Hillary looked like a sure thing for president, but

“. . . then out of nowhere came, hey, I’m Barack Obama. And she said, ‘Oh damn, where did you come from? I’m white. I’m entitled. There’s a black man stealing my show.’”

That’s Chicago’s own Father Pfleger Sunday in O’s Trinity Church on 95^th Street, citing Hillary Clinton as a case of “white entitlement and supremacy” which he felt bound to “expose.”

Addressing Rev. Otis Moss, the Trinity pastor and successor to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he said from the pulpit:

“Reverend Moss, when Hillary was crying, and people said that was put on, I really don’t believe it was put on. I really believe that she just always thought, ‘This is mine. I’m Bill’s wife. I’m white. And this is mine. I just got to get up and step into the plate.’

He

then mimicked Clinton crying as the audience erupted into applause and gave [him] a standing ovation.  . . . .  “She wasn’t the only one crying [he added]. There was a whole lot of white people cryin’.”  . . . .  Apparently realizing his remarks might attract media attention, Pfleger stated, “I’m sorry. I don’t want to get you into any more trouble.”

Moss thanked God for Pfleger’s comments.

Pfleger also pitched for reparations, demanding that whites give up their money to make up for slavery:

“Honestly now, to address the one who says, ‘Don’t hold me responsible for what my ancestors did.’ But you have enjoyed the benefits of what your ancestors did … and unless you are ready to give up the benefits, throw away your 401 fund, throw away your trust fund, throw away all the monies you put away into the company you walked into because your daddy and grand daddy. …”

Shouting, Pfleger continued, “Unless you are willing to give up the benefits then you must be responsible for what was done in your generation, because you are the beneficiaries of this insurance policy.”

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.”

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.

Some measure of how uninformed is Mark Brown’s assessment (below) of Rev. Wright may be gotten from today’s Beachwood Reporter, which cites and links:

* Rolling Stone magazine of 14 months ago (through The Daily Howler), describing Obama’s church in radical terms and Obama as its preacher’s grateful disciple:

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. . . .  The senator ‘affirmed’ his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a ‘sounding board’ to ‘make sure I’m not losing myself in the hype and hoopla.’ Both the title of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright’s sermons. ‘If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from,’ says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, ‘just look at Jeremiah Wright.’  [Italics added]

On this The Beachwood Reporter commented that it “strains credulity . . . when Obama says Wright is not the same man he has known for 20 years.”

As the Rolling Stone article shows, this is indeed the same Wright – and that’s what concerned Obama so much when he announced his campaign for president that he stuck Wright in a basement.

and

* NY Times of a year ago, which reports the invocation cancellation:

“[Obama] had sampled various faiths but adopted none until he met Mr. Wright, [whose] assertions of widespread white racism and . . . scorching remarks about American government . . . prompted the senator to cancel his delivery of the invocation when he formally announced his candidacy in February.

Wright comes off as a longtime irresponsible extremist, rather than the “generally well-intentioned guy who sometimes says some crazy stuff by white people’s standards” of Brown’s dream world.

Chi Trib’s John Kass hit a home run with the bases loaded on a 3–2 count in the bottom of the 9^th to erase his team’s 3–0 deficit to win the — what?  pennant?  world series?  name it — with his so-timely column about the call for sacred conversation about race. 

He quotes the head man of the Christian denomination to which Obama’s erstwhile pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, belongs:

“The intersection of politics, religion and race has heightened our awareness of how easy it is for our conversations about race to become anything but sacred,” Rev. John Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ, said last week. “That’s why we are calling for sacred conversations, and for the respect of sacred places to begin right here and now.

He might also have cited a 4/3 Trib story:

Gathered at Trinity United Church of Christ, the focus of intense media interest in recent weeks, officials also said they would clamp down on reporters’ access to the South Side church.

Kass responds to this fervent plea: “In other words, listen up you reporters: Back off.”

Darn tootin’.

Seriously, folks, a real, honest-to-God sacred conversation goes this way:  One guy says, “Dominus Vobiscum,” and the other says “Et cum spiritu tuo.”

Now that’s dialogue.

Maybe reporters could chant:

Reverend Wright, how does saying “G.D. America” fit into the Sermon on the Mount?

dropping their voices at “on.”  Same with something about the Big House on the golf course and other issues surrounding Wright.

As for talking about race, if we really did it, says Kass,

we’d really talk about unfair racial preferences in college and graduate school admissions [and] in hiring and on tax-subsidized public contracts. We’d talk about the horrendous drop-out rate in big city high school systems run by political bosses who, year after year after year, use minority school children as cash cows to cement their power.

It’s been so corrosive for so long, [this] black resentment over white bigotry and white resentment over racial preferences (which is, in effect, institutionalized racism); and the abandonment of minority schools, generation after generation dropping out, left behind. [Italics added]

That conversation can’t happen: “It gets too loud and too angry too fast.”

Institutionalized racism, yes.  Civil rights legislation de-institutionalized it, so-called affirmative action re-institutionalized it.

“You’re not talking ‘color-blind,’ are you?” shot back an Oak Park & River Forest High School board candidate in a forum some years back.  She stopped the other guy in his tracks.  Once it was the essence of liberalism to be color-blind.  Now it’s an epithet.

As for dialogue, Kass advises going to Gettysburg and having one with yourself.  It’s “a quiet place, where you can think about race and sacrifice. It’s not an angry place now. It’s sacred.”

It’s where “some 23,000 Union troops died in trying to break the South [and even] more Confederates died.”

[T]he next group of politicians demanding a sacred dialogue on race should just drive to Gettysburg. They can think of all those souls, fighting to hold the Union and stop slavery, and all those who died defending the South and its slaveholding ways.

It didn’t end there. The hatefulness continued for years, and still does, and shamefully.

But at least you can have a dialogue, a quiet one, a sacred one, alone, a dialogue with yourself, without politics, looking out where thousands upon thousands of Americans died, bringing freedom to others.

Yes.

Later, from Reader Phil:

I think a dialogue on race would be swell…for a change…rather than the 45–year monologue we’ve had to endure.