Monday, May 5, 2008

Obama, Oprah and the Sword of Damocles

Oprah Winfrey was once a member of Rev. Wright's church. What she heard from Rev. Wright caused her to disassociate from the Church in the mid-1990's, a time when she would have been sitting in the pews with Obama and his family, listening to the same "incendiary" sermons. Given Obama's most recent claim that the sermons he heard for twenty years were not racist or anti-American, it seems his candidacy is operating on borrowed time.
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This from Newsweek:

. . . [Oprah] Winfrey was a member of Trinity United from 1984 to 1986, and she continued to attend off and on into the early to the mid-1990s. But then she stopped. A major reason—but by no means the only reason—was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

According to two sources, Winfrey was never comfortable with the tone of Wright's more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America's favorite daytime talk-show host. "Oprah is a businesswoman, first and foremost," said one longtime friend, who requested anonymity when discussing Winfrey's personal sentiments. "She's always been aware that her audience is very mainstream, and doing anything to offend them just wouldn't be smart. . .

Read the entire article. The article offers no specifics as to the content of those "incendiary" sermons, but if they were such as to offend her mainstream audience, they had to be similar in nature to the racist and anti-American remarks of Rev. Wright playing across our airways for the past two months.

I earlier posted, in Obama as Marley, that Obama's unbelievable claims about his experiences with Rev. Wright would be his downfall:

Despite what we know about Rev. Wright, despite what we know about black liberation theology that animated Trinity United long before Obama became a member, and despite Obama writing that “white greed runs a world in need” in his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama claims that he heard nothing in the pews over twenty years in the nature of the racism and vile anti-Americanism that forms the core of Rev. Wright's black liberation theology.

. . . When I go to church it's not for spectacle. It's to pray and to find -- to find a stronger sense of faith. It's not to posture politically. It's not -- you know, it's not to hear things that violate my core beliefs. . . .

. . . During the course of me attending that church, I had not heard those kinds of statements being made or those kinds of views being promoted. And I did not vet my pastor before I decided to run for the presidency. I was a member of the church.

It is simply unbelievable on the facts we know. It is completely counterintuitive. And Obama’s sarcastic remark about not “vetting” his pastor is an insult to our intelligence after he spent twenty years in the pews. His denial assures that this issue will not go away. Moreover, given the absolute nature of his denial, this was Obama's "I did not have sex with that preacher" moment. Future revelations regarding what he knew and when he knew it will utterly destroy his credibility and, with it, likely his bid for the presidency.

There is a sword of Damocles hanging over Obama, and as I explained in the above post, it has been needlessly placed there by Obama himself. There just is no question that it is going to fall. The only question is when. I suspect it will be in October.

2 comments:

Dinah Lord said...

Re: Oprah - Rev Wright schism...

I heard a Chicago Trib reporter on FNC talking about this. She said that after Oprah left the Church the good Reverend said that she left because she didn't want to tithe...

Hah-hah.

Anonymous said...

As much as I would like to believe that Obama's campaign is on borrowed time, the stupidity of the common man continues to drag me to the possibility that he may very well be our next president.
(And people ask me why I don't believe in god.)