Required reading

Allahpundit's takedown of Barack Obama. Money graf:

Partisanship aside, as much as I loathe his politics, I always liked Obama the man and believed that his devotion to racial reconciliation was sincere. I don’t anymore. He exploited Trinity politically to establish his black “authenticity” and then demagogued Clinton for challenging his image as the post-racial candidate, and now the two have bumped up against each other so suddenly it’s time for a circle-squaring conversation that can really only end in electing him president. Typical politician, just a bit smarter than the rest. Shows you how naive I am that I’m surprised.

But there has been plenty of other good commentary, too.

Rand Simberg:

The nagging questions remain. [Jeremiah Wright]'s not merely "an occasionally fierce critic of US foreign policy." He's a man who believes that the US government was behind 911. He didn't merely say things that were "controversial." He accused the US government of deliberately creating AIDS and importing cocaine, in order to kill and injure black people. He didn't merely have political views with which one might "disagree." He held (and as far as we know, continues to hold) views that are vile, hateful, and by most lights, insane. I find this minimization and mischaracterization of the remarks to be utterly disingenuous.

[...]

[E]ven if I were a church goer, there are no amounts of good works that would allow me to hold down a pew in the presence of someone who spewed such lunacy from the pulpit. There is simply some bad that cannot be balanced against the good, when it comes to being a member of and donor to a church, and exposing children (of all ages, apparently, to judge by audience reaction) to such bigotry, hatred and idiocy. It's like praising Castro because Cuba has universal health care (ignoring the issue of how good the health care actually is in Cuba--I don't see many people flocking down there for the clinics). But then, many of the people who get funny feelings up their legs listening to Obama are exactly the sort of people who do that, so maybe I'm not the target audience here.

I understand that it's not the whole speech, and I understand that I'm only reacting to the actual words, and not his golden delivery with the halo above his head. (This latter "argument," such as it is, reminds me of people who, to my great amusement, told me that I couldn't and shouldn't judge or criticize Michael Moore's "masterpiece," Farenheit 911 by the screenplay that I read, but that I should instead watch it, as though that would somehow render nonsense sane.)

I doubt it would make a difference. The question for me remains: what was he thinking? And if this is a reliable guide to his judgment, then my judgment is that he would be a disastrous president, probably Carter-like, and an eager coddler and appeaser of dictators.

Mark Steyn:

[A]s things stand, Obama is damaged. If, as some folks are arguing, hanging with Uncle Jeremiah is simply the price of doing politics in black Chicago, that makes the Senator not the change you can believe in but just the same-old-same-old. And at least a sliver of the electorate will find it hard to accept that even the political realities of Illinois require a man to raise his daughters in a church led by a vulgar kook who makes humping motions from the pulpit when he discusses Bill and Monica. Jeremiah Wright is not most Americans' idea of a pastor, and the longer he's in the spotlight the more he distances Obama from the electorate. Accepting (as everyone assures us) that the candidate himself is not an Afrocentric liberation theologist who believes every crackpot conspiracy of the last 70 years, every other explanation as to why Barack Obama spent two decades in the company of a profane race-baiter leaves the Senator looking either weak or weird. If he can wriggle out of this tonight, he's some kind of genius.

Shelby Steele:

[I]n the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?

But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.

Ace:

Obama did not "in no uncertain terms" renounce and denounce Wright. He engaged in apologism for a racist. He equated his grandmother's alleged occasional, private racial slurs with Wright's cynical career of constant, public racial arson. Further, he claimed that just as he cannot give up on Nana Obama, he wishes he could quite Rev. Wright, but Brokeback Style, cannot. It would be selling out a "friend" to do so.

Well, we do not choose our family but we do choose our friends, or pastors, and our close and key political allies. Can anyone think of a case where a politician has had a 20 year history with a racial arsonist but claimed it was excused because, on balance, he's just a capital chap?

I am also unimpressed by his "denouncements." Will he specifically denounce the statements in question? Will he tell black conspiracy-theorizing haters that No, the CIA did not create HIV to kill you? He permits such conspiracy theorists to believe he's still on their side by refusing to specifically deny the lie and affirm the truth.

If some blacks are being told by figures of respect (ahem) that the government created AIDS to murder them and that the CIA stocks black communities with crack and guns to murder them, um, isn't that a rather large impediment to true racial reconciliation? I have to tell you, I know some Muslim terrorists really do want to murder me and I'm afraid reconciling with them is quite out of the question.

So is his message "Yes, white people are murdering you, but you need to get past that"? Really? One can get past conspiracy to commit genocide?

Obama, and his liberal media spirit squad, speak of having an "open, honest" dialog on race and racial resentments, hatreds, and paranoias. But Obama has had twenty years to have an open dialog -- but a private one, which is far easier -- with his "friend" Rev. Wright.

Did he have this dialog? He says he disagrees strongly with some of Wright's "controversial political positions." Did he, you know, actually raise these points with Wright?

If he did, his putative skills at "reconciliation" and "healing" seem woefully deficient. This bastard has gone on spreading his noxious racism and hatred of America until his retirement... and then beyond a bit. Obama's going to heal the racial "wounds" of 300 million but he can't get through to his very good "friend"? He can't even get him to tone down his hateful rhetoric, even if he continues to give hatred a safe harbor in his heart?

[...][T]his was [...] a lecture, not a "dialogue." Futhermore it was a lecture for white people only. Whites were told that legitimate grievances over black criminality -- oh, by the way, the real and enduring source of racial tension -- and Affirmative Action were "exploited" by politicians and media to stoke "fear" for personal gain. Hence, not really legitimate at all.

Meanwhile, as regards Wright and black hatred and borderline insane paranoia, he counseled "understanding" by whites -- but no call for blacks to give up such retrograde and hateful fantasies and scapegoatings.

My idea of a truly groundbreaking speech would involve a Cosbyesque riff on some of the real causes of white resentment, starting first and foremost with rampant black criminality and anti-social behavior, and blacks' acceptance of this as not only acceptable but justified -- perhaps even obligatory -- given past and current racial discrimination.

He did not touch on this. He's still pandering to Wright's flock. And it's not just pandering of course; he is required to excuse the black racist, not just out of ideological fervor, but out of personal circumstantial necessity. After all, he was caught in bed with a black racist and anti-American radical, not a white racist. So of course he demands that we "understand" and "forgive" the black racist. He needs us to. His personal fortunes depend on that.

But imagine if he were white and had been caught in a 20 year cynical political alliance with a white racist -- would his calls for "forgiveness" and "understanding," and his maudlin Checkers-style "I cannot renounce him, he's my favorite dog" self-justification carry any weight whatsoever with liberals, the media, or good-hearted conservatives?

No, it would not. But in Obama's case, we are lectured that we must forgive this particular racist and understand this particular brand of racism. The other sorts of racism are of course unforgivable and no proper person would ever befriend such malefactors, and certainly not intertwine their political fates so closely; but here, of course, we -- those who are a bit alarmed by virulent black racism -- must "understand."

[...]

My takeaway: White racism is pernicious and bad and we must correct it. We must learn.

Black racism, on the other hand, is perfectly understandable, justified even, and blacks get to keep on hatin' for as long as they might like.

Obama, of course, will one day change all this.

But he didn't change the heart of Wright when he had the chance. Nor even is there any evidence whatsoever he even attempted such an undertaking.

My own take was similar to Ace's, and I found myself asking, if this were a white candidate talking about his 20-year association with the Ku Klux Klan, would he be given the opportunity to explain it away the way Obama is?

Because that is what Jeremiah Wright represents.

I had actually given Obama a look-see before I concluded his policies on defense and foreign affairs were to the left of Jimmy Carter and were therefore unacceptable and dangerous (Obama basically advocates unilateral disarmament). But I had always thought he was a nice and honorable guy who was simply misguided about his policies. At this point I am really questioning the part about his being "nice and honorable."