Now that it’s apparent that he can’t ignore the abhorent statements of his 20 year Pastor, Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama is attempting to find a way to escape further damage.
Finally, he has removed Wright from the African American Religious Leadership Committee, a group that was advising the Obama campaign.
In an attempt to provide some explanation for why he didn’t know about Wright’s comments earlier, Barack, in a post on the Huffington Post wrote… “The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation.”
Who is he trying to get by with that statement? If my Pastor said:
“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
during a Sunday morning sermon, it wouldn’t have mattered if I was there or not. I can assure you that that statement would have sent a fire storm through our congregation and been discussed by EVERYONE as we considered whether there should be some sort of disciplinary action taken on our Pastor.
So that leads me to one of two conclusions:
A. Obama is disingenuous at best and a flat out liar at worst when he says:
When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign.
How would he or Michelle have missed the hubbub a statement like that would have created?
or
B. The rhetoric that has come to light from Jeremiah Wright was common place and because it was not unusual, it didn’t stir any controversy within the congregation when he said things like the above quote. If this is the case, then whether Barack was there on any particular Sunday is irrelevant because the type of speech would have occurred regularly and Barack would have been present for some and perhaps many sermons of similar content.
I kind of hope the answer is A because I can’t even imagine what kind of regular hate filled diatribes would get a congregation, that claims to be Christian, to excuse the language and statements that have now become public.
