enough to keep Uncle Jeremiah around to puncture the illusion.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

When that crazy old coot detonated like a PR nuke right over my campaign by calling upon the Almighty to damn all the suckers I spent all those months unifying.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

Well, my candidacy IS an exercise in the asuasion of white liberal guilt.  Too bad I'll be limited to two terms, because I could run for the next thousand years and not empty out that bottomless pit.

Okay, I guess I can't deny that my pastor is bigoted, hatemongering old bastard.  Not completely, anyway.  But you can waterboard me and I still won't give up any more than gag-inducing euphemistic qualifiers like "some" and "potential to".  Any of you for whom that's not good enough are simply the white crackers Uncle Jeremiah says you are.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

All right, I guess even I can't put over the fantasy that I attended this church for over twenty years, tithed it tens of thousands of dollars of the fortune I've amassed from sacrificing my black "authenticity," and managed to somehow never notice that my pastor was Bull Connor in robes.  But hey, isn't every church's pastor like that?

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

I could have my nuts crushed in a vice right now and it would be less painful than having to carry out this pandering to all you worthless honkeys.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Ah, left-wing ideology, blessed relief!

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. 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

Hey, most of America that my spirtual guru and chief political advisor (now gone underground) has completely alienated, I'm with you!

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.

....but only to a certain point.  The point beyond which I can't say that it doesn't matter if Uncle Jeremiah is an educated ex-Marine who masquerades as a man of the cloth, his ethnicity alone entitles him to hate all of your white guts.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity....

Hey, I'm not gonna miss a chance to get that turkey out of the remainder bin and into a second printing.

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.

"Bawdy humor"?  How does that square with Phillipians 4:8?  How does "GOD DAMN AMERICA!  GOD DAMN AMERICA!" square with ""LORD, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?" Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times."?  Styles of worship can certainly vary, but not the God Who is the object of our worship, nor His Word that we are commanded to live out day by day.  Sounds to me like even Senator Obama is arguing that that Word ought to be subordinated to the dictates of "the black experience in America", which would explain the "bitterness and bias" at Trinity United.

Link: sevenload.com

Obama’s a craven liar who tolerated racism for years and then suddenly decided it was intolerable, not when he first started running for president but when ABC News finally crammed this verbal feces down his gullet, thereby warranting an “historic,” ass-saving speech to preserve his candidacy. Liberals are only too happy to believe it’s all part of his grand strategy to heal America by accruing power to himself. Gingrich thinks otherwise. Why? Because he’s a racist, silly, that’s why.

And because Mr. Newt recognizes a slick, Americanized yet aspiring Fidel Castro/Hugo Chavez clone when he sees one.

UPDATE II: So much for the "Obamicans"?