Reading this MyDD analysis of Obama’s rhetorical flub about rural Pennsylvania voters, which would be 100% excellent if not for the writer’s insane devotion to ignoring the apostrophe whenever trying to condense ‘it is’ — which is a shame because otherwise the piece seems well written (for that it’s earned a mere 99% for its grammatical apathy), I couldn’t help but feel that the senator supposedly representing Illinois is facing a bit of Karmic justice.
People have a right to be angry that their religion and their values have been manipulated time and again to cover for a corrupt and inefficient Republican party. They also have a right to be angry that when a politician actually acknowledges that people are being played, McCain completely ignores the context of the statement itself and goes for the easy attack. Its much easier to brand someone “elitist” and walk away without addressing the actual issues they brought up. Since yesterday “elitist” seems to have become the new insult du jour. Why address the meat of the issue when you can shellac a questionable persona on someone, regardless of its truth, and just discount the individual along with their words entirely out of hand?
The writer happens to mention Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, in the following paragraph. Hence my feeling of Karmic justice contained within what’s happening to the senator. For did not Barack Obama walk away from Wright’s message about what America has done to the world and to its minority members, having dismissed it all as the ramblings of a bitter old Black man? As pointed out by The Progressive’s Kevin Alexander Gray:
[W]hile Obama gets points for not tossing his church pastor under the bus, he loses points for running away from the critique of American empire-building and oppression that his pastor offered.
Obama fobbed off his preacher’s entire sermon as an expression of the “anger and bitterness” of an older generation of black men.
What Obama refused to say was that Wright made some solid points: about the genocide of the Native Americans, the immorality of dropping atom bombs on Japanese civilians in World II, the killing of millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians, and the deaths so far of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
So now Barack Obama is paying the price, courtesy of a higher plane of justice than anything we mortals care to provide on our own initiative, for his blithe dismissal of what Jeremiah Wright was trying to explain to his congregation. Just as Obama so flippantly zeroed in on his former pastor’s delivery, ignoring the legitimate message of America’s darker side, so too are the media, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and worst of all the voters, now focusing their anger and contempt on his choice of words.
I imagine that somewhere Mr. Wright is chuckling to himself at how what goes around, comes around.
