All The News That Fits The Storyline

Earnest libs relying on the Paper of Record to keep them up to speed on the Obama-Wright controversy must be scratching their heads today.  Here is the Times "coverage" of the background; don't blink or you'll miss it:

Faced with what his advisers acknowledged was a major test to his candidacy, Senator Barack Obama sought on Monday to contain the damage from incendiary comments made by his pastor and prepared to address the issue of race more directly than at any other moment of his presidential campaign.

hough he has faced questions about controversial statements by the pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., for more than a year, Mr. Obama is enduring intense new scrutiny now over Mr. Wright’s characterizations of the United States as fundamentally racist and the government as corrupt and murderous.

The WaPo was a bit bolder in challenging their reader's tender sensitivities:

More than a year ago, Wright warned Obama and Moss that a presidential campaign made criticism of Trinity inevitable, but none of them anticipated fallout like this. Web sites and television news shows recalled Wright's praise of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and played a greatest-hits compilation of Wright's most incendiary comments: that Sept. 11, 2001, meant "America's chickens are coming home to roost." That former president Bill Clinton "did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky." That "racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run."

Getting closer, although WaPo readers might be left wondering what all the fuss is about.  Let's cut back to last week's Wall Street Journal and bring some more reality to the reality based:

In a sermon delivered at Howard University, Barack Obama's longtime minister, friend and adviser blamed America for starting the AIDS virus, training professional killers, importing drugs and creating a racist society that would never elect a black candidate president.

ABC News and Fox News had more last week:

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strikes law and then wants us to sing 'God bless America,' No, no, no, not 'God bless America,' God damn America -- that's in the Bible, you're killing innocent people, God damn America for treating us citizens as less than human."

After 9/11, Wright said, "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagaski and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye...America's chickens are coming home to roost."

And the classic, "Hillary ain't never been called a n****r".

To be fair to the Times, even though they won't tell their readers why Obama has a problem, they have some cogent commentary about the scope of the problem:

Mr. Obama is particularly vulnerable because voters are still getting to know him, said Democratic and Republican strategists — and a few voters as well. The Wright affair “makes me question other things. What else do we not know?” asked Karen Norton, 58, a computer saleswoman in North Carolina and a Republican who said that, until now, she had been stirred by Mr. Obama’s message of national reconciliation.

Mr. Wright’s statements, said strategists, threaten his greatest strength, his reputation as a unifying, uplifting figure, capable of moving the country past old labels and divisions.

“The problem is the complete contradiction between the message of the Obama campaign and the message of the minister who’s been his close friend and confidant for 20 years,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican consultant unaffiliated with any campaign.

Mr. Obama has also pitched himself as a candidate who can attract religious voters back to the Democratic Party, one who speaks the language of the Bible fluently and testifies about what he says is the impact of Christianity on his own life.

“What better way to try to undercut the way he integrates faith and political vision than to say we should all be secretly afraid of his church?” said Jim Wallis, a left-leaning evangelical who has had longstanding relationships with both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, and who says that Mr. Wright has been unfairly caricatured in recent portrayals.

So he is a cipher whose credibility as a racial and religious unifier is in jeopardy.  I agree.

Comments

[Jna]

I wondered if Obama's exclusionary church got in on that Baptist damning of Clinton. Wright and Obama were in on it too?

[clarice]

The Wa Po has a front page piece on Wright's parishoners' defense of him--not one word in it about black liberation theology. Nothing except an emotional whitewash of the issue--something even their columnist Richard Cohen is tut tutting the media for doing.

[Paul]

It's telling that the ones who do not see anything out of the ordinary about this are the same people who go out of their way to note the ratio of black people in a predominately white congregation.

[Sweating Through Fog]

I just found a link to a longer sermon by Wright, and posted it on my blog.