Dreams From My Pastor

You can't have a mentoring relationship of over 20 years without some give and take and melding of ideas, and it looks like the reflexive tendency to stoke racial conspiracies that are a well-documented part of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's character have rooted and grown deeply in at least one member of his flock, Barack Obama.

This morning in the Wall Street Journal, talk show host Rush Limbaugh rightfully rips Barack Obama for a racially-charged Spanish-language campaign ad designed to bully Hispanic voters into the Democratic camp, using fear and distortions so great as to be outright lies:

I understand the rough and tumble of politics. But Barack Obama -- the supposedly postpartisan, postracial candidate of hope and change -- has gone where few modern candidates have gone before.

Mr. Obama's campaign is now trafficking in prejudice of its own making. And in doing so, it is playing with political dynamite. What kind of potential president would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering.

Limbaugh then shows that the Limbaugh "quotes" used by the Obama campaign came from several parodies before concluding:

The malignant aspect of this is that Mr. Obama and his advisers know exactly what they are doing. They had to listen to both monologues or read the transcripts. They then had to pick the particular excerpts they used in order to create a commercial of distortions. Their hoped-for result is to inflame racial tensions. In doing this, Mr. Obama and his advisers have demonstrated a pernicious contempt for American society.

We've made much racial progress in this country. Any candidate who employs the tactics of the old segregationists is unworthy of the presidency.

"Any candidate who employs the tactics of the old segregationists is unworthy of the presidency."

Indeed, that should be automatic and reflexive disqualification in this day and age. For that matter, a candidate that goes a radical church based on a racist cult theology advocating the killing of God if God isn't sufficiently committed to one race above all others shouldn't be a factor in his party's nomination process, but Barack Obama, who was a member of a church espousing Black Liberation Theology for 20 years, is still here.

It is the height of hilarity this campaign season that the same media and blogosphere critics who are in hysterics over Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin belonging to a Assemblies of God church—the world's largest Pentecostal denomination—until six years ago when she joined a more traditional church, is utterly unconcerned that Barack Obama was a proud member of a church build upon the principles of Black Liberation Theology—a faith breach-birthed from the the radical politics of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X—until the inherent racism seeped out into YouTube of Jeremiah Wright's sermons.

But Jeremiah Wright's influence still remains in Barack Obama, as does the influence of long-time terrorist friends and fundraisers, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Perhaps Rush should consider himself lucky that he was merely the victim of racial slander, and not the target of a nail-studded pipe bomb.