"The Wheels On The Bus Go Round and Round ..."

(Editor's Note: Peeling off a quick one here ... To follow-up, some complications with the Aunt in the hospital, and, likely, a procedure will be needed tomorrow, to correct the problem ... At least, hopefully, that will be the case - the other option is surgery)

Quick, someone update the Rodney Dangerfield line;

"Hey ... I went to a political campaign the other day ... And a bus caravan broke out ..."

So many bodies under buses lately.

Are we, have we, slipped down to being some backwater banana republic, where the candidate that promises to have the buses run on time (with or without bodies under them) will be the winner?

I think you only need one, or two, more to have a quorum.

And the big question, will this be a new metric for the Clinton Campaign, that they threw more (or less, if you want to base it on golf) people under the bus then Obama, therefore, that makes Hillary the rightful, fit, nominee, ready to throw more people under the bus on Day One!

Question - If you have already been thrown under a bus, can you still, is it possible, to throw someone else under the bus, while you are still under it?

Following the Jeremiah "I Ought To Be In Pictures" Wright World Tour, it was the MSM meme that he threw Barack Obama under the bus.

This wasn't promulgated by the MSM with a tremendous amount of sympathy for Obama, mere reporting "just the facts".

And it wasn't until Obama's press conference yesterday, that the MSM could shift into their latest meme, the morphing of Obama, from, as you may remember, he entered this campaign with the question mark of "Is he black enough" ... That soon morphed, with a healthy push from the McCain-hugging, 3AM Bashing from Hillary Clinton, to "Is he experienced enough" ... And now, with the Obama denunciation of Wright yesterday, we have "Is he angry enough" in play.

Rather than note, and discuss, how Obama has taken a substantial problem (that is both political and personal), and not once, but twice now, handled it, took it straight on, looked it dead in the eyes, and articulated, with great eloquence, and simple language, what his position is, what his thoughts are, what he wants to do with it, what he will do with it.

Obama gave Wright back, in his press conference yesterday, and to paraphrase Wright, "You think you're going to come in here and throw my campaign under a bus ... You got another coming!"

And, from what I saw last yesterday afternoon, and evening, that wasn't the meme coming from the pundits.

It was "why did he wait so long" and "why didn't he do it sooner" and, as Margaret "Marcie" Carlson noted how he handled it, it was a "disaster".

Yeah, they're right, Obama should have handled last week ... Or., maybe two months ago ... No, back when he first decided to run for president ... Still late, he should have done it when he was in college ... No, perhaps back when he was a toddler, or, even, still, in the womb ...

And let's not forget how the MSM (and certainly the RWFS) will pile on now, with additional memes, of why did he join this church, why did he stay with this church, why did he even go to church ... Wright's rage will be painted on Obama directly, subtly, through smears and innuendo, perhaps prompting Obama to come up to the plate a third time on all of this ...

This should put a stake in the heart of "guilt by association" for Obama, but, likely it won't.

And don't you think, for a moment, that Hillary Clinton and her campaign, aren't retro-fitting those kitchen sinks to accommodate holding Obama, Wright, and a bus, or two, in them.

I'm hoping, that maybe, now with Obama's press conference yesterday, the natural order of the news business can be restored, and the week's mega story - Hannah Montana's Pin-Up Girl Photos - can finally land on the front page, and dominate cable news - and, of course, Brian Williams, on the NBC Nightly News.


Big, Roomy Bus Links

Andrew Sullivan: Obama Divorces Wright

Richard Blair: Delicate Flowers

Greg Sargent: Obama On Wright: "I Might Not Know Him As Well As I Thought"

Steven Benen: When Obama gets pissed

Errol Louis: Is Jeremiah Wright a colossal disaster for Barack Obama or a press trick?

Rush Calls Operation Chaos Pause

Wright's Right ...

If you didn't have a chance to catch the full program (and not just the press previews, endlessly played yesterday by the cable news pundits), head on over to Bill Moyers Journal, where you will see, clearly, how the Reverand Wright controversyis such an over-hyped, partisan, prejudiced bag of you-know-what.

Much of what Moyers and Rev. Wright discussed could have easily been a handful of break-out sessions, had it taken place the day of Obama's Race Speech.

Here's two passages, the full context, of what has been so hideously displayed in the video loops aimed at bashing Obama.

1. The God Damn America Brouhaha

REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT: Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change. And I'm through now. But let me leave you with one more thing. Governments fail. The government in this text comprised of Caesar, Cornelius, Pontius Pilate - the Roman government failed. The British government used to rule from East to West. The British government had a Union Jack. She colonized Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Hong Kong. Her navies ruled the seven seas all the way down to the tip of Argentina in the Falklands, but the British government failed. The Russian government failed. The Japanese government failed. The German government failed. And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America! That's in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizen as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!

2. The Chickens Come Home To Roost Brouhaha

REVEREND WRIGHT: Yes, I did. I was trying to show how people- how the anger- and we felt anger. I felt anger. I felt hurt. I felt pain. In fact, September 11th, I was in Newark. September 11th, I was trapped in Newark 'cause when they shut down the air system I couldn't get back to Chicago. September 11th, I looked out the window and saw the second plane hit from my hotel window. Alright, I had members who lost loved ones both at the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center. So, I know the pain. And I had to preach to them Sunday. I had to preach. They came to church wanting to know where is God in this. And so, I had to show them using that Psalm 137, how the people who were carried away into slavery were very angry, very bitter, moved and in their anger from wanting revenge against the armies that had carried them away to slavery, to the babies. That Psalm ends up sayin' "Let's kill the baby-let's bash their heads against the stone." So, now you move from revolt and revulsion as to what has happened to you, to you want revenge. You move from anger with the military to taking it out on the innocents. You wanna kill babies. That's what's going on in Psalm 137. And that's exactly where we are. We want revenge. They wanted revenge. God doesn't wanna leave you there, however. God wants redemption. God wants wholeness. And that's the context, the biblical context I used to try to get people sitting again, in that sanctuary on that Sunday following 9/11, who wanted to know where is God in this? What is God saying? What is God saying? Because I want revenge.

REVEREND WRIGHT: The people of faith have moved from the hatred of armed enemies, these soldiers who captured the king, those soldiers who slaughtered his son and put his eyes out, the soldiers who sacked the city, burned the towns, burned the temples, burned the towers, and moved from the hatred for armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents, the babies, the babies . "Blessed are they who dash your baby's brains against a rock." And that my beloved is a dangerous place to be. Yet, that is where the people of faith are in 551 BC and that is where far too many people of faith are in 2001 AD. We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents. We want revenge. We want paybacks and we don't care who gets hurt in the process.

I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday. Did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox news. This is a white man and he was upsetting the Fox news commentators to no end. He pointed out. You see him John? A white man he pointed out -an Ambassador! He pointed out that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true. America's chickens are coming home to roost! We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working fathers. We bombed Gadafi's home and killed his child. "Blessed are they who bash your children's head against a rock!" We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to payback for the attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hard-working people; mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing that they would never get back home. 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! Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians - not soldiers - people just trying to make it day by day. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans, and now we are indignant? Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yards! America's chickens are coming home to roost! Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism. A White Ambassador said that y'all not a Black Militant. Not a Reverend who preaches about racism. An Ambassador whose eyes are wide open, and who's trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised--

Peck's Bad Boy

The Ambassador Peck Rev. Wright refers to?

From Counterpunch, Oct 11, 2001;

"Why it is that all of these people hate us. It's not because of freedom. It's not because Britney Spears has a belly button or because we export hamburgers. They hate us because of things they see us doing to their part of the world that they definitely do not like."

And this;

Edward Peck, former US Ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan's terrorism task force.
PECK: You have to understand now. Just like the colonel here, I'm a veteran of the armed forces. I have had two tours of active duty in the Army. And I don't take a back seat to anybody in terms of patriotism. This is the greatest nation that ever was and may be the greatest nation that ever will be. But that's my view, and it is not universally shared. So we have come out with 21 pages of proof that Osama bin Laden was involved. I have read that material. That's allegations. That's not proof. It's an entirely different thing. Proof of what it means to us. So, yes, he's not a nice guy, Saddam Hussein. But I think that the costs to our nation and its interests of taking him out are probably vastly exceeding anything we would gain by doing it.

You can also check out this: Meet The (White) Man Who Inspired Wright's Controversial Sermon

Hmmm ... I didn't see, in that Obama-bashing, Rev. Wright video loop, any footage of Ambassador Peck and his criticism ...Then again, as we know from the revelations last week, the Bush Grindhouse didn't put anyone on television that they didn't approve of, so, it's very likely Peck didn't make Rumsfeld's, and Torie Clarke's list, as to going out and selling the war.

And I chuckle when I think of the Right Wing Freakshow, and their flying monkeys (they're already up-in-arms over it, here and here), salivating at the prospects of a McCain-Obama final, so they can claw and bash Obama with Rev. Wright ... This from the people with Hagee, Robertson, Falwell, etc in their closets ...

Why let facts and context get in the way, when it's just as easy to make things up and smear people ... Play the Fear Card and you hook'em everytime ...

Oh, what a tangled web we weave ...

Links

Bill Moyers Journal

Transcript of Moyers-Wright Interview

Watch The Video

Obama-Wright, Part II ... Some Perspective

Well, Well, Well ...

We could go on a diatribe, on the extra distance one candidate has to go, that the other candidates do not, even though that candidate addressed the issue - repeatedly, publically, and in his own words.

The big breaking news last evening was that Barack Obama is going to give a major address to this morning on race.

From Marc Ambinder, over on The Atlantic;

"He is expected to recount, in detail, how he came to know Rev. Wright, how he came to admire Rev. Wright, the history and meaning of the Trinity church, and address the controversial remarks attributed to Wright.

He is also worried that Wright and church will get caricatured unfairly.

Since everyone is paying attention to Obama and race, the basic thought, according to advisers, is why not give a big speech about... Obama and race."

Thankfully, Ambinder refrained, but others didn't, of alluding to Mitt Romney's big moment, his big speech on "Mormonism" (See The Garlic's Romney Speech: Where's Leonard Pinth Garnell When You Really Need Him?)

Make-up Mitt delivered a snoozer, and only mentioned the word "Mormon" once.

Little worry about Obama on that front.

He's been in the big show for a while now, and, be it his 2004 Convention speech, or out on the stump, he's shown he can hit the fastball.

While the MSM, and Cable News, seems to take glee, in showing the montage of video clips of Reverend Wright (and the Freakshow is having a field day with them), they are often, in most cases, presented out-of-context.

It isn't discussed why Rev. Wright is angry, or hostile, only that he is, and he is Barack Obama's guy, therefore, Obama must endorse what Rev. Wright is saying.

And stating, for three-or-four days that he doesn't, isn't enough, hence today's big Obama speech.

We looked around the World Wide Web, the blogosphere and found some good posts, to counterbalance, better yet, to, hopefully, enlighten, the single-prisim people.


Some Perspective

From Melissa McEwan's "I Recommend Not Holding Your Breath, Either", over on Shakesville;

"We know Obama's minister's name because he told us. And until we all grow up and decide we're really going to have a country with a genuine separation between church and state, and no religious litmus tests, we are going to have candidates introducing us to their religious mentors, and various other ways of trying to out-god each other. This would certainly be as good a time as any to revisit the wisdom of that habit and engage in a little self-reflection on whether it's actually helping our country in any discernible way."

The Anonymous Liberal;

"I always figured that if Barack Obama's presidential campaign took off, media attention would eventually focus on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and some of his more colorful sermons. I was expecting it to be more of a general election, swiftboat type issue than an issue in the primaries, though. I guess I never really figured a Democratic rival would pursue an electoral strategy based on stirring up white resentment. A failure of the imagination I guess.

Conservative double standards are rarely as soul-crushingly obvious as this one. Hinderaker has no problem with Republican politicians associating themselves with (and indeed aggressively seeking the endorsement of) people like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, John Hagee, and James Dobson, men who have track records of saying crazy, hate-filled things that Rev. Wright can't possibly compete with. Moreover, if we're looking for segments of society into which "irrationality has penetrated deeply," we need look no further than the conservative evangelical community which forms the base of the Republican party and to which Republican politicians endlessly pander."

And Dennis Perrin knocks one out of the park, hitting it dead-on, in his "Land of Chains";

"Amid all the righteous noise made about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, it was David Gergen on Anderson Cooper's show who made the most pertinent observation. The veteran GOP operative with bipartisan ties informed the audience that black America is having a different conversation than white America, so one cannot apply the CNN, Fox, or MSNBC framework to African-American concerns.

That it took a power broker like Gergen to make this obvious, important point further reveals how fixed our "national dialogue" remains. This of course allows all manner of patriotspeak to flow unimpeded, for there's nothing that the Liberal Media loves more than to prove its nationalist bonafides. After all, who do you think keeps the American flag lapel pin industry in the, er, black?"

With kitchen sinks coming at him from all directions now, I hope the Superdelegates and DNC are paying attention.


Bonus Links

Transcript of Obama’s Interview on “NewsHour”

Andrew Sullivan: The Testing Of Obama

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes/TMV: Barack is Not White, Barack is Not Black” The Possible Gift in Being Bi-Racial

Kos: The Clinton civil war

Sticks and Stones Will Break My Bones ...