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Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Pushing and Shoving

What Clinton adviser Lanny Davis says:
I have tried to get over my unease surrounding Barack Obama's response to the sermons and writings of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. But the unanswered questions remain.

.... Now is the time to address these questions, not later.

Clearly Mr. Obama does not share the extremist views of Rev. Wright. He is a tolerant and honorable person. But that is not the issue. The questions remain: Why did he stay a member of the congregation? Why didn't he speak up earlier? And why did he reward Rev. Wright with a campaign position even after knowing of his comments?

What he means:
Our best chance for derailing Obama's nomination has started to fall out of the political spotlight. Quick, let's pretend there are still "questions" that remain "unanswered"!

What's really pathetic about this particular effort is what Davis says "triggered" this latest column. Davis claims that he was forced to write after he "read for the first time" these three excerpts from Wright's sermons:
- "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
-- Sept. 16, 2001 (the first Sunday after 9/11)

- "The government . . . wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, no. God damn America; that's in the bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human."
-- 2003

- "The United States of White America."
-- July 22, 2007

Does anybody in their right mind believe that Davis had never seen these excerpts? These are the claims that were at the center of the controversy. You cannot have heard of the connection between Rev. Wright and Obama without having heard about the "God damn America" speech. It strains credulity to the breaking point to believe that this is all really new data for Davis. And he adds nothing new to the conversation. The only motivation for this sort of article is to pretend that this story is still a story. Unfortunately for Clinton supporters, Obama has by all objective accounts done an excellent job defusing it. Trying to shove it back into the spotlight is a waste of everyone's time.

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