Bill Clinton had bimbo eruptions. Barack Obama, apparently, has pastor eruptions. The latest is Catholic pastor Michael Pfleger, another Obama supporter who got a little carried away last Sunday as preached to Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. I am telling you that is some rockin' church. You really have to watch the YouTube clip to appreciate this. I got it from Powerline. Here are samples of the transcript from Fox:
In it, Pfleger mocked Clinton for getting choked up on camera before the New Hampshire primary in January.
“When Hillary was crying … I really don’t believe it was put on. I really believe that she just always thought ‘This is mine. I’m Bill’s wife. I’m white. And this is mine’,” he said, shouting at times. “Then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey I’m Barack Obama’. And she said, ‘Oh damn! Where did you come from? I’m white! I’m entitled! There’s a black man stealing my show’!”
After that, he simulated Clinton crying and then said: “She wasn’t the only one crying. There was a whole lot of white people crying … I’m sorry. I don’t wanna get you in any more trouble. The live streaming just went out again.”
He also said at one point, “America has been raping people of color and America has to pay the price for the rape. “
Now I have to admit that I was suspicious of Ms. Clinton's tears. I think that if a Clinton passes gas in range of a microphone, it was due to calculation. But I did consider the possibility that they were genuine. She has been aiming at the White House for decades, and suddenly it seemed to be slipping away. That would make me cry, if I had such ambitions. But now I learn that Senator Clinton wasn't crying because she was getting beat. She cried because she was getting beat by a Black man. It was raw racism that poured out of her tear ducts. She thought she was entitled to the nomination (that part is surely right). But Pastor Pfleger thinks she felt entitled because she was White.
This is utter nonsense. I think the Clinton's are guilty of cynically using the race card in this election. But the key word there is "cynically." There is no reason to suspect that Senator Clinton was offended by the race of her competitor, and not by the fact that he was winning.
Watching the tape, Pastor Pfleger strikes me as a text book case of what Norman Mailer called "the White Negro." That's a White guy who wants to be cool, and thinks he can be cool by acting Black. Pfleger does it a lot better than most. He has mastered the style of Black preaching that we saw in the Jeremiah Wright clips. But this kind of thing is always a conceit. Can any well-educated and privileged White man really understand what it is like to be Black in America? I doubt it. Black American culture has been very powerful. It has generated some of the most important of Americas gifts: blues and jazz, for example. No wonder White guys want to be part of that cool.
The most disturbing thing about this episode is that it reinforces the impression that the Trinity United Church of Christ, which Barack Obama attended for twenty years, is deeply committed to a gospel of victimology. America is very bad place. All White people are guilty of racism. And if they do not agree with anything that Pastor Pfleger or Trinity United Church may believe, that is racism expressed. So anyone who votes against Barack Obama in the primaries or in the general election, well, that's not choice, it's racism. This is pathological.
Pastor Pfleger forgot, in the heat of his sermon, that there were other people watching. He let us see what he says when he thinks he is surrounded by right thinking people. What does Obama think and say when the microphones are off?
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