While Barack Obama’s supporters are gnashing teeth trying to figure out how many conspirators there were at the ABC debate, one thing stands out as the biggest problem they had and the biggest issue they’re losing on; the flag pin. Now, before you turn away and go back to trolling myspace for SWF’s, hear me out.
The flag pin is significant, and tremendously so, but not in the way everyone is making it out to be. We have to follow along here, for a bit, just so the flag pin can be put in its proper context.
1. Barack Obama doesn’t like putting his hand over his heart during the National Anthem.
When the photo above reached the public last year, many people thought it was a joke or a bit of Photoshop trickery. How could a Presidential candidate not put his hand over his heart during the anthem? People were shocked and dismissed the photo until it was proven that the photo was indeed true. To the criticism he received, Obama’s campaign responded…
“Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t. In no way was he making any sort of statement, and any suggestion to the contrary is ridiculous.”
Indeed, sometimes he does, and sometimes he doesn’t. Inside Edition was provided a few examples of him indeed placing his hand over his heart and singing, so he can’t fein ignorance on it. Instead, he follows the custom and gives the flag and the anthem their due respect when he feels like it. I don’t know about you, but when I’m at a sporting event and the anthem is played, my hat comes off, I stand, and my hand goes over my heart. Not “sometimes” or “when I feel like it” or “if I’m in the mood.” Every single time, without a shadow of a doubt and without fail.
And I’m not running for President.
2. Barack Obama coddles his racist anti-American reverend.
For years, Barack Obama attended a church where Reverend Jeremiah Wright professed his anti-American bigotry. Obama, at first, claimed he had never heard such things, despite having been at that same church every single Sunday for over twenty years. Then he claimed that he had heard those things, but he could never leave his church. Then, he claimed that the remarks were taken out of context. Then he claimed one could no more easily walk away from their church than they could walk away from their skin color. Finally, he disowned Wright from his campaign, despite a speech many people called historic in which he justified nearly every word of Wright’s sermons (the ones he didn’t, as stated earlier, even hear). Charles Krauthammer disassembled him for it:
Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: “There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?”
But that is not the question. The question is, why didn’t he leave that church? Why didn’t he leave —- why doesn’t he leave even today —- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells), “God damn America”? Obama’s 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.
His defense rests on two propositions: (a) moral equivalence and (b) white guilt.
(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there’s Wright, but at the other “end of the spectrum” there’s Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and Obama’s own white grandmother, “who once confessed her fear of black men … and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.” But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?
(b) White guilt. Obama’s purpose in the speech was to put Wright’s outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, “We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country,” and then does precisely that. And what lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.
This contextual analysis of Wright’s venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It’s the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That’s why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.
After Barack Obama gave this historic “it isn’t really that important” justification speech, his lackeys in the media went on full spin control. Instead of condemning the overt racism of Wright, we heard that his explanation of white evil in the world were taken out of context (despite all the DVD recordings of Wright’s speech being removed from the church’s website. Why remove all of them if it was merely a context issue?) and then the spin went into overdrive with Bill Maher proving there isn’t a liberal glass of Kool Aid he can’t fit into his mouth (particularly since he never shuts it):
When Barack Obama didn’t hear Reverend Wright say those awful things about America, he still should have rushed the stage, smite Reverend Wright with the cross, and left the church. If there’s anything the right wing can agree on, it’s that. And that gays are going hell, right after they suck them off in the airport bathroom.
But it raises an obvious question, one that I haven’t heard asked, which is strange because it’s so obvious: If you leave a church when the head of the church says bad things about America, what do you do when your church hierarchy is caught up in a systematic and decades-long sex abuse scandal? And did I mention the people being sexually abused were children? Hundreds of them?
How about when the head of that church, or Pope, associated with and promoted members of the clergy who not only facilitated the sexual abuse and rape of hundreds and hundreds of children, but engaged in a decades-long cover-up of those crimes?
Reverend Wright associated with Farrakhan. The Pope works with Cardinal Law. Which is worse? Isn’t it the man who shuffled “priests” like Shanley and Geoghan and many others from parish to parish with the full knowledge of their crimes, and then claimed he had no idea?
No, and here’s why.
Barack Obama gave over twenty thousand dollars to the church that Reverend Wright spewed his hatred from last year; a church that incidentally gave Louis Farrakhan an award, and in the speech said that his views on racism are “helpful and honest.”
Barack Obama called Reverend Wright his spiritual mentor on numerous occasions. He invited him into his home and broke bread with him. The man was more than a reverend, but a friend of the family.
Barack Obama justified, in a tortured and painful way, the words of Wright, as taken out of context, misunderstood, and mudslinging.
Barack Obama said nothing about Wright until he couldn’t avoid the issue and his allies in the media stopped ignoring the issue.
So, what does that have to do with Catholics?
Despite Obama’s complacency with the racism he, his wife, and his two children sat in front of for all these years, he didn’t speak out. When the church scandal broke out, despite the ineptitude of the church in doing the right thing, many Catholics pushed the church to do the right thing. While Obama’s awakening was forced by political pressure from outside and the potential death of his campaign, Catholics were outraged and active once the scandal came out. Did they defend their church? Of course, as one would be expected to do, but the calls for priests to resign came from inside the church and from outraged parishioners who, to this day are still enraged, offended, and embarrassed by the incident. Wright’s parishioners defend him, his church, and despite the overwhelming and repetitive racism displayed by he and his church, his remarks including remarks that said the white man created HIV to destroy the black man. Every interview with parishioners from his church that I’ve seen not only defended his remarks, but went as far as to say they were true and white people just don’t understand.
Obama calls Wright his spiritual advisor, checks with him before making a major decision, and quoted him numerous times in his last book. The average Catholic I know barely makes mass once a week, and most have never had a priest in their home at all (myself included). I won’t even get into how many of them use birth control, don’t care about gays and gay marriage, and don’t care about abortion as much as the church. If, however, the Catholic church started claiming non Catholics were the cause of evil in the world and poisoned people with diseases, I reckon people might take a different stance on the church.
Finally, Obama has called Wright a friend on numerous occasions. As much as I respect my priests for their spiritual guidance, I’ve never called one a friend, never written a book based on their teachings, and never donated $20,000 to them.
So no, Bill. Catholics don’t need to leave the church just so there’s parody between Barack Obama and the racist Anti-American Reverend he loves so much. I found it interesting that Maher picked Catholics, again, for the target of his vitriol, and yet didn’t really examine the issue of Obama’s Reverend at all, especially considering on the liberal scale of severity, nothing is higher than racism (although you could make a case for homophobia).
3. Barack Obama’s association with Bill Ayers.
Who is Bill Ayers?
According to his memoir, Ayers became radicalized at the University of Michigan where he became involved in the New Left and the SDS. Ayers joined the Weatherman group in 1969, but went underground with several associates after the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in 1970, in which three members (Ted Gold, Terry Robbins, and Diana Oughton, who was Ayers’s girlfriend at the time) were killed while constructing a bomb. While underground, he and fellow member Bernardine Dohrn married and had two children, Zayd and Malik. They were purged from the group in the mid-1970s, and turned themselves in to the authorities in 1981. All charges against him were dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct during the long search for the fugitives. They later became legal guardians of Chesa Boudin, the son of former Weathermen David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, after his parents were arrested for their part in the Brinks Robbery of 1981.
In 2001, Ayers published Fugitive Days: A Memoir. Ayers’s interview with the New York Times about his book was published, by historical coincidence, on September 11, 2001, and opens with his statement, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers later explained that by “no regrets” he meant that he didn’t regret his efforts to oppose the Vietnam War, and that “we didn’t do enough” meant that efforts to stop the war were obviously inadequate as it dragged on for a decade; the two statements were not intended to elide into a wish they had set more bombs. The interview also includes his reaction (in his book) to Emile De Antonio’s 1976 documentary film about the Weathermen: “He was ‘embarrassed by the arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew the way. The rigidity and the narcissism.” New Politics reviewer Jesse Lemisch has contrasted Ayers’s recollections with those of other Weathermen and has alleged serious factual errors. Ayers, in the foreward to his book, states it was written as his personal memories and impressions over time, not a scholarly research project. His history occasionally surfaces, as when he was asked not to attend a progressive educators’ conference in the fall of 2006 on the basis that the organizers did not want to risk an association with his past.
So what does this have to do with Barack Obama? Well, this man that Obama “barely knows” along with another member of the WU Bernadine Dohrn worked on a foundation with him, hosted a fundraiser for him that raised thousands of dollars, and have had numerous meetings with him over the years. The Obama campaign has chosen to whitewash the former radical as “a respected educator.”
People change over time, and while there’s no evidence that Ayers ever planted a bomb himself, he’s unapologetic for his membership in the WU, and as mentioned above he thinks they should’ve planted more. If you want to read more about these domestic terrorists that Barack Obama so freely associates himself with and who are unrepentant for their crimes, feel free to read more at Wikipedia.
John McCain rightfully went after him on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and despite the Obama campaign’s tepid response and moral equivalence (they compared a bombing conspirator to US Senator Tom Coburn, and of course called McCain’s pointing out of the ties with Ayers a “smear”), the fact remains that he remains friendly with an admitted member of a domestic terrorism organization. His defense that it happened when he was eight years old doesn’t hold water. I wouldn’t hang out with Lee Harvey Oswald (were he still alive) or throw back a beer with Ted Kennedy and both of them did their killing long before I was born.
4. Obama belittles midwesterners as bitter.
(buckle found here)Quite possibly the biggest misstep of his campaign, and the first one that seems to be causing some damage, is his assertion that midwestern people are bitter over the economy, and because of it are clinging to God and guns. Here’s Obama saying as much in his own words.
In essence he claims that in the absence of jobs, those dopey Pennsylvanians have “clung” to God, Guns, Xenophobia, etc. Just a bunch of dumb mid-westerners clutching rifles in their suburban homes and praying the big evil black man doesn’t win the presidency. The tone used (specifically the word clinging) is an excellent example of his disdain. Notice he didn’t use the word “seek” or “turn to,” he used the word “cling” which implies that religion, guns, etc., were old-fashioned things that were running away from them along with their jobs. Obama has, in essence, looked down his nose at those silly religious racist gun nuts he sees all of flyover country as.”
So what the hell does this have to do with flag pins, you ask?
Take the four examples above. In every case, Barack Obama has associated himself with people who hate this country, hate white people, hate the government, and even at times has shown his own elitist tendencies. While everyone was having a smooth-talk-induced orgasm over his speech on “race relations,” many people completely ignored the justifications he gave for Reverend Wright, and missed the subtle racism of the speech itself.
So anyway, back to the flag pins. Many have called the issue of “flag pins” a plant, and a plot to question Barack Obama’s patriotism. In essence, he has refused to wear one at any time ever because he believes it’s shallow and emblematic of the kind of shallow patriotism he believes lead us into the war in Iraq.
The fact remains, though, that the flag pin is a symbol, and it’s a symbol of the very flag that flies above every school, library, and government building. It’s unifying symbol behind which people who respect it feel great pride in this great country we live in. Barack Obama has expressed his disdain for the symbolism of this country through his associations and through his actions and when given a chance again and again, he chose to make the flag and the symbols of this country the issue he took a stand against.
Imagine that.
Taken by itself, the Obama campaign would have a point. The flag pin issue is a non-starter, and probably one designed more to trip him up than to prove a point, but when taken in context of his continual slaps, disrespect, and disdain, you have to wonder if the flag pin is the holy water to his vampirism. The baking soda to his acid. All he would have to do to diffuse the situation is stop being so stubborn and put a pin on. It’s a custom. A symbol. And it’s one that means a lot to a great many people in this country.
His refusal to wear one, while at the same time speaking down to flyover country and continuing to associate with those that outwardly and unapologetically hate this country says a lot more about him than any flowery speech he’ll give in the coming weeks, and despite his constant assertions in his speeches about American exceptionalism and his love for this country because it is the only country in the world where his story could be a reality, he really doesn’t like those pesky lower-class folks who salute the flag, have a gun in their home, and pray to God. No, they cling to that because they don’t know any better. Barack, on the other hand, knows better. He’s smarter than you are.
Just ask him. He’ll tell you.
