Rhetorical rampage

OPINION:

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.”

Those statements reveal a terribly mixed up mind that has a hate-filled view of the fabric of America. Among his remarks:

• “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God,” he said from the pulpit in 2006.

• “The government gives [black men] drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ’God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” he said in a 2003 sermon. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”

• “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted en eye,” he said in a sermon five days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

To say this is a man of contradictions, is putting it mildly. In his remarks Monday at the National Press Club, he said, paraphrasing Proverbs, “It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

However, “From the moment he entered the room, Wright seemed to be looking to stir controversy,” wrote The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. He was accompanied by Nation of Islam and New Black Panther Party officials. He defended Louis Farrakhan’s statement saying “20 years ago Zionism — not Judaism — was a gutter religion,” and called Mr. Farrakhan “one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century.”

In his own defense, he noted the good his church has done with its programs to feed the poor and his service to his country as a young man who became a Marine. But it is his words that speak for him now — hateful, racist, unforgiving.

In Mr. Wright’s world there are no inspiring examples of black advancement who have overcome prejudice and bigotry, people like Jackie Robinson, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Arthur Ashe, and Douglas Wilder, or more recently, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

In the 1990s, polls showed 70 percent said they could support Mr. Powell for president. And now one of Mr. Wright’s own parishioners, Barack Obama, whose political views I do not subscribe to, is on the precipice of being nominated for the presidency.

That says a lot about Americans and America that Jeremiah Wright refuses to recognize.

Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of The Washington Times, is a nationally syndicated columnist.