Say Anything Blog

Remember all the hoopla a while back about “Who would the world elect President?” Well, since liberals care about those kind of things, here’s a view from across the Canadian border…

Obama is simply guilty

Obama is simply guilty.  That is the “problem” which pundits pretend to be talking about regarding his twenty years at Trinity United Church of Christ and his long held admiration for its pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  What Obama has done is commit a serious moral crime which disqualifies him for the presidency just as much as if he had been a member of the Communist Party or the Nazi Party or the Black Panthers.  There is no explanation and no excuse.

About the same time that this news story blossomed into a full blown scandal, New York Democrats faced a similar problem with Elliot Spitzer, former Governor of New York.  Then, as here, there was no explanation or excuse that would work.  Spitzer did a terrible thing.  Obama, in attending a church of hate for twenty years without protest or complaint, did a terrible thing too.  It simply cannot be undone.

What would black Americans think about a presidential candidate who had been an active member of the Ku Klux Klan for twenty years and who called an Imperial Wizard the inspiration for one of his books?  Would any amount of explanation about the misery of poor whites in America or the misunderstanding between the races have mattered to black Americans?  Would any excuse – should any excuse – have been accepted?  Of course not!

...Obama did have a way out of his moral crimes.  He could have said something like this:  “Yes, I did attend a church that preached hatred of whites and hatred of America.  Yes, what I did was wrong.  It was also wrong of me not to tell the American people about my relationship with this church before I ran for president.  I will not try to excuse what I did, I simply admit that what I did was wrong.  I have learned my lesson.  I will never allow myself to be morally compromised like that again.”

Instead Obama compounded his original sin by hiding it and then lying about it.  He pretended that his church was a mainstream church.  Then he pretended that Reverend Wright did not make the sort of ghastly sermons that evidence later showed that he did.  Then Obama pretended that he never attended the church when Wright made one of his “hate America and hate white people” sermons. 

At every step, instead of coming clean with the American people and asking forgiveness, which is what he should have done, Barack Obama tried to trick the American people and to finesse his own moral shortcomings through his undeniable charm and eloquence.  But America does not need charming, eloquent liars in the White House.  America does not need morally flawed leaders who are quite unwilling to admit their moral flaws, almost adamant – even when confronted with those flaws – that the flaws themselves do not exist.