At the risk of turning this into a Jeremiah Wright blog, let me do a document dump on the latest on the Rev. Let's just say it hasn't been a good day. Obama supporter Andrew Sullivan calls on Obama to disown Rev. Wright, something Obama said he could not do in his famous "race speech." Rod Dreher suspects that Sullivan is the first in the line of many who will become disillusioned with Obama as they learn precisely how left-wing he is. Ross Douthat's estimation of Jeremiah Wright's weekend is quite direct: Jeremiah Wright, SOB. Mark Hemingway questions Wrights exegesis, while Prof. Schramm thinks that Obama is done, thanks to Wright.
Here is the transcript to Wright's speech before the National Press Club. I have not seen the video. Seems like it was more energetic than most Press Club events. In this speech Wright defends innate racial differences:
Being different does not mean one is deficient. It simply means one is different, like snowflakes, like the diversity that God loves. Black music is different from European and European music. It is not deficient. It is just different. Black worship is different from European and European-American worship. It is not deficient. It is just different. Black preaching is different from European and European- American preaching. It is not deficient. It is just different. It is not bombastic. It is not controversial. It's different. (Laughter, applause.)
(snip)
Black learning styles are different from European and European- American learning styles. They are not deficient. They are just different.
Wright does not defend genetic racial superiority, but he does defend innate racial difference. On the other hand, he does defend Louis Farrakhan who does believe in racial superiority:
What I think about him, as I said on Bill Moyers and it got edited out -- how many other African-Americans or European-Americans do you know that can get 1 million people together on the mall? He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century; that's what I think about him. I said, as I said on Bill Moyers, when Louis Farrakhan speaks it's like E.F. Hutton speaks. All black America listens. Whether they agree with him or not, they listen.
Now, I am not going to put down Louis Farrakhan any more than Mandela will put down Fidel Castro. You remember that Ted Koppel show where Ted wanted Mandela to put down Castro because Castro is our enemy, and he said, "You don't tell me who my enemies are; you don't tell me who my friends are."
Let me suggest that if you cannot denounce a Farrakhan or a Castro without significant equivocation than you have a damaged moral compass.
Wright also buys into Marxist inspired theology:
Now, in the 1960s, the term "liberation theology" began to gain currency with the writings and the teachings of preachers, pastors, priests and professors from Latin America. Their theology was done from the underside. Their viewpoint was not from the top down or from a set of teachings which undergirded imperialism. Their viewpoints, rather, were from the bottom up, the thoughts and understandings of God, the faith, religion and the bible from those whose lives were ground under, mangled and destroyed by the ruling classes or the oppressors. Liberation theology started in and started from a different place. It started from the vantage point of the oppressed.
What liberation theology started from was a Marxist interpretation of history. This is why John Paul II chastised liberation theologians for politicizing the gospel (yes, I know Wright is not Catholic). Liberation theology plays with the heresy of pelagianism, which like Marxism denies the fallen nature of man.
Barack Obama claims he is "shocked" at what he is hearing from Wright:
Obama said he was ``shocked'' by Wright's statements during a speech at the National Press Club yesterday in Washington.
``The person I saw yesterday was not the person I had come to know over 20 years,'' said Obama, an Illinois senator.
This strains credulity. Did Obama, a smart highly educated man, really not know that he was going to a Marxist inspired church? Did he really not know that his church preaches a gospel of racial exclusivity? I mean, it's on the dang website. Are we really to believe that after twenty years he is "shocked" that Rev. Wright holds those views? If this is true then Barack Obama is so dense that he cannot possibly be qualified to be president. But he isn't that dense. He's just a hedger, like your stereotypical politician. He hedged his bets with Rev. Wright when he was a Chicago politician who needed street cred, and now that he is being called on it he is going to fold that hand.
Unlike others I think Obama will weather this storm and come out of it a stronger candidate. He will get his party's nomination and he can still win in the fall. He will use any attacks on this subject as a reason to play the victim and decry the politics of negativity. Meanwhile, through his surrogates he will beat on John McCain like Ali beat on Frazier.
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