What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright's pews, and at Wright's mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations?... How is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama? This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it...

If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company — and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable — then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner. I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community. To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she's much influenced by the definition of black "separationism" offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America...

I last saw [Stokeley Carmichael] as the warm-up speaker for Louis Farrakhan in Madison Square Garden in 1985, on the evening when Farrakhan made himself famous by warning Jews, "You can't say 'Never Again' to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you're there forever." I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: "Are we getting two for one?" And don't be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it's too late to ask. [More]

The latest installment in the “Wright saga” represents a precipitous deepening of the political crisis crippling democratic politics in the United States and gestures toward the virtual end of politics. What is called for then is an ethical and responsive political commentary infused with the spirit of Reverend Wright’s adamant refusal of the normal, the acceptable, and the commonsense that marginalizes the vast majority of the citizens of our nation, not to mention the people of the world.

Political style and clichéd soundbytes cannot paper over long-term structural determinants that maintain and perpetuate poverty, inequality, and discrimination. A rabid patriotism cannot legitimate a corrupt nationalism that seeks to maintain the racial asymmetries of the status quo predicated on a historical amnesia that evades the legacies of America’s peculiar institution. Mass mediated political commentary cannot dictate the terrain of acceptable politics for those whose base of support is independent of the political games that Capital plays.

For “We the people”, the Wright episode can mark the end of politics – the politics of the given – and mark the beginning of a radical politics of deep democracy. [More]

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.

No one disputes Wright's summary of U.S. history. His comments have simply been lifted, just to beat up on Barack Obama; everyone knows that. Just like everyone knows that the corporate media destroy political enemies, which means anyone who poses a challenge to America's unelected corporate oligarchy. That's why it is so frustrating to hear people say, "The media is not doing its job." That's just plain wrong; the media IS doing its job. It's cheerleading the country to war, it is diverting attention from the main political and economic issues of the day, and it is destroying thr system’s political enemies, actual or potential.

What the media try to do by singling out Wright is pretty straightforward. They're trying to create the impression that blacks conceal a deep sense of grievance which expresses itself in rage. This generates feelings of fear among whites which, of course, is all part of the strategy. The message is simple; "blacks are angry, blacks are dangerous" and, oh by the way, Obama is black...

The media preach uber-nationalism and vilify America's critics as unpatriotic. That's why the wrath of the media has descended on Obama like a Texas hailstorm; they're afraid he doesn't understand who really runs things in America. Wright means nothing to the media or to the men behind the curtain. If he didn't provide an avenue for denigrating Obama, he'd be treated with the same indifference as the thousands of other blacks who were herded at gunpoint into the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina. Better buckle up. Obama has entered the crosshairs of America's criminal oligarchy and things are bound to get nasty. [More]