Obama says he's outraged by ex-pastor's comments

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

"I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday," Obama told reporters at a news conference.

After weeks of staying out of the public eye while critics lambasted his sermons, Wright made three public appearances in four days to defend himself. The former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago has been combative, providing colorful commentary and feeding the story Obama had hoped was dying down.

On Monday, Wright criticized the U.S. government as imperialist and stood by his suggestion that the United States invented the HIV virus as a means of genocide against minorities. "Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything," he said.

And perhaps even worse for Obama, Wright suggested that the church congregant secretly concurs.

"If Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected," Wright said. "Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."

Obama stated flatly that he doesn't share the views of the man who officiated at his wedding, baptized his two daughters and been his pastor for 20 years. The title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, came from a Wright sermon.

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Oh for cryin' out loud!

Obama's clearly in some deep trouble at the moment. Running scared, in fact. His rhetoric is now about denial, insisting that he's not in any way like his preacher of twenty years. You can't win with an argument of denial. As Noam Chomsky once said in frustration back in the 1980s when liberal French Zealots branded him a Nazi for supporting the free speech rights of a French academic who had denied the Holocaust, "What am I supposed to say, 'I am not a Nazi'?"

What I'd like to know is when Obama quit beating his wife.

The point is that this ongoing Scary-Black-Preacher-Gate scandal has exposed the cracks in the Senator from Illinois's soaring unity rhetoric. That is, Obama, as well as his supporters, seem to believe that, if he avoids actually talking about the deeply divisive issues facing our country, we can all come together as a post-racial, post-ideological, forward-moving nation. This was bunk from the beginning. I mean, as a campaign strategy, it's worked well. So far. But, to borrow a very apt and very recycled phrase, the chickens are coming home to roost.

There are just too many issues about which Americans disagree intensely. Reverend Wright may be jump starting the process, but this day was bound to come. Obama was always going to have to start talking about actual issues, always going to have to take sides. In this most recent attempt to continue sitting on the unity fence, to convince Americans that the scary Black preacher doesn't represent his views, Obama has already taken sides: he's alienated tens of thousands of African-Americans, white progressives, and others who essentially agree with Reverend Wright. And just like that, Obama's fallen of the fence.

I mean, I don't agree with everything Wright's said. The government creating AIDS assertion is flat out wrong. But the Reagan administration did sit on its hands while countless gay men died in the early 80s, and every administration since has ignored the soaring HIV infection rates in Africa. So Wright's wrong, but he's only a stone's throw away from the truth.

The only way for Obama to survive this crap-scandal is to take charge of the narrative. He's got to get out of the rhetoric of denial, which is now doing nothing but digging a bigger hole, and start talking about real issues, the ones that piss people off. He's got to take sides. He's got to declare enemies. He's got to tell Americans that, even though he would never phrase it as "God damn America," we have some horrific sins on our national conscience, with which we have never dealt.

The time for uplifting good vibes is over. Obama's got to roll up his sleeves and ball up his fists. Time to fight. 'Cause right now, he's getting his ass kicked.

Anyway, John Stewart gets the last word. As usual, his commentary makes more sense than anybody else's:



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