A Cunning Artificer and Eloquent Orator!
March 22, 2008
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
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Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer is one of my all time favorite writers.
His analysis of Obama’s speech cuts to the very heart of the uneven political manipulations of degrees of prejudicial remarks Obama used when referring to a comment by his white grandmother, which he compared it to that of “God Damn America” by his pastor. He referred to her as having a “typical white woman” attitude when she indicated she felt afraid of black men she did not know. There is a great deal of difference with a “typical white woman” saying she feels afraid of some black men, and a pastor, be he black, white, or purple, saying, “God Damn America,” as well as other racial remarks about white U.S. leaders.
Applying illustrative examples of comparisons between his white grandmother’s remark and pastor Jeremiah Wright’s racially inflamed offensive rhetoric,
which he makes from time to time in his preaching, is intellectually dishonest.
In no way do I deny pastor Jeremiah Wright’s right to say what he has said and preached in his ministry. Nor do I deny Obama and his family the right to belong to any church in the world.
That is strictly their business.
But I do believe it is impossible for me to vote for someone who has planted himself in the pew and listened to that sort of rhetoric off and on for some twenty years, and yet is still a member of a church that espouses it.
I am afraid the “change” he intends to bring to this country will include some manifestations of this kind of rhetoric.
When Isaiah advised Israel that a lot of different public figures with certain characteristics were going to be taken away from Jerusalem and Judea, he included one of them with two characteristics which would be found among them.
In Isaiah 3:3, he described this individual as “the cunning artificer, and the eloquent orator.” The Hebrew word used for “artificer” means “a fabricator of material.” Sometimes such a man can weave words into a beautiful enchanting paradise, but the tapestry he eventually weaves by his actions results in a chaotic maze different from what his words promised.
Proverbs 15:4 – A wholesome tongue is a tree of life: but perverseness therein is a bre
ach in the spirit.
I am afraid that the old political escape message, designed to hold onto the most votes of the maximum number of elements in the racial and ethnic segments of our society, has become the standard for most of our politicians, namely: “Some of my friends are for it, and some of them are against it, and I always stand with my friends” or, “Some of my friends feel strongly about this issue, and some of my friends could care less, and I feel the same as my friends.”
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Krauthammer: Obama Fraud Speech
Friday, March 21, 2008 11:20 AM
By: Newsmax Staff
Barack Obama’s speech on Tuesday has been widely hailed as an attempt to deal honestly with the race issue in the U.S. and his longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright, but Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer is having none of that.
In an Op-Ed article headlined “The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud,” Krauthammer acknowledges that Obama condemned Rev. Wright’s inflammatory remarks as “wrong and divisive” — without specifying the remarks he was referring to.
But Krauthammer goes on to say: “The question is why didn’t he leave that church
? Why didn’t he leave — why doesn’t he leave even today — a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells), ‘God damn America’?
“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.”
Krauthammer opines that Obama’s defense of his relationship with Wright rests on “moral equivalence” and “white guilt.”
For moral equivalence, Krauthammer notes, Obama places his white grandmother at the “other end of the spectrum” from Wright, since according to Obama she “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.”
Krauthammer writes: “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?”
As for white guilt, Krauthammer observes that Obama’s purpose in his speech was to put Wright’s outrages in the context of history — and by history, “he means the history of white racism…
“What lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination
? Jeremiah Wright, of course.
“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.”
Krauthammer asserts that Obama “flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor…
“Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness?”
The writer concludes: “Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?”
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