Obama's Headache Over Pastor Jeremiah Wright

Posted on April 28, 2008

After his big speech on race -- in which he said he could no more disown his pastor than he could disown the black community or his white grandmother -- Barack Obama may be regretting his words. Because Jeremiah Wright has decided to speak out -- and it's not pretty.

Wright is on some kind of Tour of Racial Divisiveness, speaking to churches, Bill Moyers, the NAACP and the National Press Association. Wright and Obama have repeatedly said that Wright's hate-filled video rants were taken out of context, that we should listen to the entire speeches. We did, and frankly they're even worse than the video clips.

Here's some fun highlights: Wright mocked the accents of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson (you know, the guy that got the Civil Rights Act passed), he reiterated his claim that the U.S. created AIDS to exterminate people of color, that the U.S. is the same as Al-Qaeda, that Louis Farrakhan is one of the greatest people of the 20th and 21st centuries, that black people and white people have different brains, that black people have better rhythm than white people (complete with clapping examples!), that Obama only criticized Wright's speeches because it polled well and he wanted to get elected, and that American deserved to be hit on 9/11 because of our own terrorist acts (the chickens have come home to roost!).

Yes, it was full-bore, hate-filled, vile nonsense. The full transcript Wright's speech to the press corps is here.