Charles Krauthammer points out that Obama’s recent remarks disowning Wright vitiate his “race” speech:
“I can no more disown him [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother.”
— Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18
Guess it’s time to disown Granny, if Obama’s famous Philadelphia “race” speech is to be believed. . . On Tuesday, the good senator begged to extend and revise his previous remarks on race. Moral equivalence between Grandma and Wright is now, as the Nixon administration used to say, inoperative.
These equivalences having been revealed as the cheap rhetorical tricks they always were, Obama has now decided that the man he simply could not banish because he had become part of Obama himself is, mirabile dictu, surgically excised.
At a news conference in North Carolina, Obama explained why he finally decided to do the deed. Apparently, Wright’s latest comments — Obama cited three in particular — were so shockingly “divisive and destructive” that he had to renounce the man, not just the words.
What were Obama’s three citations? Wright’s claim that AIDS was invented by the U.S. government to commit genocide. His praise of Louis Farrakhan as a great man. And his blaming Sept. 11 on American “terrorism.”
But these comments are not new. These were precisely the outrages that prompted the initial furor when the Wright tapes emerged seven weeks ago. Obama decided to cut off Wright not because Wright’s words or character or views had suddenly changed. The only thing that changed was the venue in which Wright chose to display them — live on national TV at the National Press Club. That unfortunate choice destroyed Obama’s Philadelphia pretense that this “endless loop” of sermon excerpts being shown on “television sets and YouTube” had been taken out of context.
(Emphasis mine.) Exactly right. The “you have to hear it in context” line was very clever, because no one at all is going to do that. (I sat through 10 minutes of one of them, and that was quite enough, thank you.) Unfortunately for Obama, that line is worthless now.
Krauthammer continues:
Obama’s Philadelphia oration was an exercise in contextualization. In one particularly egregious play on white guilt, Obama had the audacity to suggest that whites should be ashamed that they were ever surprised by Wright’s remarks: “The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning.”
That was then. On Tuesday, Obama declared that he himself was surprised at Wright’s outrages. But hadn’t Obama told us that surprise about Wright is a result of white ignorance of black churches brought on by America’s history of segregated services? How then to explain Obama’s own presumed ignorance? . . . Obama’s turning surprise about Wright into something to be counted against whites— one of the more clever devices in that shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud in Philadelphia — now stands discredited by Obama’s own admission of surprise.
(Emphasis mine.) There’s more. Read the whole thing.
(Via LGF.)
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