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Rhetorical rampage

By Donald Lambro
May 1, 2008

Barack Obama's fiery former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is back in the public spotlight, just when the Illinois senator hoped he would fade away.

There is no question that Mr. Wright's hateful, racially charged, disturbingly conspiratorial rhetoric from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's South Side has hurt the Democratic front-runner. But whether the damage would derail Mr. Obama's historic bid for the presidency remains an open question.

Mr. Wright's reappearance at a time when Mr. Obama is creeping closer to the 2,025 delegates he needs to defeat Hillary Clinton for the nomination has less to do with his specious claim that his incendiary words were taken out of context and more to do with his bitterness and anger over Mr. Obama's rebuke and condemnation of his outrageous remarks.

He had laid low when his inflammatory sermons exploded into public view last month, creating a crisis for Mr. Obama's campaign that he dealt with in a carefully crafted address that distanced himself from the minister who preached "God damn America" and in effect said America was to blame for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on U.S. soil.

But now he has returned, unrepentant, to inflict further damage on the man who has been a member of his church for 20 years, whose political prominence and success is a testament to America's enduring promise as a land of everlasting opportunity. Why?

Mr. Wright claims video clips of his sermons were taken out of context and were unfair, unjust and untrue. "I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech" and the sound bites were used to "paint me as some sort of fanatic," he said on Bill Moyers' PBS show over the weekend.

In fact, while the sound bites that were constantly shown on TV news programs often used snippets of his most outrageous remarks, the fuller statements from which they taken were often broadcast as well, or were published in full in newspapers, periodicals and on numerous Web sites at the height of the controversy they sparked in March.

Mr. Obama called those statements "a profoundly distorted view of this country," saying Mr. Wright's comments "were not only wrong, but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity, racially charged at a time when we need to come together."

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