Like JFK, Obama Lacks Spine to Repudiate Racists Whose Support He Needs

JFK made nice speeches about civil rights, but knew that he needed the support of racist Southern Democrats in the U.S. Senate, so he was relatively inert during the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement.

He also understood that Blacks were inalienably Democratic, and therefore would remain in his column despite his flirtations with white racist demogogues like James Eastland, Orville Faubus, William Fulbright and Sam Ervin.

Likewise, Sen. Obama has generated some soaring rhetoric about unity and racial reconciliation, but he understands as a prosperous biracial man that his bona fides with the resentful Black underclass are not secure enough to permit him to repudiate Black racist demogogues and economic hypocrites like his Chicago pastor.

Just in case Obama wavers, ideological enforcers like the Washington Post's Colbert King are at the ready with columns like the one below.

Why Obama Stands With His Church
By Colbert King

All they wanted to do was pray with the rest of the congregation. But that was asking too much.

To be sure, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two leaders in Philadelphia's black community, enjoyed great success in bringing African Americans into the Christian fold. But the steady growth in black membership at St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church distressed the white congregation that owned the church.

At first, black Christians were moved to seats along the wall. That still allowed for too much mingling. So one Sunday morning as Allen, Jones and the other black worshipers knelt to pray, white church elders tapped Jones and Allen on the shoulders and told them to take their praying upstairs to a recently built balcony.

Rather than submit to such humiliation, Jones, Allen and the rest of the black worshipers walked out. The two men formed their own congregations.

Jones gained permission from the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania to establish America's first black parish, St. Thomas African Episcopal Church. He eventually became the Episcopal Church's first African American priest.

Allen formed a Methodist congregation that eventually became today's multimillion-member African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.

The walkout in the City of Brotherly Love occurred in 1787 -- a year that marks the beginning of America's independent black church, a theological movement born out of racism.

This history comes to mind as I listen to conservative commentators, chief among them MSNBC's Pat Buchanan, brand as "racist" the slogan adopted by Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago: "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian."

Trinity is Barack Obama's church and the place where the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. -- a gift to all who would bring down Obama -- served as pastor until his recent retirement.

Buchanan and his ilk look at Trinity's slogan with horror. They label the church's theological values "Afro-centric" and "racially exclusive." Trinity is beyond the pale of Christianity, at least their version of it. Psst: Trinity has plenty of company, coast to coast.

Many black congregations, from storefronts to mega-churches, are in sync with the Trinity slogan. They, too, see no need to apologize for their African roots. Nor are they ashamed of preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

But hey, what's with this newfound concern about African Americans worshiping among themselves in their own way? More important, who forced that separation?

As sociologist Kenneth Clark noted in his book "Dark Ghetto," ministers and lay leaders of white Christian churches historically were unwilling to incorporate large numbers of blacks into their houses of Christ. That's still the case today with some churches.

Truth is, folks like Buchanan don't really care that America's Christian congregations don't look like salt and pepper on Sunday mornings. The reality of blacks and whites worshiping apart doesn't disturb them. If anything, Buchanan thinks African Americans are ingrates -- that we should be satisfied with our station in life.

"America has been the best country on earth for black folks," Buchanan wrote in his column, " PJB: A Brief for Whitey," posted on his Web site yesterday.

"It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known," he wrote.

Like JFK, Obama Leading "Double Life"

JFK was a notorious adulterer who profaned the presidency with multiple trysts, and used the White House staff to prevent his wife from discovering women with him there. By contrast, Obama appears to be a faithful husband. Yet, as Thomas Sowell writes below, he "has been leading as much of a double life as Eliot Spitzer."

What Obama found irresistible, however, was not a mini-skirt or a bursting bodice, but the cult of Black racism and treason in Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Now he is telling his spiritual mistress of 20 years not to call him at work, and not to embarrass him in front of his new friends. But it's hard not to notice the lipstick on his collar.

Race and Politics
By Thomas Sowell
March 18, 2008

There is something both poignant and galling about the candidacy of Barack Obama. Any American, regardless of party or race, has to find it heartening that the country has reached the point where a black candidate for President of the United States sweeps so many primaries in states where the overwhelming majority of the population is white.

We have all seen the crowds enthralled by Barack Obama's rhetoric and theatrical style. Many of his supporters put their money where their mouths were, so that this recently arrived Senator received more millions of dollars in donations than candidates who have been far more visible on the national stage for far more years.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Barack Obama has been leading as much of a double life as Eliot Spitzer.

While talking about bringing us together and deploring "divisive" actions, Senator Obama has for 20 years been a member of a church whose minister, Jeremiah Wright, has said that "God Bless America" should be replaced by "God damn America" -- among many other wild and even obscene denunciations of American society, including blanket racist attacks on whites.

Nor was this an isolated example. Fox News Channel has played tapes of various sermons of Jeremiah Wright, and says that it has tapes with hours of more of the same.

Wright's actions matched his words. He went with Louis Farrakhan to Libya and Farrakhan received an award from his church.

Sean Hannity began reporting on Jeremiah Wright back in April of 2007. But the mainstream media saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke no evil.

Now that the facts have come out in a number of places, and can no longer be suppressed, many in the media are trying to spin these facts out of existence.

Spin number one is that Jeremiah Wright's words were "taken out of context." Like most people who use this escape hatch, those who say this do not explain what the words mean when taken in context. In just what context does "God damn America" mean something different?

Spin number two is that Barack Obama says he didn't hear the particular things that Jeremiah Wright said that are now causing so much comment.

It wasn't just an isolated remark. Nor were the enthusiastic responses of the churchgoers something which suggests that this anti-American attitude was news to them or something that they didn't agree with. If Barack Obama was not in church that particular day, he belonged to that church for 20 years. He made a donation of more than $20,000 to that church. In all that time, he never had a clue as to what kind of man Jeremiah Wright was? Give me a break! You can't be with someone for 20 years, call him your mentor, and not know about his racist and anti-American views.

Neither Barack Obama nor his media spinmeisters can put this story behind him with some facile election year rhetoric. If Senator Obama wants to run with the rabbits and hunt with the hounds, then at least let the rabbits and the hounds know that.

The fact that Obama talks differently than Jeremiah Wright does not mean that his track record is different. Barack Obama's voting record in the Senate is perfectly consistent with the far left ideology and the grievance culture, just as his wife's statement that she was never proud of her country before is consistent with that ideology.

Senator Barack Obama's political success thus far has been a blow for equality. But equality has its down side. Equality means that a black demagogue who has been exposed as a phony deserves exactly the same treatment as a white demagogue who has been exposed as a phony.

We don't need a President of the United States who got to the White House by talking one way, voting a very different way in the Senate, and who for 20 years followed a man whose words and deeds contradict Obama's carefully crafted election year image.
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Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
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