Barack Obama makes me sick.
Here he is, on my TV, condemning his former pastor for the allegedly “appalling” and “outrageous” remarks said pastor has made in public. According to Obama, “They offend me. They rightly offend all Americans.”
It’s bad enough that the US is the kind of place where a politician feels compelled to defend or distance himself from remarks made by someone only vaguely connected with him, but when that politician does succumb to the urge to prevent further damage to his image caused by such a vague association, he should not be so arrogant as to profess to have gauged the feelings of an entire nation, such that he may now speak on their behalf.
Sarah, for one, does not feel insulted by the Rev. Wright’s remarks. Nor, for what it’s worth, even though I’m not an American, do I.
Amongst other things, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has said he believed the 11th September attacks were retribution for years of malevolent U.S. foreign policy that has caused huge numbers of deaths overseas.
Hmm, what is “outrageous” or “appalling” here? The only thing that’s outrageous about this remark is that it’s patently true. Obama’s dismissal of the remark is what I find appalling.
Obama goes on to say that the Rev. Wright’s remarks are “divisive and destructive” and that they “give comfort to those who prey on hate”. Clearly, Obama needs a better speech-writer to convey the pretence of eloquence, since “those who prey on hate” are presumably those who do good in the world; or so I would have thought.
Now, make no mistake, the Rev. Wright has said a few things that are, at best, hard to prove. More probably, they are simply untrue. Take, for example, the assertion that the US government has spread AIDS in order to wipe out black people. The spread of AIDS amongst certain groups of the American population may, at one time or another, have raised cheers behind closed doors in Washington, but that’s a far cry from their having deliberately propagated and spread the virus.
Nevertheless, Wright’s entitled to his views and Obama should be defending his right to make them, even if he doesn’t agree with the views themselves. Similarly, if he feels that guilt by association is damaging to him with the judgemental electorate, he should merely distance himself from Wright’s remarks, rather than condemn the man himself.
Let’s get one thing straight here. The attacks on American targets on 11th September 2001 were unquestionably the result of the US’s ruthless foreign policy over the last few decades. The terrorists have even said as much. Does Obama perhaps think the US was picked at random and that there’s no rationale behind the attacks? Why is the idea of looking inward to seek the motivation for the attacks anathema to him?
Another thing, Obama said that Wright was equating America’s “wartime efforts” with terrorism, but Wright referred explicitly to foreign policy, not wartime efforts. Of course, you could argue that American foreign policy effectively amounts to war in many territories, but one can’t help but think that Obama wasn’t acknowledging that. rather, he was twisting Wright’s words to be more worthy of the condemnation that was about to follow.
So long as the US continues to take no responsibility for its actions on distant shores, it shall surely know no peace. We all suffer as a result of America’s tragically myopic, unsustainable and pathologically self-serving foreign policy. In fact, I might even go so far as to call such policy “appalling” and “outrageous”, “divisive and destructive”.
I’m glad I can’t vote in American elections. What a responsibility to have to pick the next leader of the most powerful nation on Earth from the pitifully lamentable stable of wankers on offer at the moment.
Between Obama’s spineless and transparent attempts at voter salvage and Clinton’s sublimely ill-conceived decision to lie that she had been under sniper fire during a visit to the former Yugoslavia in the nineties (not to mention her camp’s distasteful negative campaigning against Obama), you could be forgiven for being driven into the arms of McCain. Well, almost.
As usual, it’s all about the public image. In America, sound-bite politics are served to a fast-food culture, and every serious candidate will say or do anything to get elected. Obama is not one iota different in this regard.
