Redstate

Posted at 3:27pm on Jun. 2, 2008 What Obama Didn't Say

AND NEITHER DID THE PRESS

By absentee

The media machine is quite something to behold. The process of taking an untruth, an exaggeration, or a misstatement, and turning it into a Known Fact™ is fascinating, if frightening. Take Scott McClellan, for example. Once you thresh the narrative, sort through the interviews, headlines and hype, you find there's nothing there. Here's a business plan for you.

Thank me later.

It's been the same throughout Senator Obama's storied campaign. The idea is that he's a transformative figure. He's a Christ for politics, healing the sick with his perfected health care, turning oil to wine, and making the rivers run clear and blue.

Of course, the truth is slightly less divine. His campaign has been a series of surrogate scandals, personal scandals, gaffes, mistakes, and oopsies to have easily warranted dumb guy treatment on shows like Saturday Night Live; Quayle's potato has nothing on Obama's 10,000 dead. Nevertheless, he yet glides on a soft cloud of adoration. He is the untouchable, the unassailable. He is the Obama. At least in the press it is so.

So now we have another "narrative" spreading. Witness an LA Times editorial from this morning. The dismayed tone is regretful, shaming the rest of us for hurting this poor church, for separating the Obama from his flock. The Washington Post ran a story that is filled with a number of interesting facts, but which too has a tone of mournful sadness. The New York Times reports on the "battered" congregants of Trinity, who, we are assured, will "go on worshiping as ever."

Poor Barack, pushed from his church home by an evil nation. Poor Trinity, suffering at the unjust, unseen hand of infamy. Tragic.

There is a lot that isn't being said in these obituaries. Reporters and columnists have happily jumped on the new meme that it's all a big, unfair, out of context comedy of errors. It is immediately being taken for granted that the church really hadn't done wrong in the first place. Victims of circumstance and the cruelty of selective YouTubery. Wright was really right most of the time. Moss is mostly benign. Father Pfleger is a friendly but infrequent visitor, not representative. Yes the press is leaving out a lot of information, and why not? They take their cues from the Obama, and the Obama had a lot to not say as well.

Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Obamafiles | swooning press | Trinity United Church of Christ — Comments (17)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 5:58pm on May 31, 2008 Thirty Pieces of Silver From the Pulpit

By Erick

CNN is reporting that Barack Obama is leaving Trinity United Church of Christ. It is a little late for that. He has been there for twenty years. Why is he leaving all of a sudden? Is it because there is another untold story out there? Does he suspect the media will stop covering his connections to Wright and Pfleger if he now throws the church under the bus? The way the media operates, he is probably right. But I suspect there is one more untold story out there about Obama, Wright, Pfleger, and Trinity.

Anyone who has ever run a political campaign objectively knows there is a double standard between Democrat and Republican campaign activities in churches.

Were a Republican to go into a church and pass a hat for campaign dollars, he'd be thrown out and the IRS would swarm through the church doors to yank the church's non-profit status.

With Democrats, very typically fundraising goes on hand in hand with campaigning from the pulpit. Witness Reverend Pfleger's comments from the pulpit about Hillary Clinton. Witness also the $250,000.00 in tax payer funds that Barack Obama secured for Rev. Pfleger's church. Had it been, for example, Jim DeMint or Tom Coburn getting that money for their church, Barry Lynn and Kathryn Kolbert would be sending out their great hordes of lawyers to put an immediate stop to it.

Let me let you in on a little secret -- I've been known to run a Democrat race or two in my time. These are local races where, in Georgia at least, some Democrats are more conservative than some of the Republicans. And these local campaigns involve a lot of connections with a lot of pastors, particularly in the black community.

I generally give an initial piece of advice to non-partisan and Democratic candidates running for office: get into the black churches early and often. Every other constituency comes after the pastors. The pastors are the gate keepers between the candidate and the congregation. The pastors can turn out the money in the congregations that have it, like Trinity United Church of Christ, or, particularly in the rural south, the pastors can turn out the votes. I know of pastors endorsing from the pulpit. I know some pastors whose churches are broadcast on television who will keep their congregation until after the camera go off and open up about preferred candidates. Some times they do it with the cameras on hedging their bets that the IRS will not do anything.

Given the video we have seen of Reverend Wright and Reverend Pfleger stumping for Obama from the pulpit and given their high level of political engagement on his behalf, I suspect that they have raised money from within the church walls for Barack Obama.

Every candidate of every party goes into the heart of the community to campaign and raise money. Largely for historic reasons, in the black community the heart of that community is the pulpit. So how much money did Reverend Wright and Reverend Pfleger raise for Barack Obama behind their pulpits?

Posted in 2008 | Michael Pfleger | Obamafiles | Rev. Wright | Trinity United Church of Christ — Comments (13)/ Email this page » / Read More »