Krauthammer Asks Real Questions Obama Declined to Address
If there was any doubt prior to this past week that Barack Obama is nothing more than your typical politician, those questions were answered. About the only thing left to ask is whether or not he is of a particular nasty breed of politicians; Chicago Machine Politicians.
Caught up in the issue of his judgement over hanging around a race-baiting pastor which he chose to associate with and even put on his campaign staff, Obama tried to revert to what he had been doing so successfully - giving long, flowery speeches with no substance. Of course his response to the controversy wooed those that really, really, really want to believe in him as the Messiah. But apart from the Kool Aid drinkers, the speech was a miserable flop as Charles Krauthammer so eloquently observes
The beauty of a speech is that you don’t just give the answers, you provide your own questions. “Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes.” So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.
An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which”controversial” remarks?
Wright’s assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented HIV “as a means of genocide against people of color”? Wright’s claim that America was morally responsible for Sept. 11 — “chickens coming home to roost” — because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?) What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them?
Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: “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?”
But that is not the question. The question is why didn’t he leave that church? Why didn’t he leave — why doesn’t he leave even today — a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) “God damn America”? Obama’s 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.
These are the real questions. They are the ones that really deserve to be answered and not with just hand waving dismissals.
People go to churches because they agree with the message. Obama will probably never admit that because that would mean he would have to admit agreeing with Rev. Wright.
Instead we are to believe that not only has Obama transcended race and politics, but he has also transcended religion and his own church and is also above that as well?
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