The hypocrisy of religion and the hypocrisy of politics. Is he uniting or dividing?

I think this is a man who has truly been thrown for a loop by a place and a people that he had trusted.

He was a member of this congregation for years, and Wright and Pfleger didn't just become "like that" overnight.

Fact of the matter is, he was an active participant in that congregation, and he didn't have a problem with it until its rhetoric saw the light of day in the national press.

Now, whether or not that portrayal is fair is another question. But betrayal? No way.

____________________________

"It's gettin' so a businessman can't expect no return from a fixed fight. Now, if you can't trust a fix, what can you trust?"

Kelefa Sanneh argues that Obama fundamentally misread Wright's core beliefs, thinking he could filter out the bitterness and angry cadence and keep the hopefulness. But to an existentialist, hope and bitterness are two sides of the same coin.

Audacious hopefulness is sometimes said to be the thing that separates Obama from more conventional politicians, but it is also what separates him from the radicals who have given it up. (The Back to Africa movement—echoed in Wright’s Afrocentric approach to Christianity—was, in part, a politics of resignation, fuelled by a sense that America would never be truly hospitable to blacks.) Hope is proof that Obama believes in the system, after all. And it is what helps him appeal to swing voters with fond memories of Bill Clinton, who never tired of reminding voters that he was born in a town called Hope.

Wright’s hope is a different thing. His 1991 “Audacity to Hope” sermon was based on 1 Samuel 1:1-18, which tells the story of a woman, Hannah, childless and bereft, who prays for a son. Wright isn’t interested in the happy ending, so he doesn’t mention 1 Samuel 1:20, in which Hannah finally gives birth. Instead, he dwells on her torment, comparing her to Martin Luther King, Jr., in his last years, when the civil-rights coalition seemed to be crumbling and his old allies were criticizing his increasingly comprehensive political program. “There was nothing on the horizon to say that he should keep on hoping, but he kept on hoping anyhow,” Wright said. For Wright, earthly adversity and the struggle against it are existential. If he thinks that things haven’t changed much in the past hundred years, it’s because he thinks that things haven’t changed much in the past two thousand years. You don’t hope because the odds look good. You hope because they don’t.

It's all becoming so clear. Obama is a Closet Republican preened by his Chicago mob buddies. This is another sham to get the voters to vote for McCain in the GE. I bet Pfleger was bought and paid for the the Republicans. Surely nobody is that damned ignorant. It's win-win for the Pubes. Wait and see. The peoples votes DO NOT COUNT in the primaries at all. I'm going to tally up all the democrat state delegates who have endorsed against their state's wishes. It's an unbelievable number. Bend over America- It's Bush politics as usual.

It's sad that Obama felt he needed to do this.

Liberty and justice for all.

My home

If you can't say something good...

I will shut up now.

There is a tradition and direct African linkage to the kinds of rhetorical style used by preachers like Rev. Wright. In his important book "The Signifying Monkey", Henry Louis Gates, a fabulous African American scholar, spends a great deal of time talking about the tradition of "signifying". Esu was the African god of discourse. This paper summarizes some of Gates' conclusions.

(link...)

"If Esu stands for discourse upon a text, then his Pan-African kinsman, the Signifying Monkey, stands for the rhetorical strategies of which each literary text consists. For the Signifying Monkey exists as the great trope of Afro-American discourse, and the trope of tropes, his language of Signifyin(g) [this is Gates's coinage for the black vernacular practice of signification, particularly oral practices involving double-voiced trickery through indirection that can involve innuendo, needling, and ridiculing] is his verbal sign in the Afro-American tradition."

Reading "The Signifying Monkey" was one of the biggest literary challenges I have ever faced. It took me a couple of years to read and re-read it and to understand the importance of what Gates was saying, but the things I learned in the process were amazing.

As fond as I have grown of Esu and the Signifying Monkey's delightful ability to put someone in their place or express truth, I think it may be time to say goodbye to the ancient monkey. The Signifying Monkey might be a great teacher when it comes to verbal ju-jitsu, but as a politician he sucks. If he isn't preaching to the choir, the poor old thing looks like a fool.

I would like to comment on this latest Obama church issue. Now I am not a Democrat, nor a Republican, but an American who now believes more than ever that political parties need to be put to rest. That being said, I find it a little disturbing that so many Dem's are excited about a man that appears willing to sell his soul, if need be, to be President.

First, he rips his former Pastor. Then his white granny. Now he rips and runs from his church of twenty years. This doesn't speak much of change to me but of a politician willing to do absolutely anything to be President.

Do you really want a man in the office that holds the nuclear trigger who will do all of this?

The U.S. Constitution, it is what makes us free and makes us American. Let's treat it as such and with care.