When we hire anyone for a job, we look at their record. Barack Obama’s record is now clear for all to see.
For two decades, Obama has been attending a church where paranoid hatred of America is preached on a regular basis. For two decades, the senator has counted as his minister, friend and adviser a man who says that America created the AIDS virus to kill blacks, puts blacks in prison rather than killing them off, and deserved to be attacked on 9/11 because of its racism.
In his eloquent speech in Philadelphia, Obama sought to distance himself from that record while retaining support from blacks who — as my friend Fox News commentator Juan Williams puts it — revel in looking at themselves as victims.
As in the past, Obama carefully parsed his words. Without specifically saying he heard these extremist comments, Obama acknowledged hearing comments by his longtime minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., that “could be considered controversial.”
“Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views?” Obama asked. “Absolutely — just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”
In making that remark, Obama maligned the vast majority of clergymen who would never utter the kind of anti-American hatred that Wright spews forth on a regular basis.
At the same time, Obama implicitly defended Wright by saying his anger against America was understandable.
“For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years,” Obama said. “That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table.”
Obama went on to malign the many black churches that would never condone featuring such hatred in their services.
Occasionally, the anger “finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews,” Obama said. “The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.”
Thus, while he condemned Wright’s statements at other points in his speech, Obama was condoning the mindset of victimhood.
As Williams, author of “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America,” has told Newsmax, that victim mindset “is so self-defeating in the black community and one that is played on by weak black leadership that chooses to have black people identified as victims rather than inspiring them as people who have overcome.”
Williams adds, “In posing as victims, they say the most prejudiced and vicious things, not only about whites but about America. They call it theology. In fact, it’s nothing but bigotry.”
Now Obama says he would not have belonged to the church if he had regularly heard Wright’s hate-filled statements. Yet when he announced for the presidency, Obama disinvited Wright from giving an invocation because his sermons can get “kind of rough.” Why did Obama not resign from the church then?
In December, Wright gave an award to Louis Farrakhan for lifetime achievement. Why did Obama not resign then? Instead, after Newsmax broke the story on Jan. 14, Obama dissembled about the issue, saying the award was for Farrakhan’s work with ex-offenders. Neither the presentation nor the article about it in the church magazine said anything about ex-offenders.
The truth is that Obama joined the church and adopted Wright as his friend and mentor because — beyond the good works that the church performs, as do most religious organizations — he feels an affinity for what Wright has to say. Michelle Obama’s comment that, for the first time in her adult life, she feels proud of America, highlights the fact that she has the victim mentality Wright promotes.
How could Michelle Obama, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School who makes more than $1 million a year with her husband, say she is proud of America for the first time? The same way Wright can say, “God d*** America.”
Those who are gullible will accept Obama’s brilliant rhetoric as the compass to his thinking. They can try to convince themselves that a man who continues to belong to a church that describes itself on its Web site as “unashamedly black” will unify the country.
Whether hiring a president, an electrician, or a plumber, they ignore the candidate’s track record at their own peril.
Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via
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