2008 Election CoverUps

Obama sleight-of-hand speech on racism in America

The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud

Charles Krauthammer, columnist for the Washington Post, points out some key facts about Obama's recent state-of-racism address to the U.S., which was in response to his ties to a controversial, anti-American pastor Jeremiah Wright.

• 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 (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?"
• 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 has been fawned over as a great meditation on race, but is little more than an elegantly crafted, justification of that scandalous dereliction.
• His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence and (b) white guilt.
• Moral equivalence: Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?
• "I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was Grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. In addition, Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus' time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.
• Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?
• White guilt: Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. In addition, by history, he means the history of white racism.
• Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then he proceeds to do precisely that. What lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.

Get The Full Scoop

WashingtonPost.com

The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud
By Charles Krauthammer

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Our Take

Krauthammer is right on target about Obama's speech. How long will we continue to foment anger and justify reverse racism as a way to atone for past racism or as a way to say racism is wrong?

Obama's speech does nothing to explain why a racist has been his mentor for years. How would the black community feel if John McCain's pastor was racist and blamed black people for the woes of America? What is at stake here is a question of fairness and substance and Obama's speech falls short on both counts.