Greeley (belly)aches

I’d like to be able to feel Andrew Greeley’s pain, but he hurts in so many places, I wouldn’t know where to start. 

It’s a darn shame Obama had to “defend his outspoken pastor,” says G. in his Sun-Times column.  I would have said he had to defend himself for picking the guy, and not in a month of Sundays at Trinity UCC on 95^th St. or in any other church would I let him off the hook with “outspoken.” 

“There is no evidence at all that the senator identifies with his clergyman, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”  Other than he picked him as a veritable soul mate and guide and stayed with him 20 years.

If O. loses Pa., “[t]he United States will reveal itself to the world as a country in which a candidate can be destroyed by a single explosion on YouTube — at least if he’s black.”  Oh boy.

“The media will celebrate that they have dragged down another celebrity like Gov. Eliot Spitzer.”  Oh my.  Where do we start with that comparison?  Or “the media” as undifferentiated beast.  Where is this Andrew Greeley coming from, to use a semi-current expression meaning, what makes him tick or what in tarnation is he thinking?

The teacher [whom G. creates for the moment] will have to tell [students wondering years hence why a good speaker like O. didn’t make president] that there were enough closet racists in the United States (especially in Pennsylvania) in those days who seized on the outburst of his cleric as an excuse to destroy Obama. It’s not fair, they will cry out. Whoever said fair? The teacher will reply, quoting John F. Kennedy.

Or he will tell them what he says about William Jennings Bryan or Adlai Stevenson — excellent speakers, I believe — using the reason offered frequently by Mayordaley I when one of his candidates lost, they didn’t get enough votes.

Hillary C. and her staff

did everything they could to keep the race issue alive during the campaign [the teacher will say]. They attacked Obama on every possible occasion, just as if they were Republicans. She even hinted by lack of strong support that Obama might not be a Christian.

I am working on that “lack of strong support” part and hoping it comes to me in the wee hours when I sit up in bed and say “Eureka,” which is a once-current expression meaning, “Yippee, I got it!”

Hillary, G’s teacher will tell these terminally disillusioned kids, one of them “a boy with clenched fists,”

was the only one to gain by it. Of course, it proved that [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright was correct in his judgments about the American people. Many of them hated blacks so much they would do anything to keep one of them out of the White House. At least they didn’t shoot him.

I’ll say.  G’s teacher, his hyper-melodramatic back-to-the-future alter ego, concluded:

He almost won the primary anyway. If he had, they probably would have shot him.

Spattering brains all over the motorcade.

Back to 2008, when “many of the gloating members of the commentariat” — the dirty stinking bastards! sob! —

have appointed themselves to be the jury to determine whether Obama was guilty or not guilty of a major “gaffe” that cost him the election.

The majority seems to have found him guilty. In fact, the only thing of which he is guilty is that he is black. Worse still, he is a pushy black. My teacher in the future used the wrong word. Obama was lynched.

And Clinton was ultimately responsible for playing the race card.

She set loose the whirlwind.

Beat that for purple prose if you can.  Does this guy get excited or not?