Krauthammer Blasts Obama Speech

I love Charles Krauthammer. I love it when Brit Hume has him as one of the "Fox News All-Stars." I love reading his columns. He is thoughtful, deliberate, and right on target with what he says.

His column in yesterday's Washington Post tears apart Barack Obama's race speech, calling it, "A Brilliant Fraud."

The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.

An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which"controversial" remarks?

Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented HIV "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible for Sept. 11 -- "chickens coming home to roost" -- because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?) What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them?

Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction [of not having left Wright's church].

His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence and (b) white guilt.

(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?

"I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was Grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus's time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did Grandma.

Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?

There's more. The problem with trying to get key excerpts from this is that it's so tightly written that each point flows into the next in such a way that it starts losing too much without the missing pieces. Read the whole thing.

Of course, the New York Times fawned over the speech, saying among other things, "It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better." They obviously have a limited imagination over at the NY Times.

Those on the left loved the speech, many believing it to be the greatest speech on race ever. But was it really good enough to start renaming all the Martin Luther King Jr Boulevards to Barack Obama Boulevard? That's where my imagination starts to fail.

On the right, the reaction was more like Krauthammer's. Obama's was a flawed speech whose many words did little to answer the real questions that still need answering.

Wright's church preaches black liberation theology, and liberation theology plays itself out in the broader world through the promotion of socialism as the liberation vehicle. That Michelle Obama declared she was never proud of America before her husband ran for president is no surprise. The Obamas have been attending the church for twenty years, the church has been preaching against white America for I don't know how long, and Barack Obama supports socialist policies for our country. It all fits. No matter how much he protests, this is his church and he is at home there.