I'M GOING TO take the next week and a half off to work on "Greg's Guide to Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father".  If anything strikes my fancy in the mean time I'll post it right here.  Check back April 7.

THE CIVIL WAR in the Democrat party is a culture and economic war between traditional Jacksonian Democrats for Clinton versus government dependent bureaucrats and academics for Obama explains Michael Barone.  Quotable:

Academics and public employees (and of course .. academics in the United States are [on the government payroll]) love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war. Economically, defense spending competes for the public-sector dollars that academics and public employees think are rightfully their own. More important, I think, warriors are competitors for the honor that academics and public employees think rightfully belongs to them. Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees. They have, in historian David Hackett Fischer's phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, "If you attack my family or my country, I'll kill you."

STANLEY KURTZ:

[The racist Rev.] Wright's ability to give a popular and hard-edged spin to the sophisticated academic theology of black liberation is what drew Obama to Wright -- who was the perfect bridge between Obama's radical intellectual world and the ethnic authenticity he lacked.

PETER WEHNER has some questions for Barack Obama.

TALK ABOUT TAKING MONEY out of the community.  Obama uses the voice of other people to attack Jews and Koreans for "taking money out" of black neighborhoods.  How about taking money out of the poorest black neighborhoods through your own church?  Take a look at this story about Rev. Jeremiah Wright's 10,000+ square foot home in a gated community.  In his book Obama quotes Wright attacking "middle class" blacks who move out of the crime-racked poor neighborhoods.

MORE LIES, bullshit, or what ever  you want to call it from Barack Obama:

[My pastor Jeremiah Wright has] acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and [and the things he said] were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country ..

BARACK OBAMA plays the race card -- calls his critics racists.  Did you notice this:

Obama:  "This is somebody that was preaching three sermons at least a week for 30 years and it got boiled down ... into a half-minute sound clip and just played it over and over and over again, partly because it spoke to some of the racial divisions we have in this country."

WALTER WILLIAMS on Barack Obama -- you're no Jackie Robinson:

For the nation and for black people, the first black president should be the caliber of a Jackie Robinson and Barack Obama is not. Barack Obama has charisma and charm but in terms of character, values and understanding, he is no Jackie Robinson. By now, many Americans have heard the racist and anti-American tirades of Obama's minister and spiritual counselor. There's no way that Obama could have been a 20-year member of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church and not been aware of his statements. Wright's racist and anti-American ideas are by no means unique. They are the ideas of many leftist professors and taught to our young people. The basic difference between Sen. Obama, Wright and leftist professors is simply a matter of style and language ..

HOW STUPID is John McCain?  This stupid.  John McCain wasn't at the bottom of his Naval Academy class for no reason.

JONAH GOLDBERG has The Quote Of The Day:

Maybe it's just me, but aren't most of the people begging for a "new conversation" on race the same folks who shouted "racist!" at anyone who disagreed with them during all the previous conversations?

.. To my un-rehabilitated ear, [these folks sound] like an old Soviet apparatchik[s] saying that what the USSR really needs is an open and frank conversation about the importance of communism ..

IT'S A RACE(ism) WAR IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY -- Hillary Clinton says, "[Jeremiah Wright] would not have been my pastor."

That Barack Obama, he's such a uniter.

Hillary Clinton has decided to fight for the Democratic nomination -- and I'm betting that Obama's embrace of the racist rev. Wright is going to prove a loser with the American people.

The Democrat Party and it's Super Delegate leadership is at an historic turning point, and the question is at what price will they continue to buy off the most radical elements of their political base among left-leaning African-Americans.  Clinton and Obama have put the choice out in front of them, and the identity of the Democratic Party among all Americans, white or black, will be established by this choice.  And the choice is between a Democratic party which allies itself with anti-white hate and anti-American hate and a party which clearly rejects these as outside the limits of civic behavior.  It's an important choice for America, and may determine the outcome of the November election.

Obama said he wanted a national dialog on race, and it looks like he's got one ..

UPDATE:  Here's the video:




And Hillary Clinton saying the same thing again at her the press conference:

WHAT OBAMA SAYS versus what Obama does.  Studies repeatedly show that conservatives typically give a far larger percentage of the income to charity than do leftists.  It's just a fact.  And it's something you should remember every time you hear a leftist speak.

And who does Obama give his money to?  Leading the list are race-based political organizations like Rev. Wright's church and the Congressional Black Caucus.

GERALDINE FERRARO SAYS the Obama smear against her is giving her nightmares staring Jesse Jackson ..

You know .. Bill, this has upset me. I actually had a dream the other night about Jesse Jackson, we were both much younger and he's saying don't worry about this. That's not healthy, and I will tell you what else I'm getting. I got an email from, a very educated thoughtful long email, and this guy said to me, I'm an African American, I'm a man and he says he's 33 years old and he is under the impression that I am saying that any black man who has achieved anything has achieved it simply because they're black. Now, that is not who I said ..

I have got to tell you something, the reaction on the Obama campaign, Bill, was awful. It was emails, voice mails, hate mail, not only for me, but it also went to my law firm. It went to the board of a public company that I'm on. It went to the board of NDI.

I mean, I can't believe that this people actually wanted to have my - got me fired.

HEMMER: So, both sides are throwing stones?

No, it's worse than that. This is -- first, they distorted my view and then they wanted to punish me for not backing down and saying, yes, I'm sorry, I was wrong. I wasn't wrong and I won't back down and say that. And the fact that you distort my words doesn't mean it's going to happen.

Ferraro isn't taking this lying down, she's pushing back, letting it be know that she thinks Obama's church has been teaching racism to little children:

I think what [Obama is] trying to do is he's trying to balance, you know, what the Reverend Wright has said with his grandmother's comments and my comments, and, you know, it really doesn't work.

But what is sad to me, I've read through the speech .. is that Senator Obama doesn't recognize that his grandmother said something to him or I said something to a small group, is not equivalent in any way to what comes out of the mouth of Reverend Wright, that we were not speaking to actually generations of young people.

And, you know, race is taught. Babies aren't born knowing differences in color, gender, religions. You know, they're taught those things. They're taught them at home. They're taught in the schools. They're taught in the churches ..

AMERICA'S GREATEST PHILOSOPHER, Thomas Sowell, on Barack Obama and The Audacity of Rhetoric:

It is painful to watch defenders of Barack Obama tying themselves into knots trying to evade the obvious ..

Barack Obama's own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far left fringe. In college, "I chose my friends carefully," he said in his first book, "Dreams From My Father." These friends included "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets" -- in Obama's own words -- as well as the "more politically active black students." ..

Obama didn't just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college -- members of the left, anti-American counter-culture. In Shelby Steele's brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama -- "A Bound Man" -- it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were -- and, like many converts, he went overboard.

BARACK OBAMA READS Dreams For My Father -- audio clips from the Hugh Hewitt show.  FCC regulations required Hugh to bleep out a number of words -- Hugh seems to have selected these clips for the  entertainment value of listening to a Presidential candidate swear.  It would have been more entertaining -- and more authentic I'm sure -- to have clips of Navy man John McCain swearing, perhaps at a Reagan conservative.

The thing to note in these clips is Obama's genuine talent for taking on the persona of other people -- this goes beyond good acting into something more like ventriloquism.

And be aware that the character Ray is a stand in for the views of Obama himself, according to Obama's childhood friend.

JEREMIAH WRIGHT HAD A PRIVILEDGED upbringing and attended a most mostly Jewish, mostly white integrated high school: "Rev. Wright had a comfortable upper-middle class upbringing. It was hardly the scene of poverty and indignity suggested by Senator Obama to explain what he calls Wright's anger and what I describe as his hatred."  Wright's race hate against whites, America and Israel seems to have others sources than the Jim Crow laws of the Deep South.

UPDATE:  Here's Wright on Louis Farrakhan.

NEWSWEEK REVEALS that Barack Obama was writing fiction rather than a factual autobiography when he wrote Dreams For My Father -- and Steve Sailer suggests what we'll be getting for President is not the post-racial Presidency but Zelig in the White House.

I'll be posting "Greg's Guide to Barack Obama's Dreams For My Father" here on PrestoPundit in the next week or two.  What I have found is the same thing Sailer has found -- Obama's book is largely a work of invention -- fiction -- in both the best and worse senses of the word.  Much of the book and even the dialog seems borrowed from what Barack has watched on television or studied at college.  Some of it is obvious fiction, impossible to be anything other than fiction.  But I'll fill you in on the details when I post my "Greg's Guide."

UPDATE:  Christopher Hitchens on Obama and his pastor:

To have accepted Obama's smooth apologetics is to have lowered one's own pre-existing standards for what might constitute a post-racial or a post-racist future. It is to have put that quite sober and realistic hope, meanwhile, into untrustworthy and unscrupulous hands. And it is to have done this, furthermore, in the service of blind faith. Mark my words: This disappointment is only the first of many that are still to come.

Also -- more evidence that the theology of Obama's church -- a theology which condemns the idea of heaven -- is well outside the mainsteam of American Christianity, whatever Obama might claim.  (But perhaps Obama can be excused by this:  if we are to believe his autobiography, what Obama knows of Christianity comes almost entirely from the good Rev. Wright.)

And now, your Quote Of The Day:

One of the keys to Obama's strategy in getting himself off the hook is convincing whites that Wright's beliefs, however regrettable they may be, are thoroughly mainstream in black America and therefore inescapable .. Thus does the new great national conversation on race begin with a lie, smearing untold millions of blacks who don't follow people like Wright in order to excuse a guy who did for 20 years.

WHERE DOES BLACK ANGER COME FROM?  If Barack Obama wants to have an honest discussion of race, let's have it:

The harsh truth is, much of the anger he speaks of is based on paranoia manifesting in urban legends about whites creating AIDS to kill blacks or crack cocaine to lock them up. Wright spreads these pernicious lies in Obama's church, and Obama has rewarded him with $23,000 a year in donations ..

Intellectually honest blacks, such as Shelby Steele, will tell you that racism is such a distant memory that racial victimologists like Wright are now left with concocting wild-eyed conspiracy theories to maintain their power. They see their power slipping, so "they rub racism in the face of whites," said Steele, who like Wright and Obama hails from Chicago's South Side.

It's self-serving black leaders such as Wright who hold back blacks today. In fact, Steele says their victim-focused, racial-identity politics has stifled black advancement more than racism itself. "The No. 1 black problem is not racism," Steele says, it's groupism and a desperate clinging to the black power movement of the '60s. Obama's church requires members to pledge allegiance to this movement, recast as the "Black Value System."

"The pursuit of black power is the worst thing we can do," Steele said. "It's the kiss of death," because it falsely convinces blacks they can't succeed on their own as individuals in "racist white America," a mantra at Obama's church of hate.

The ignorance and paranoia is bred by something called "black liberation theology," preached by Wright and his own mentor, Rev. James H. Cone. This theology is the core of the "black experience" and "black perspective" and "legacy of the African-American church" that whites are told they wouldn't understand.

Now that Obama has opened the dialogue about race in America, we need to talk frankly about what this "theology" means to blacks. According to Cone's writings and lectures, it teaches them that Jesus was black and blacks are the chosen people, and that the white man is "the devil."

It also teaches that black values are superior to American values, and as Cone himself has said, "all white men are responsible for white oppression" and will be held accountable and unforgiven until blacks are "completely emancipated" from white society.

We need to take these beliefs out of the shadows ..

UPDATE:   David Victor Hanson talks honestly about Barack Obama's call for a national conversation on race:

.. does Obama realize that the last thing he needs right now is a real conversation on race that would deal by needs with disproportionate illegitimacy, drug usage, crime, the values espoused in rap music, anti-Semitism, and black racism -- as well as undeniable long-standing white racial prejudice? Such an honest discussion might well alienate his base of white elites and African-Americans that is rapidly becoming his only constituency -- and is never held not because America is "afraid of talking about race" but because millions don't wish to be demonized as racists for introducing unpleasant realities into the discussion.

And we know from his record that Obama has no desire to talk honestly -- if you've read his autobiography you know his greatest fear in life is to found out as an  "inauthentic" black man -- and his ticket to "authenticity" throughout his life has been to surround himself with left of center anti-white, anti-corporate, anti-American black anger.  Really.  Buy a copy and read for yourself.  Or read a few articles about "black liberation theology", Trinity church, and Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

"DOUBTS ABOUT OBAMA'S CHARACTER AND JUDGMENT" Yes, some of us have doubts.

JUDITH KLINGHOFFER on the "typical white person" who gave her all to provide Barack Obama with a home and education -- "she succeeded in raising a color blind daughter but not a color blind grandson."

"GREATER LOVE HATH NO MAN than to lay down is grandma for his life."  -- Mark Steyn on Barack Obama.

THE KEY THING TO KNOW ABOUT BARACK OBAMA is that the man isn't a liar, he's a bullshitter in Harry Frankfurt's sense -- he has no regard for the truth one way or the other.  He isn't intent on deceiving you, he just wants to tell you whatever he needs to to get along and get what he wants.  This has a lot in common with Shelby Steele's various discussions of Obama as a "bargainer", a man without an authentic identity, and an "invisible man". 

Barack Obama was up to his old bullshitting again last night, in his interview with Larry King.  It is well known that Jeremiah Wright and his Trinity Church are very much not your typical black church.  Jeremiah Wright is a pioneer of "Black Liberation Theology", he's a former member of the Nation of Islam, and he's the one who very controversially introduced many of the themes of Black Nationalist Muslims into the black Christian church.  If fact, every aspect of the Trinity church are centered around the racist themes of "Black Liberation Theology" which many Christians must understand as fundamentally sacrilegious in their racist distortions of the Christian creed.

Jeremiah Wright himself says that his church was very much outside the mainstream of black churches in Chicago, as he explains in this interview:

I am not your typical garden-variety African-American clergy person, and because I'm not -- [Obama] was talking about organizing the churches in those early days. I said, man, you don't know who you're talking to. They don't like me. I'm not well liked in the city of Chicago, so you tell them you're a member of Trinity, you're going to turn off preachers before they ever get to know you, 'cause they're going to associate you with me, and just that association could be a negative in terms of how you are perceived in their eyes before you open your mouth -- "Oh, you go to Jeremiah's church." That kind of negative imaging I said might be harmful to him in terms of what he was trying to do in building coalitions and getting other churches to do things, again, for the benefit of the people. That would never happen just because they're going to associate your name with mine.

Contrast the truth about Jeremiah Wright and Trinity Church with this bullshitting by Barack Obama about his church on Larry King:

the church that I have attended for 15 years is a very conventional Christian church, a African-American church, squarely grounded in the tradition of the African-American church, that we talk mostly about Christ and salvation and sin and mercy and justice and hope.

This isn't intentional deception, this is bullshit.  Obama assumes the audience doesn't need to be deceived, it's an ignorant audience with a desire to believe a particular thing, and Obama is more than happy to tell them what they want to believe.  He gets what he wants (at the price of being genuine) and the audience gets what it wants (at the price of being bullshitted), and everyone feels good about themselves.  It's all bullshit, but it buys everyone what they "bargained" for, as explained by Shelby Steele.

UPDATE:  I call it bullshit, Charles Krauthammer calls it fraud.  Also -- Powerline calls "bullshit" on the post-modern "narrative" dodge used by Jeremiah Wright's racist successor at Barack Omama's church.

UPDATE:  McClatchy takes a look inside Obama's "conventional" church:

Jesus is black. Merging Marxism with Christian Gospel may show the way to a better tomorrow. The white church in America is the Antichrist because it supported slavery and segregation.  Those are some of the more provocative doctrines that animate the theology at the core of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Barack Obama's church ..

Via Instapundit via Gateway Pundit.  Gateway Pundit also has a link to what must be considered the ultimate in Obama bullshit:

(AP) Senator Barack Obama has told members of his denomination that some conservative Christian leaders have exploited and politicized religion to sow division.   In a 30-minute speech before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ .. the Democratic presidential candidate said, "Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us."

Read the whole thing.

BARACK'S RACIST CONFESSION.  Like his racist grandmother, there was a time (written about in his autobiography) when an evidently equally racist Barack Obama confessed his fear of innocent black men on the street.

At what point do we simply say that Obama's speech was ridiculous?

TWO SMART PEOPLE DISCUSS Barack Obama and the Wright speech -- bloggingheads TV features John McWhorter & Glenn Loury.  A lot to chew on, much more than in Obama's speech.  Glenn Loury is from South Chicago, and his discussion is particularly interesting.  For his own part, McWhorter seems unable to imagine that anyone could disagree with his perspective on the Obama speech without coming from a place of deep ignorance and stupidity.  It's an embarrassing position to hold, but there it is.  McWhorter's discussion drips with condescension.  But don't let that throw you.  There's all sorts of fascinating stuff besides McWhorter's claims that everyone besides himself is unable to think.

And just for the record I think Loury and McWhorter are both deeply wrong about the what attracts many whites to Obama.  But decide for yourself.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER has some questions for Barack Obama.  More on Obama from Rich Lowry here.

SUSAN ESTRICH on what it's like being a Hillary Clinton supporter running against Barack Obama:  "I've been accused of being a racist more times during this campaign than in all the rest of my political life, combined."

UPDATE:  In a new interview Bararck Obama seems clearly to be saying that "the typical white person" is a racist.  This is really going to help in Pennsylvania.

Also -- the executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition explains to Chris Matthews and the rest of the Democrat media elite why Barack Obama's speech didn't unite the country but rather "amplified deep-seated racial tensions and divisions."

SO WHAT DOES DEMOCRATIC PARTY LEADER Geraldine Ferraro think of Barack Obama and the fact that Obama lumped her in with Obama's race-hating mentor Rev. Jeremiah Wright in Obama's "It's OK To Have Racist Friends (As Long As They Are Black)" speech?   Well, she's not real happy about it.

Moreover, Ferraro believes that Obama's 20+ years of close association with a man who teaches hate to young people puts into question Obama's judgment.  So why did Obama throw Ferraro -- along with his own grandmother -- under the bus, yet retain his ties to an anti-America, race-hating associate?  Ferraro believes that Obama couldn't afford to alienate blacks sympathetic to the Wright.  Read the whole thing for specifics.

Sweetnes & Light points out the Ferraro has a very good reason to be upset about being equated with a racist by Barack Obama -- Obama himself once said almost the exact same thing the Obama campaign labeled Ferraro a racist for saying (scroll down).

OBAMA'S multi-decade "God Damn America" problem is turning large segments of the Democrat party against him -- in West Virginia his numbers are falling like rocks.  And things don't look good at all for November:  "If Obama is nominated, just 42% of Clinton supporters say they are even somewhat likely to vote for him against McCain. Eighteen percent (18%) of Clinton voters say that they are Not Very Likely to vote for Obama and 35% say they are Not at All Likely to vote for Obama."

UPDATE:  Obama's b*llsh*t isn't playing in working class Pennsylvania.  It turns out that only "elites" are buying what Obama is dishing up and real people like aesthetician Rodica Mitrea in Tacony, PA are on to the fact that Obama "lied to Anderson Cooper" about Rev. Wright and Wright's America-hating, white-hating past.

UPDATE II:  Someone else notices that Barack Obama is trading in something other than "eloquence".  Via Instapundit.

PETER WEHNER has done the work documenting Barack Obama's repeated zigging and zagging on the war in Iraq (did you know Obama once supported the war?) that our lazy MSM journalists can't be bothered to do.  Obama is revealed once again to be a true master of b*llsh*t and a thoroughly old-school politician concerned more with the needs of the moment and his own power than with the national interest.  It's an old story and not an edifying one, and one you won't hear from the Obama-For-President Democrats at NBC and the NY Times.  Wehner points out how Obama's behavior  "demonstrates a record of problematically ad-hoc judgments at best, calculatingly cynical judgments at worst" and suggests that the Senator isn't fit to serve as President of the United States, a conclusion I reached on other grounds some time ago.

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY -- not called the "stupid party" for no reason (scroll down).

"DON'T TELL ME WORDS DON'T MATTER"  But that was then.  This is now.

OBAMA'S POLL NUMBERS are in free-fall.  And from a near dead heat last month, Hillary Clinton now leads Obama by 22 points in Pennsylvania.  

THE MORE I LEARN of Barack Obama the more revolted I am by the man.  Barack Obama tells us directly in his autobiography that the angry anti-white and anti-American sentiments of Nation of Islam "Black Nationalists" were his own sentiments -- he only differed with them in his estimation of effective tactics.  His pastor, a one time Black Nationalist Muslim, did more than any other American to mainstream the anti-white, anti-American ideology of Black Muslims into the black community and the Christian left -- and he hasn't been shy about calling attention to the intellectual source of his anti-white, anti-American ideology -- the work of James Cone of New York's Union Theological Seminary.  In fact, the members of his church -- like Barack Obama -- and advised and instructed to read Cone's seminal book, Black Theology & Black Power.  So what is it that Cone believes?  Among other things, Cone believes things like this:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community. . . . Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy.

Are you sick to your stomach yet?

Has anyone asked Obama what he knows about James Cone and the foundational role this thinker plays in his own church?  Will anyone believe his answer?

UPDATE:  More here.

UPDATE II:  If you've been paying attention, it's clear that Obama is lying even about his own grandmother, in a manner that unjustly slanders both her and Obama's grandfather.  If you translate out of Obama's "invisible man" speak, you can hear Obama ranting -- to make sure everyone understands that Obama is a "genuine" black man and fully down with this "identity" community -- "God Damn My Grandmother.  God Damn My Grandfather."  What a guy, that Barack Obama.

See also -- "The Crazy Uncle in Obama's Attic" from Slate and Stanley Kurtz, "The Wright Foreign Policy".

MORE TROUBLE for Barack Obama.

SO WHO HAS THE BEST Obama speech analysis?  Try these:

-- Sister Toldja

-- James Taranto

-- AllahPundit

-- Mickey Kaus

-- Stanley Kurtz

-- Right Wing Nut House

IS OBAMA the post-racial messiah?  Well, no.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

[Obama] gets caught dirty with a anti-American radical leftist racial arsonist and yet it turns out the only way to heal those wounds is to elect Barack Obama President of the United States of America.

THIS IS transformational politics -- Barack Obama is successfully mainstreaming the anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-white far left.  It's where he comes from and as he himself says it's a part of him, a part that he will not and cannot reject.   This IS an historic presidential election.

SHELBY STEELE on Barack Obama:

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. No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

BARACK OBAMA'S SPEECH on his racist pastor Jeremiah Wright has been posted on the Drudge Report.

Obama says this:  "[the anger against against whites and against America of the older generation] is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."

But note well.  Barack Obama continues to act to make sure that this anger against whites and against America gets passed along to the next generation, even to his own children, by putting them in the pews of Rev. Wright's racist church, by bankrolling Wright's anti-white and anti-American ministry, and in the realm of public policy by advocating the expanded teaching of grievance history and victimology in the schools.

And this agenda is not a deviation from the course of Obama's life history.  Throughout his life he sought out peers, mentors and teachers -- in college, in his religion and in Chicago -- who also cultivated anger and grievance against America and especially "White America."  It's documented in his own autobiography, it's documented in his actions in Chicago.  And the facts are not going to go away.

Oh, ya.  Also this.  I still think he's lying.

UPDATE:  Ann Althouse picked up the same thing I did:

Missing here, I think, is an explicit acknowledgment that Wright is not merely expressing the anger he feels but that he is leading people into anger, keeping anger fresh and alive .. Obama speaks as if Wright were only expressing his beliefs, and he does not say that Wright was, from his powerful leadership position, instilling these beliefs in many others.

BARACK OBAMA IS LYING about what he knows about his church, its leader Jeremiah Wright, and the always far left, often anti-white and anti-America views advocated by that church and its leader.  This is the kind of stuff that even outsiders quickly learned about Wright and his church:

[Wright's] intellectual sermons sometimes more resemble leftwing political rants than religious preaching. Startling for a preacher, he can be both profane and provocative. Despite advancing a multicultural agenda, like Obama, Wright's church is rooted in Afro-centrism. Wright himself often dons colorful African dashikis and is not shy about laying historical and modern-day blame on whites for much of the social and economic woes in the African-American community. His sermons frequently denounce Republican politics, and he has called people who voted for George W. Bush "stupid." .. His intellectualism and black militancy put him at odds with some Baptist ministers around Chicago, with whom he often sparred publicly, and he finally accepted a position at Trinity. The church's motto was "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian."

This is the church and the pastor that Barack Obama was attracted to, as much for Wright's extremist politics as for any other reason, as Obama himself says in his autobiography.  So let's stop playing pretend about this.  Obama comes from a far-left background, and he's chosen to associate with far left, often anti-American and anti-white radicals all of his life -- as he chose to do in college and as he chose to do Chicago.  It's in his own autobiography, folks. People need to stop lying to themselves about this.  The worms are out of the can and good luck stuffing them back in.

UPDATE:  Barack Obama supported Louis Farrakhan's 1996 Million Man March, and flew to Washington, D.C. to attend the event.

HALF OF ALL AMERICANS have a negative view of Barack Obama, making his negatives worse even than Hillary Clinton.

And this:  "56% said Wright's comments made them less likely to vote for Obama ..  However, among African-Americans, 29% said Wright's comments made them more likely to support Obama."

Yes, that's right, Obama the uniter.

Just One Minute -- a great source for Barack Obama news and analysis.

Dog Bites Man.  The LA Times whitewashes the Obama-Wright story, and refuses even mention the most salient facts of the case.

Again last night someone tried to get me to subscribe to that miserable excuse for a newspaper.  I got a free copy of the paper and it quickly made its way to the trash, unopened.

"THE UNITED STATES OF WHITE AMERICA"  Less than a year ago Barack Obama was in the pews of his church nodding his head in agreement to the racist rantings of his minister Jeremiah Wright.  Tom Maguire has some pressing questions for the junior Senator from Illinois.

THE BEST REPORTAGE on Barack Obama and his America hating political adviser Jeremiah Wright comes from Sweetness & Light. 

Do I need to add that the political advocates for Barack Obama at the NY Times and the major networks aren't going to be giving you the facts about Mr. Obama and his corrupt and hateful Chicago friends?

HERE'S THE AUDIO of the sermon titled "The Audacity of Hope" delivered by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, one of the Wright sermons which inspired Barack Obama during his time at Harvard Law School.  The man speaking in this evening presentation of his talk is a very different Jeremiah Wright from the one revealed in his widely circulated "God Damn America" sermon.

The two persons become united as one when you read this account from American Thinker of Jeremiah Wright's theological inspiration -- Dr. James Cone -- whose book Black Theology & Black Power was highlighted on the Trinity Church website (until late last year) "as required reading for Trinity parishioners who wished to more thoroughly understand the church's theology and mission."  The great influence of his life reveals Wright as an intellectual with a deeply Manichean view of the world, one in which white America represents the great force of darkness and devastation in the world and Black Christianity represents the great force of light and hope.  It is a near impossibility that Barack Obama would have failed to be aware of this overarching theological structure in Jeremiah Wright's ministry. Indeed, you can easily imagine Wright's sophisticated anti-American/European Manicheanism appealing to the Barack Obama who wrote this:

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake,we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

Finally, here's Obama's account of his encounter with Jeremiah Wright and his sermon "The Audacity of Hope":

The title of Reverend Wright's sermon that morning was "The Audacity of Hope." He began with a passage from the Book of Samuel--the story of Hannah, who, barren and taunted by her rivals, had wept and shaken in prayer before her God. The story reminded him, he said, of a sermon a fellow pastor had preached at a conference some years before, in which the pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting title Hope. 

"The painting depicts a harpist," Reverend Wright explained, "a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountain. Until you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.

"It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere...That's the world! On which hope sits!" 

And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House. As the sermon unfolded, though, the stories of strife became more prosaic, the pain more immediate. The reverend spoke of the hardship that the congregation would face tomorrow, the pain of those far from the mountaintop, worrying about paying the light bill...

UPDATE:  The NY Times interviews James Cone as part of its story on Barack Obama's denunciation of Jeremiah Wright's hate speech against white people and America.  Quotable:  "If you're black, it's hard to say what you truly think and not upset white people."

UPDATE II:  Here's the text of Wright's "The Audacity of Hope", along with the painting which is the theme of the sermon.   Note well that the painting Wright cites differs discernibly from Wright's description of it.