Does Barack Obama's affiliation with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright somehow indicates Obama is secretly radical, even somehow Mooslim, for going to Wright's church ?
That's ludicrous.
Let's apply that sort of measure to Obama's opponents for the presidency...
We get a Hillary Clinton who might well secretly advocate that children chop off their parents' heads for the good of the state and a John McCain who blames liberal Jews, gays and "secularists" for all order of natural disasters and lusts for a thermonuclear holocaust he thinks will bring back Jesus Christ.
Do I think either characterization is accurate ? No. But that's the media yardstick being applied Barack Obama, so fair's fair.
Point being : if Barack Obama's supposed secret views can be derived from the public speech of his ex-pastor then the same should hold, for different but probably more compelling reasons, for McCain and Clinton.
Here are two posts,juxtaposed, that I've done in consecutive days and which highlight the extent to which mainstream media is ignoring the relative "pastor problems" of John McCain and Hillary Clinton, to harp on the words of Barack Obama's Pastor Jeremiah Wright.
"Barack Obama's STILL getting slimed in the media for his association with his ex-pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, but as ThinkProgress so neatly details, McCain endorser John Hagee has just reiterated a rather more contentious claim. . .
So, sipping my organic shade grown Fair-Trade certified Nicaraguan coffee from Trader Joe's this morning, what should assault my ears but Juan Williams kerfluffling on GOP ads, slated for North Carolina, that lambaste Barack Obama for his association with Pastor Wright.
The fact that such biased twaddle can get past Morning Edition's editors and screeners indicates a massive systemic breakdown."
So, here are two other controversies our erstwhile media is studiously trying to avoid:
By her own description, Hillary Clinton joined one of The Fellowship's sex-segregated fundamentalist prayer cells almost a decades and a half ago, and in short order Clinton was supporting additions, to the so-called "welfare reform" act which in fact ended welfare, that Fellowship Member David Kuo has described as "fairly radical". The "charitable choice" provisions added by Fellowship member John Ashcroft to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act signed in to law by President Bill Clinton were 'non-trivial'. Indeed, they were a dagger aimed at the heart of the New Deal and Hillary Clinton was all for it : it was the rebranding of "compassion" (more on this is a bit).
If Barack Obama is a fire-breathing black separatist who advocates some brand of black supremacy, then Hillary Clinton wields an axe and lusts to lop off the heads of middle aged and elderly white Americans such as the Pennsylvanians who just voted disproportionately for Clinton in the 2008 PA democratic priamry. It's only fair.
Actually, the more judicious treatment would be to cast Clinton as a closet conservative secretly sympathetic with the ongoing Christian fundamentalist war, of seven or eight-odd decades, to unmake all that Roosevelt hath wrought and Clinton is also managing, that's even possible, to run to the utopian, neoconservative right of John McCain in foreign policy matters...
Which is to say that Hillary Clinton is not the classic liberal many Americans perceive her to be, and Bill Clinton' who has a gift of accidental candor, has pegged it pretty neatly: "she and John McCain are very close..." ; true enough, even physically - they've been photographed sitting together at Doug Coe's/The Fellowship's National Prayer Breakfasts.
And John McCain ?...
Well if McCain is to be judged by beliefs of Christian evangelical leaders whose endorsements McCain was after, in 2006 and 2007, like a dog in heat then McCain believes that all manner of natural and also manmade disasters (such as 9-11) to befall America were actually God's punishment for "walking away from the Bible". And, needless to say, McCain also thinks nuclear war would be fine and dandy, a one way Rapture-ticket to box office seats at the greatest barbecue and orgy of divine bloodletting and gut-pulling-out in history.
But, the bottom line is this:
The Reverend Jeremiah Wright has minor national prominence, more now for the recent media hubbub over Wright's damning of America, but both Hillary Clinton and John McCain have much more significant connections to religious leaders who wield vastly more political influence than Wright probably will ever wield. John Hagee is building a political machine that compromises at least millions of pro-apocalypse voters, and Doug Coe, head of The Fellowship, might wield as much or much influence as the Pope who, in the final analysis, isn't around in the nation's capital on a regular basis, as is Coe, brokering face time with United States presidents.
"The Fellowship's reach into governments around the world is almost impossible to overstate or even grasp" - David Kuo, former special assistant to George W. Bush
In the 2000 election, John McCain inveighed against evangelists such as pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, calling them "agents of intolerance", and he described the behavior of Bob Jones as "racist and cruel". True to McCain's characterization Jerry Falwell proceeded, little more than a year later, two days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, to declare that America had gotten what it "probably deserved".
To rephrase that, for emphasis, Jerry Falwell declared, September 13, 2001, that America had been damned and had received a divine whupping. Falwell and Robertson went on to suggest they thought far worse divine whupping was in order.
What did John McCain do ? How did he react ? Well, he did what any red-blooded American politician with few scruples and unlimited appetite for power might do :
McCain analyzed his loss, to George W. Bush in the 2000 GOP primaries and realized the bottom line, that the Christian right has made such inroads into the GOP and American conservativism that no Republican can now be elected without the enthusiastic support of evangelical right heavyweights such as [the late] Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson or rising new star John Hagee.
So, John McCain went after such Christian right leaders like a dog in heat. And, the media praised McCain as a "maverick".
[Video, below: McCain snuffles after the political influence issuing from John Hagee's fundament.]
We get a Hillary Clinton who might well secretly advocate that children chop off their parents' heads for the good of the state and a John McCain who blames liberal Jews, gays and "secularists" for all order of natural disasters and lusts for a thermonuclear holocaust he thinks will bring back Jesus Christ.
Permalink | 19 comments