“..a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.”

In other words, it’s American businesses and the Bush administration’s tax cuts that are to blame.

See no evil,

Hear no evil,

Speak no evil,

However, there is a fourth monkey (Shizaru),

Do no evil.

By covering his eyes, ears and mouth, Obama allows evil to sit at his table. In doing so, Obama allows evil to exist.

By his example, there is now the “Obama-Wright escape” clause for those embarrassing situations where you can now say .. “I can no more likely renounce him/her than Obama could renounce Rev. Wright.”

Wow. Doesn’t that make the world a better place ?

Or .. I would like to invoke my “Obama-Wright escape” clause rights.

Ranks right up there with the 5th amendment and has the Constitutional feel.

Example:
Mary Jo Kopechne could no more likely renounce Ted Kennedy than Obama could renounce Rev. Wright.

Yeah. That feels right, doesn’t it ?

Perhaps we should all automatically consider this response the next time we consider demanding a repudiation of someone.

I don’t know about you, but I would be extremely uncomfortable entrusting this country to a person who subscribes to this type of theology, and would even (God help me) prefer Hillary if I were forced to make a choice.

It seems to me that Obama is at pains to completely disassociate himself from the revered lest he be accused in the black community of the worst of the worst ñ selling out.

Hereís an angle to the Rev. Wright situation you may not have considered: certain cultures have a tradition of ritual boasting or ritual exaggerating, especially when declaiming speeches. I donít mean this as condescending towards Africans; the Celts did it too. And when the Scotch-Irish came to America, they brought ritual boasting with them. The ìbragsî of Mike Fink and Davy Crockett have made it into the folklore anthologies:
ìI’m a Salt River roarer and I eat live coals .
I’m a half-alligator and I ride tornadoesî etc. etc.
And of course, Texans are legendary for boastful exaggeration.

(Yíknow, back in í62 or í63 at Dartmouth, I recall hearing a speech by Paul Zuber, a lesser-known civil rights figure, and he was full of fury, shouting to the white liberal college kids about how the combined armies and navies of Ghana and Kenya would soon storm Americaís shores to free its oppressed Negro people. I just dismissed him then as nuts; nobody had explained to me about ritual boasting).

Also: the other side of exaggerating your own prowess is to exaggerate your adversaryís wickednessói.e, he is not simply bad, but monstrous, and only the oratorís superhuman strengths are sufficient to overcome the monstrous enemy.

Now look again at some of Rev. Wrightís worst statements: does he really believe, for example, that the US government invented AIDS to destroy black people? If you or I really believed such a thing, I think weíd leave the country at once and do everything in our power to bring such a government down (much the way Willy Brandt left Nazi Germany and took up arms against it.) But the reverendís parishioners hear this horrific accusation and respond ìYes! Thatís right! Preach the truth!î etc., and then drive to their jobs the next day and stop off at Starbuckís on their way and, at the end of the year, pay their taxes. The reverend is implicitly understood to be exaggerating for effect (though he would vigorously deny it). There is even an African-American slang term for this kind of speech: ìwolf ticketsî

Likewise, he has called on God to curse America, an America in which the Reverend has actually done pretty well for himself. Is he really praying for God to sink the ship on which he and all his flock are traveling? I doubt it.

In his way, Obama is trying to explain this. This is what he means when he says ìthe anger is real.î Implicitly, he is adding: but the accusations against America are false.
Heís asking us to understand it in the ìAfrican-Americanî cultural contextówhich of course he himself was not born into, but acquired in order to establish his political credentials in Chicago. These are undoubtedly personally painful areas for him to dig into, which was why he didnít face all this till it became a political liability.

A politician of greater candor and courage would have met these issues head-on long ago. Obama may project a well spoken sincerity, but he has neither candor nor courage.
–Mike Reynolds