Monday, March 17, 2008

Does Obama Want to Lose?   [Victor Davis Hanson]

Wrightgate is more and more becoming Nixonian.

Now we hear that Rev. Wright considers Israel a "dirty word". I don't want to sound like a broken-record, but we are back to 1973-4 when almost every day a new disclosure helped doom the stonewalling Nixon.

The gamut of Wright's hatred is amazingly extensive—Israel, whites, rich people, the United States, the American conduct of World War II, moderate blacks, middleclassness, Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice—to such a degree that he seems consumed with hatred and simply fills in the target spontaneously at any given moment.

As long as Sen. Obama remains in that extremist church, and as long as he continues to offer these reprehensible mea culpas for Wright ("scholar," "not particularly controversial," "cherry-pick," "Uncle," etc.), and the more the massive Wright corpus is disseminated, the more Nixonian Obama becomes, as he scrambles to devise a new modified hangout, while allowing the last failed one to become 'inoperative.'

Visiting the networks, or offering a speech on race, won't do, unless he honestly and forthrightly explains—as we know is true from his long church membership, his memoirs, his past interviews and film clips (cf. 6/5/07: "[Wright'] puts up with me, counsels me, listens to my wife complain about me, he's a friend, and a great leader"...)—that he showed poor judgment in maintaining an intimate relationship with such a hate-monger, and that for there to be reciprocal racial respect and harmony in this country, then all parties must respect basic protocols of speech and reference—and therefore he is resigning from the church while expressing an apology for his past de facto sanction of such a firebrand.

Blaming others for "divisiveness" or "cherry-picking" or whining that similar scrutiny is not devoted to Sen. Clinton's church, or contextualizing Wright's venom on something like the Huffington Post is a prescription for abject disaster.

One wonders at this point whether the Senator would prefer not to be president of the United States than tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the nature of Rev. Wright and his own connection with him?

03/17 05:45 PMShare