“I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother.” What exactly was Grandma’s offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus’s time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.
Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one’s time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?
And Steyn:
The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”
Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years.
Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.
One quibble: it’s AIDS, not AIDs. AIDS stands for “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome,” and all letter of the acronym should be capitalized.
In a peculiar way, it may turn out that Obama will do more damage to race relations than Bill Clinton did. When Sister Souljah suggested that black people kill white people rather than other blacks, Clinton rightly slammed her, on the grounds that remarks like that deserve no respect. When given the opportunity to criticize the venom Wright spews, Obama whiffed. As Krauthammer noted above, Obama’s grandmother never spread divisiveness like Wright, and her remarks have been echoed by Jesse Jackson, who has also been afraid of strange black men. Obama had a chance to excise a tumor from the body politic.
But Obama chose differently, as Steyn put it:
Instead of distancing himself from his pastor, he attempted to close the gap between Wright and the rest of the country, arguing, in effect, that the guy is not just his crazy uncle but America’s, too.
To do this, he promoted a false equivalence. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother,” he continued. “A woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.” Well, according to the way he tells it in his book, it was one specific black man on her bus, and he wasn’t merely “passing by.” When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life.” In Philadelphia, Senator Obama topped that: Greater love hath no man than to lay down his gran’ma for his life.
I was curious, so I picked up Dreams from my Father and read pages 88-91, which discuss the incident where his grandmother felt threatened. Money quote [emphases in original]:
I [Obama] took her into the other room and asked her what had happened.
“A man asked me for money yesterday. While I was waiting for the bus.”
“That’s all?”
Her lips pursed with irritation. “He was very aggressive, Barry. Very aggressive. I gave him a dollar and he kept asking. If the bus hadn’t come, I think he might have hit me over the head.”
I returned to the kitchen. Gramps was rinsing his cup, his back turned to me. “Listen,” I said, why don’t you just let me give her a ride. She seems pretty upset.”
“By a panhandler?”
“Yeah, I know—but it’s probably a little scary for her, seeing some big man block her way. It’s really no big deal.”
He turned around and I saw now that he was shaking. “It is a big deal. It’s a big deal to me. She’s been bothered by men before. You know why she’s so scared this time? I’ll tell you why. Before you came in, she told me this fella was black.” He whispered the word. “That’s the real reason why she’s so bothered. And I just don’t think that’s right.”
The words were like a fist to my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure.
A few pages later, Obama talks to an older black man, Frank, who explains things to him:
Frank opened his eyes. “What I’m trying to tell you is, your grandma’s right to be scared. She’s at least as right as Stanley is. She understands that black people have a reason to hate. That’s just how it is. For your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it’s not. So you might as well get used to it.”
Let’s look at the relevant passage from Obama’s speech again [emphases added]:
I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.
If I’m reading Obama right, the author of the speech and the author of Dreams from my Father, it looks like Obama used his grandmother’s legitimate fears to try to whitewash Wright’s illegitimate conspiracy theories. And Obama must know (on some level) that his grandmother deserved better. This isn’t the audacity of hype; it is the mendacity of ambition.
Posted by Hubbard in Audacity of Hype, Kraut-hammered