Life Without Rev. “Wrong” And With O’Reilly

“…just terrible, absolutely dreadful,” a prominent supporter of Barack Obama said Monday morning after listening to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s screed at the National Press Club. Obama is hemorrhaging so badly that he is metaphorically simply bleeding to death politically. NPR reporter-Fox commentator Juan Williams, himself black, told Robert Novak Wright’s demagoguery is “ridiculous. I never have heard that in church.” The damage has been severe with Obama’s unfavorable ratings jumping up and his polling numbers falling.

Rev. Wright’s rants, as Obama now calls his pontifications, are simply wrong. Joe Conason says, “So long as a religious or political leader sounds sufficiently “militant” and seems to outrage white people, he (or she) must be not only accepted and excused but celebrated. That is why Minister Louis Farrakhan — the Nation of Islam leader who shares responsibility for the conspiracy to murder Malcolm X and whose theology of hovering spaceships and evil big-headed scientists is highly eccentric, to be polite — enjoys fulsome admiration from the likes of Wright. That is why the Rev. Al Sharpton — who was paid and financed by Republican dirty tricksters in 2004 — still somehow wields influence in the media and politics. And that is why Wright himself can insinuate that the government purposely invented AIDS, and claim that the brains of white and black children function differently (a notion that would rightly be dismissed as racist idiocy coming from a white academic or preacher).”

In contrast to Obama tawdry performance Hillary Clinton was on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor looking the reasonable, measured, thoughtful candidate with good judgment.

The question writ large is, “Can Obama escape his toxic mentor or more specifically be excused for what has turned into a history of a dishonesty about ongoing relationships with the likes of Rev. Wrong?” So far the answer is an emphatic “No.”