Month: May 2008

Oprah vs. Rev. Wright in Newsweek

This blogger was wondering where he’d seen this item before:

[Oprah] Winfrey was a member of Trinity United from 1984 to 1986, and she continued to attend off and on into the early to the mid-1990s. But then she stopped. A major reason—but by no means the only reason—was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Even the published source looked familiar:

Oprah’s decision to distance herself came as a surprise to Wright, who told Christianity Today in 2002 that when he would “run into her socially … she would say, ‘Here’s my pastor!’ “

Then it clicked.  This piece on one my favorite blogs that ran in all its glory on March 17, seven short weeks ago, is where I read:

“She has broken with the [traditional faith],” [Rev. Wright] says. “She now has this sort of ‘God is everywhere, God is in me, I don’t need to go to church, I don’t need to be a part of a body of believers, I can meditate, I can do positive thinking’ spirituality. It’s a strange gospel. It has nothing to do with the church Jesus Christ founded.”

From Christianity Today of 4/1/02.  Yes. The item drew 585 “views,” or hits, since then, for roughly a dozen a day, by far the second-highest draw of my 1,385 posts.  (Highest is this, about Rev. Donald McGuire, the convicted molester, as retreat-giver, with 615 hits.)

Good catch, Newsweek!

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Catholic liberalism is dead. Long live — what?

Have liberal Catholics lost the fight?

He may not have been thinking about it at the time, but Pope Benedict, in the course of his recent U.S. visit may have dealt a knockout blow to the liberal American Catholicism that has challenged Rome since the early 1960s. He did so by speaking frankly and forcefully of his “deep shame” during his meeting with victims of the Church’s sex-abuse scandal. By demonstrating that he “gets” this most visceral of issues, the pontiff may have successfully mollified a good many alienated believers — and in the process, neutralized the last great rallying point for what was once a feisty and optimistic style of progressivism.

Vatican Council II had its “revolutionary impact,” but Pope John Paul II, “a charismatic conservative . . . refused to budge on the left’s demands.”  Liberal bishops were “swept away,” and “the heads at Call to Action grayed” as their movement faltered, writes David Van Biema in Time Mag.

Then came the “monstrous reprieve” provided by the clergy sex scandals.

[T]he old anger returned, crystallizing around the battle-cry “They just don’t get it.”

But then came Benedict to the U.S.  His visit “changed the dynamic” through his “forthright response” to the problem.  “It’s a new ball game,” said Peter Steinfels, the Commonweal Mag-NY Times editor and writer now with a Catholic think tank.

So goes this essay, which summarizes and simplifies and for some may lay the groundwork for further summarizing and simplifying in man’s never-satisfied zest for finding Answers to Everything.

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Puff the magic orator

Mark Steyn does Obama’s Philadelphia speech, refusing to accept comparisons with “the Gettysburg Address, or FDR’s First Inaugural, or JFK’s religion speech, or [per Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books] Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860.”

It was never a great speech. It was a simulacrum of a great speech written to flatter gullible pundits into hailing it as the real deal. It should be “required reading in classrooms,” said Bob Herbert in the New York Times; it was “extraordinary” and “rhetorical magic,” said Joe Klein in Time – which gets closer to the truth: As with most “magic,” it was merely a trick of redirection.

With it he seemed to make Jeremiah Wright “vanish into thin air,  Having “sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years,” he

looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes?

This is his rhetoric problem.

The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama’s adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the senator’s speechifying “magic” came from Jeremiah Wright himself. “He’s a politician,” said the reverend. “He says what he has to say as a politician. … He does what politicians do.”

It’s this comment that finally got O’s dander up:

“What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I’m about knows that – that I am about trying to bridge gaps and that I see the – the commonality in all people.”

Sure.  And he’s still sore, says the Mrs., who

told a rally in Durham, North Carolina, on Friday that only her husband’s desire to change US politics had helped him to control his feelings: “Barack is always thinking three steps ahead – what do we need to do to make change.”

Her husband was thinking “I can’t let my ego, my anger, my frustration get in the way of the ultimate goal,” she said.

She’s “a bizarre mix of condescension and grievance – like Teresa Heinz Kerry with a chip on her shoulder,” says Steyn.

But the common thread to her rhetoric is its antipathy to what she calls “corporate America.” Perhaps for his next Gettysburg Address the senator will be saying, “I could no more disown my wife than I could disown my own pastor. Oh, wait … .”

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Why so low, O.?

One reason for Obama’s slipping markedly in polls in the wake of the Rev. Wright business, says Michael Barone,

is that Obama now has taken two diametrically opposed stands on the minister whose church he attended for 20 years, who married him and his wife and baptized their children, whose sermon inspired the title of his 2006 book, “The Audacity of Hope.” On March 18, his response was: No, I cannot renounce my pastor. On April 29, his response was: Yes, I can.

Another and more important reason is that Obama’s long association with [Wright] . . . tends to undermine the central theme of Obama’s candidacy. Obama has presented himself since his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech as a leader who can unite America across political and racial divides.

The National Press Club appearance is what did it.  O. seems to be hurt by the Rev. Wright affiliation, mostly because of how he handled it.

Update: From Reader D.:

Not just by “how” he handled it — but that it took him 20 years to handle it. Wright’s was an Afro-centric church from the beginning. So Obama needed to find his African roots. Great. At a certain point he bought the radical stance of Wright or he would have exercised judgement and left. Or does bitter little Michelle pull his strings?
 
I don’t think the Obama Family can be impartial in the White House. I think they have a cause and an agenda and they may smile and speak softly, but it is only a Trojan Horse. Rev. Wright has endowed them with an “attitude.”
Someone has planted the seeds of one.  Too many indications of O&M as rad couple.
 
Yet later, Reader John:
I truly feel the Reverend Wright sounds like an Old Testament Prophet. He preaches a liberation theology and does not deserve the vilification given him by the sound bites taken out of context.
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Chatham Five robbed?

The Chicago Defender has stayed with the “massacre” in the longtime-black, until recently peaceful Chatham neighborhood.

An unpaid debt by one of the five people found murdered inside a Chatham home may be at the root of the killings, sources said Tuesday [4/29]. A home in the 7600 block of South Rhodes Avenue was the scene of a backyard barbeque April 22 that lasted into the wee hours of the night.

When one of the attendees returned to the home the next day, she found the back door ajar and the music blaring. She went inside, saw her friends–two women and three men–dead and called 911. Police have not determined when the massacre took place, but a source said a neighbor heard gunshots about 2:30 a.m., but did not call police.

Oh my.  What’s in that not calling police at 2:30 when you hear shots?  It’s the beginning of the end of a quiet neighborhood.  There has to be indignation when shots are heard, and a willingness to raise hell.

I have felt that indignation, though not at gunshots.  Rather, on being told of lewd suggestions made by black kids from nearby Chicago to some of our kids playing in the Beye School playground across the street in the 70s.

They heard me yelling from a front porch a block away, as I ran across the street towards the offenders, kids in their early teens.  Someone else called the cops.  I chased the offenders off the playground.  They ran east toward Austin Boulevard, the Oak Park-Chicago boundary, not waiting to hear my beef because who wants to hear what a crazy man wants to say?

It was after school had been left out.  One of the teachers, a veteran whom we knew and liked, took umbrage at my display, commenting to one of our kids then or the next day, I forget.  I told the cop, who said they had hightailed out of reach, that at least they know a wild man lives here, meaning they would try some other block to pull their stuff.

Meanwhile, on the Chatham block, there had been problems that the alderman and police say they never had been told about. 

An investigation into whether a prostitution ring was being run out of the home is also underway. . . .   Neighbors said there was plenty of foot traffic in and out of the home during late night hours. However, there were no complaints filed with the alderman’s office, Ald. Freddrenna Lyle (6th) said hours after the bodies were found. The neighborhood’s police district commander also said no alarming activity has been reported to the police about the home.

““I’ve lived in this area for more than 20 years, and it’s always been quiet,” said one woman.

And maybe it will be for 20 years more.  But cops and residents and alderman have to be in contact.

Later: Reader B. wonders, “how the neighbors knew there was in excess of $20 grand taken??????  seems oddly specific.”

Regarding this in the Defender story:

Other neighborhood reports are that a large amount of cash–in excess of $20,000–and high end televisions and stereo systems were taken from the home before the bodies were discovered. While police declined to confirm or deny the allegations, they said the incident is isolated and robbery is the likely motive. 

Yes.  Who knew and how did they know and why didn’t they too call the police?
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