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Commodore Hopwood, Unemotionally and unideologically, I'm telling you that your pre-occupation with who is whose former pastor is a non-issue -- a distraction from real issues: the disastrous economy, the wars without end, the administration's use of torture, its unconstitutional behavior, etc. Those are issues.
Yes I did, Mr. Luker. Simply put it was that I considered your #122472 in response to my #122468 to be noteworthy for its absence of reasoned discussion and its abundance of ideology and emotion.
You had a point?
As someone noted (I think I saw it at Sideshow), the irony of this is that the Democratic candidates are all more religiously active than most senior Republicans: neither McCain, nor either of the men on the ticket he's trying to replace, are regular churchgoers, so they don't have any real religious connections to examine. We're just supposed to believe that they're "good Christians" who eschew all the nasty stuff spouted by all the religious leaders they work with on a regular basis.
Thanks for making my point.
Given what you've said here in the past, I'm not surprised that you insist that who is whose former pastor is a serious presidential campaign issue. You'd think that the United States is not in two wars abroad, that the national economy is robust, that Bush/Cheney are the model of constitutional rectitude, etc. Your "sincere effort to seek out the truth" has your head buried in the sand up to your tail bone.
Mr. Luker. the tenor of your response is no surprise so I'll ignore the usual petty aspersions. I never heard of the "winger" sources you mention. My sources are less "lofty" and more mainstream. I hope you will forgive me, but I believe that In matters of such importance as the selection of a presidential candidate one should make a sincere effort to seek out the truth and not be governed by emotionalism and prejudice, one way or another.
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Good to see that you've got the winger talking points down, Commodore Hopwood. You can run back over to The Corner and Free Republic, now, and pick up some others. We wouldn't want to miss out on any here at Cliopatria.
"What kind of a lunatic actually thinks that Obama is running for the presidency in order to legitimize, let alone to advance, the most ridiculous and divisive of Wright's views?"
The uproar over Rev. Wright's most repugnant views is not because of any significant belief that Senator Obama supports them. It is because in the many years Obama has been a member of the Rev's congregation he apparently never raised his voice against such views until now, when it is politically expedient for him to do so.
That seems to have been the thrust of Rev. Wright's recent remark about Obama's political motivation to which the Senator has taken considerable offense. The problem for Obama is that his current indignation with any of Rev. Wright's remarks is considerably overdue.
Oh, and the offense Obama took to Wright's statement, that the distance he claimed from his comments was political, is justified and seems sincere. Wright had no place to assert that. Of course, they could have discussed this beforehand privately and played it out according to a script. But who cares? What kind of a lunatic actually thinks that Obama is running for the presidency in order to legitimize, let alone to advance, the most ridiculous and divisive of Wright's views? That takes an even bigger leap to believe.
That's fine, but the issue has disintegrated into what the thread above represents. Some want to insist that the most problematic or offensive of Wright's comments over 20 years represented a guiding force of his theology, and one that was both pernicious and profuse enough for Obama to have deliberately chosen to overlook them for political reasons rather than for personal ones. Any thinking person realizes that the only evidence for malice or ideological intemperance on Wright's part comes from his using this moment to steal the national spotlight and unapologetically showcase those highlights in a most divisive way. The narrative makes perfect sense now for Obama politically, but also for anyone with a respect for evidence and with a mind for understanding that relationships are indeed, as Luker reminds us, complex. We have even less evidence that Obama had previously understood Wright to be someone as prone to deliberately abusing his pulpit as adamantly as he now has.
I'm appalled that you continue to insist that Wright is a "serious issue". His association with Obama is no more than fodder for the swiftboat crew and you've signed on to it by memorizing all the talking points and rushing over here to push them on the rest of us, even entitling your comment with the cliche that's carried by *all* the right wing propagandizers.
And, no, I am *not* bound by the iron logic of your right wing errand to choose between two positions you outline. Jeremiah Wright has a twenty year ministry at Trinity UCC. You know and care *nothing* about most -- yea, 99+% -- of it. Your knowledge by YouTube sound bites isn't impressive. Neither Senator Obama hold the views expressed in them. So, what's there to discuss?
I don't repudiate my earlier op-ed, any more than Martin Marty needs to repudiate the article he wrote about Wright. I do regret Wright's taking advantage of the national attention to reassert his offensive views and appreciate Obama's anger about them and that his former pastor would seize the opportunity to damage his own former parishioner.
Now, would you or your machine care to discuss healthcare, the deteriorating economy, the war on terror, or some other *real* issue?
It's unfortunate that you decline to grapple with the serious issues Wright presents for Obama and instead continue slurs like "winger propaganda."
As for the term I used for Wright, I gave the definition I was using (the common meaning of the term) and provided examples that fit the definition. You don't refute the examples or otherwise explain why the term doesn't fit.
Your love for Obama makes lose perspective. It's perfectly all right to support a candidate without having to defend the indefensible. In fact, admitting a candidate's flaws (and all candidates have them) can even make your support more impressive. Trying to excuse everything will only tie you up in knots. You earlier defended Obama's association with Wright by saying that Wright was simply a prophetic black preacher and by suggesting that the sound bites could somehow be redeemed by their context. Now that Wright has repeated his praise of Farrakhan and all the rest in a non-pulpit setting, that won't wash. Moreover, now that Obama has repudiated Wright, you have to choose one or the other: either Wright was right and Obama is wrong to reject his "prophecies," or Wright was wrong and Obama is right in rejecting him (albeit very, very belatedly).
If you'll bear with me for a moment more, consider these words from an editorial today in that notorious "winger" publication, the Washington Post:
"Did Mr. Obama climb out of that hole yesterday? It seems to us that the whole sorry episode raises legitimate questions about his judgment. Given the long and close relationship between Mr. Obama and the Rev. Wright, voters will ask: How could Mr. Obama have been surprised by the Rev. Wright's views? How could he not have seen this coming? Mr. Obama didn't help matters much by initially seeming to dismiss the furor building over the Rev. Wright's Washington performance, just as he did with the initial uproar last month. At a media availability at an airport Monday afternoon, he displayed none of the anger and sorrow that etched his face in North Carolina one day later."
And for Obama supporting him. But this new propaganda tour of Wright's saddens me deeply. I agree with much of what he says, but doesn't he realize he's handing the nomination to Hillary? Now is the time for pragmatism. If he wants to unbutton his lip maybe he can do that after November.
The whole "under the bus" meme originated at The Corner. "Lunatics" like yourself (why is it o.k. for you to use ad hominem against Wright and not o.k. for me to use it on you?) should allow discussion of issues, rather than going ballistic about who's whose pastor. Human relationships are complicated and probably few of them have the neat narrative that you insist that Obama must have about his relationship with his former pastor. You abstract from a few sound bites to *all* of Wright's preaching for 20 years -- knowing full well, since you are a reasonably intelligent man, that doing so creates a lie for propaganda purposes only. You're not interested in reasonable discussion -- only in winger propaganda.
You up the rhetorical stakes pretty quickly, don't you? "Kool-aid?" "The Corner?" Let's skip the ad hominems and stick to the substance.
No doubt your definition of lunatic is more restrictive than mine. In common use the term means more than clinical insanity. It's broad enough to cover someone who repeatedly asserts racist and baseless conspiracy theories like the AIDS one, praises people like Farrakhan, and all the rest that Wright has done. If you don't believe that sort of ranting qualifies as lunacy, so be it. You can use your own dictionary.
I read, watched, and listened to Obama this time and in his previous remarks. He has given several conflicting explanations. First he tried to slide out from the connection by saying that he never heard those remarks while he was in the pew. Then he admitted that he knew Wright had been making these sorts of comments during Obama's time at the church. He said that he didn't privately or publicly disagree because he knew Wright was about to retire. In Philadelphia, he tried to have it both ways by equating Wright's public charges with his own grandmother's private comments. Now he says this wasn't the man he knew all those years, as if all these comments are brand new to him. To compound the obfuscation, he now says that Wright was NOT his mentor, even though he earlier praised him for just that role.
Obviously all those things can't be true. Worse, it doesn't explain why he sat in that pew for 20 years, listening to that sort of preaching, yet only backed away from him once he became a liability.
Brother Nolan, You've been drinking the kool-aid over at The Corner or Free Republic, again. Wright is not "a lunatic". Senator Obama's statement is there for you to read or to watch and listen. He answers the question that you say he hasn't answered. Can you read? Can you see? Can you hear? I'm inclined to think that you don't want to. Right?
Aren't you outraged at Obama's disowning of Wright, Professor Luker? After all, a few weeks ago you were telling us that Wright was simply preaching in the prophetic tradition of the black church. If so, then Obama could no more disown Wright than the rest of his heritage.
Or have you finally decided that blaming the US government for creating the AIDS virus to eliminate minorities and all those other statements that outraged the rest of us weren't just "prophetic" after all?
The one question Obama still hasn't answered is why he stuck with this lunatic for 20 years, even selecting him as his mentor and borrowing the title of his book from a Wright sermon. After all, Wright has making the same sort of racist, ridiculous comments for a very long time. The obvious answer isn't one that Obama could easily offer: he joined the church for Chicago political reasons and remained with it only as long as it helped his career. Now that Wright is a liability, Obama is happy to abandon him.