Do the (Jeremiah) Wright Thing

I’m convinced that Barack Obama really might be a supernatural being. He has the ability to both dismiss his racist and paranoid pastor, Jeremiah Wright, as “an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with”, AND also claim that he never heard any of these racist, paranoid rants. This is sort of like on Law and Order when a judge orders the jury to “disregard” a particularly inflammatory statement by counsel- Obama heard the statements, but he didn’t.

Jeremiah Wright is a bigot. A few of his statements paraphrased:

• The US government knew about Pearl Harbor before it happened (and decided that we really didn’t need all of those planes?)
• The US government invented HIV to keep the black community down (and to provide collegiate researchers with a project for a few decades?)
• 9/11 was merely America’s foreign policy coming home (because we were so out-of-line in the Balkans, right?)
• White people are the “skunks of the planet” (I can’t add to that one.)

Here we have the candidate who will unite the two parties (but is rated as the #1 most liberal US Senator) and the man who will unite America (but belonged to a separatist African-American church with a racist pastor for 20 years.) Obama has claimed, most notably in his borrowed speech, that “words matter”. Now he claims that the words of the man who married the couple, baptized their children, served as Obama’s spiritual advisor for 20 years, and led the candidate’s African-American Religious committee just don’t matter.

Obama claims that he has never heard the angry rhetoric that Jeremiah Wright spews every week. I have heard this morning (haven’t done the fact-checking yet) that a reporter has claimed to have been with Obama at the Trinity church during one of these bigoted, paranoid, divisive sermons. It appears that Obama is lying, plain and simple. Oprah Winfrey left the Trinity Church to distance herself from Wright’s rhetoric, which she ostensibly disagreed with. If Oprah knew about Wright’s positions, how could Obama be completely unaware of what his pastor of 20 years was saying (quite loudly)?

This morning, Jay Weber, a conservative talk show host, described Wright as “Archie Bunker, but far angrier.” This really says it all. But I do have a question for the gentle reader:

If I were a white male candidate for president, and the man who served as my spiritual advisor for 20 years, married my wife and I, and baptized my children ranted loudly about “mud people”, the “Zionist agenda” and called black Americans “the skunks of the planet”, would I have the slightest chance to win the Democratic party nomination? Would I have made it through even one primary without media scrutiny of my pastor?

I guess the rules are different for African-Americans. But we knew that- Geraldine Ferraro told us so last week. And boy, is she paying for that message…