The Dream and Reverend Wright

Get your barf bags ready, boys and girls. Barack Obama could have stayed home and forgotten about his speech yesterday, because America's liberals had all weekend to come up with excuses for hate speech, and they came up with some doozies. A few random thoughts, and then I'll get to the freakiest excuse of them all.

Expect to hear Pat Robertson's name kicked around a lot over the next few days as Obama's defenders try to draw equivalency between his comments about 9/11 and Wright's decades of hate speech.

On Glenn Beck's show last night we were treated to NPR/Esquire contributor John Ridley spouting the false claim that Ronald Reagan had called AIDS a judgment on gays for their behavior. Never mind that Reagan never said any such thing; did Reagan make a habit of making comments like that in front of hundreds or thousands of people every week for decades? Is every person who ever said that theologically-wrong-but-not-necessarily-hateful thing suddenly as bad as a professional race-baiter?

But folks, here's the king of all the freaky Obama excuses:

DR. GAIL ANDERSON HOLNESS, GREATER WASHINGTON COUNCIL OF CHURCHES: He [Wright] is not preaching hate theology. And that should be a clear statement. It's not hate theology. It is a liberation theology. When Jesus was around, they didn't respect Jesus. They were angry with him. When he spoke the beatitudes on the mountain. They were angry with Martin Luther King when he was around, and they didn't respect him. And now he's a great hero. . .

(Hat tip to The American Thinker)

I'm not even going to bother dealing with the idea that Jeremiah Wright and the Savior of the World are bearing the same message. I'm surprised Anderson didn't burst into flame right after saying it. I won't even bother with the idea that anything Jesus preached was "liberation theology," a term for Marxist doctrine disguised as Christian preaching. Again, that is just too sickening to contemplate, and I can only ask that God forgive Anderson and her fellow travelers, for they know not what they do.

No, I want to take issue with the idea that Wright is similar to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the "I Have A Dream" speech, Dr. King recited the words of a patriotic song...

"My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father's died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!"

Can you imagine Jeremiah Wright calling our nation a "sweet land of liberty?"

After discussing segregation, King said "But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation." Jeremiah Wright says the bank is bankrupt, that we live in the USKKK of A, and Michelle Obama chimes in to back him up.

Was Jeremiah Wright listening when Dr. King said this passage? I can't imagine it coming from Wright's mouth:

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

I could go on, but you get the point. Reading King's speech after days of having Wright's venom ringing in my ears is like reading the the Gettysburg Address after reading the Communist Manifesto. There truly is no shame in the ranks of liberalism anymore.

Chris Clukey
Contributing Editor