"In his Philadelphia address, the potential Democratic presidential candidate said: "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely." Notice he said "many," not all.
Which of his pastor's racist comments did he support?"
Let the Swift Boating of Obama ensue! Fox News has done it's job reasonably well. Bob, you've just done Fox's bidding! Spread the mud far and wide. Of course Obama should just quit campaigning for President! He should parse and defend and explain his positions on 20 years of Dr. Wright's sermons.... No time for a POLITICAL campaign. The question is completely irrelevent!
"I hate to tell Obama and his pastor that progress has been made and some black Americans have risen above the fray, rather than wallow in the distant past."
We'll know that you haven't helped Fox play the RACE card when you can say that some progress has been made and some WHITE Americans have risen above the fray, rather than wallow in the past. Or, even better, just "SOME AMERICANS" have risen above the fray.... I think Obama's whole message is even more positive than that. He's saying that ALL AMERICANS should be able to rise above the fray.
Just who is wallowing in the past?
The so called "Swift Boating" technique for slandering political opponents works like this: Find a detail in the life of your political opponent that seems like it could be embellished. Monkey with the context, add a large dose of innuendo, a pinch of the "correct" ideology, and spice it up with some truly outrageous exaggerations. Leak the "new" information to the media telling them that vital new information has been found by our "investigative" team and voila! Swift Boated!
The point of "Swift Boating" is to persuade voters that the opposing candidate is "untrustworthy" and "unfit for office." Fox broke the "news" on Obama's pastor on March 12. By playing the race card so swiftly and mercilessly Fox News knew that this incendiary topic would have the potential to derail Obama's bid for the Presidency.
With single-minded efficiency, Fox has done all it can to hype the story first broken by ABC News. ABC News, by the way, covered it pretty benignly. It took the Fox News' "hard-hitting investigators" to uncover the dirt, change the context, and insert the race card. They are still mopping up the drool in the Fox news room!
It was only after Fox began to sensationalize and repeat the video snippets in an endless loop, (which they purchased from the church for expressly this purpose) did ABC and other MSM pick it up as a news story. It was not so much, listen to Dr. Wright's sermons, but it was look what FOX IS SAYING ABOUT DR. WRIGHT! Fox became the story and Fox's version became the controversy. Mission Accomplished! This is simply institutionalized Swift Boating!
Glenn Greenwald sums it up:
While Democrats are constantly forced by manufactured controversies generated by the right-wing noise machine and their media allies to "repudiate" and "renounce" a never ending carousel of "extremists" ranging from the moderate to the irrelevant (Michael Moore, MoveOn, Louis Farrakhan, Ward Churchill, etc. etc.), the GOP establishment for years has tied itself at the hip to hate-mongering extremists along the lines of John Hagee, Rod Parsley, Pat Roberston, Ann Coulter, and all sorts of various Instapunks, with no repercussions or accountability whatsoever.
and on Feb, 25:
By far, the most significant pattern in how our political discourse is shaped is that the right-wing noise machine generates scurrilous, petty, personality-based innuendo about Democratic candidates, and the establishment press then mindlessly repeats it and mainstreams it. Thus, nothing was more predictable than watching the "Obamas-are-unpatriotic-subversives" slur travel in the blink of an eye from the Jack Kingstons, Fox News adolescent McCarthyites, and Bill Kristols of the world to AP, MSNBC, and CNN. That's just how the right-wing/media nexus works.
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