The Absurd Report

Obama’s Loyalty to Liberation Theology
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In one paragraph—in one line—in an otherwise official-sounding communiqué, Senator Obama gives us insight into what he really thinks about what’s going on at Trinity. I consider it by far the most telling piece of information yet about whether his pastor problems have anything to do with his readiness to be the President of the United States of America.
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At the end of Fr. Pfleger’s despicable tirade, and to the sound of feral applause, Rev. Otis—Senator Obama’s new pastor—had this to say: “we thank God for the message and we thank God for the messenger”. If Senator Obama was waiting for good reason to resign his membership from Trinity, there it was, staring, yelling at us all.

Rev. Wright’s replacement—a man whom Senator Obama knew well and praised for his leadership just weeks before—was acting like Rev. Wright and even inviting another one of Senator Obama’s spiritual guides to come and act like Rev. Wright, too.

It all sounds so implausible. Could it be that a party’s presidential nominee could get it so wrong, so many times?

But as I said, none of this history comes close to the importance of the content of Senator Obama’s letter of resignation. As I said, one line in it was the single most telling piece of information yet about whether Senator Obama’s pastor problems have anything to say about his readiness to be president.

In their letter Barack and Michelle Obama direct themselves to Rev. Otis Moss, the man who just one week before thanked God “for the message and the messenger”: Fr. Michael Pfleger.
Their thoughts about the type of leadership the new pastor is giving? “We also have come to appreciate your ministry and both think you have been, and will be, a wonderful pastor for years to come.”

I’ll let others decide if Senator Obama’s letter of resignation from Trinity was a good political move. To me, on a very different level, it spoke volumes.

Read more from The Wall Street Journal

The company Obama has kept By Rod Dreher

Forty years ago this month, Paris exploded in left-wing student riots that led to a nationwide general strike. The revolutionary fervor of France’s soixante-huitards (’68ers) spread widely, including to American campuses. If you’re wondering when the Good ’60s of peace, love and civil rights gave way to the Bad ’60s of anarchy and violence, May 1968 is as good a historical pivot point as any.John McCain was in the Hanoi Hilton at the time.

Barack Obama was 6 years old. Yet the restless spirit of ‘68 haunts this year’s presidential campaign, especially the White House bid of Mr. Obama, who, having pretty much missed the ’60s - “Civil rights, sexual revolution, Vietnam War. Those all sort of passed me by,” he told The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan last year - was supposed to take us beyond those divisive traumas.

It’s not working out that way. His former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is an unreconstructed ’60s radical, a fire-breathing disciple of James Cone’s period-piece black liberation theology. Mr. Obama wrote in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, about his attraction to the leftist pastor’s church as a vehicle for social change. If black nationalism would uplift the race, he wrote, “then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence.”

That’s a remarkable admission of a racialized “ends justify the means” morality. It helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to stick with a crackpot like Dr. Wright. It also might explain why an up-and-coming Barack Obama found nothing particularly wrong with rubbing political elbows with Bill Ayers, the Chicago university professor and onetime fugitive member of the revolutionary, communist Weather Underground.

It’s not “guilt by association” to inquire…