Huckabee defends Wright

Mick Huckabee has come out in defense of Obama on Wright, and somewhat in defense of Wright himself.

[Obama] made the point, and I think it’s a valid one, that you can’t hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do. You just can’t. Whether it’s me, whether it’s Obama…anybody else. But he did distance himself from the very vitriolic statements. Now, the second story. It’s interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what Louis Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Reverend Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you’d say “Well, I didn’t mean to say it quite like that.”

Via LizzyPop at dKos.

John McCain: passed that threshold?

John McCain appears not to understand the most basic issues in the Middle East. Writing in the Washington Posts campaign blog, The Trail, Cameron W. Barr and Michael D. Shear report:

Speaking to reporters in Amman, the Jordanian capital, McCain said he and two Senate colleagues traveling with him continue to be concerned about Iranian operatives “taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.”

Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.” A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate’s ear. McCain then said: “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.”

Hillary Clinton believes that she and McCain have passed the commander-in-chief threshold with their knowledge of foreign policy. McCain has been happy to embrace Clinton on this one

In recent days, McCain has repeatedly said his intimate knowledge of foreign policy make him the best equipped to answer a phone ringing in the White House late at night.

McCain had to rely on Joe Lieberman to explain to most basic facts on the ground. Does McCain really think that Iran is training al Qaeda? Has he simply internalised that Bush-Cheney lie that of insurgent = terrorist = al Qaeda? Or is this part of a pattern that includes McCain’s repeated denials of simply verifiable facts? We are, after all, talking about a tired man in his seventies. His memory may not be that good. That’s not a big deal, it’s just part of life. Unless, of course, you are talking about someone who wants to be president of the US. Add that to his temper, which worries the people who know him, and there’s potential for a real problem.

H/T Bruce Wilson at Talk To Action.

Jeremiah Wright and the Prophet Jeremiah

Henry Neufeld has an interesting post comparing Jeremiah Wright with the Prophet Jeremiah.

The role of a prophet is to speak truth to power.   Devilstower at dKos also looks at Wright’s words in the context of the words of Jesus.

Kern protest

PFLAG is organising a rally tomorrow (Tuesday 18^th) at the Oklahoma State Capitol building rotunda from 12 noon to 1 pm.

Here’s video of the Classen rally from last Friday.

Manufactured crises

Pastor Dan writes

The fact is, America has postponed a necessary conversation on race for at least forty years. Jeremiah Wright makes white (and not a few black) people uncomfortable because he reminds them that America is not as morally pure as it would like to imagine itself as being. Nor is it as post-racial. Injustice, however ameliorated, is still daily a part of many lives. Until we are willing to face that truth, we can never truly leave the ghosts of our racial past behind. White Americans don’t like to hear that, and I don’t blame them.

Obama on Wright

Statements by the pastor of Barack Obama’s church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, have ignited a bit of a firestorm, especially at TPM. It really didn’t strike me as comparable with McCain’s endorsements from Hagee and Parsley – McCain, after all, sought and welcomed the endorsements from that pair. Obama, on the other hand, is a member of the church that Wright pastors. After all – a church is a community, not (generally) a band of followers of one charismatic individual.

Writing at HuffPo today, Obama addressed the Wright issue. He begins with an outright rejection of Wright’s statements

The pastor of my church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who recently preached his last sermon and is in the process of retiring, has touched off a firestorm over the last few days. He’s drawn attention as the result of some inflammatory and appalling remarks he made about our country, our politics, and my political opponents.

Let me say at the outset that I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy. I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies. I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it’s on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue.

Some people have said that by remaining members of the church, they are somehow endorsing Wright. Obama writes

The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.

The key question here is “what is a church?” While it varies from denomination to denomination and from church to church, by an large a church is a community, not a group of devotees of a charismatic preacher. Of course, this is a continuum – most televangelists are the opposite – the preacher is the focus, and often, the church is treated as if it were private property. But this isn’t the case in most denominations – whether the church is connectional (and all property is owned by the broader denomination) or congregational (where the church owns its own property and chooses to associate with the broader denomination), the church is the functional unit. The church employs the pastor…sometimes the local church actually hires and fires the pastor, sometimes it is the denomination that does so. A good pastor can attract and hold crowds. And sometimes, when a pastor leaves, a portion of the congregation goes with him or her.

The United Church of Christ is congregational, so Trinity UCC actually employed Wright. And Wright was pastor there for a long time – his Wikipedia article says that he was pastor for 36 years. It goes without saying that he was an important part of shaping that congregation. And from what Obama says, Wright probably played a significant role in his decision to join and remain in the church

I knew Rev. Wright as someone who served this nation with honor as a United States Marine, as a respected biblical scholar, and as someone who taught or lectured at seminaries across the country, from Union Theological Seminary to the University of Chicago. He also led a diverse congregation that was and still is a pillar of the South Side and the entire city of Chicago. It’s a congregation that does not merely preach social justice but acts it out each day, through ministries ranging from housing the homeless to reaching out to those with HIV/AIDS.

Most importantly, Rev. Wright preached the gospel of Jesus, a gospel on which I base my life. In other words, he has never been my political advisor; he’s been my pastor. And the sermons I heard him preach always related to our obligation to love God and one another, to work on behalf of the poor, and to seek justice at every turn.

But a church is a community, it’s a family. It’s far more than a single individual. Obama’s decision to remain a member of his church is in no way comparable to McCain’s decision to seek out the endorsement of bigots.

$55 million?!

The Obama campaign reports that it raised $55 million in February.

That’s just a mind-boggling amount of money.

John McCain: Denialist

I suppose it takes a good measure of denialism to be able to say that the war’s not going horribly, but this still shocked me

McCain said, per ABC News’ Bret Hovell, that “It’s indisputable that (autism) is on the rise amongst children, the question is what’s causing it. And we go back and forth and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines.”

Really?  It’s indisputable?  No, it’s indisputable that autism diagnoses are on the rise, but there are people who wonder how much of it is real and how much of it is related to changing diagnostic standards and greater awareness.  As for strong evidence?  Huh?  Oh, you mean something like the evidence that the US is winning in Iraq, and that Saddam had WMDs?  So does McCain simply not care whether he knows anything before he chooses to run his mouth on a subject, or is this just part of his outright falsehoods (I never met with Buckingham, I don’t do favours for lobbyists,…)  Or maybe it’s the Ronald Reagan excuse – after all, he’s older than Reagan was when he ran for the presidency.

McCain said there’s “divided scientific opinion” on the matter, with “many on the other side that are credible scientists that are saying that’s not the cause of it.”

Ahh. Teach the Controversy^TM, shall we?

Fortunately, ABC’s Jake Tapper got the actual facts into the story

The established medical community is not as divided as McCain made it sound, however. Overwhelmingly the “credible scientists,” at least as the government and the medical establishment so ordain them, side against McCain’s view.

Moreover, those scientists and organizations fear that powerful people lending credence to the thimerosal theory could dissuade parents from getting their children immunized — which in their view would lead to a very real health crisis.

H/T Aetiology.

Texas

Truly beautiful, especially the stadium shot.

H/T dKos

Tom Coburn: Iraq war “probably a mistake”

This news is probably a week old, but I still think it’s worth noting.  On Thursday the Tulsa World reported:

U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn’s comment that going to war in Iraq was “probably a mistake” represents a significant departure from where the Oklahoma Republican started out on the 5-year-old conflict.

Coburn’s comment came at the beginning of remarks at a weekend town hall meeting in Muskogee.

“I will tell you personally that I think it was probably a mistake going to Iraq,” said the freshman senator, who made it clear he did not believe the U.S. could withdraw but had to stay.