THE KEY THING TO KNOW ABOUT BARACK OBAMA
is that the man isn’t a liar, he’s a bullshitter in Harry Frankfurt’s sense — he has no regard for the truth one way or the other. He isn’t intent on deceiving you, he just wants to tell you whatever he needs to to get along and get what he wants. This has a lot in common with Shelby Steele’s various discussions of Obama as a “bargainer”, a man without an authentic identity, and an “invisible man”.
Barack Obama was up to his old bullshitting again last night, in his interview with Larry King. It is well known that Jeremiah Wright and his Trinity Church are very much not your typical black church. *Jeremiah Wright is a pioneer of “Black Liberation Theology”, he’s a former member of the Nation of Islam, and he’s the one who very controversially introduced many of the themes of Black Nationalist Muslims into the black Christian church. If fact, every aspect of the Trinity church are centered around the racist themes of “Black Liberation Theology” which many Christians must understand as fundamentally sacrilegious in their racist distortions of the Christian creed.
Jeremiah Wright himself says that his church was very much outside the mainstream of black churches in Chicago, as he explains in this interview:
I am not your typical garden-variety African-American clergy person, and because I’m not — [Obama] was talking about organizing the churches in those early days. I said, man, you don’t know who you’re talking to. They don’t like me. I’m not well liked in the city of Chicago, so you tell them you’re a member of Trinity, you’re going to turn off preachers before they ever get to know you, ’cause they’re going to associate you with me, and just that association could be a negative in terms of how you are perceived in their eyes before you open your mouth — “Oh, you go to Jeremiah’s church.” That kind of negative imaging I said might be harmful to him in terms of what he was trying to do in building coalitions and getting other churches to do things, again, for the benefit of the people. That would never happen just because they’re going to associate your name with mine.
Contrast the truth about Jeremiah Wright and Trinity Church with this bullshitting by Barack Obama about his church on Larry King:
the church that I have attended for 15 years is a very conventional Christian church, a African-American church, squarely grounded in the tradition of the African-American church, that we talk mostly about Christ and salvation and sin and mercy and justice and hope.
This isn’t intentional deception, this is bullshit. Obama assumes the audience doesn’t need to be deceived, it’s an ignorant audience with a desire to believe a particular thing, and Obama is more than happy to tell them what they want to believe. He gets what he wants (at the price of being genuine) and the audience gets what it wants (at the price of being bullshitted), and everyone feels good about themselves. It’s all bullshit, but it buys everyone what they “bargained” for, as explained by Shelby Steele.
UPDATE: I call it bullshit, Charles Krauthammer calls it fraud. Also — Powerline calls “bullshit” on the post-modern “narrative” dodge used by Jeremiah Wright’s racist successor at Barack Omama’s church.
UPDATE: McClatchy takes a look inside Obama’s “conventional” church:
Jesus is black. Merging Marxism with Christian Gospel may show the way to a better tomorrow. The white church in America is the Antichrist because it supported slavery and segregation. Those are some of the more provocative doctrines that animate the theology at the core of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Barack Obama’s church ..
Via Instapundit via Gateway Pundit. Obama’s Church Promotes “White Church Is AntiChrist”
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2008/03/ruh-roh-media-reports-obamas-church.html
Gateway Pundit also has a link to what must be considered the ultimate in Obama bullshit:
(AP) Senator Barack Obama has told members of his denomination that some conservative Christian leaders have exploited and politicized religion to sow division. In a 30-minute speech before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ .. the Democratic presidential candidate said, “Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us.”
By Greg Ransom March 21, 2008
* [Cone's Black Liberation Theology is as follows:
"Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community ... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love."]
Kerry, I can understand your disappointment that Hillary Clinton in going to lose the Dem nomination, but is this kind of smear job really necessary?
You are factually wrong in several places here, starting with your assertion that Wright is “former member of the Nation of Islam.” That’s simply not true — read any bio of Wright.
In the interview you quoted from PBS, Wright also said of Obama, “He was a community organizer … He was the organizer of all the churches in Chicago and got us all working together across the denominational lines.” What a monster Obama is — he got people working together! BTW, I live in Chicago and Trinity is one of the two biggest black churches in the city, so it’s not true that it’s “very much outside the mainstream of black churches in Chicago.”
And, of course, if your going to quote this interview as a reliable source, then you must also believe this of what Wright said about Obama: “His position across the years has been I know who I am, I know what I believe, but I don’t disrespect you or diminish you because you have a different belief, and we don’t have to believe the same thing to get along and to build a better world — that we can coexist. That he happens to believe that Shiites and Sunnis and Orthodox Jews and Conservative Jews and Catholics and Protestants can all live in the same neighborhood and have their kids go to school together without fighting and killing each other. That doesn’t we stop praying at home or stop going to church or teach our kids our faith. … Yes, this is who we are, this is what we believe, but that doesn’t mean that somebody else who believes differently is inferior or that we hate them. That’s how I’ve seen faith operate in his life, and that’s one of the reasons I think he’s so successful in moving across the aisle, in moving across denominations, in moving across interfaith, talking to people who are not Christian without beating them over the head with his Christianity.”
Also, if Wright is such a crazy crank Black Liberation Theologist, then why did Bill Clinton invite him to the White House for spiritual counseling during the Lewinsky flap?
Watch the video for yourself here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hED5h5EAl28
Then, Kerry, without shame you went on to link to neocon sites like David Horowitz’s Front Page Mag, InstaPundit, Gateway Pundit, Powerline and such right-wing nutcases as Charles Krauthammer and Shelby Steele.
Do you know what Front Page Mag, just for example, has said about Hillary Clinton? Here’s a sample:
From David Horowitz in “Hillary Clinton and ‘The Third Way’ How America’s First Lady of the Left Has Bamboozled Liberals and Conservatives Alike,” Front Page Mag, June 22, 2000:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=BB3F7027-35CA-4777-8C3D-77B1494E4565
“…in a brilliantly etched and elegantly deconstructed portrait of Mrs. Clinton by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. Thus, the focus of The Case Against Hillary Clinton is not Mrs. Clinton’s kitsch Marxism or perverse feminism or cynical progressivism. Instead, it is her narcissism. It is this psychological nexus in which Noonan finds the key to Hillary Clinton’s public persona.” [...]
“New Left progressives—including Hillary Clinton and her comrade, Acting Deputy Attorney General Bill Lann Lee—were involved in supporting, or protecting or making excuses for violent anti-American radicals abroad like the Vietcong and anti-American criminals at home like the Black Panthers.* We did this then—just as progressives still do now—in the name of “social justice” and a dialectical world-view that made this deception appear ethical and the fantasy seem possible.”
Do you agree with Horowitz’s view of Hillary, Kerry?
How about this interview with Front Page editor Richard Poe from May 2004:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200405190007
FRONTPAGE: “Hillary’s Secret War tells us that Hillary personally led a secret police force from her office in the White House. Tell us about your proof and evidence.”
POE: “The operations of Hillary’s secret police have been copiously documented, to the point where the topic can hardly be called controversial any longer.
“During the Clinton years, journalists who probed too deeply into Clinton scandals ran terrible risks. Journalists were beaten, wiretapped, framed on criminal charges, fired and blacklisted. They experienced burglaries, IRS audits, smear campaigns and White-House-orchestrated lawsuits.
“Some may have paid the ultimate price. In February, 1998, just as the Clinton impeachment was gathering steam, Sandy Hume, the 28-year-old son of Fox News anchorman Brit Hume, suddenly turned up dead of a gunshot to the head. He was covering the U.S. Congress for the magazine The Hill, and was known for his excellent sources among Republican insiders. Sandy Hume supposedly committed suicide, but friends and associates have questioned the official story.”
Most of the other sites you quoted had similar opinions of Hillary. Do you embrace this view of her as well, Kerry?
If not, stop using these idiots as your sources for info on Obama.
Comment by RS Janes — May 9, 2008 @ 7:25 pm