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A post by Maynard

With the political arguments swirling fast and furious, here’s what I see as the bottom line on Obama.

I don’t place much faith in what a candidate says and does after declaring his or her candidacy. Once he steps into the spotlight, he’s playing to the crowd. He’s on good behavior, and he’ll tell us whatever we want to hear. This is a demonstration of his acting ability…and a politician is indeed part actor, but there’s more to the job than that. The true measure of the man is what he did with his life when he didn’t think he was being watched. That’s what you’re going to get when the candidate is in power, and never mind the speeches.

As we do with celebrities, we tend to project our fantasies onto politicians. The less we know about a person, the easier this is. With Obama’s charisma and short history, and with the sympathies of the mainstream media behind him, he’s been allowed to remain too much of a blank slate. This is slowly changing, as the reality becomes known and eats away at his mystique. Note that Obama’s greatest string of victories in the Democratic primaries came when he was a new thing. As information trickled out, he lost steam. If more facts had been on the table earlier, Hillary certainly would have been the Democratic nominee.

Our job as voters isn’t to nitpick and debate every nuance and gaffe. In a world of trivia and spin, we must seek the most essential truths and make them known.

Barack Obama, Hatemonger

Looming very large in Obama’s background is the Trinity Church, with his mentor and close friend Jeremiah Wright at the helm. Obama spent more than 20 years in that church. Wright officiated at Obama’s marriage and baptized his children. The Trinity Church took the greater portion of his charitable contributions. This was a very big part of Obama’s life…at least until a few weeks ago. If we want to know his true inclinations, I would argue that his association with this church tells us more than anything else about him.

We’ve heard Jeremiah Wright’s sermons damning America and applauding the 9/11 attacks as our just deserts. Go to YouTube and refresh your memory if you need to. We’ve heard Wright’s paranoid rants about sinister plots to spread AIDS, and Michael Pfleger’s race baiting outburst against Hillary Clinton. We’ve heard the crowds react to these tirades with thunderous applause. It’s clear that, whatever else may go on there, hatemongering and fear is the glue that holds this group together. Any decent man would leave that place immediately. If you had heard this sort of stuff from your own church or social group, wouldn’t you have walked out and never returned? What can you say about a man that stays there and then brings the kids?

At this point I’m scratching my head in puzzlement and wondering how Obama’s candidacy didn’t come to a complete halt when his background became known. He stood at the forefront of an organization that is on the record in promoting a hateful, racist agenda. He did this over the entirety of his adult life, only stepping away reluctantly and when compelled as a matter of political expediency. Something has gone horribly wrong with a political party that takes this damaged man and pushes him to the head of the crowd.

Am I Being Unfair?

As I’ve watched the Democrats (with a few noteworthy exceptions) rally behind Obama, I’ve repeatedly asked myself whether I could somehow be wrong in my perception. Believe me, I wish I were wrong, because then I’d be less afraid for the future of America. Here are my answers to the most reasonable arguments given in support of Mr. Obama.

They say: “I just don’t think this church association is very important.

This is a naïve argument; dangerously naïve when we’re seeking to guide the nation through a difficult period of history. Anyone that says the church isn’t important is listening to Obama’s words and ignoring his deeds. That’s not the right way to judge people. Can anyone point to anything Obama has actually done to justify our confidence?

By way of contrast, I can better understand how someone would argue that Bill Clinton’s situation with Monica Lewinsky wasn’t important in the scheme of things. Whatever you think about Clinton’s legal or moral lapses, they didn’t reflect on his love of country. But for Obama to stand with the leadership of the group that cheered the 9/11 attacks and proclaimed the murder of thousands of Americans to be what was due us…this cuts to the core of the president’s job. I honestly don’t care what Obama’s platform is. He’ll lead the nation in the wrong direction because his heart is not with us.

They wonder: How can this be a big problem? Nobody seems upset.

There are people that are deeply concerned about Obama’s history, and they are sounding the warning. Many in the mainstream media are Obama-friendly, and they’re inclined to soft-pedal this inconvenient truth because it would benefit their political opposition. But set all that aside. It’s right to hear the other guy’s argument. But you must ultimately decide for yourself. What would you think of this man if you didn’t know what you were supposed to think? That’s the way to look at it.

They say: “Obama is the candidate, not his church.”

The church is too big in his life history to dismiss. This is what Obama has chosen to do with his life. If we can’t judge him by what he did there, what can we judge him by?

They say: “That’s just what they do in black churches. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Not all black churches are presided over by angry racists. And to the extent that this behavior isn’t an isolated example, it’s no excuse. Large numbers of people believing in a thing doesn’t make it right.

They say: “He’s put the church behind him.”

Too little, too late. For me to consider the possibility that Obama is a decent human being, he’d have to have put this behind him years ago, and established an independent track record that proves he’s not a tool of the racists. (For example, Robert Byrd, whatever else you may think of him, has clearly and unequivocally put the Klan behind him. Says Byrd: “Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times…and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again.” Says Obama, after his reluctant resignation from Trinity at the end of May: “This is not a decision I came to lightly, and frankly it’s one that I make with some sadness…I am not denouncing the church.”)

They say: “McCain had a pastor problem also.”

That’s a reference to John Hagee. First of all, whatever you think of Hagee, he’s not a hatemonger like Wright. Second of all, he was merely someone whose endorsement McCain sought at one point, not a lifelong association or mentor. The comparison is absurd.

They say: “Conservative pastors say the same thing about the nation deserving 9/11 as Rev. Wright did. And the prophets of the Bible, such as Wright’s namesake Jeremiah, also railed against the wickedness of the land.

When you hear someone like John Hagee say that America made herself vulnerable to 9/11 through its sinful ways, the message is delivered as a sad lament and a prayer that the nation will remember God. The prophets of the Bible demanded repentance of their audience. This is in stark contrast to Rev. Wright, who rants with hateful enthusiasm against outsiders, and whose words are answered by the screams of an angry mob. Even Obama himself was finally compelled to acknowledge Wright as a man who was, intentionally or not, giving aid and comfort to dangerous hatemongers.

They say: “That’s the way things are done in Chicago. You can’t get anywhere unless you join this church. Obama didn’t believe any of that stuff; he just did what he had to do.”

Actually, I’m almost sympathetic to this argument. All politicians do some amount of pandering to the activist organizations and powerful special interests in order to climb to the top of the pile. Maybe it’s true that the doings of the Trinity Church don’t reflect Obama’s true inclinations.

The problem is, if Obama put on a false façade to rise in Chicago, then shouldn’t we assume he’s now putting on another false façade to rise in the national election? What possible basis do we have for evaluating the true Obama? Remember that his history is short, and think of all those “present” votes in the legislature. At best, Obama is an unknown. The “he had to do it” defense implicitly acknowledges him as a chameleon and a liar.

Also, the people who argue that this is business as usual in Chicago tend to wink at the excesses of the Left. Imagine turning the situation around and contemplating a politician who came out of a place in the Deep South where you couldn’t rise in politics unless you were in good standing with the local white supremacist group. Would you give that politician a pass because there was no other means of ascent? Wouldn’t you, at the very least, look upon him with suspicion, and demand that he establish a decent track record? So again, Obama’s apologists are bowing to a racial double standard.

Obama says he was surprised by what was revealed about his church.

Does anyone really believe this?

…which brings us to:

Barack Obama, Liar

You’ll remember that Obama finally renounced Wright at the end of April.

“The person that I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago,” he said. “His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church.”

So Obama is claiming he was surprised by what he saw. He’s even setting himself up as a something of sympathetic character: A good-hearted man saddened and betrayed by a friend’s shortcomings. But Wright himself said that Obama’s denouncement was staged, and had been planned in advance:

But Wright, long critical of the establishment Obama must embrace in his Oval Office bid, knew it was coming. He predicted as much in a New York Times interview more than a year ago.

“If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me,” Wright told the newspaper with a shrug in April 2007. “I said it to Barack personally, and he said, ‘Yeah, that might have to happen.’ “

So either Wright or Obama is lying here. Look back a year to this New York Times article from March 6, 2007:

CHICAGO, March 5 — The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., senior pastor of the popular Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago and spiritual mentor to Senator Barack Obama, thought he knew what he would be doing on Feb. 10, the day of Senator Obama’s presidential announcement.

After all, back in January, Mr. Obama had asked Mr. Wright if he would begin the event by delivering a public invocation.

But Mr. Wright said Mr. Obama called him the night before the Feb. 10 announcement and rescinded the invitation to give the invocation.

Mr. Wright said that in the phone conversation in which Mr. Obama disinvited him from a role in the announcement, Mr. Obama cited an article in Rolling Stone, “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama.”

According to the pastor, Mr. Obama then told him, “You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.”

In other words, Obama knew his history was unacceptable, and the day he declared his candidacy is the day he started to hide that history. Obama’s systematic deception is right there on the record for all to see.

Concerning the Jews

I wanted to specifically mention the Trinity Church’s anti-Semitism, which gets lost in the general anti-Americanism and hatemongering. I am drawn to the metaphor of the Jews as a miner’s canary. As described by Rabbi Harold Kushner:

I find myself compelled to face the fact that the Jew plays the role for the world that the canary used to play for the coal miners. You’ve read about how the miners would take canaries with them into the mines because the canaries were extremely sensitive to dangerous gases. They responded to danger before the humans did. So if the miners saw the canaries get sick and pass out, they knew that the air was bad and they would escape as fast as they could.

That’s what we Jews do for the world. We are the world’s early warning system. Where there is evil, where there is hatred, it affects us first. To be a Jew, whether we like it or not, is to be a magnet for hatred, for envy, for resentment no matter how unjustified, no matter how irrational. If there is hatred anywhere in the world, it will find us. If there is evil somewhere in the world, we will become its target. People overflowing with hatred for whatever reason, including self-hatred, make us the objects of their hatred.

Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, hated Jews though he could never have explained why.

Leo Felton who was convicted in a Boston courtroom of trying to start a racial war by blowing up local landmarks, hated Jews though it is not clear if he ever met any.

White supremacists who hate blacks hate Jews, too, and black extremists who hate white people hate Jews with special fervor, not because there is anything wrong with us but because there is something terribly wrong with them…

…This is the role we play in the world, not by choice but imposed on us by others, to be the miner’s canary, to smoke out the bigots, the haters, the people who will be a menace to their communities if someone doesn’t stop them, and we identify them early on by their hatred of us.

Hitler attacked Jews before he attacked western civilization, and that should have alerted the world to what kind of person he was, but the world misread the signal. Muslim fanatics practiced their terrorist skills on Israelis before turning those skills on the rest of the world, but the world never understood the warning. When I see what Pat Buchanan or James Traficant have to say about Jews, or Jean Marie LePen in France or Jorg Haider in Austria, I don’t have to look any further into their political philosophies. I know everything I need to know to consider them disqualified from public office.

You’ll recall that Wright and the Trinity Church have lauded Louis Farrakhan as a man that “truly epitomized greatness”. That New York Times article notes:

“When [Obama’s] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli” to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Wright recalled, “with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”

When I saw this, I went to the Trinity Church website and found one of Rev. Wright’s brochures (which has since been removed). About the Middle East, Wright wrote:

The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost 40 years now. It took a divestment campaign to wake the business community up concerning the South Africa issue. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism.

The Divestment issue will hit the floor during this month’s General Synod. Divesting dollars from businesses and banks that do business with Israel is the new strategy being proposed to wake the world up concerning the racism of Zionism.

Cozying up with Farrakhan and an unreformed Qaddafi, condemning the “racism” of Zionism and the “illegal” occupation of Palestine, organizing a divestment campaign against banks and businesses that do business with Israel — these are the footprints of the Jew haters. Yes, Obama will say he disagrees with these policies. But is disagreement enough? What did he do to set the Trinity Church on a righteous path? Nothing. As recent history has shown us, Rev. Wright and the Trinity Church are as ugly as they ever were. In fact, Obama would have us believe they’ve morally deteriorated; note that his resignation was supposedly in response to the racism of the Mr. Wright (“…not the person I met 20 years ago”) and Father Pfleger. Whatever Obama may feel in his heart — something we can never know — events have demonstrated he was either unwilling or unable to make his church a more decent place. Take that as a warning for how effective he would be if he had to deal with the evil powers of the world.

Evaluate Obama the same way you evaluate anyone else. Set aside the impressive charisma. Ignore the pretty words; remember that talk is cheap. Never mind what you feel is in the person’s heart; feelings are not facts. Examine the deeds and you’ll know what sort of human being you’re dealing with.