Cass Sunstein: Censor Hannity, right-wing rumors!!
If Obama has his way…The First Amendment will be a thing of the past! Yes people, a thing of the past where only politically correct language is
authorized. Everything else will be sanitized to the goverment’s favor, a.k.a. China.
Even after Bo ’s most recent trip to China promoting,(clear throat, cough, ahem)
Free speech..at least on the internet. This evolves! Remember the language/terms used in the movie The Demolition Man? You were fined every time you spoke unfavorably. Yes, BIG BROTHER was LISTENING AT ALL TIMES!
The American People are slowly, I repeat slowly, being conformed to a such
a civilization. No matter how extreme you may think it may be, just remember things,
issues, or circumstances that have come to fruition after seeing them in film or someone idealistic put a plan into action.

This is not a condemnation of films or inventions, but to show if a person put it on film or paper (thought of it)
another can, will or try,to take whatever the issue may be to the next level. But back to the immediate issue at hand. This infringement on the FIRST AMENDMENT must be squelched!

This is an absolute abomination of American Freedoms! We finished this fight over 200 years ago and are doing it again! When you have a President who can tell a CEO of a Major Company to resign, then determines which company will stay in business and which will fail it’s pretty obvious that the micro manager will extend himself elsewhere. This can be seen with threats to those who dislike his policies but extends to ALL Americans, Problem is too many are still ignorant to that fact. We conveniently have a hate crime law now, where you have been muzzled and is the beginning of the end for Freedom of Speech.
Case in point. …You cannot threaten anyone speaking their mind without intention any intention to harm anyone. The President infers through his mouth pieces that issues concerning particular talk shows should be CENSORED, yet it seems that he also has brought back a piece of CHINA’S policies, while including what has rubbed of from his militant friend Rev. Wright. While Rev. Wright is a Marxist by self admission and a racist, he is the one Obama should be censoring!
This Presidency is something Americans would soon hope to forget, but it will take quite awhile considering the damage that has been cause to the American People.

By the way accept Timothy Geitner’s resignation! You set him up to FAIL! So take responsibility and find some one who can do the job while also getting a straight answer from Bernanke about the missing 13 TRILLION DOLLARS!

Rep. Steve King, who is one of the darlings of the far right who hails from the state of Iowa, is on the attack again using all of the old and tired clichés about President Obama, Chicago, the Chicago Machine, gangsters, Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers … yadda, yadda, yadda.

Apparently, Rep. King has no new materials and instead resorts to the same tired and weak attacks against President Obama.

KING: Valerie Jarrett is a product of Chicago politics. This is power politics through Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama, son and daughter of Saul Alinsky, linked up with Mayor Daley, the one that actually hired Michelle Obama and put her into that link, which may have well been the link that put Barack Obama into that machine. The Chicago Machine, we know what it is. Someone called it gangster government. In Chicago, you have gangster government and Valerie Jarrett’s been in the middle of that. She’s been brokering power for a long time. And the link she has with William Ayers, and other nefarious characters in Chicago tells us what we’ve got in the White House itself. I mean she’s there. There are a number of links directly to Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett, and they go back to Chicago.

This guy is a nut, who is attacking Chicago to score political points with the far right (which he should already have in his back pocket if this talk is indicative of anything).

If President Obama, Valerie Jarrett, Rahm Emanuel, Michelle Obama and others are a product of Chicago politics then does that make Steve King truly representative of Iowa politics?

I certainly hope not, but there are some Iowans who continue to vote for this clown to represent them in front of the citizens of the United States of America.

Here is one of the comments in response to the article:

Equalness4all wrote:

What concerns me is the lack of civility we have in discourse, political and otherwise. I believe that it is healthy to disagree, and argument is a good thing, but hate speech seems to be the rule rather than the exeception. Don’t like someone, call them a name, assassinate their character, spread viscious gossip about them. These things can always be attributed to having heard it from someone else. It is so much easier to protray everybody else as the bad guy than to stand up and offer something for the good of the cause. Mr. King’s double speak is also fascinating, unfortunately he is not alone in doing this. Just look at the quote above. “There are a number of links to Chicago…and they go back to Chicago.” Huh? Really intelligent banter. People in Iowa deserve better, people in the country deserve better.

The people of Iowa may deserve better, but apparently Steve King represents them well enough that they support him and his divisive talk.

Mr. Obama a quote I thought you should learn.

“There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.”

My quote for mr obama

Reportedly written by Sherry Hackett, the widow of Buddy Hackett.

“WE NOTICED”

President Obama:

Today I read of your administration’s plan to re-define September 11 as a National Service Day. Sir, it’s time we had a talk………

During your campaign, Americans watched as you made mockery of our tradition of standing and crossing your heart when the Pledge of Allegiance was spoken. You, out of four people on the stage, were the only one not honoring our tradition.

YES, “We noticed.”

During one of your many speeches, Americans heard you say that you intended to visit all 57 states. We all know that Islam, not America has 57 states.

YES, “We noticed.”

When President Bush leaned over at Ground Zero and gently placed a flower on the memorial, while you nonchalantly tossed your flower onto the pile without leaning over.

YES, “We noticed.”

Every time you apologized to other countries for America’s position on an issue we have wondered why you don’t share our pride in this great country. When you have heard foreign leaders berate our country and our beliefs, you have not defended us. In fact, you insulted the British Crown beyond belief.

YES, “We noticed.”

When your pastor of 20 years, “God-damned America” and said that 9/11 was “America’s chickens coming home to roost” and you denied having heard recriminations of that nature, we wondered how that could be. You later disassociated yourself from that church and Pastor Wright because it was politically expedient to do so.

YES, “We noticed.”

When you announced that you would transform America, we wondered why. With all her faults, America is the greatest country on earth. Sir, KEEP THIS IN MIND, “if not for America and the people who built her, you wouldn’t be sitting in the White House now.” Prior to your election to the highest office in this Country, you were a senator from Illinois and from what we can glean from the records available, not a very remarkable one.

YES, “We noticed.”

All through your campaign and even now, you have surrounded yourself with individuals who are basically unqualified for the positions for which you appointed them. Worse than that, the majority of them are people who, like you, bear no special allegiance, respect, or affection for this country and her traditions.

YES, “We noticed.”

You are 9 months into your term and every morning millions of Americans wake up to a new horror heaped on us by you. You seek to saddle working Americans with a health care/insurance reform package that, along with cap and trade , will bankrupt this nation.

YES, “We noticed.”

We seek, by protesting, to let our representatives know that we are not in favor of these crippling expenditures and we are labeled “un-American”, “racist”, “mob”. We wonder how we are supposed to let you know how frustrated we are. You have attempted to make our protests seem isolated and insignificant. Until your appointment, Americans had the right to speak out.

YES, “We noticed.”

On September 11, 2001 there were no Republicans or Democrats, only Americans. And we all grieved together and helped each other in whatever way we could. The attack on 9/11 was carried out because we are Americans.

YES, “We noticed.”

There were many of us who prayed that as a black president you could help unite this nation. In six months you have done more to destroy this nation than the attack on 9/11. You have failed us.

YES, “We noticed.”

September 11 is a day of remembrance for all Americans. You propose to make 9/11 a “National Service Day”. While we know that you don’t share our reverence for 9/11, we pray that history will report your proposal as what it is…a disgrace.

YES, “We noticed.”

You have made a mockery of our Constitution and the office that you hold. You have embarrassed and slighted us in foreign visits and policy.

YES, “We noticed.”

We have noticed all these things. We will deal with you. When Americans come together again, it will be to remove you from office.

Take notice.

Psa 118:8-9 NIV  It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in man.  (9)  It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in princes.

After 800 billion spent on your bail outs
And you said unemployment would not go over 8%
Just wanted to tell you moron it reached 10.2% today.
Now resign your clueless

“All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.”

Obama lies right to our collective faces, while & putting on the show at Rev. Right’s church. You people were sucked right into that one, but shame on you. When you heard the foul mouthed Rev. Wright, someone should have known there was something rotten in Denmark! All I can say WE TOLD YOU THIS WAS NOT GOOD to elect someone that couldn’t tell the truth! But then to have cronies like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi,but which one is pulling the strings. Or is it both of them?

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=tCAffMSWSzY#t=28

A giant signpost that Faux News is losing in their War on the Obama White House was on full display last night, as several Faux propagandists sought to dredge up, yet again the ghost of Reverend Jerimiah Wright with this clip -

According to NewsHounds -

Hannity And Fox News Still Obsessed With Rev. Jeremiah Wright

I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that Rev. Jeremiah Wright is African American but Fox News’ obsession with him has gone over the top. Even if you think the guy is a radical extremist whatever, Wright is a former Marine and Navy corpsman who attended President Johnson as a cardiopulmonary technician. And yet Wright, who has committed no crime (or you could be sure Fox News would trumpet it 24/7) other than to espouse a political philosophy Fox News finds distasteful, has been turned into the 21st Century Willie Horton – and by a bunch of self-styled patriots who who never served their country when they had the chance. With video.

“Great American” Sean Hannity sneered by way of introduction last night (11/2/09) to a meaningless video of Wright speaking of the country as being a land of greed and slavery. “(Wright) used his time at the podium to do what he does best, that’s bash the United States of America.”

As opposed to Hannity who uses his time before the cameras to bash our president, vice president, Speaker of the House, Democrats and liberals, Chicago, the media, African Americans, etc.

After the clip, Hannity said, “That’s Rev. Wright at an event hosted by a SOCIALIST (his emphasis) magazine. So I wonder how many other friends of the president are subscribers to that publication.” Not that Hannity bothered to find out. Smarmy, baseless, innuendo is, apparently, A-OK on the “fair and balanced” network.

Hannity was not the only one to focus on this non-news event. Bill O’Reilly included Wright in the “Reality Check” segment last night. “Same tune, different place. I know the Obama people hate when we show you Wright in any context because it brings back bad memories… But Wright did influence the president’s life and that still has not been fully examined.”

Sort of like that Birth Certificate “hasn’t been fully examined”?

Faux is losing. There is no sweeter sound than racist conservative whimpering.

Send your email in to us. show eveyone what u are saying. Send your emails to us.

To obama: You and all the dems are next to get voted out! I have a perfect credit score but banks won’t refinace my house. I’m tired of you dems only Lining your pockets I talk to everyone I can about your ( change ) change in my pocket is all I see

To pelosi: get ready to be voted out you are the worst speaker of the house I have ever watched i think a first paraplegic would speak better than you. ( I will talk to every person I know and make sure they see thru your Cham gov. )

People are now beginning to realize America is under attack. However, I am not sure they realize just how engrained the attack is in certain segments of our society. Today we will attempt to show you how pervasive it is. From religious institutions to unions, and how they are directly related to Cloward and Piven.

Rev Jeremiah Wright (introduced by Robert McChesney) speaking at the 60th anniversary celebration of the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review. The event was held on September 17th, 2009, at the New York Society for Ethical Culture in New York City. The full half hour presentation is available in my Vodpod theatre at right.

The Marxist Roots of Black Liberation Theology

by Anthony B. Bradley Ph.D. at action.org

….Black Liberation theologians James Cone and Cornel West have worked diligently to embed Marxist thought into the black church since the 1970s. For Cone, Marxism best addressed remedies to the condition of blacks as victims of white oppression. In For My People, Cone explains that “the Christian faith does not possess in its nature the means for analyzing the structure of capitalism. Marxism as a tool of social analysis can disclose the gap between appearance and reality, and thereby help Christians to see how things really are.”

In God of the Oppressed, Cone said that Marx’s chief contribution is “his disclosure of the ideological character of bourgeois thought, indicating the connections between the ‘ruling material force of society’ and the ‘ruling intellectual’ force.” Marx’s thought is useful and attractive to Cone because it allows black theologians to critique racism in America on the basis of power and revolution.

For Cone, integrating Marx into black theology helps theologians see just how much social perceptions determine theological questions and conclusions. Moreover, these questions and answers are “largely a reflection of the material condition of a given society.”

In 1979, Cornel West offered a critical integration of Marxism and black theology in his essay, “Black Theology and Marxist Thought” because of the shared human experience of oppressed peoples as victims. West sees a strong correlation between black theology and Marxist thought because “both focus on the plight of the exploited, oppressed and degraded peoples of the world, their relative powerlessness and possible empowerment.” This common focus prompts West to call for “a serious dialogue between Black theologians and Marxist thinkers” — a dialogue that centers on the possibility of “mutually arrived-at political action.”

In his book Prophesy Deliverance, West believes that by working together, Marxists and black theologians can spearhead much-needed social change for those who are victims of oppression. He appreciates Marxism for its “notions of class struggle, social contradictions, historical specificity, and dialectical developments in history” that explain the role of power and wealth in bourgeois capitalist societies. A common perspective among Marxist thinkers is that bourgeois capitalism creates and perpetuates ruling-class domination — which, for black theologians in America, means the domination and victimization of blacks by whites. America has been over run by “White racism within mainstream establishment churches and religious agencies,” writes West.

Perhaps it is the Marxism imbedded in Obama’s attendance at Trinity Church that should raise red flags. “Economic parity” and “distribution” language implies things like government-coerced wealth redistribution, perpetual minimum wage increases, government subsidized health care for all, and the like. One of the priorities listed on Obama’s campaign website reads, “Obama will protect tax cuts for poor and middle class families, but he will reverse most of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers.”

Black Liberation Theology, originally intended to help the black community, may have actually hurt many blacks by promoting racial tension, victimology, and Marxism which ultimately leads to more oppression. As the failed “War on Poverty” has exposed, the best way to keep the blacks perpetually enslaved to government as “daddy” is to preach victimology, Marxism, and to seduce blacks into thinking that upward mobility is someone else’s responsibility in a free society.

Monthly Review , the subject of the celebration Rev. Wright was attending in the video above, says it ”speaks to workers, labor organizers, activists, and academics. A scholarly, accessible critique of capitalism” http://www.monthlyreview.org/

Among contributing writers, you will find Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the two original authors of Cloward - Piven strategy .  In a more recent article, written, I believe, in 1997, called “The Era Of Power” they write: 

http://www.monthlyreview.org/198piven.htm

…Thus dominant interdependencies, and dominant forms of power, reflect the co-operative activities that generate the material bases for social life, and that sustain the force and authority of the state. If workers withhold their labor, production stops; if they withhold their votes, regimes fall. And, of course, the one set of relations is deeply intertwined with the other. States define and enforce property rights, regulate money and credit, and regulate the relations between employer and employees, for example. The relations between class-based interest groups and state authorities inevitably focus importantly on these economic policies. And the broadly parallel evolution of industrial capitalism and electoral-representative institutions in the twentieth-century means that working-class economic challenges are systematically transported into the relations between voting publics and the state.

This emphasis on power capacities shaped by the interdependent relations which constitute economy and polity is clearly consistent with the Marxist view of working-class power as rooted in the role of the proletariat as a force in capitalist production…. And it fits Schumpeter’s model characterizing the capitalist state as the “tax state” which, because it depends on economic resources it does not control, ties state authorities in close interdependence with the owners of private property who do control those resources.

The left confidence in working-class power was also expressed in the belief that working-class power would grow. Marx had rooted the growth of proletarian power in the development of industrial capitalism; Bernstein saw roughly parallel possibilities for working-class power in the development of electoral-representative arrangements. Social democratic perspectives later melded the power yielded workers by industrial capitalism with the power generated by electoral representative arrangements, so that working-class power resources were said to grow in tandem with both industrial capitalism and electoral democracy. In the happiest variants, these power resources resulted in a welfare state compact which promoted the “decommodification” of labor, and therefore a fundamental empowerment of labor in market relations.

…With these points made, it is clear that the globalization thesis cuts to the core of left political conviction. The effective exercise of labor power has always been premised on the limited ability of capital to exit or threaten to exit from economic relations. Globalization, together with postfordist production methods, seems to open unlimited opportunities for exit, whether through the relocation of production, accelerated trade, worker replacement, or capital flight, all of which seems to radically reduce the dependence of capital on labor. Workers, for their part, tied as they are by their merely human fear of change and rupture, can never match these exit options. And while working-class voters may still be able to make regimes topple, the significance of voting power depends on the significance of state power. But, so the argument goes, states whose sovereignty is confined to fixed territories also must knuckle under to the whims of a mobile capital. Economic globalization thus presumably eviscerates both economic and political forms of working-class power. As a result, workers and voters in the mother countries of capitalism are now pitted against low-wage workers and feeble governments everywhere, and pitted against technological advances as well. So, if the globalization thesis is true, it is devastating to the left as we have known it.

No wonder the determination with which MR authors (and we as well) scrutinize and challenge the argument. But scrutinizing and disputing the extent of global trade or capital movement does not quite grapple with the realities of class power under new conditions. What is at issue is not simply whether it is still capitalism, or whether capital is still dependent on labor in the abstract, or whether nation states still matter, but whether economic changes have undermined the conditions which once made at least the partial actualization of economic and political power from the bottom possible.

…since the relevant contributions to ongoing economic and political activities typically involve numerous individuals, people must develop a sense of solidarity and some capacity for concerted action so that their collective leverage can be deployed against those who depend on them, for work, votes, or acquiescence in the rules of civic life. This is the classical problem of organizing, whether workers, or voters, or community residents. And finally, the threat of exit, including the threat that employers will turn to replacement workers or that politicians will court alternative voter blocs must be limited, or at least the prospect of exit must not be so frightening that people cannot imagine enduring it.

… Meanwhile, economic change also creates concrete new possibilities for worker power. People work at new and different occupations, they have different skills, and in time they will see the power potential inherent in the interdependencies of a new and fabulously complex and precarious communications-driven economy that is as vulnerable to mass disruption as the manufacturing-driven economy was. In time, maybe only a little time, they will develop the awareness of commonalities and capacities for joint action which will make working-class power possible again. And they are also likely to find the imagination and the daring to break the new rules governing communications which are even now being promulgated to criminalize the exercise of power from below.

It is the end of a power era. It is also the beginning of a power era.

For More understanding of  Marxist and Maoist theology, I recommend the Definitions page on angelfire.com . 

Guess Who is visiting the White House?

To see the list of who is visiting the White House click here .

Unions have become catalysts for Marxist Change. That being said, from the National Education Association Website:

Recommended Reading: Saul Alinsky, The American Organizer

http://www.nea.org/tools/17231.htm

Reveille for Radicals
by Saul Alinsky
Vintage; Reissue edition (October 23, 1989)

Rules for Radicals
by Saul Alinsky
Vintage; Reissue edition (October 23, 1989)

An inspiration to anyone contemplating action in their community! And to every organizer!

… Alinsky practiced what he preached. He said, “Tactics means doing what you can with what you have … tactics is the art of how to take and how to give.”

He uses eyes, ears and nose for examples…

Eyes
“If you have a vast organization, parade it before the enemy, openly show your power.”

Ears
“If your organization is small, do what Gideon did: conceal the members in the dark but raise a clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more that it does.”

Nose
“If your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place.”

Alinsky devised and proved thirteen tactical rules for use against opponents vastly superior in power and wealth.

   1. “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
   2. “Never go outside the experience of your people.
   3. “Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.
   4. “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
   5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
   6. “A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
   7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
   8. “Keep the pressure on.
   9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
  10. “Major premise for tactics is development of operations that will maintain constant pressure upon the opposition.
  11. “If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
  12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
  13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

“The real action is in the enemy’s reaction. The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength. Tactics, like life, require that you move with the action.”

Alinsky was hated and defamed by powerful enemies, proof that his tactics worked. His simple formula for success… “Agitate + Aggravate + Educate + Organize”

This should illustrate to you how important it is you get involved. On every level, they are attacking our values, our morals, our decency.

One such place to start is the 9.12 Project  – check out your local branch today.

From JoAnne’s blog, thanks for the find

http://www.blogster.com/joannemor/new-rev-wright-video-surfaces

This is not a Prayer, it’s rhetoric that God ignores

Here is Rev Wright in a short video.

Listen closely.

He thanks his host for providing a Socialist forum.

At the end, he slams America as usual.

“Home of the greed”

“Land of the slave”!

  The President and the Preacher

 Reflections On the African-American Jeremiadic Tradition

 Because of his cool, calm, ostensibly detached speech performances and persona, some folks, especially African Americans of his post-Civil Rights generation, call President Barack Obama, “No drama Obama.”  Many African Americans of the pre-Civil Rights generation even see him as such  despite his background as representing the awesome fulfillment in their lifetime of the African American messianic tradition.       

Unlike the charismatic Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., his former pastor and advisor, President Obama was not raised in the bosom of the black church or African American Baptist and Methodist Jeremiadic tradition.  The son of a black Kenyan father and white Kansan mother, he was raised in a different time, place, and culture by pre-Civil Rights white maternal grandparents in Hawaii.  How, then, should we understand the historical and cultural contexts as well as the truth of President Obama’s angry claim that his former pastor’s comments do not accurately portray the perspectives of the black church?

In criticism of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah’s defensive interview on the Bill Moyer show, didactic keynote address at the NAACP convention, and defiant, signifying  speech at the National Press Club, a TV reviewer wrote that President Obama’s former pastor emerged as “a voluble, vain and erudite entertainer, a born televangelist who quotes Ralph Ellison as well as the Bible and mixes highfalutin academic trope with salty street talk” (Stanley A1, 14).  Responding finally to the unrelenting criticism and political pressure of Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain during the presidential campaign, as well as of media critics to denounce his retired pastor for righteously reminding his predominantly black congregation of the wrath and damnation of God to come to America for its alleged if not actual historical sins, President Obama angrily denounced the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah and severed his long, close relationship with him in an April 29, 2008, news conference. 

“His comments were not only divisive and destructive,” President Obama declared, “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. . . .They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs” (qtd. in Zeleny and Nagourney A1, 17).  While some people may still have questions about the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah’s influence on President Obama, it is more enlightening at this time after the election to question the caricature of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah and to examine the facts about the relationship of his beliefs and values to “the perspective of the black church,” which was and is mainly Baptist or Methodist for most African Americans.

 ********

Generational Shifts in Cultural Identity

“At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing and Christ has no east or west,” as typical black elders of the pre-Civil Rights generation of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah who were raised with black brothers and sisters in African American Baptist and Methodist churches know, and as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us in 1963, “we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation.  This is tragic.  Nobody of honesty can overlook this” (King).  Is this one of the probable reasons that so many typical white media journalists and pundits, as well as politicians, reduced the complex identity of the unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian Rev. Dr. Jeremiah to spliced controversial sound bytes from his sermons?  

Quoted repeatedly out of context during the presidential campaign by the news media from sermons he preached in 2001 and 2003, the sensational sound bytes, as in yellow journalism, fostered the false impression that he is an unpatriotic, radical black separatist and racist bigot who deserves vilification and crucifixion.   Some in the media and in blogs even exacerbated their historical, political, cultural, and rhetorical disingenuousness or ignorance by questioning President Obama’s reference to his pre-Civil Rights white grandmother’s belief in racial stereotypes and prejudice as that of the typical white person of her generation. 

Typical is hardly an esoteric word.  Nor is that commonly used adjective as difficult to define as the commonly misused and abused abstract nouns patriotism, separatism, racism, and terrorism.  So, what is there about typical that ordinary educated folks don’t understand?   Well, Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary reminds us that typical means “combining or exhibiting the essential characteristics of a group.”  Although academic postmodern theorists and critics like Jean-Francois Lyotard undermine the traditional grounds for belief in the essential or core principles in master narratives of national identity, unity, community, truth, and reality, readers and listeners do not have to be high-school graduates to know that the media have helped to foster and perpetuate the negative racial stereotypes, myths, and prejudice that constitute some of the fundamental characteristics of our shared national identity that President Obama seeks to change.[1]

Preaching Truth to Power!

 An avatar of the Afro-American Jeremiadic Tradition

Who, then, is the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah?  And how does his dedication, like that of Jeremiah and the other fifteen prophets of the Old Testament, to a social Gospel, and his commitment to an African American sermonic, especially jeremiadic, tradition, like the Reverends Martin Luther King, Jr., Wyatt T. Walker, and Jesse Jackson, contribute to the complexity of his identity as one of the most respected and influential, until recent political attacks, African American ministers in the nation?[2]  President Obama’s former spiritual advisor and the retired senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), a primarily African American megachurch in Chicago, Illinois, with more than 6,000 members, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah is the Philadelphia son of a Baptist minister, a veteran of the U. S. Marine Corps and U. S. Navy, a graduate of Howard University (B.A. and M.A. in English), the University of Chicago Divinity School (M.A. in Divinity), and the United Theological Seminary (DMin).

A highly distinguished national and international preacher and speaker, as well as an accomplished musician and writer, he is the author, editor, or co-editor of more than eight books, many articles, and a vast number of sermons.  He also serves on several national committees and boards of directors.  His numerous awards include eight honorary doctoral degrees and three presidential commendations. An important demonstration of his and his congregation’s dedication to the social Gospel are the more than 70 TUCC ministries that serve the community, including HIV/AIDS, Drug & Alcohol Recovery, Health Advisory, Can-cer-vive, Domestic Violence Advocacy/Care, Housing, and Career Development.[3]  These facts suggest that the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah’s comments, beliefs, and values are consistent with the tradition and perspective of many urban black American Baptist and Methodist churches.

  The Trinity Church in Chicago

 A Modern Temple of the Social Gospel

The commitment of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah to the African American jeremiadic tradition is more dramatically demonstrated in the complete fiery sermons delivered in TUCC than on the video sound bytes by sensationalizing journalists and newscasters.  ABC News reporters Brian Ross and Rehab El-Buri, for example, open their March 13, 2008, yellow-journalism column “Obama’s Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11” with the sensational, fallacious statement that “Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor says blacks should not sing ‘God Bless America’ but ‘God damn America.’”  According to these reporters,  “The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s south side, has a long history of what even Obama’s campaign aides concede is ‘inflammatory rhetoric,’ including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own ‘terrorism.’” Based on an alleged review by ABC News of “dozens of Rev. Wright’s sermons,” Ross and El-Buri claim to have “found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans” (Ross and El-Buri). 

 So let us examine more closely their claims and those of some anti-Rev. Dr. Jeremiah bloggers.  Even though many people will express different interpretations of  historical facts, of patriotism, of racism, of terrorism, and of the invention of HIV, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah was speaking truth to the people and to power as a preacher and prophet in the African American jeremiadic tradition when he engaged in hyperbolic rhetoric and passionate denunciations of America for its national sin of racialized slavery, for its violation of the founding principles of the nation with institutional anti-black racism, and for its selective demonizing and violent destruction of non-democratic, non-Christian peoples as suspected threats and terrorists to the United States.  In “Love of God, Love of Man, Love of Country,” a speech on American slavery in 1847, Frederick Douglass stated:  “So long as my voice can be heard on this or the other side of the Atlantic, I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of moral indignation.  In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of this country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.  It is righteousness that exalteth a nation while sin is a reproach to any people” (qtd. in Foner).  While it is rarely mentioned when speaking of the great abolitionist and moral clarion, Frederick Douglass was also an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal church.

 Frederick Douglass

 He Cursed America For Her Sins!

This is the tradition to which the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah bears witness.  According to the responses in the blogs of some people, especially African Americans, ABC News and other media are shamelessly guilty of reprehensible yellow journalism for sensationalizing, distorting, and misrepresenting the rhetoric and character of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah by quoting him out of historical and cultural context.

In “Confusing God and Government,” his April 13, 2003, sermon, he did not say, for example, that blacks should sing “God damn America.”  Assuming the traditional role of the preacher and prophet in many black American Baptist and Methodist churches and communities, like his father the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Sr., he passionately declared in righteous indignation that “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’  No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people.  God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.  God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme” (qtd. in Cooper).  Why do so many people, especially those with access to such research engines as Google, blind themselves to the unpopular, unpleasant facts about our government?  Why have so many newscasters, pundits, politicians, preachers, and everyday Americans failed to understand the relationship of the sin of blasphemy in the adverbial clause, i.e., “for as long as she acts like she is God,” to the American and African American jeremiadic traditions? 

In other words, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah prophesies that until America repents its sins of overbearing pride against God and man—for acting like God, “for killing innocent people,” and “for treating our citizens as less than human”—the nation is destined for divine—not man’s, not the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah’s—wrath and damnation.   Perhaps more Americans would understand better our complex national identities, moral transgressions, and historical fate if they learned and lived the lessons of the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States, as well as the lessons in classic books on American and African American language, literature, and life!

We learn, for instance, in the Old Testament of the King James edition that the prophet Jeremiah is empowered by the Lord to curse the political corruption, oppression, immorality, and idolatry of the king of Judah, his son Shallum, and the Hebrew nation.  “Woe unto him,” the Lord angrily declared in the voice of Jeremiah, “that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong, that useth his neighbor’s service without wages, and giveth him not for his work” (Jeremiah 22:13).  Similarly, in preaching to his predominantly black working-class and middle-class congregation, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah was justifiably angry at the crimes and sins of our government for breaking the covenant with God that all men are equal and endowed with such inalienable rights as life and liberty; replacing that covenant with the myth of white supremacy. 

 The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was also similarly impassioned with righteous indignation at the injustice of the Memphis government.  As Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning King biographer, reminds us in “The Last Wish of Martin Luther King,” two sanitation workers, “Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had been crushed in a mechanical malfunction; city rules forbade black employees to seek shelter from rain anywhere but in the back of their compressor trucks, with the garbage” (15).  The night before he was assassinated on April 4 while supporting civil demonstrations by black Memphis sanitation workers in 1968 for higher pay than $1.27 an hour and for more healthful working conditions, he completed writing his Sunday sermon with the jeremiadic title, “Why America May Go to Hell.”[4]  Like the anti-war voice of the post-1963 Rev. Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the voice of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah was radical.   Both voices were in the tradition of the antebellum David Walker, a free North Carolina black man who owned a second-hand clothing store in Boston and whose jeremiad, “Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles” (1829), culminated in rebuke and scorn by the government and his death by anti-black racists. Like the Rev. Dr. King and David Walker, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah was impassioned and provocative in developing  his jeremiad on American national sins:   “y’all looking to the government for only what God can give.  A lot of people confuse God with their government” (qtd. in Cooper).

Reverend Dr M. L. King

A Great Preacher in the Prophetic Tradition

The Sacred and Secular Origins of the American Jeremiad

 As defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, jeremiad means a “lamentation; a writing or speech in a strain of grief or distress; a doleful complaint; a complaining tirade.”  It is derived from the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, who, between the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., predicted the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem as divine punishment for the Israelite violations of the Mosaic covenant.   Jeremiah also prophesied the future redemption and restoration of Israel after its atonement in a golden age.  The complete rhetorical structure of the American jeremiad, according to David Howard-Pitney in The Afro-American Jeremiad (1990), has three elements: “citing the promise; criticism of present declension, or retrogression from the promise; and a resolving prophecy that society will shortly complete its mission and redeem the promise” (8).[5]

The corridors of American history resound with the cries for justice and prophecies of national disaster by blacks in the tradition of Jeremiah and other Old Testament prophets.  Many cultural historians argue that the messianic rhetoric of the American and African American jeremiad has its ori­gins in the Judeo‑Christian tradition, the Bible, and New England Puritanism.  The historians George Bancroft, Perry Miller, Henry Nash Smith, R.W.B. Lewis, Sacvan Bercovitch, Ernest Tuveson, David Noble, Wilson Moses, and David Howard‑Pitney credit sacred and secular myths of origin as the foundation of the providential interpretation of Ameri­can history and America’s self‑righteous mission of saving the world and establishing the kingdom of God on earth.  For example, in his ten‑volume History of the United States (the first volume appeared in 1834 and the last in 1873), George Bancroft, the father of American history and the most widely respected nineteenth‑century interpreter of America, celebrated a providential view of Americans as a chosen people covenanted by God to save the world—not to purify America—and usher in the millennium by spreading the American way: freedom, individualism, capitalism, and democracy.

This is the Judeo‑Christian myth and mission, secularized in the ironies and paradoxes of the American Dream, that informed our nation’s City-upon-a-Hill “civil religion” of 1630, whites only Naturalization Act of 1790, anti-Europe expansionist Monroe Doctrine of 1823, and transcontinental Manifest Destiny of 1845 as well as our   imperialism in the Spanish‑American War of 1898.  This myth of origin and mission of ourselves as a Chosen People also informed both President George Bushes’ declarations of a new world order of the American way in the wake of the balkanization of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in our own time.

In addition, recent studies in the field of African American studies by such historians as John Blassingame, Nathan Huggins, Lawrence Levine, and Leslie Owens argue persuasively that vestigial elements of African religious customs have endured through the process of syncretism, that is, the merging or hybridization of African and non‑African cultural patterns and sign systems. Perhaps the most illuminating discussions of the relationship between African religious survivals and black messianism are in Roll, Jordan, Roll (1976) by Eugene Genovese and Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms (1982) by Wilson Moses.

 Derived from the Hebrew mashiah, or “anointed,” messiah, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the Hebrew title … applied in the O.T. prophetic writings to a promised deliverer of the Jewish nation, and hence applied to Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfillment of that promise…. An expected liberator or savior of an oppressed people or country.”  In Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms, Moses concisely summarizes the Judeo­-Christian tradition of messianism:

“The belief in a messiah grew out of the Hebrews’ experience of oppression at the hands of the great Middle‑Eastern empires. It symbolized their hopes for an improvement in the fortunes of their nation and the restoration of their ancient ideals. The messiah would usher in a messianic age. The chosen people would revolt against their political oppressors and revitalize the conservative values advocated by the prophets. Messianic ideas were adapted by the early Christians, who saw Jesus of Nazareth as the long-awaited messiah (Christos in Greek means the anointed one). After the death of Jesus, the early Christians began to await his second coming, at which time he would inaugurate a messianic era of a thousand years’ duration. This belief came to be known as millenarianism or chiliasm, from the Latin millenarias and the Greek chilios (a thousand)….  A messianic people are a chosen or anointed people who will lead the rest of the world in the direction of righteousness.  The messianic people traditionally see themselves as a conscience for the rest of the human race—some­times as a suffering servant or a sacrificial lamb, some­times as an avenging angel. (4-5)

 During the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the African American jeremiadic cry was “No more water, the fire next time,” as well as “We shall overcome!”   The recurring jeremiadic shift between lamentation and righteous anger is grounded in the contradictions and paradoxes of a nation founded simultaneously on the principles of freedom and equality and on the practice of slavery and inequality. These contradictions, however, find synthesis in the mixed emotions of faith, perseverance, and hope in the cry from black folk for social and moral justice, cries which have deep historical roots in the Old Testament tradition of Jeremiah and the other prophets, as well as the principles of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States. This tradition has also been syncretically combined with elements of sub-Saharan African religious beliefs and values.

Perry Miller’s The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939) reveals the sacred Puritan roots of the secular myth of Americans hold of themselves as a chosen people, whose exodus from the corruption and bondage in the old Crown‑dominated church in England took them to the promised land of religious freedom and “a city upon a hill” in America.  In The American Jeremiad (1978), Sacvan Bercovitch identifies the American Jeremiad as the crucial rhetorical ritual that has charac­terized the major writings of Anglo-American culture since the Puritan era. This rhetorical ritual involves three stages: promise, declension, and prophecy. According to David Noble in The End of History, the promise of the first stage held that “the exodus of the Puritans as a New Israel was leading toward the millennium.” The second stage of the Jeremiad was the assertion of declension:

“Although the Puritans as a Chosen People had crossed the frontier threshold from the medieval past in which history had no meaning, they, as individuals and as a group, had not fully accepted their responsibility to make history a progressive path toward the future Kingdom. They were slothful. They were distracted and pursued false and evil values. And they received divine punishments for their failures to act as a Chosen People. This Progressive jeremiad … established great tension in the community of saints as the distance between the perfection of the promise and the imperfection of daily activity was examined and deplored.” (Noble 5)

 The third and final stage of the jeremiad was “a proph­ecy that the Chosen People would accept their responsibility, reject their sinful life­styles which looked so similar to those of the corrupt medieval past, and construct the environment for the Kingdom in the immediate future” (Noble 5).  This myth of God’s covenant with Puritans as a chosen people informed John Winthrop’s sermonic proclamation on the Arbella in 1630 of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as “a city upon a hill.” Spreading from the New England Puritans to all colonial Protestants in the eighteenth century, the Puritan jeremiad became political and American by 1776. “The promise was a virtuous republic,” writes David Noble.  “The Revolution was the exodus from the Egyptian bondage of monarchy. The new citizen‑saints found themselves living in a state of declension, reflecting their failure of the promise and the gap between the ideal republic and their imperfect political experience. But political prophets pointed out their failings, explained their sufferings as punishment for those failures, and pointed toward redemption and the fulfillment of the promise in the future” (6).

More important for black Americans, Moses indicates, is the evolution of two varieties of American messianism: hard‑line and soft‑line. Hard-line messianism “eventually developed into the doc­trine of white racial supremacy, ruthless expansionism, religious intolerance, and economic insensitivity”; the latter grew “out of the unrealized ideals of the Jeffersonian tradition and the American enlightenment, which came to emphasize America’s mission to preserve the inalienable rights of man.” According to soft‑line messianism, “the American mission was not to dominate the rest of the world, forcing it into the paths of righteousness, but to serve as an example of the spiritual per­fection that human nature could aspire to in an atmosphere of political freedom” (Moses 8).

Many students of American history are familiar with Thomas Jefferson’s advocacy of political, religious, and educational freedoms as principal author of the Declaration of Independence and Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and founder of the University of Virginia.  Fewer are familiar with his advocacy of the myth of white supremacy in Notes on the State of Virginia (France 1785, England 1787), which includes an American jeremiad that contains a classic ironic illustration of the fusion of oppositional varieties of messianism:

“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?  Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. (289)

 Although Jefferson believed that abolition followed by deportation was the best solution to his personal guilt and fear about the national sin of slavery, Notes also reveals his belief in white supremacy.   Such racist comments as “the blacks are … inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind” (270) and that blacks prefer white mates “as uniformly in the preference of the Oranootan [sic] for the black woman over those of his own species” (265) were answered in black jeremiads by “Othello,” Benjamin Banneker, and David Walker.

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 The African American Jeremiad

In Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms, Moses defines the African American jeremiad as “mainly a pre‑Civil War,” ingenious adaptation of messianic traditions in the form of “constant warnings issued by blacks to whites, concerning the judgment that was to come for the sin of slavery” (30-31).  Diverse scholars from W. E. B. Du Bois, Melville Herskovits, and E. Franklin Frazier to Lawrence Levine, Albert Raboteau, and Orlando Patterson persuasively argue that evidence of the retention and reinterpretation of vestigial African religious traits by black people in the Americas is stronger in the Caribbean than in the United States. As historian Wilson Moses notes, “The religion of black slaves in the United States was similar to both that of West Africans and that of Europeans. These similarities may be attributed to African retentions, syncretic tenden­cies, and spontaneous parallel evolution” (28).

A dramatic, historical example of the so­ciocultural, sociopsychological dualism, or double consciousness, of black Americans is the connection between revolutionary black nationalism and African religious survivals. This is apparent, on one hand, in the role of conjuring by Gullah Jack, a leader in the 1822 slave revolt of Denmark Vesey, and, on the other hand, in the messianic avenging angel mission that Nat Turner assumed in his 1831 revolt. Both, similar to the contemporary examples of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Minister Malcolm X, involve a synthesis of orthodox and unorthodox faith in the ritual power of the spoken word:  incantations, curses, blessings, and prayers, as well as the magical power of charms, fetishes, and totems to bridge and balance the physical and spiritual, historical and mythical realms of reality, knowledge, and truth.

In Spite of his Islamic Veneer

 Malcolm X was also in the Afro-American Prophetic Tradition

Some scholars believe that the African American jeremiadic tradition began in 1788 with the “Essay on Negro Slavery” by a free black from Maryland who used the pen name “Othello.” Adapting the American jeremiad and warning of God’s wrathful judgment for the American national sin of slavery, he wrote, “Beware Americans! Pause—and consider the difference between the mild effulgence of approving Providence and the angry countenance of incensed divinity” (qtd. in Moses 33). There are four important responses to the racial injustice and social inequality expressed in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and in American life of the time: Benjamin Banneker’s letter in 1791, the Reverends Richard Allen and Absalom Jones’ “Address to those who keep Slaves, and approve the Practice” in 1794, Prince Hall’s speech “Charge Delivered to the African Lodge at Menotomy” in 1797, Robert Alexander Young’s Ethiopian Maifesto in 1829, and especially David Walker’s “Walker’s Appeal” in 1829.

Black Americans have responded historically to the hypocrisy, injustice, and immorality of white Americans both by reacting ambivalently to the prophecies of false prophets and by reinterpreting the prophets and prophecies in a manner consistent with their own bi-cultural African American tradition of faith, hope, resistance, resilience, and resourcefulness.  Probably the most moving passage in President Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995, 2004), is his tearful memory of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah’s “meditation on a fallen world” in his sermon, “The Audacity of Hope.”  “‘It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year,’” the reverend chants, “‘where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That’s the world!  On which hope sits!’” 

 Drawing on the story of a barren and taunted Hannah in the Book of Samuel and the analogy of a bruised and bloodied woman harpist playing on a single frayed string in a museum painting titled Hope, “Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House” before his stories “became more prosaic, the pain more immediate,” our new black president recalls his former preacher’s and advisor’s words.  “‘Like Hannah, we have known bitter times!  Daily, we face rejection and despair…And yet consider once again the painting before us.  Hope!  Like Hannah, that harpist is looking upwards, a few faint notes floating upwards towards the heavens.  She dares to hope….She has the audacity…to make music…and praise God…on the one string…she has left’” (293)!  

 Unlike such false prophets and charlatans as Daddy Grace and Father Divine, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah has scriptural and secular authority for his prophetic mission of warning the nation of divine judgment for transgressing our personal and national covenant with God and man.  Like “Othello,” Benjamin Banneker, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, Prince Hall, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah is respected by many black Americans, especially Baptists and Methodists, as an African American prophetic preacher in the tradition of Jeremiah.  Can I get a witness?

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[1] Bill Schneider, “Wright Flap May Hurt Obama,” CNN Political Ticker, 21 Mar 2008, 6 Apr 2008 <http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/21>.[2] “Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Biography,” The History Makers, 11 Jan 2002, 6 Apr 2008 <http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/biography.asp?bioindex=331&category=religionMakers>. 

 [3] “Ministries: Christ, Community, and Culture,” Trinity United Church of Christ, 2008 6 Apr 2008 <http://www.trinitychicago.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=28

>

[4] David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1986) 622.  [5] Martin, Roland S., “The Full Story Behind Wright’s ‘God Damn America’ Sermon,” Anderson Cooper: 360  21 March 2008, 6 Apr 2008 <http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/03/21/the-full-story-behind-wright%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cgod-damn-america%E2%8%9D sermon/>.

*************

 

By: Dr. Bernard Bell

Professor of Literature

Penn State University

November 2009

 

* This essay was originally published as President Barack Obama, the Reverend Dr.  Jeremiah Wright, and the African American Jeremiadic Tradition.”  The Massachusetts Review (Autumn 2009): 332-343.

 

 

 

 

 

Lie, Cheap Steal Mislead, Destroy Fight, Propaganda, Deceit, Deception. Deceive, Blame, Delude,

Lie, Cheap Steal Mislead, Destroy Fight, Propaganda, Deceit, Deception. Deceive, Blame, Delude,

We Interrupt the series on how Cap & Trade will destroy America for bit of Liberal silliness.

Dateline: Washington D.C.

The White House has Declared at War on  Fox News!

Why?

Because they won’t join the rest of the Ministry of Truth in slobbering praise and awe all over the White House and the Democrat Congress.

They actually ask questions.

Dear God, NOT THAT!

The SKY IS FALLING!

These hens are threatened by someone who won’t go along with the Party Line.

And the White House’s conflict with Fox News? “It’s not so much a conflict,” Chief of Staff Raul Emanuel said. Fox News is simply “not a news organization, so much as it has a perspective.”

OH MY GOD! It Has a Perspective! The Anti-Christ has been let loose upon the world!

Hide the women and Children!

Obama Guru Advisor David Axelrod on ABC: “The only argument that Anita (Dunn. White House Communications Director) was making is that they are not really a news organization, if you watch even its not even their commentators, but a lot of their news program. It’s really not news, it’s pushing a point of view and the bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours, ought not to treat them that way. And we’re not going to treat them that way, we’re going to appear on their shows and participate, but understanding that they represent a point of view.”

OH MY GOD! A point of View! No, saw it ain’t so Joe!

So let’s all just walk away and ignore them, if we put them in the corner and just pretend their not there maybe they will just go away.

And don’t anyone talk to them. They’re crazy!

They are not of the body!

Has he ever watched MSDNC or ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, or read the New York Times or AP??

They have a “perspective” too.

But since it is to kiss his bosses ring and bend over and prostrate themselves at his holy feet I suppose it is a matter of perspective.

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, said in an interview with The New York Times. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

When the Ministry of Truth was at war with George W Bush, that was ok though and that how news was suppose to behave.

And by now you should now what Alinsky Liberals do to people that disagree with them.

ATTACK. DESTROY! CENSOR!

This, by the way is the same Mao-Tse Tung “is one of my favourite philosophers” Dunn who in recent days was caught saying  effectively, ‘Oh, and all of you in the Ministry of Truth shall do the same. After all, we control the media from the White House, don’t we’:

President Obama’s presidential campaign focused on “making” the news media cover certain issues while rarely communicating anything to the press unless it was “controlled,” White House Communications Director Anita Dunn disclosed to the Dominican government at a videotaped conference.

“Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” said Dunn.

“One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters,” said Dunn, referring to Plouffe, who was Obama’s chief campaign manager.

“We just put that out there and made them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it,” Dunn said.

Continued Dunn: “Whether it was a David Plouffe video or an Obama speech, a huge part of our press strategy was focused on making the media cover what Obama was actually saying as opposed to why the campaign was saying it, what the tactic was. … Making the press cover what we were saying.”

“I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.” President Obama on Nov 4, 2008. But since I and my minions control the press and the press is more than willing to be controlled I don’t really have to mean it.

I can say damned fool thing I want to  and they won’t bat an eye. They never did over Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers, Van Jones, ACORN, Frank Marshall Davis,Father Pfleger,Saul Alinsky,Bernadine Dohrn, Alice Palmer, and my 30 self-named “Czars”…

But it sounds good, don’t it.

Kinda like “not one dime” or “no one under 250,000 will be taxed”, “will not add to the deficit”

“Hope and Change”

How is that going to happen? and why are all your plans the exact opposite of what you say?

No one from CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times or the AP will ask any of these questions. They don’t even think they’re important.

But There’s a FOX in their hen house and they want it NUKED! NOW!

They keep telling people things we don’t want them to hear  and going off message!  Damn Them!

They must be made into unpeople.

We don’t wanna talk to you anymore. <<sticking tongue out>>

On the official White House Web site, a blog called Reality Check provides a running tally of transgressions by Fox News. It ends with this: “For even more Fox lies, check out the latest ‘Truth-O-Meter’ feature from Politifact that debunks a false claim about a White House staffer that continues to be repeated by Glenn Beck and others on the network.”(NYT)

Childish, ain’t it folks.

The Liberals even have a name for it, Faux News.

But this is your tolerant, more open, Bi-Partisan, Give Unity a new chance, Give peace a Chance, Yes we Can Transparent, “post partisan” politics, man of the little people President.

“The divisions, the stereotypes, the scapegoating, the ease with which we blame the plight of ourselves on others, all of that distracts us from the common challenges we face..” Senator Obama Jan 21st, 2008

Ain’t he just Magnificent!

If Obama refuses to deal with them, he is making a decision – plain and simple – that he doesn’t want to talk to anyone who will seriously challenge him. That is irresponsible. He is not doing his job. He is choosing to serve himself rather than give the American people answers to reasonable if not-always-friendly questions.

And since this is indefensible, he has his people try to rationalize it by painting Fox News Channel as less than a real news organization. Because it has a point of view – like, everyone.

And if the President can’t or won’t handle tough questions what kind of a Leader is he?

New York Times:

The American presidency was conceived as a corrective to the royals, but trading punches with cable shouters seems a bit too common. Perhaps it’s time to restore a little imperiousness to the relationship.

Yes, for god’s sake let’s get back to the Imperial President. What is he, Darth Obama?

So join the Rebellion and really annoy the Imperials and watch FOX.

You might actually learn something you weren’t supposed to know.

October 12, 2009

Peace, Brother. But what about Chicago?

By Kyle-Anne Shiver

Yes, yes, peace be upon him, but honestly, did the Nobel folks ever think to check the utter lack of peace in our president’s adopted home town, the first place to receive his miracle-touch community organization, aka peace initiatives?

Hmm.  Nobel nitwits?  Quite possibly.

The Nobel nitwits thought Obama’s record of past non-performance was as irrelevant as America’s press thought it was during the election.  But, of course, it’s very relevant.  Giving the presidency – and the Nobel Peace Prize — to a man who pursued peace in Chicago and left it in such a mess is akin to giving the CEO job of a major corporation to the guy who couldn’t even fix the mail room where he started.  It’s a Peter Principle nightmare.

The young vagabond, Barack Obama, went straight from a dorm room at Columbia to his first laboratory, the Southside of Chicago.  There, he hooked up with the Alinsky network of community organizers and took his political baby steps.  He learned power tactics, tried to help Roseland public-housing residents get their units tested for asbestos and joined a church.

The most puzzling thing about Barack Obama’s choice of church was that he sat there, listening to the hate-filled rants of Jeremiah Wright for what would come close to 1,040 Sundays but never saw the obvious connection between all that hate and the young, black male violence right outside the door there. 

via American Thinker: Peace, Brother. But what about Chicago?.

Just some of his comments from his sermons:

Background

Barack Obama first met Wright in the late 1980s, while he was working as a community organizer in Chicago before attending Harvard Law School.^[7] Wright officiated at the wedding ceremony of Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as their children’s baptisms.^[8]

The title of Obama’s 2006 memoir, The Audacity of Hope, was inspired by one of Wright’s sermons, which was also a theme of Obama’s 2004 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention.^[7][8][9] Wright served as both a role model and a spiritual mentor for Obama, and the senator would check with Wright prior to making any bold political moves.^[7] According to the Reverend Jim Wallis, who is a leader of the religious left, “If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from, just look at Jeremiah Wright.”^[10]

Wright was scheduled to give the public invocation before Obama’s presidential announcement, but Obama withdrew the invitation the night before the event.^[11] Wright wrote a rebuttal letter to the editor disputing the characterization of the account as reported in an article in The New York Times.^[12]

In 2007, Wright was appointed to Barack Obama’s African American Religious Leadership Committee, a group of over 170 national black religious leaders who supported Obama’s bid for the Democratic nomination.^[13] However, it was announced in March 2008 that Wright was no longer serving as a member of this group.^[14]

Controversial sermon excerpts

Most of the controversial excerpts that gained national attention in March 2008 were taken from two sermons: one titled “The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall” delivered on September 16, 2001 and another, titled “Confusing God and Government”, delivered on April 13, 2003.

“The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall”

In a sermon delivered shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001, Wright made comments about an interview of former U.S. Ambassador Edward Peck he saw on Fox News. Wright said:

“I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday. Did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox News. This is a white man, and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out — did you see him, John? — a white man, he pointed out, ambassador, that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true — America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”^[15]

Wright spoke of the United States taking land from the Indian tribes by what he labeled as terror, bombing Grenada, Panama, Libya, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and argued that the United States supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and South Africa. He said that his parishioners’ response should be to examine their relationship with God, not go “from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents.” His comment (quoting Malcolm X) that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” was widely interpreted as meaning that America had brought the September 11, 2001 attacks upon itself.^[16][17][18] ABC News broadcast clips^[19] from the sermon^[1][20] in which Wright said:

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye… and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

Later, Wright continued :

“Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y’all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people that we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.”^[19]

“Confusing God and Government”

Clips from a sermon that Wright gave, entitled “Confusing God and Government”, were also shown on ABC’s Good Morning America^[1] and Fox News. In the sermon, Wright first makes the distinction between God and governments, and points out that many governments in the past have failed: “Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change.”^[21] Wright then states:

“[The United States] government lied about their belief that all men were created equal. The truth is they believed that all white men were created equal. The truth is they did not even believe that white women were created equal, in creation nor civilization. The government had to pass an amendment to the Constitution to get white women the vote. Then the government had to pass an equal rights amendment to get equal protection under the law for women. The government still thinks a woman has no rights over her own body, and between Uncle Clarence who sexually harassed Anita Hill, and a closeted Klan court, that is a throwback to the 19th century, handpicked by Daddy Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, between Clarence and that stacked court, they are about to undo Roe vs. Wade, just like they are about to un-do affirmative action. The government lied in its founding documents and the government is still lying today. Governments lie.”

He continued:

“The government lied about Pearl Harbor too. They knew the Japanese were going to attack. Governments lie. The government lied about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. They wanted that resolution to get us in the Vietnam War. Governments lie. The government lied about Nelson Mandela and our CIA helped put him in prison and keep him there for 27 years. The South African government lied on Nelson Mandela. Governments lie.”

Wright then stated:

“The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment. They purposely infected African American men with syphilis. Governments lie. The government lied about bombing Cambodia and Richard Nixon stood in front of the camera, ‘Let me make myself perfectly clear…’ Governments lie. The government lied about the drugs for arms Contra scheme orchestrated by Oliver North, and then the government pardoned all the perpetrators so they could get better jobs in the government. Governments lie…. The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. Governments lie. The government lied about a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and a connection between 9.11.01 and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Governments lie.”

He spoke about the government’s rationale for the Iraq War:

“The government lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq being a threat to the United States peace. And guess what else? If they don’t find them some weapons of mass destruction, they gonna do just like the LAPD, and plant the some weapons of mass destruction. Governments lie.”

Wright then commented on God and government:

“And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton field, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that’s in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent..”^{[21][22][23][24]}

These sermon excerpts were widely viewed in early 2008 on network television and the internet.^[25]

When Wright’s comments were aired in the national media, Obama distanced himself from them, saying to Charles Gibson of ABC News, “It’s as if we took the five dumbest things that I’ve ever said or you’ve ever said in our lives and compressed them and put them out there — I think that people’s reaction would, understandably, be upset.”^[26] At the same time, Obama stated that “words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it’s on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue.”^[27] Obama later added, “Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn’t have felt as comfortable staying at the church.”^[28]

Obama first denied that he had ever heard Pastor Wright’s controversial comments before.^[29] The Illinois Senator later admitted, “Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes.”^[30] Obama said the remarks had come to his attention at the beginning of his presidential campaign but contended that because Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of Obama’s strong links to Trinity, he had not thought it appropriate to leave the church.^[31] He began distancing himself from Wright when he called his pastor the night before the February 2007 announcement of Obama’s presidential candidacy to withdraw his request that Wright deliver an invocation at the event. A spokesperson later said, “Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church, but… decided to avoid having statements and beliefs being used out of context and forcing the entire church to defend itself.”^[32] Wright attended the announcement, prayed with Obama beforehand, and in December 2007 Obama named him to the African American Religious Leadership Committee of his campaign.^[33][34] The Obama campaign released Wright after the controversy.^{[35][36][37][38]}

Many critics found this response inadequate; Mark Steyn, writing in the conservative publication National Review, stated: “Reverend Wright['s] appeals to racial bitterness are supposed to be everything President Obama will transcend. Right now, it sounds more like the same-old same-old.”^[39]

On March 18, in the wake of the controversy, Obama delivered a speech entitled “A More Perfect Union” at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During the course of the 37-minute speech, Obama spoke of the divisions formed through generations through slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow laws, and the reasons for the kinds of discussions and rhetoric used among blacks and whites in their own communities. While condemning the remarks by the pastor, he sought to place them in historical context by describing some of the key events that have formed Wright’s views on race-related matters in America. Obama did not disown Wright, whom he has labeled as “an old uncle”, as akin to disowning the black community or disowning his white grandmother, Madelyn Dunham.^[40] The speech was generally well received.^[41] Obama said that some of the comments by his pastor reminded him of what he called America’s “tragic history when it comes to race.”^[42]

Other Presidential candidates

In an interview with the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on March 25, 2008, Hillary Clinton commented on Obama’s attendance at Trinity United Church of Christ, stating, “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.” Later the same day, during a press conference, Clinton spoke on her personal preference in a pastor: “I think given all we have heard and seen, [Wright] would not have been my pastor.” A spokesperson for the Obama campaign asserted that Clinton’s comments were part of a “transparent effort to distract attention away from the story she made up about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia” the prior week.^[43] Weeks later during the Pennsylvania debate in Philadelphia, Clinton said, “For Pastor Wright to have given his first sermon after 9/11 and to have blamed the United States for the attack, which happened in my city of New York, would have been just intolerable for me.”^[44]

Future Republican nominee John McCain defended Obama when it came to allegations of guilt by association, saying, “I think that when people support you, it doesn’t mean that you support everything they say. Obviously, those words and those statements are statements that none of us would associate ourselves with, and I don’t believe that Senator Obama would support any of those, as well.”^[45]

And more from the Chicago Tribune

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is a member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. served as pastor for more than three decades. With Obama and Hillary Clinton in a close battle for the nomination, provocative snippets of Wright’s sermons began circulating widely in the last month. Obama has repudiated the remarks but continues to support Wright.

Many observers argue that Wright’s sermons convey a more complex message than simple sound bites can express. Here are several of the most notorious snippets, followed by longer excerpts for context. Tribune reporters transcribed these words from sermon recordings made by Trinity.

SEPT. 16, 2001

Sound bite: “We’ve bombed Hiroshima, we’ve bombed Nagasaki, we’ve nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye. . . . We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant. Because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

Excerpt: “Every public service of worship I have heard about so far in the wake of the American tragedy has had, in its prayers and in its preachments, sympathy and compassion for those who were killed and for their families. And God’s guidance upon the selected presidents and our war machine as they do what they do and what they got to do.

“Paybacks. There’s a move in Psalm 137 from thoughts of paying tithes to thoughts of paying back. A move if you will from worship to war. A move in other words from the worship of the God of creation to war against those whom God created. And I want you to notice very carefully the next move. One of the reasons this psalm is rarely read in its entirety because it is a move that spotlights the insanity of the cycle of violence and the cycle of hatred.

“Look at the verse, Verse 9: ‘Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rocks.’ The people of faith, by the rivers of Babylon, how should we sing the Lord’s song if I forget thee? The people of faith have moved from the hatred of armed enemies, these soldiers who captured the King, those soldiers who slaughtered his sons and put his eyes out, the soldiers who sacked the city, burned their towns, burned the temple, burned their towers. They moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents. The babies. The babies. Blessed are they who dash your babies’ brains against a rock. And that, my beloved, is a dangerous place to be.

“Yet that is where the people of faith are in 551 B.C. and that is where far too many people of faith are in 2001 A.D. We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents. We want revenge. We want paybacks and we don’t care who gets hurt in the process.

“Now, I asked the Lord, what should our response be in light of such an unthinkable act? But before I share with you what the Lord showed me, I want to give you one of my little faith footnotes. Visitors, I often give faith footnotes so that our members don’t lose sight of the big picture. Let me give you a little faith footnote. Turn to your neighbor and say ‘faith footnotes.’

“I heard Ambassador [Edward] Peck on an interview yesterday, did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox News. This is a white man, and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. Did you see him, John? A white man. He pointed out, an ambassador, that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true, that America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

“We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Iroquois, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism. We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism. We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel; we bombed the black civilian community of Panama, with stealth bombers, and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working fathers. We’ve bombed [Moammar] Gadhafi’s home and killed his child.

“Blessed are they who bash your children’s heads against the rocks. We bombed Iraq; we killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back an attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hard-working people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing that they would never get back home.

“We’ve bombed Hiroshima, we’ve bombed Nagasaki, we’ve nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye. Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant. Because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards.

“America’s chickens are coming home to roost. Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that, y’all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who’s trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people that we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have but they do have individuals who are willing to die, to take thousands with them, and we need to come to grips with that. Let me stop my faith footnote right there. And ask you to think about this for the next few weeks if God grants us that. Turn back to your neighbor and say: ‘Footnote is over.’

“Come on back to my question to the Lord. What should our response be right now in light of such an unthinkable act? . . . This is a time of self-examination. The Lord said to me: ‘How is our relationship doing, Jeremiah? How often do you talk to me personally? How often do you let me talk to you privately? How much time do you spend trying to get right with me? Or do you spend all your time trying to get other folk right?’ This is a time for me to examine my own relationship with God. Is it real or is it fake? Is it forever or is it for show? Is it something you do for the sake of the public or is it something you do for the sake of eternity? This is a time to examine my own relationship and a time for you to examine your own relationship with God. Self-examination.”

JULY 2003

Sound bite: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America’? No, no, no, not ‘God Bless America,’ ‘God Damn America.’ “

Excerpt: “Prior to Abraham Lincoln, the government in this country said it was legal to hold Africans in slavery in perpetuity. Perpetuity is one of them University of Chicago words that means forever. From now on.

“When Lincoln got into office the government changed. Prior to the passing of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, the government defined Africans as slaves, as property. Property. People with no rights to be respected by any whites anywhere. The Supreme Court of the government, same court, granddaddy court of the one that stole the 2000 election. The Supreme Court said in its Dred Scott decision, in the 1850s, no African anywhere in this country has any rights that any white person has to respect at any place any time.

“That was the government’s official position backed up by the Supreme Court—that’s the judiciary, backed up by the executive branch, [and] that’s the president, backed up by the legislative branch and enforced by the military of the government. But I stopped by to tell you tonight that governments change.

“Prior to Harry Truman’s government, the military in this country was segregated. But governments change. Prior to the civil rights and equal accommodations laws of the government in this country there was backed segregation by the country, legal discrimination by the government, prohibiting blacks from voting by the government. You had to eat in separate places by the government. You had to sit in different places from white folk ’cause the government says so. And, you had to be buried in a separate cemetery. It was apartheid American-style from the cradle to the grave all because the government backed it up. But guess what! Governments change.

“Under Bill Clinton, we got a messed up welfare-to-work bill. But under Clinton, blacks had an intelligent friend in the Oval Office. Ooh, but governments change. The election was stolen. We went from an intelligent friend to a dumb Dixiecrat, a rich Republican who has never held a job in his life, is against affirmative action, against education—I guess he is, ha!—against health care, against benefits for his own military, and gives tax breaks to the wealthiest contributors to his campaign. Governments change—sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad.

“But I’m fixing to help you again. Turn back and say: ‘He’s fixing to help us again.’ When governments change, write this down: Malachi 3:6, Malachi 3:6: ‘Thus said the Lord,’ repeat it after me, ‘For I am the Lord, and I change not.’ That’s the King James Version. The New Revised says: ‘For I the Lord do not change.’ In other words, where governments change, God does not change. God is the same yesterday, today, and forevermore. That’s what his name ‘I am’ means. You know, he does not change. There is no shadow of turning in God. One songwriter puts it this way: ‘As thou has been, thou forever will be. Thou changest not. Thy compassions, they fail not. Great is thy faithfulness Lord unto me.’ God does not change.

“God was against slavery on yesterday and God who does not change is still against slavery today. God was a God of love yesterday, and God who does not change is still a God of love today. God was a God of justice on yesterday, and God who does not change is still a God of justice today. Turn to your neighbor and say: ‘God does not change.’

“Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change. And I’m through now. But let me leave you with one more thing.

“Governments fail. The government in this text, comprised of Caesar . . . [and] Pontius Pilate, the Roman government failed. The British government used to rule from East to West. The British government had a Union Jack. She colonized Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Hong Kong. Her navies ruled the Seven Seas all the way down to the tip of Argentina in the Falklands. But the British government failed. The Russian government failed. The Japanese government failed. The German government failed.

“And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on the reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating the citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of the racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America’?

“No, no, no, not ‘God Bless America,’ ‘God Damn America.’ That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating its citizens as less than human, God damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.”

JAN. 13, 2008

Sound bite: “Hillary is married to Bill, and Bill has been good to us. No he ain’t. Bill did us just like he did Monica Lewinski. He was riding dirty.”

Excerpt: “Some of us, his own disciples, could not see how the Lord could use a Rosa Parks, a Martin Luther King to bring an end to the sick and silly system of segregation. White Christian preachers, the Lord’s disciples, told Martin Luther King he was moving too fast. ‘Slow down. Give it some time’ God shows us the answer but we let our ‘buts’ get in the way.

“There is a man here who can take this country in a new direction. ‘But he’s a black man.’ There is a man here who is empowered by hope to usher in an era of change in a country that is in desperate need of a change. ‘But he ain’t black enough.’ There is a man here who can get Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and persons of no faith to sit down at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood and talk about our common humanity and our common future. ‘But I ain’t gonna vote for him ’cause I don’t want to waste my vote.’

” ‘But Hillary is married to Bill, and Bill has been good to us.’ No he ain’t. Bill did us just like he did Monica Lewinsky. He was riding dirty. But he fixed it so that some of y’all are now riding pretty. Money talks and BS walks. BS, that’s bogus stuff. Walk all over this country; walk all over the Internet—bogus stuff. Walk all over your self-confidence.

” ‘I would work for Barack, but he doesn’t have the experience that Hillary has.’ ‘But he’s an unknown in terms of foreign policy.’ ‘But his health-care plan ain’t as good as Edwards’ plan.’ ‘But the church he has belonged to for 20 years causes some white people and some Uncle Toms some problems.’ God shows us the answer and we let our ‘buts’ get in the way. Put it another way, God shows us the answer and, like Andrew, we show God our ‘buts.’

” ‘But this ain’t gonna work.’ ‘But we never did it that way before.’ ‘But this can never happen.’ ‘But Pastor Wright don’t do it like that, Pastor Moss.’ God shows us the answer and we let our ‘buts’ get in the way. God shows us the answer and we show God our ‘buts’ as we head for the exit. God shows us the answer and like Andrew we tell God what he shows us ain’t gonna work.”

Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune

They are basically the same thing.
And how special is it that out esteemed President sat in Rev. Wrights congregation for 20 years and never heard Rev. Wright spew this garbage??

I can tell you that I actually listen to my pastor when he speaks, and if something sounds off,  I investigate and ask questions.  But there is absolutely no way I would sit through sermon after sermon listening to crap like Rev. Wright was spewing.

And it’s so lame of Obama to say he never heard anything like that? Oh really. When the Rev. was “Goddamning” the USA, what exactly was Obama thinking??  Was he thinking “well, there’s nothing wrong with that?”  I can’t believe he would be so ignorant as to say he never heard anything like that at the church.  Any normal thinking Christian would run out of a church that was spewing such garbage as Rev. Wright was spewing.

Oh, wait.  I forgot,  this is Chicago.

This is an interesting article about Black liberation Theology

The Marxist Roots of Black Liberation Theology

by Anthony B. Bradley Ph.D.

What is Black Liberation Theology anyway? Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright catapulted black liberation theology onto a national stage, when America discovered Trinity United Church of Christ. Understanding the background of the movement might give better clarity into Wright’s recent vitriolic preaching. A clear definition of black theology was first given formulation in 1969 by the National Committee of Black Church Men in the midst of the civil-rights movement:

Black theology is a theology of black liberation. It seeks to plumb the black condition in the light of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, so that the black community can see that the gospel is commensurate with the achievements of black humanity. Black theology is a theology of ‘blackness.’ It is the affirmation of black humanity that emancipates black people from White racism, thus providing authentic freedom for both white and black people. It affirms the humanity of white people in that it says ‘No’ to the encroachment of white oppression.

In the 1960s, black churches began to focus their attention beyond helping blacks cope with national racial discrimination particularly in urban areas.

The notion of “blackness” is not merely a reference to skin color, but rather is a symbol of oppression that can be applied to all persons of color who have a history of oppression (except whites, of course). So in this sense, as Wright notes, “Jesus was a poor black man” because he lived in oppression at the hands of “rich white people.” The overall emphasis of Black Liberation Theology is the black struggle for liberation from various forms of “white racism” and oppression.

James Cone, the chief architect of Black Liberation Theology in his book A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), develops black theology as a system. In this new formulation, Christian theology is a theology of liberation — “a rational study of the being of God in the world in light of the existential situation of an oppressed community, relating the forces of liberation to the essence of the gospel, which is Jesus Christ,” writes Cone. Black consciousness and the black experience of oppression orient black liberation theology — i.e., one of victimization from white oppression.

One of the tasks of black theology, says Cone, is to analyze the nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ in light of the experience of oppressed blacks. For Cone, no theology is Christian theology unless it arises from oppressed communities and interprets Jesus’ work as that of liberation. Christian theology is understood in terms of systemic and structural relationships between two main groups: victims (the oppressed) and victimizers (oppressors). In Cone’s context, writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the great event of Christ’s liberation was freeing African Americans from the centuries-old tyranny of white racism and white oppression.

American white theology, which Cone never clearly defines, is charged with having failed to help blacks in the struggle for liberation. Black theology exists because “white religionists” failed to relate the gospel of Jesus to the pain of being black in a white racist society.

For black theologians, white Americans do not have the ability to recognize the humanity in persons of color, blacks need their own theology to affirm their identity in terms of a reality that is anti-black — “blackness” stands for all victims of white oppression. “White theology,” when formed in isolation from the black experience, becomes a theology of white oppressors, serving as divine sanction from criminal acts committed against blacks. Cone argues that even those white theologians who try to connect theology to black suffering rarely utter a word that is relevant to the black experience in America. White theology is not Christian theology at all. There is but one guiding principle of black theology: an unqualified commitment to the black community as that community seeks to define its existence in the light of God’s liberating work in the world.

As such, black theology is a survival theology because it helps blacks navigate white dominance in American culture. In Cone’s view, whites consider blacks animals, outside of the realm of humanity, and attempted to destroy black identity through racial assimilation and integration programs–as if blacks have no legitimate existence apart from whiteness. Black theology is the theological expression of a people deprived of social and political power. God is not the God of white religion but the God of black existence. In Cone’s understanding, truth is not objective but subjective — a personal experience of the Ultimate in the midst of degradation.

The echoes of Cone’s theology bleed through the now infamous, anti-Hilary excerpt by Rev. Wright. Clinton is among the oppressing class (“rich white people”) and is incapable of understanding oppression (“ain’t never been called a n-gg-r”) but Jesus knows what it was like because he was “a poor black man” oppressed by “rich white people.” While Black Liberation Theology is not main stream in most black churches, many pastors in Wright’s generation are burdened by Cone’s categories which laid the foundation for many to embrace Marxism and a distorted self-image of the perpetual “victim.”

Black Liberation Theology as Marxist Victimology

Black Liberation Theology actually encourages a victim mentality among blacks. John McWhorters’ book Losing the Race, will be helpful here. Victimology, says McWhorter, is the adoption of victimhood as the core of one’s identity — for example, like one who suffers through living in “a country and who lived in a culture controlled by rich white people.” It is a subconscious, culturally inherited affirmation that life for blacks in America has been in the past and will be in the future a life of being victimized by the oppression of whites. In today’s terms, it is the conviction that, 40 years after the Civil Rights Act, conditions for blacks have not substantially changed. As Wright intimates, for example, scores of black men regularly get passed over by cab drivers.

Reducing black identity to “victimhood” distorts the reality of true progress. For example, was Obama a victim of widespread racial oppression at the hand of “rich white people” before graduating from Columbia University, Harvard Law School magna cum laude, or after he acquired his estimated net worth of $1.3 million? How did “rich white people” keep Obama from succeeding? If Obama is the model of an oppressed black man, I want to be oppressed next! With my graduate school debt my net worth is literally negative $52,659.

The overall result, says McWhorter, is that “the remnants of discrimination hold an obsessive indignant fascination that allows only passing acknowledgement of any signs of progress.” Jeremiah Wright, infused with victimology, wielded self-righteous indignation in the service of exposing the inadequacies Hilary Clinton’s world of “rich white people.” The perpetual creation of a racial identity born out of self-loathing and anxiety often spends more time inventing reasons to cry racism than working toward changing social mores, and often inhibits movement toward reconciliation and positive mobility.

McWhorter articulates three main objections to victimology: First, victimology condones weakness in failure. Victimology tacitly stamps approval on failure, lack of effort, and criminality. Behaviors and patterns that are self-destructive are often approved of as cultural or presented as unpreventable consequences from previous systemic patterns. Black Liberation theologians are clear on this point: “People are poor because they are victims of others,” says Dr. Dwight Hopkins, a Black Liberation theologian teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Second, victimology hampers progress because, from the outset, it focuses attention on obstacles. For example, in Black liberation Theology, the focus is on the impediment of black freedom in light of the Goliath of white racism.

Third, victimology keeps racism alive because many whites are constantly painted as racist with no evidence provided. Racism charges create a context for backlash and resentment fueling new attitudes among whites not previously held or articulated, and creates “separatism” — a suspension of moral judgment in the name of racial solidarity. Does Jeremiah Wright foster separatism or racial unity and reconciliation?

For Black Liberation theologians, Sunday is uniquely tied to redefining their sense of being human within a context of marginalization. “Black people who have been humiliated and oppressed by the structures of White society six days of the week gather together each Sunday morning in order to experience another definition of their humanity,” says James Cone in his book Speaking the Truth (1999).

Many black theologians believe that both racism and socio-economic oppression continue to augment the fragmentation between whites and blacks. Historically speaking, it makes sense that black theologians would struggle with conceptualizing social justice and the problem of evil as it relates to the history of colonialism and slavery in the Americas.

Is Black Liberation Theology helping? Wright’s liberation theology has stirred up resentment, backlash, Obama defections, separatism, white guilt, caricature, and offense. Preaching to a congregation of middle-class blacks about their victim identity invites a distorted view of reality, fosters nihilism, and divides rather than unites.

Black Liberation Is Marxist Liberation

One of the pillars of Obama’s home church, Trinity United Church of Christ, is “economic parity.” On the website, Trinity claims that God is not pleased with “America’s economic mal-distribution.” Among all of controversial comments by Jeremiah Wright, the idea of massive wealth redistribution is the most alarming. The code language “economic parity” and references to “mal-distribution” is nothing more than channeling the twisted economic views of Karl Marx. Black Liberation theologians have explicitly stated a preference for Marxism as an ethical framework for the black church because Marxist thought is predicated on a system of oppressor class (whites) versus victim class (blacks).

Black Liberation theologians James Cone and Cornel West have worked diligently to embed Marxist thought into the black church since the 1970s. For Cone, Marxism best addressed remedies to the condition of blacks as victims of white oppression. In For My People, Cone explains that “the Christian faith does not possess in its nature the means for analyzing the structure of capitalism. Marxism as a tool of social analysis can disclose the gap between appearance and reality, and thereby help Christians to see how things really are.”

In God of the Oppressed, Cone said that Marx’s chief contribution is “his disclosure of the ideological character of bourgeois thought, indicating the connections between the ‘ruling material force of society’ and the ‘ruling intellectual’ force.” Marx’s thought is useful and attractive to Cone because it allows black theologians to critique racism in America on the basis of power and revolution.

For Cone, integrating Marx into black theology helps theologians see just how much social perceptions determine theological questions and conclusions. Moreover, these questions and answers are “largely a reflection of the material condition of a given society.”

In 1979, Cornel West offered a critical integration of Marxism and black theology in his essay, “Black Theology and Marxist Thought” because of the shared human experience of oppressed peoples as victims. West sees a strong correlation between black theology and Marxist thought because “both focus on the plight of the exploited, oppressed and degraded peoples of the world, their relative powerlessness and possible empowerment.” This common focus prompts West to call for “a serious dialogue between Black theologians and Marxist thinkers” — a dialogue that centers on the possibility of “mutually arrived-at political action.”

In his book Prophesy Deliverance, West believes that by working together, Marxists and black theologians can spearhead much-needed social change for those who are victims of oppression. He appreciates Marxism for its “notions of class struggle, social contradictions, historical specificity, and dialectical developments in history” that explain the role of power and wealth in bourgeois capitalist societies. A common perspective among Marxist thinkers is that bourgeois capitalism creates and perpetuates ruling-class domination — which, for black theologians in America, means the domination and victimization of blacks by whites. America has been over run by “White racism within mainstream establishment churches and religious agencies,” writes West.

Perhaps it is the Marxism imbedded in Obama’s attendance at Trinity Church that should raise red flags. “Economic parity” and “distribution” language implies things like government-coerced wealth redistribution, perpetual minimum wage increases, government subsidized health care for all, and the like. One of the priorities listed on Obama’s campaign website reads, “Obama will protect tax cuts for poor and middle class families, but he will reverse most of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers.”

Black Liberation Theology, originally intended to help the black community, may have actually hurt many blacks by promoting racial tension, victimology, and Marxism which ultimately leads to more oppression. As the failed “War on Poverty” has exposed, the best way to keep the blacks perpetually enslaved to government as “daddy” is to preach victimology, Marxism, and to seduce blacks into thinking that upward mobility is someone else’s responsibility in a free society.

Anthony B. Bradley is a research fellow at the Acton Institute, and assistant professor of theology at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis. His Ph.D. dissertation is titled, “Victimology in Black Liberation Theology.” This article was originally published on the newsletter of the Glen Beck Program. Watch Bradley’s guest appearance on Beck’s CNN Headline News show here.

 This one is a little different…

Two Different Versions! ……………..  Two Different Morals!

OLD VERSION: The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long,  building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.

The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.  

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!

MODERN VERSION:

  The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

  The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

  Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.

  CBS, NBC , PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.   America is stunned by the sharp contrast.

  How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing,
‘It’s Not Easy Being Green.’

  Acorn stages a demonstration in front of the ant ’s house where the news stations film the group singing, ‘We shall overcome.’

Rev. Jeremiah Wright  then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper’s  sake. 
 

Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer.

  The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar.

  The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ants food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him because he doesn’t maintain it.

  The ant has disappeared in the snow.

  The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident
and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders
who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.

  MORAL OF THE STORY:  Be careful how you vote in 2010.

” I recognize that I have been involved in the death of 35,000 unborn babies” – Carol Everett, former abortion clinic worker

IS ABORTION RACIST ? ARE WEALTHY WHITE ELITISTS PLOTTING THE GENOCIDE OF THE BLACK RACE?
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In The Matrix, the blue pill sustains blissful ignorance.

The analogy is to The Matrix, but it is Obama making it. For reference (Ann Althouse), “the red pill opens your eyes to the truth, letting you see the world as it really is. The blue pill allows you to live in blissful ignorance with no idea what’s really going on.”

There are several clips in this video of Obama comparing taking the red pill with taking the blue pill. He always sides with the blue pill as probably more cost effective. He’s diabolically correct of course; but Diabolics is no way to govern, unless tyranny is your endgame and the seeds of destruction, watered by myriad figures from Frank Marshall Davis, James Cone, Rev. Wright,  Bill Ayers and Rashid Khalidi, is actually an ACORN.

So, Obama says take the blue pill and make the world go away. The MSM has tried to swallow enough blue pills for the rest of us by trying to avoid creating news by conducting investigative journalism.