{"id":2281,"date":"2008-03-18T12:01:30","date_gmt":"2008-03-18T17:01:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2281"},"modified":"2008-03-18T13:11:09","modified_gmt":"2008-03-18T18:11:09","slug":"post-mortem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2281","title":{"rendered":"Post-Mortem"},"content":{"rendered":"

I didn’t get to hear Obama’s “I Am Not A Racist” speech, but Jay Reding did<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Rhetorically, this is brilliant stuff. But like everything else that Obama says, once one gets past the wonderful words, the message itself is largely meaningless. Sen. Obama admits that Rev. Wright is a racist with a deeply disturbing view of America. Yet he won\u2019t back down from him (any more than he already has). On one hand, he thinks that this country needs to have a conversation about race\u2014on the other, he is siding with people who preach a gospel of racial division.<\/p>\n

Sen. Obama just can\u2019t have it both ways.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s a given that the nation needs a “conversation about race”. Framing the conversation is the hard part.<\/p>\n

Maybe we need a referee…<\/p>\n

UPDATE: E-Mo<\/a> at Hot Air:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s essentially a non-distancing distancing, akin to the non-apology apology. He excuses Wright\u2019s anti-American rhetoric with a mixture of rationalizations. Wright gets a pass because he served in the military, because he grew up in another generation that apparently hated America, and because he does good work in other areas. Obama also makes the curious claim that rejecting Wright means rejecting the entire black community<\/em> \u2014 something other black churches might see as rather presumptuous. Obama essentially argues that the same kind of anti-Americanism can be found in all black churches, and speaks at length about how the legacy of racism and Jim Crow makes this incendiary rhetoric ubiquitous.<\/p>\n

Is that true? Hardly. Black ministers have flocked to the airwaves over the last few days to vehemently deny that kind of argument. However, Obama has little choice but<\/em> to argue this, because he needs to cast his situation as having little choice in spiritual venues.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All generalizations are false, including this one – and Ed’s. Is it true that this racial rhetoric is common in Afro-American churches? No, but where it’s present, it is very prominent. There is (or has fairly recently been) at least one Baptist church in Saint Paul, and another in Minneapolis, that I’d cautiously classify as being in the same rhetorical category as Wright. If there were such an identifiable undercurrent of paranoid racism in a white denomination, they would be a (justifiable) uproar.<\/p>\n

Now, the First Amendment defends their right to preach whatever they want, and I’ll defend that right (not “to the death” – Patton said my job is to make the other poor dumb SOB die for his <\/em>country, and I’m cool with that) – but nothing about the First Amendment immunizes people from criticism.<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I didn’t get to hear Obama’s “I Am Not A Racist” speech, but Jay Reding did: Rhetorically, this is brilliant stuff. But like everything else that Obama says, once one gets past the wonderful words, the message itself is largely meaningless. Sen. Obama admits that Rev. Wright is a racist with a deeply disturbing view […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-08","category-democrats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}