Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Victims, suffering in the land of the devil

No, not the daily contents of “Deep Thoughts”, but…

Red State:

It was a typical Obama speech — soaring rhetoric, allusions to Martin Luther King, Jr., and probably a few fainters in the audience. It was a ballsy speech to be sure. But it was still bull.

Obama wants to be both the black candidate and the candidate above race. He wants to embrace race and move beyond race. He tries to have his cake and eat it too. He wants us to do the same. I for one threw up.

Let’s be clear on one thing. Obama would not be here but for being outmaneuvered by Camp Clinton. Obama never made this campaign about race. The Clintons made it about race. Obama has tried his best to avoid race — to be a black man transcendent of race — and he largely succeeded until Jeremiah Wright made it to YouTube.

This is the Democratic equivalent of Mitt Romney’s mormonism speech. Obama urges us to overcome. Dr. King, after all, said that we shall overcome. Obama intends himself to be the legacy of overcoming. But desiring his cake, desiring to eat it, and desiring all of us to eat in common communion with him, is a rich plate of empty calories. Like Mitt Romney’s speech, it will only serve to remind Americans of that which Obama hopes they will forget. In Obama’s case, that Mr. Being Above Race has shown judgment poor enough to designate as his mentor a man profoundly embittered by this country and who believes the white man killed Jesus and now distributes AIDS to kill all the black men.

Read on . . .

He begins by tying up American history quoting the preamble. Then he addressed slavery and multiculturalism. Then he got to Reverend Wright and his grandmother, throwing them both under the bus without disowning them.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

Of course, he has tried to run his campaign totally ignoring race. I take this as an admission that the Clintons have him. He now is forced to talk about it.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

I welcome Barack Obama’s call to work through these things. Along those lines, I would like to know how he thinks Reverend Wright, his mentor and moral compass, came up with the idea that white men invented AIDS to kill black men.

I would like to know how Reverend Wright came up with the idea that the American government was behind September 11th.

After these two paragraphs Barack Obama says

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point.

Let me tell you how we got here.

We got here because the Clintons are willing to use race to get into the White House. But more importantly, we got here because while Barack Obama has tried to be above race, he has been mentored by a man who is deeply, deeply affected by the issue of race. While Barack Obama has tried to make white people comfortable, the man who married him, baptized his children, and mentored him for twenty years has been preaching sermons, in Barack Obama’s words, that stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

Here is what Barack Obama did not answer:

He did not answer whether he has ever seriously tried to disabuse Rev. Wright of his stereotypes. If he did not, how does he expect to lead the nation away from its racist past?

And let’s not forget what all of this is about — Barack Obama using 4,881 words to distract from the fact that he has spent two decades taking spiritual advice from a man who fundamentally hates this country and cannot move forward as a result. That calls into question not this country’s legacy, but Obama’s judgment.