More right reax to Obama's Wright plight
Posted 1 year 46 weeks ago byEven at this late hour, the blogosphere remains abuzz over Barack Obama's break with his long-time pastor Jeremiah Wright. What's next? Who knows? Maybe Obama will ask Wright to go down to Florida to do a... er, fundraiser with some guy named Anthony. As Kathryn Jean Lopez reminds us at the Corner, Wright himself called today's events almost a year ago exactly. Here are some more comments across the right-wing of the blogosphere on Obama and Wright and what it all means:
John Podhoretz: "It may be that Obama came to believe he could talk his way out of anything, and he did not want to disavow Wright -- not, it would be my guess, because he loves him so dearly but because he understands that the kind of energy generated by Wright and the Wrights of this country has done him a great deal of good over the past few months and he didn’t want to jeopardize it. Which would be another mark of his political short-sightedness. As the Democratic frontrunner, Obama should have begun to pivot to the center, and the perfect moment for doing that would have been to kick Wright to the curb weeks before the Pennsylvania primary. Instead, he has allowed Hillary Clinton to become the candidate of the Democratic center."
Jennifer Rubin: "So what is 'particularly' noteworthy is what got Obama angry: Wright’s lack of loyalty and concern for him. Now ,that’s natural, I suppose, but it also shows a strange ranking of priorities. Insulting his country, spouting bizarre conspiracy theories, voicing racism and much more -- none of that is what 'particularly' triggered a repudiation. That, as much as the intellectual inconsistency (”I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother”), should provoke concern among people looking for a selfless leader for the new era in American politics."
Joseph Knippenberg: "The ground will shift from whether Obama disagrees with the Rev. to why it took so long for the scales to fall from his eyes. This is clearly not a new or changed Wright. And while I’ll concede that you can’t size up a pastor all at once (especially if you’re as innocent of the ways of the church as Obama was twenty years ago), who he is and what he believes ought to have been clear enough long before now. So Obama’s judgment indeed becomes the issue. And he will continue to be distracted by questions about Wright, either putting him off message or making it difficult for him to pierce the fog of this particular political war."
Hugh Hewitt: "So, was Obama just as naive as a child for 20 years, or as disingenuous as any major political figure of the last forty years when he denied knowing the real Pastor Wright this morning? Either way it creates a huge issue for voters. Is Obama a dupe, or just duplicitous? Do you want him in charge of the nation's security, making judgments about our enemies?"
Michelle Malkin: "Who knew that the greatest threat to his presidential campaign would come from the preacher who married him, baptized him and prayed with him? Barack Obama should have known. That's who. Take that judgment and shove it on a pretty campaign poster. 'Yes, we can'? Try 'Yes, you should have.'"
John Hinderaker: "The problem for Obama is that his books do not, in fact, support the conclusion that he is entirely out of sympathy with what we now know to be Jeremiah Wright's noxious views. To be sure, Obama has never suggested that the federal government developed the AIDS virus. But Obama's own account of his first encounter with Wright's preaching, as related in his book Dreams From My Father, reveals that Obama knew of Wright's virulent racism from the beginning, and that it was a racist screed by Wright that initially drew Obama to his church."
Richard Baehr: "One part of this story that I have not seen discussed is that while the Obama distancing from Wright is aimed at shoring up support among white voters, his campaign seems to take for granted that he will suffer no losses among black voters for his sharp statements Tuesday. In other words, they are counting on black voters winking and nodding their approval of Obama's words, as if Wright were out there on his own, when in fact he is not, and many ministers and black talk radio hosts speak just as Wright does, and have been doing so for years. ......In fact, we have been told repeatedly these last few weeks, that whites just do not understand the black church vernacular, and we live in separate societies on Sundays. This may be true, but Obama is now saying he is not part of that angry chorus on Sundays, and his church's minister is out of line. Not to play the cynic, but I find this sudden split a bit inauthentic."














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