Thursday, April 10, 2008

The Good Reverend Wrong (Cigar Smoke 4-10-08)

I took Hadley for a walk at the Rose Bowl the other day, and on the way home I stopped at a Starbucks. The car just turned into the parking lot. I couldn’t control it.

And as I was walking in to get my coffee cappuccino de latte with two shots of caramel and one shot of vanilla/cinnamon with a jolt of whipped cream and some pumpkin syrup left over from Halloween, I noticed a news rack. There was a copy of the Los Angeles Sentinel in there and a headline read “Jeremiah the Wright Message for America.”

The only reason I didn’t throw up my cafĂ© de espresso magnifico was that I hadn’t ordered it yet. What a disgusting headline. And right under it was another story headline that read “Barack Obama Shows America What It Means to Be Presidential.”

Talk about regurgitation.

When I first saw all that bullshit with the Rev. Wrong I knew Obama was dead meat. He’s done. If the Democrats don’t put a fork in that guy, they are truly self-destructive. In my humble opinion, he has no friggame of a chance to win the general election. He makes Hillary look like she has character.

The damn Sentinel is defending the Rev. Wrong for calling our country the KKK of A. They’re defending him for saying that the United States intentionally spread AIDS to kill African Americans. The Rev. Wrong rants that the United States sells drugs to black people to keep them down. The Rev. Wrong spews out conspiracy crap that we brought the Sept. 11 attacks on ourselves. He calls us the same as al-Qaida. The Rev. Wrong high-fives Farrakhan. The Rev. Wrong goes to Libya. And the Sentinel just laps it up.

Give me a frigging break. That’s journalism? I guess they just didn’t think the Rev. Wrong needed to provide any evidence for his weak-ass, bogus charges. Nope. I guess as long as he was black and pissed off, that was all they needed. Evidence is for other people. Something to back up the bullshit would be too much to ask of the Rev. Wrong. All the Sentinel needs is some frothing at the mouth. I’ll give you frothing. I just upchucked my Starbucks. Again.

And all this worship of Obama. That speech he gave on race was a good speech on race. The only problem was that the problem wasn’t race. The problem was maturity and judgment. The problem was Obama didn’t have too much of either. Obama danced around the Rev. Wrong. He turned the good reverend’s hate speech into a discussion on race. Imagine if a white politician sat in a church for 20 years — two damn decades — and the white frothing minister was in favor of the KKK and hated blacks and blamed blacks for every damn thing wrong with the country, and the white politician just sat there on his white butt and never said anything and got married in that church and had his kids baptized in that church, and he called that frother his friend and he admired him and he took the title of his book from him and he stood behind the frothing pastor because he was a good man whose words were just taken out of context. Can you imagine that?

Then imagine that if the white politician gave a speech on race relations, it would make it all better, and he would be a statesman, and would show America how to be presidential. The only thing more disgusting than the Sentinel’s take on all this is to see The New York Times and all the other mainstream media fall all over themselves in praise of the guy who wouldn’t condemn all that racist bullshit. Black racism. Yes, there are bigots on both sides, Virginia. Not that you’d know that if you read or watched most of the press.

As I said, I think Obama has no chance to win in November. Those tapes of the Rev. Wrong will be played over and over, as well they should be. Of course, it will be called a vast right-wing conspiracy and the Republicans will just be out to smear poor little Rev. Wrong-loving Obama. And then when all these people in the Midwest and South, and in rural areas, hell, basically everywhere, see all that Rev. Wrong ranting and hating America, and then you couple that with Obama’s ungrateful Ivy League-school-attending wife saying she was never proud of America until her hubby ran for president, he doesn’t have a, well, a prayer. In or out of church.

I am not a Hillary fan, but baby, she’s all the Democrats have now. And give me a break about this whining by Obama about the superdelegates. Not to sound too much like Geraldine Ferraro, but if Obama weren’t black, you would never even hear about how unfair this whole delegate thing would be. This politics business is a rough business.

So what if Obama had more votes than Clinton? It’s not about having the most (but not quite enough) votes, it’s about winning the nomination. Hell, will the Democrats really nominate a guy who will have lost all the big states: California, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida? Jesus, if the Democrats didn’t have their crazy pro-rated primary system and it was a winner-take-all deal, Hillary would have won easily.

But that is how it is. Hillary has to live with that. And Obama is going to have to live with some superdelegate shit. Hey, what the hell are smoky back rooms for anyway?

So, if Obama loses the nomination, he won’t have lost it because he is black. He will have lost it because he lost it. Period. Someone else beat him. In this case, it might be Hillary.

If he loses the nomination, he should just take it like a man. If he says he lost because he was black, that won’t be true. Just as it wouldn’t be true if Hillary would say she lost because she was a woman. Nope. Not true. In either case.

The best politician will win.

In either case the Sentinel will lose.