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March 15, 2008
As Paul notes below, Barack Obama denies having personally heard the now notorious statements of Jeremiah Wright: 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.Obama reiterated this assertion in an interview on FOX News with Major Garret yesterday: None of these statements were ones that I had heard myself personally in the pews. One of them I had heard about after I had started running for president and I put out a statement at that time condemning them.Hiroshima and Nagasaki figure prominently in Wright's condemnation of the United States in his disgusting post 9/11 sermon: We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and the black South Africans, and now we are indignant. Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yard. America's chickens are coming home to roost.At NRO's Corner, Rich Lowry discovers an admiring allusion to this vein of Wright's rhetoric in Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father about the first sermon Obama heard Wright give: The title of Reverend Wright’s sermon that morning was “The Audacity of Hope.” He began with a passage from the Book of Samuel—the story of Hannah, who, barren and taunted by her rivals, had wept and shaken in prayer before her God. The story reminded him, he said, of a sermon a fellow pastor had preached at a conference some years before, in which the pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting title Hope.(Emphasis added by Lowry; the text of Wright's sermon is here.) In other words, as Lowry notes: "Wright when he first got to know him was pretty much the same Wright we're getting to know now (the one that Obama is at pains to say is on the verge of retirement). Wright was striking some of the same notes, saying racially venomous things and attacking the bombing of Hiroshima." |