Posted by
flagwaver on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 2:30:29 PM
Now that Barack Obama has finally repudiated his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in a press conference this week, we the people are supposed to suddenly forget the longstanding relationship between the two men. We are being asked to believe that we, as people who never heard of Jeremiah Wright until his inflammatory remarks were splashed all over the news and internet, know more of him than Barack Obama did...even though Obama was a member of his church for twenty years.
Barack Obama and his supporters will now try to say the matter is closed, but to me the matter remains open mainly because even this raises questions about Mr. Obama's essential character. Obama and the media have painted this man as someone who is above the politcal fray; he is post-partisan, post-racial, clean as the wind driven, and oh-so-erudite. Yet this move smacks of politics at its most base level, a level where a man that has stood beside you for over twenty years suddenly becomes expendable in the crucible of a presidential campaign.
This is a man, Wright, who took Obama under his wing after he joined his church; this is the man that led Obama to Christ; this is the man that married the Obamas and baptized their children...and now he is persona non gratta? If Rev. Wright is taking this rather personally, well he should. Maybe Rev. Wright is just now realizing that Obama has used him for his own political gain for the vast majority of his career. Is it a coincidence that the young man from Hawai'i trying to estbalish himself in the black community wound up at Trinity? Is it a coincidence that Trinity has a huge congregation and prescence in the city of Chicago? And is it yet another coincidence that Obama attached himself to Wright and held fast to that relationship for all of this time? After all, Wright was more than a pastor to Obama, he was a spiritual mentor whose sermon
The Audacity to Hope was channeled in the title of Obama's book
The Audacity of Hope.
What Wright has so recenly learned is that politicians are not to be trusted. No matter how much you supported them in the past, no matter how many times you were there when they needed you to be there, when the time comes to get votes you can be scuttled if necessary. The man that Obama claimed just a few weeks ago he could no more disown than his own racially insensitive grandmother has just been disowned, disavowed, and denounced. Suddenly Obama has become Popeye to Wright's Bluto; "That's all he can stands, and he can't stands no more!" Suddenly the sermons that got a big fat Amen for twenty years are words that Obama is angered by, is disappointed in, and are not representative of what he believes. And worst of all, Wright has had the audacity (yes, audacity) to not spend his time working to keep the Obama campaign afloat.
Because all of this is not about what Wright preachd from his pulpit or said at the National Press Club; it is all about Obama's need to save his campaign. So the man who gave him entree into the Chicago black community, the man who served as pastor, friend, and mentor for many years is no longer a part of the Obama program. There is no room here for real friendship, only for politocal allegiance. And so, when Rev. Wright went out and had the chutzpah to say that Obama was "speaking like a politician", Obama had to strike back. He could not allow himself to be so characterized by anyone, even if it was the pastor that just a few short weeks ago Obama was defending by saying that his incindiary comments were being taken out of context. So Obama and his staff circled around the Rev. Wright and proceeded to rhetorically stab him to death, just as the conspirators did to Caesar in Shakespear's classic work.
But this also brings into focus a glaring question about Obama: Does he have any scruples or have any loyalty? Or is his loyalty only to his ambitions? If this man (Obama) is willing to attack his mentor, his friend, and pastor for political gain, what else is he willing to do to have his way?
And as he lies suffering, with his repuatation near death, Wright must look up at hs attackers, recognize the one he loved most of all, and ask "Et tu, Barack?"