Month: May 2008

Oprah Left Wright’s Church Over Concerns about Message

Jon Ponder

At the core of GOP attacks on Barack Obama this fall in the controversy over remarks by Rev. Jeremiah Wright will be the issue of judgment. Just as liberals criticized conservatives for exercising poor judgment when they remained members of private clubs that excluded African-Americans, Jews and women, the GOP attack machine will say that Obama exercised poor judgment by remaining a member of Wright’s congregation at Trinity Church for 20 years, even though Wright espoused beliefs like his assertion that HIV was a bioweapon developed by the U.S. government targeted at African-Americans.
“She’s been around black churches all her life, so Reverend Wright’s anger-filled message didn’t surprise her. But it just wasn’t what she was looking for in a church.”
— Friend of Oprah
Now Newsweek is reporting that Oprah Winfrey, who joined Trinity Church in 1984, stopped attending about 10 years ago, in part because of concerns over Rev. Wright’s message:

Winfrey was never comfortable with the tone of Wright’s more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America’s favorite daytime talk-show host. “Oprah is a businesswoman, first and foremost,” said one longtime friend, who requested anonymity when discussing Winfrey’s personal sentiments. “She’s always been aware that her audience is very mainstream, and doing anything to offend them just wouldn’t be smart. She’s been around black churches all her life, so Reverend Wright’s anger-filled message didn’t surprise her. But it just wasn’t what she was looking for in a church.” Oprah’s decision to distance herself came as a surprise to Wright, who told Christianity Today in 2002 that when he would “run into her socially … she would say, ‘Here’s my pastor!’ ” (Winfrey declined to comment. A Harpo Productions spokesperson would not confirm her reasons for leaving the church.)

But Winfrey also had spiritual reasons for the parting. In conversations at the time with a former business associate, who also asked for anonymity, Winfrey cited her fatigue with organized religion and a desire to be involved with a more inclusive ministry. In time, she found one: her own. “There is the Church of Oprah now,” said her longtime friend, with a laugh. “She has her own following.”

The Obama campaign hopes that the Wright controversy will be old news by the time the campaign in the general election begins in September. That’s possible, unless there are more revelations like this one to come.

Our Man in N.C. Reports on the Bickerin’ Republicans

Buck Banks

This is the final post from a friend in North Carolina who has been monitoring the buildup to tomorrow’s presidential primary and giving us a Wilmington-eye view on the campaign. Thanks Mike!

With just a few days to go before the North Carolina primary, it’s not surprising that almost everybody here in Wilmington is talking politics. We hear a lot about Democrats bickering, but my guess is a lot of Republicans are bickering too. And it’s not just about McCain being too liberal (though my Republican friends here do view him as such).

nc.jpg

As one example, I stopped by an old friend’s house this week. Larry works at the local Goodyear tires. Teresa, his wife, is unemployed, but not looking for a job any more since she has become a grandmother and is busy with the grandkid. She’s bolting the Grand Old Party (literally, this year) to vote for Hillary. Her husband is seething about this: “She [Hillary] talks disrespectfully of President Bush. He’s our president and presidents deserve respect.” He looks at her with intensity when saying this.

But their kid is in the military (in Iraq last year, stationed in Hawaii now), Teresa doesn’t want any chance of him going back to Iraq. Plus, there’s that gender issue: “It’s time we had a woman in charge,” she says.

Larry spits back: “Mrs. Bill Clinton will not be in charge. It’s Bill Clinton’s third presidency!”

“Oh,” I interject innocently, “you’d rather have Obama?”

My son is with me, so Larry tones down his terminology when he replies that “America is not ready to vote for a black man.” He does not use the “N word,” though in other company he would perhaps do so.

The next day I had lunch with Ron, a home repair guy who pretty much says the same thing about Americans never voting for a black man. Maybe blue-collar folk are the true elitists in our country.

Anyhow, as for the campaign itself, I kind of see what Larry means about Mrs. Bill Clinton, just because Mr. Hillary Clinton is so much in evidence, doing a spectacular job of campaigning at the local level. On one day alone he made 12 stops in Carolina towns, with highlights of his address airing on newscasts throughout the state.

His stump speech is about 25 minutes; he takes no questions from the audience or press, but revels in speaking to the common people. They applaud and he moves onto the next town. The crowds are large and enthusiastic — proud that an ex-president has come to their small town.

To me, Bill Clinton conjures images of that old populist William Jennings Bryan, at least as he was portrayed by Fredric March in “Inherit The Wind.” Sounding much like Bryan railing against banks, railroads and Adlai Stevenson (an elitist from Illinois), Bill Clinton criticizes oil companies and elitists (though not mentioning Obama by name).

Following his failed runs for president, Bryan took to going from Southern town to Southern town with lucrative speaking engagements, raising the hopes of people by trashing Darwinism, hailing the of glory of America’s past and praising the common sense of small-town people.

For his part, Bill Clinton essentially calls for a return to the glory days of the ’90s, praising the wisdom of the people in the crowd and emphasizing Hillary’s common sense. “She got that by spending 14 years with the people in Arkansas,” he says with a kind of weird, ingratiating smile. “There’s not much difference between the good people of Arkansas and the good people of Carolina.” Wisely, no mention of Scranton or New York people this time around.

Anyhow, that’s my final Carolina primary update. Packing my bags and heading to Chicago for the summer, so you’ll have to rely on the professionals from now on.

Before leaving, I participated in early voting, expecting long lines, but finding none, just me, some black men (two bringing their kids) and old white women (taking a very long time to vote). I found the low turnout a little surprising because there are only two early voting places in Wilmington: one at the senior center, one at the government center. The latter is conveniently located near both the university and a strip club, so you’d think there’d be greater voter interest. However, as of Thursday morning at 11 a.m., neither of those demographics appeared to see any need to vote early, despite Senator Obama’s exhortations to do so during his rally in the Port City.

Latest on “The War Room” Clip. ABC Says Kantor Did Diss Indiana

Trish

The scene in question appears at about 4:45.

According to the man who started it all, Jake Tapper of ABC News, the clip that circulated the interwebs today (and was ignored by the mainstream media) from the movie, “The War Room” was accurate in at least part. Mickey Kantor, who claims otherwise on the Huffington Post, did say to James Carville as they looked over election results, “Look at Indiana, wait, wait – look at Indiana. 42-40. It doesn’t matter if we win. Those people are shit. Excuse me.”

Tapper also found old press clippings from when the movie was made.

When “The War Room” came out other folks interpreted Kantor to be impugning Indiana residents.

In The Washington Post’s review of the film in 1993, critic Desson Howe referred to “a Mickey Kantor comment about the people of Indiana (when it looks as though Clinton’s ahead in Dan Quayle’s state).”

And a 1995 story in the Sydney Morning Herald said that “As for the good folk of Indiana, they are still recovering from the 1993 documentary War Room, which revealed the grim truth behind the Clinton election campaign. It showed Mr Kantor bursting in on election night to tell other campaign staffers that incredibly, Mr Clinton was doing well even in Republican Indiana. ‘And those people are s—!’ he declared breathlessly.”

As to the other part of the film that is circulating today, the words used are much cloudier. One clip had Kantor saying, “How would you like to be a worthless white n****r?” like the folks in the Hoosier state. In the original film, it’s really not clear what Kantor said but “How’d you like to be —” is pretty audible while the end of the sentence is lost. All we know is that George Stephanopoulos shakes his head.

Who supplied the “clarified” version of the video is still not known. The (possibly too) obvious choice would be someone from the Obama campaign. The next suspect would be someone from the Clinton campaign trying to make the Obama campaign look bad. After that, who knows? Someone from McCain’s campaign?

The red flag to me is that someone recalled this teeny weeny Indiana reference from a 15-year-old documentary. Who would have such top of mind recall about a film on the ’92 Clinton campaign? I’ll stop but I hope someone gets to the bottom of all this before Tuesday.

McCain Accidentally Admits We Invaded Iraq for Oil

Trish

Gramps is losing it. John “Maverick” McCain accidentally told the truth and now he’s trying to spin it back into something that doesn’t make Bush look so bad. Good luck with that.

At issue was a comment he made at a town hall-style meeting Friday morning in Denver.

“My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East,” McCain said.

“Again”? As in, “We already went to war over oil?” I thought so! But Bush said it was because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I’m confused.

The expected GOP nominee sought to clarify his comments later, after his campaign plane landed in Phoenix. He said he didn’t mean the U.S. went to war in Iraq five years ago over oil.

“No, no, I was talking about that we had fought the Gulf War for several reasons,” McCain told reporters.

One reason was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, he said. “But also we didn’t want him to have control over the oil, and that part of the world is critical to us because of our dependency on foreign oil, and it’s more important than any other part of the world,” he said…

“The Congressional Record is very clear: I said we went to war in Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction,” he said.

Oil, weapons of mass destruction, same thing.

Obama Supporters Smear Clinton Adviser Mickey Kantor with Fake Video Four Days Before Indiana Primary

Jon Ponder

The rabidly pro-Obama Huffington Post is calling a video released today smearing informal Clinton adviser Mickey Kantor a fake:
“A review of the original copy of the 1993 film The War Room, from which the excerpt was taken is virtually inaudible. The sound suggests, if anything, that instead of saying ‘How would you like to be a worthless white n****r?’ Kantor says, ‘How would you like to be in the White House right now?'”
— Huffington Post

A former aide to President Bill Clinton, and current informal adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton, expressed outrage and shock on Friday after a videotape from 1992 surfaced allegedly showing him describing Indianans as “white n—rs.”

Mickey Kantor, who served as campaign chairman during Clinton’s 1992 run for the White House and says he has offered help and advice to Sen. Clinton, insisted that the tape was a fraud and that he was exploring legal steps against the individual who posted it online.

“I’ve never used that word in my entire life, ever, under any circumstance, ever,” an angry Kantor told The Huffington Post, citing his and his parent’s work fighting for civil rights. “I have listened to [the video] and so have you. You can’t tell what it is I’m saying in that second sentence, you can’t decipher that.”

Indeed, a review of the original copy of the 1993 film The War Room, from which the excerpt was taken (around the 4:40 mark) is virtually inaudible. The sound suggests, if anything, that instead of saying “How would you like to be a worthless white n****r?” Kantor says, “How would you like to be in the White House right now?”

The director of the film, moreover, says that Kantor never uttered those words. “He does not say that. He does not say that,” D.A. Pennebaker told Ben Smith.

The cropped video, which spread through the Internet like wildfire on Friday morning, shows Kantor with fellow former Bill Clinton staffers James Carville and George Stephanopoulos discussing results from the general election. In the footage, Kantor approaches the two aides and says, “Look at Indiana — wait, wait, look at Indiana. 42-40. It doesn’t matter if we win, those people are shit.” That much seems true, though Pennebaker says Kantor was referring to the George H.W. Bush White House.

Interestingly, the video is no longer available on YouTube.

Update: Ben Smith at the conservative Politico.com has spoken with the director of “The War Room,” who confirms that Kantor never said the words in the doctored video:

[…]

Polls: Obama’s Double Digit Lead in North Carolina Vanishes

Jon Ponder

Clinton Comes Within 7 Points in Average of Six Polls

In the wake of the Wright controversy and despite — or because of? — the trashing Hillary Clinton is receiving in the media and on the web, the RealClearPolitics poll of polls shows that, with four days to go before the North Carolina primary, the double digit averaged lead Barack Obama once held in the state has disappeared:

Poll Date Obama Clinton Spread
RCP Average 04/26 – 05/01 48.3 41.3 Obama +7.0
Rasmussen 05/01 – 05/01 49 40 Obama +9.0
Zogby 04/30 – 05/01 50 34 Obama +16.0
Research 2000 04/29 – 04/30 51 44 Obama +7.0
Mason-Dixon 04/28 – 04/29 49 42 Obama +7.0
Insider Advantage 04/29 – 04/29 42 44 Clinton +2.0
SurveyUSA 04/26 – 04/28 49 44 Obama +5.0

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Gasoline is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.

— Simone Weil (1909-1943), French philosopher, Christian mystic and social activist

General Accuses Bush Admin of ‘Gross Incompetence And Dereliction of Duty’ in Iraq – ‘Liberal’ Media Yawns

Jon Ponder

In just the last month, the “liberal” media has studiously ignored two revelations of extreme malfeasance by the Bush administration: First, that George Bush admitted that he and his most senior advisers willfully violated U.S. and international laws by drafting torture guidelines for CIA interrogators, and, second, that retired senior military officials hired as on-air “analysts” for television news organizations during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq knowingly made false statements during news broadcasts in order to bolster the administration’s bogus pretexts for war.

Now, in new book set for release next week, the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq has accused the administration of the most serious possible charges short of treason in its handling of the occupation: gross incompetence and dereliction of duty. Unfortunately, if the past month is an indicator, there is no chance this dire allegation will lead the news on cable for even a single hour, or that it will be mentioned, even in passing, on the Sunday political shows this weekend.

In his new memoir, “Wiser in Battle,” which hits the shelves on May 6, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez offers this blistering assessment of the Bush administration’s handling of its misbegotten occupation of Iraq:

“Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were unnecessarily spent, and worse yet, too many of our most precious military resource, our American soldiers, were unnecessarily wounded, maimed, and killed as a result. In my mind, this action by the Bush administration amounts to gross incompetence and dereliction of duty.”

The quote comes from an excerpt from the book published in Time Magazine. And here is a clue of what’s (not) to come: Raw Story points out that Time has chosen not to highlight the accusation, which was buried three pages into the story.

The fact is, “gross incompetence and dereliction of duty” are apt descriptions of everything the Bush administration has undertaken since it took office — from its horrendous response to Hurricane Katrina to its bungling of the U.S. economy, its ham-fisted international diplomacy, its blockheaded approach to domestic politics and on and on.

In fact, as cynical as it sounds, the truth is that the Bush team’s only real competence is in lying about its activities and smearing its opponents. That’s why, in the unlikely event this story were to find legs, we can expect loyal Bushies to flood the airwaves to remind viewers that Gen. Sanchez was their fall guy for the early failures in Iraq and, especially, the torture regime at Abu Grahib prison.

Right now, the White House political shop is undoubtedly working up a rigorous smear campaign against Sanchez. Luckily for him, the corporate media is bored with the Bush administration and the odds this story will get any notice lies somewhere between slim and none.

Spike Lee: Who’s Paying Rev. Wright?

Trish

Director Spike Lee questioned the timing of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s press conference this week, and the statements he made.

Lee hinted at a political conspiracy behind the Chicago pastor’s recent, contentious attempts to justify his remarks. “It looks like he’s being paid to keep talking,” he said…”I’m starting to wonder whether somebody has been contributing to the building funds of his church. Seriously.” Lee, whose films have frequently tackled the issue of race relations in the US, believes that Obama had hoped to survive the presidential contest without talking about race: “But now he’s been forced to – by a combination of Jeremiah Wright and the Clintons.”

Is Lee on to something? Is someone exploiting the split in Obama’s relationship with Wright? And are they paying — in money, favors, or future promises — for his continued high profile?