The American Spectator

With all the heated feelings and rhetoric surrounding the firestorm that is Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a bit of truth telling may be in order. Conservatives have demanded that Barack Obama repudiate all of the controversial statements made by his spiritual advisor, while supporters of the Illinois senator believe that he has sufficiently distanced himself from them. But what if there is actually some truth in Wright’s allegations?

Barack Obama is said to be a tremendous orator, and the speech he delivered last week was hailed by many as superb and spiritually moving. And he should know about preaching and inspiring events; after all, his justification of same-sex unions based on the Sermon on the Mount earlier this month was quite illuminating.

But, laying aside his racially-tinged, finger-pointing diatribe itself, let’s go to the veracity of a few of his Pastor’s statements and the extent to which Obama and those of his party may or may not be in agreement with them.

One of Wright’s dependable mantras is that America is a country controlled by “rich, white people,” who, according to him, are doing harm to people of color. To a certain extent this is true. There is a large group of people for whom it is politically expedient to keep blacks in “their place.”

But these rich white folks — let’s call them limousine liberals — are those who support Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

Almost from this country’s founding, politicians of all stripes have been known to make promises to those in need of government largesse. But Franklin Delano Roosevelt used his New Deal coalition to form a solid Democratic base of big city political machines, labor unions, subsidized farm groups, and ethnic and racial minorities, which purchased millions of votes via federal handouts.

THIS WAS HONED into an art form in later years by Democrats who, unlike their predecessors, sought to keep those in need perpetually needy, and therefore dependable on Election Day.

This is the ugly truth of modern liberalism. Keeping minorities dependent on government help instead of self-help is their goal; and race and class envy are their weapons. Indeed, in his “healing” speech, Obama identified our “corporate culture” as the “real culprits of the middle-class squeeze.”

We used to salute as “Captains of Industry,” risk-takers who invested their own money in order to found solid companies which used their profits to create jobs for all classes of people. These men drove the machine that fueled the American dream.

Today, those once proud men are now shunned as “culprits” by liberals, some of whom have grown wealthy investing in the very corporations they seek to vilify and drive into submission via unionization, litigation, regulation, and taxation. And when these burdens become too heavy to bear and these companies are forced to relocate offshore, they are deemed un-American.

Rev. Wright has famously said of the 9/11 attacks, that Americans were “indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” And, despite the view of liberal relativists who believe there are no objective truths — such as, you’re either with the terrorists or against them — this charge actually has a ring of accuracy to it.

Most Americans believe that “the stuff” we’ve been doing overseas for decades — liberating countless millions of people of all faiths and colors from brutal regimes and dictators in every corner of the world — is a major reason why thugs like Osama bin Laden despise us and our way of life.

But a belief that countries like America may be the only thing standing athwart bin Laden’s dreams of global Islamist domination, is incomprehensible to liberals who believe that all American military actions are somehow “imperial” in nature.

PROBABLY THE MOST outrageous claim of Rev. Wright is that our government lied about its involvement in inventing “the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.”

Here, he’s got the right church but the wrong pew. The real genocide perpetrated against all of the American people and particularly its people of color was, in a way, brought to bear by a branch of our own government. The U.S. Supreme Court, usurping the powers of the legislative branch and therefore the American people, discovered out of whole cloth the right of women to murder their own children in the womb.