Rev. Wright Apologizes - Or Does He?

Senator Obama should have stopped with:

"Had the reverend not retired."

But, instead, he had to continue on with:

"...and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country -- for all its flaws -- then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying there at the church."

The primary problem is that the Reverend doesn't seem to have acknowledged anything of the sort, at least not publicly, especially since he now seems to have disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle or something.

I will be interested to see if the "mainstream" media picks up on this. I'm not holding my breath.

An interesting blog with a lot of links within the article ... Can Obama disown Rev. Wright? Yes, he can

There is no evidence that Wright ever acknowledged that his comments were inappropriate, though that is an absurdly mild description of Wright's comments. Moreover, it seems like just last week that Obama gave a major speech in which he said that he could no more disown Wright than he could disown the black community. Indeed, it seems like only Tuesday that Team Obama was blasting Hillary Clinton's comment that you choose what church you want to attend. Those statements appear to be no longer operative.

People like TNR's Marty Peretz are probably wondering why they did not get the memo before praising Obama for sticking by Wright. Then again, Obama's apologists should have known that Obama and Wright already had an understanding that Obama might have to distance himself from Wright.

While Pew and others ran polls which purported to show that Obama had weathered the storm over Wright, the internals of such polls consistently suggested that Obama had not put the issue behind him. Michael Barone noticed the erosion in state-by-state polls also.

Obama's decision to wade back into the issue on The View suggests that his internal polling was not favorable or that he feared that people like Mickey Kaus will continue to point out that Obama was in fact drawn to the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago because of Wright's blaming white greed for the world's sins, that his answers to questions about Wright and Trinity have been inconsistent at best, and so on.

A fairly devastating critique ...

Let's Just All Agree That Wright Apologized And Move On

A very brief excerpt:

So, when did Wright acknowledge that what he had said was deeply offensive and inappropriate? The AP story recounts some of Wright's controversial comments but oddly omits to mention his apology, as does all other news coverage with which I am familiar. And I am strangely certain that a Wright apology would have made the news - unless he never made it publicly.

So what are we supposed to believe - that Wright apologized to Obama, who is now apologizing to the rest of us on Wright's behalf? For heaven's sake, this really does show that Obama is made of Presidential stuff - maybe he can do an Apology Tour, just as Bill Clinton did.

But why is Wright apologizing to Obama, who only heard these remarks second hand - well, "second hand" if we still believe Obama's insistence that he missed every service with these controversial comments (Huffington Post) but heard others (The Speech) but didn't hear anything at all (town hall). Shouldn't Wright be apologizing to those of us who took offense? Or after thirty years of delivering three sermons per week, has Wright developed a fear of public speaking?

From Slate:

"White Man's Greed" - Obama's very first service at Wright's church was ... controversial.

On his radio show yesterday, Hugh Hewitt played excerpts of Barack Obama reading from his autobiography, Dreams of My Father. In one, Obama remembers a sermon by Rev. Jeremiah Wright:

[T]he pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting title Hope.

"The painting depicts a harpist," Revernd Wright explained, "a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountaintop. Untill you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.

It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, aprtheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere ... That's the world! On which hope sits."

And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpesville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House. ... [E.A.]

Sounds ... controversial! Keep in mind: a) Obama isn't disapproving of this sermon. In the book he weeps at the end of it; b) Demonstrating that at least some blaming of "white greed" for the world's sins--which Obama now criticizes-- isn't an exceptional topic for Rev. Wright in a few wacky sermons ("the five dumbest things") that Obama may or may not have missed. It's at the quotidian core of the Afrocentric philosophy that Obama says drew him to the church; c) Indeed, in his big March 18th race speech Obama reads the passage from his book that describes his emotional reaction to this very sermon (his "first service at Trinity")--how it made "the story of a people" seem "black and more than black." d) This is also the sermon that gave Obama the title of his next book, The Audacity of Hope. e) The "profound mistake" of this sermon is not that Wright "spoke as if our society was static"--Obama's analysis on Feb. 18th. The problem is that "white folks' greed" is not the main cause of a "world in need."

I'm not saying voters shouldn't cut Obama a lot of slack on Wright's anti-white fulminations. But the Senator should have spoken up publicly against the semi-paranoid "white greed" explanation a long time ago, no? And he could show a little humility. Again, this wasn't the occasion for him to be lecturing everyone else. ...

Slate is published in conjunction with Newsweek and Washington Post.

Gateway Pundit reports ...

A Sweet Spot to Roost

Wright is about to move to a 10,340-square-foot, four-bedroom home in suburban Chicago, currently under construction in a gated community.

While it is not uncommon for an accomplished clergyman to live in luxury, Wright's retirement residence is raising some questions.

"Some people think deals like this are hypocritical. Jeremiah Wright himself criticizes people from the pulpit for middle classism, for too much materialism," said Andrew Walsh, Associate Director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life with Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.

"So he's entitled to be tweaked here. So the question really is, how unusual is this? Somewhat unusual," he said.

Now what is that famous quote by Jeremiah Wright again?... Oh yeah:

White folks' greed runs a world in need.
Yeah, that's the one.

Compare that with: The Trinity United Church of Christ Black Value System, which says, in part:

Disavowal of the Pursuit of "Middleclassness." Classic methodology on control of captives teaches that captors must be able to identify the "talented tenth" of those subjugated, especially those who show promise of providing the kind of leadership that might threaten the captor's control.

Those so identified are separated from the rest of the people by:

Killing them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to kill off one another. Placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.

Seducing them into a socioeconomic class system which, while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of "we" and "they" instead of "us."

So, while it is permissible to chase "middleclassness" with all our might, we must avoid the third separation method – the psychological entrapment of Black "middleclassness." If we avoid this snare, we will also diminish our "voluntary" contributions to methods A and B. And more importantly, Black people no longer will be deprived of their birthright: the leadership, resourcefulness and example of their own talented persons.

At $1.6 million, some would say this mansion completely avoids "middleclassness" in every way.

From a church youth bulletin ...

Trinity UCC Publishes Letter Alleging Israeli "Ethnic" Bomb