The Obama defense

Charles Krauthammer:

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 central 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 his own white grandmother, "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, 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?

"I can no more disown (Wright) than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street.

And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus' time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did grandma.

Yet Obama compares her to Wright.

Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?

(b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context....

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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.

But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor.

Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign.

Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness?

This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero.

It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well.

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Another question for Obama is why would he maintain fellowship with people who cheer these words of hate instead of condemn them as you have lately done? To this day they still defend the bigotry and racism of Rev. Wright. Why isn't that a problem? Isn't that really as much of a problem for Obama as what his minister said? It certainly looks like bad judgment. What kind of dialog on race can you have with people who believe so many things that are not so?