Re March 20 Carl Strock column, “Obama: transcending race no longer”: Carl Strock is an anti-Christian bigot! Now we find him comparing Gov. Spitzer’s laundering money to pay for an extramarital affair to Barack Obama going to church. Carl makes it sound like Obama has done something illegal, which he has not, even suggesting/implying that Obama agrees with everything his minister taught. If your roommate at college was a communist, are you then a communist? (A classic case of “guilt by association.) As a white Republican, I find this analogy to be disturbing, a stunning revelation of the character of Carl Strock. TOM HORTON Niskayuna
Obama candidacy, fl ap over preacher, exposes racism in America
Neil Nusbaum, in his March 26 letter, “Strock saw Obama for what he is,” isn’t shy about where he stands. He says, “Why couldn’t John McCain be a Democrat?” meaning, of course, “why can’t we have an older, conservative, white man as president?” He berates Mr. Obama for associating with a firebrand black preacher from Chicago, conveniently ignoring Mr. McCain’s association with equally divisive white preachers like Rev. John Hagee, Rev. Rod Parsley and deceased Rev. Jerry Falwell, who attributed the 9/11 tragedy to God’s anger for feminists and homosexuals in America. The only difference I can see between those preachers is that they are white. It’s difficult for white Americans, particularly intolerant ones, to comprehend and accept the ambivalence of black Americans toward their homeland. They love this country as passionately as their white counterparts and are ready to die defending its principles. They, however, find it hard to take when the beloved country turns her back on them when it comes to fairness in housing, justice and schools. Researchers have shown high blood pressure to be rare in the African black man. It is, however, endemic in the American black. They attribute their findings to a physiological phenomenon titled “Fight or Flight” syndrome. When blacks are in white surroundings, they don’t know how they are going to be received, whether they are going to have to fight or have to flee. The uncertainty causes stress, and large amounts of blood pressure-elevating hormones are secreted into the bloodstream. Over time, those elevations become permanent. America, in the eyes of most blacks, including yours truly, is the best country in the world for whites, blacks and other groups alike. Unfortunately, the scales are still tipped and blacks have a way to go to gain parity, not only with the whites they have been sharing the land with for more than 200 years, but also later immigrants from Asia, Latin America and the East European countries. That hurts. Things have improved since I arrived in the United Stated in 1961, but there is still a great deal of racism, anti-Semitism, religious intolerance. Mr. Obama running for president has hit a sore spot in many white and other Americans’ hearts. It looks like the scab is being lifted from an ugly, unhealed wound. Indignation does not fit well in the white culture, particularly when it comes to racial matters. It looks and sounds hypocritical. A stroll in our past history will back me on that. Where was the white indignation recently when a black man in Johnstown was sent to jail for a long term by an all-white jury. Why? He was being assaulted with a baseball bat by a drunk, white bully shouting derogatory racial terms and telling him he was going to kill him. The black victim managed to stab his aggressor in the side. The assailant died two weeks later from infection of his wound. The white jury felt that the black man should have run away and he was found guilty. As I said, it was in Johnstown — not Johnston, Miss. By the way, where was Mr. Carl Strock and his righteous indignation? I hope and pray whoever makes it to the White House will have the vision to bring us all together in brotherhood and equality, for the betterment of this great country. That should be a loftier, worthier goal than achieving military success in Iraq even if it takes us 100 years, as Mr. McCain so famously said. ROGER MALEBRANCHE Broadalbin
Re March 20 Carl Strock column, “Obama: transcending race no longer”: As a pastor myself (supposedly retired), I am amazed that Mr. Strock presumes to have the ability, from only six short sentences, which he quotes from two sermons, to discern not only the true nature and quality of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons and pastorate for the past 20 years, but also their impact and influence on Barack Obama over the same period. Certainly out of context, the sentences Mr. Strock quotes are outrageous — almost as outrageous and unpatriotic as many of the prophesies of Jeremiah may have sounded to the people of Israel when he first spoke them. If I were to judge Mr. Strock by one or more of several of his columns, which have seemed outrageous to me, I would have stopped reading them long ago — I haven’t. I’m grateful I live in a country where newspapers like the Gazette will publish columns like Mr. Strock’s, and where churches like the one to which Sen. Obama belongs can thrive and provide pulpits so that pastors like the Rev. Wright can preach — and sometimes even make outrageous statements. Sen. Obama does not sound to me at all like the few sound bites from Mr. Wright’s sermons played on television news shows or the few sentences quoted by Mr. Strock. Sen. Obama, from his own experience, is someone with a keen mind and remarkably serene spirit who has a wise, tempered view of race in America today and speaks with both passion and poise on many other important issues that are of deep concern to all Americans. He is someone, I think, we can all benefit from listening to, regardless of our political persuasions. To dismiss him, as Mr. Strock so unfairly does in his column by linking his pastor to Louis Farrakhan and the Rev. Al Sharpton, seems an astonishing exercise in prejudging. Barack Obama, after all, is the candidate, not his pastor. WENDELL H. ELMENDORF JR. Hagaman
Racism will always exist as a sidebar for conversation for the sheeple to keep their eyes on the shortsighted things in life......no different than the need to urinate.......
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
Obama's Dimestore 'Mein Kampf' by Ann Coulter Posted: 04/02/2008
If characters from "The Hills" were to emote about race, I imagine it would sound like B. Hussein Obama's autobiography, "Dreams From My Father."
Has anybody read this book? Inasmuch as the book reveals Obama to be a flabbergasting lunatic, I gather the answer is no. Obama is about to be our next president: You might want to take a peek. If only people had read "Mein Kampf" ...
Nearly every page -- save the ones dedicated to cataloguing the mundane details of his life -- is bristling with anger at some imputed racist incident. The last time I heard this much race-baiting invective I was ... in my usual front-row pew, as I am every Sunday morning, at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
Obama tells a story about taking two white friends from the high school basketball team to a "black party." Despite their deep-seated, unconscious hatred of blacks, the friends readily accepted. At the party, they managed not to scream the N-word, but instead "made some small talk, took a couple of the girls out on the dance floor."
But with his racial hair-trigger, Obama sensed the whites were not comfortable because "they kept smiling a lot." And then, in an incident reminiscent of the darkest days of the Jim Crow South ... they asked to leave after spending only about an hour at the party! It was practically an etiquette lynching!
So either they hated black people with the hot, hot hate of a thousand suns, or they were athletes who had come to a party late, after a Saturday night basketball game.
In the car on the way home, one of the friends empathizes with Obama, saying: "You know, man, that really taught me something. I mean, I can see how it must be tough for you and Ray sometimes, at school parties ... being the only black guys and all."
And thus Obama felt the cruel lash of racism! He actually writes that his response to his friend's perfectly lovely remark was: "A part of me wanted to punch him right there."
Listen, I don't want anybody telling Obama about Bill Clinton's "I feel your pain" line.
Wanting to punch his white friend in the stomach was the introductory anecdote to a full-page psychotic rant about living by "the white man's rules." (One rule he missed was: "Never punch out your empathetic white friend after dragging him to a crappy all-black party.")
Obama's gaseous disquisition on the "white man's rules" leads to this charming crescendo: "Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. black person."
For those of you in the "When is Obama gonna play the 'N-word' card?" pool, the winner is ... Page 85! Congratulations!
When his mother expresses concern about Obama's high school friend being busted for drugs, Obama says he patted his mother's hand and told her not to worry.
This, too, prompted Obama to share with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people: "It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved -- such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time."
First of all, I note that this technique seems to be the basis of Obama's entire presidential campaign. But moreover -- he was talking about his own mother! As Obama says: "Any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning." Say, do you think a white person who said that about blacks would be a leading presidential candidate?
The man is stark bonkersville.
He says the reason black people keep to themselves is that it's "easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you."
Here's a little inside scoop about white people: We're not thinking about you. Especially WASPs. We think everybody is inferior, and we are perfectly charming about it.
In college, Obama explains to a girl why he was reading Joseph Conrad's 1902 classic, "Heart of Darkness": "I read the book to help me understand just what it is that makes white people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. I helps me understand how people learn to hate."
By contrast, Malcolm X's autobiography "spoke" to Obama. One line in particular "stayed with me," he says. "He spoke of a wish he'd once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged."
Forget Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- Wright is Booker T. Washington compared to this guy.
After 9/11, the ex-Marine pastor of Barack Obama’s Chicago church of 20 years damned America in the name of God. This proclamation is personal, especially to those patriots who have pledged their lives, fortunes, sacred honor on behalf of their Constitution — which includes mostly our Founding Fathers and the millions who died in wars of liberation of enslaved men of all creeds and colors. That particular offense is personal for every patriot and can’t be absolved by oratory. Mr. Obama is a candidate for president of the United States who would be commander in chief of our armed forces and the keeper of our nuclear arsenal. He tacitly approved borderline sedition, and, when necessary, strategically disapproved of his pastor’s diatribe. A pastor is the shepherd, with the sheep following their leader. Mr. Obama is just another deceitful politician. The electorate should be mindful that whereas the FBI investigates and grants top-secret clearances to government contractors on a need-to-know basis, the media is charged with vetting politicians to be trusted with the nuclear keys and the nation’s secrets. What a crazy, dangerous system, considering that the media may not do the job expected of them by the First Amendment. Mr. Obama is a product of a media which failed to rudimentarily investigate a favorite politician! ALBERT J. KAUSCH Scotia
Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE One more preacher into the fray Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com. Post a comment at dailygazette.com.
So now we’ve got a new one — a new black preacher with a fiery style and a racial take on the world, but lo, this one is not talking Barack Obama up; he’s talking him down. He is the Rev. James David Manning of the ATLAH World Missionary Church in New York City (ATLAH, he says, is a name God gave him to replace Harlem), and politically he is a counter to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago, the churchman who caught national attention not long ago for having preached “God damn America” and who for 20 years was spiritual mentor to Sen. Obama. In the Rev. James David Manning’s opposing ecclesiastical view, Sen. Obama is not a worthy candidate for president at all. Rather, he is “a long-legged mac daddy,” who “pimps white women and black women” and whose “African inheat father went a-whoring after a trashy white woman,” so that little Barack was “born trash,” and more in that entertaining vein, including an engaging rhyme of “Obama” and “white mama,” all of which is freely available on YouTube, to the delight of both Fox News and David Duke. So you see what you get, you folks who allowed Obama and Wright some slack on account of the shameful history of slavery and Jim Crow. You can’t just cut it off. You can’t just say Jeremiah Wright is OK, but James David Manning is not OK. If one demagogic race-baiting preacher passes muster, why not another? Just because he goes against your preferred political candidate? Just because he vilifi es Obama rather than glorifies him? I don’t think that will work. I think if you liked Sen. Obama’s speech about the history of race in this country and if you accepted it as a good explanation of why he identified himself with a congregation where racial grievance was so lovingly nurtured, I think, in fairness, you have to cut James David Manning the same slack. I think you have to say, yes, it’s perfectly understandable that a man of the cloth would denounce a presidential candidate as a pimp and would scorn him for having a white mother. And I think you also have to say it’s understandable that a reasonable and responsible citizen would sit in his congregation week after week and consider him a spiritual guide, because you don’t have to agree with everything a preacher says in order to belong. Which is what some of you wrote to me when I expressed dismay about Sen. Obama’s association with the Rev. Wright. One could hear the Rev. Wright propose that our government invented HIV to wage genocide against people of color, for example, and just sort of set it aside. Barbershop talk, is what some indulgent commentators called it. Now, I recognize that the Christian pulpit is a prodigious fount of hokum without regard to race or ethnic preference, and vast numbers of white people are happy every Sunday to listen to propositions that would make any clear-thinking 8-year-old squirm. In fact, the pulpit may be the last bastion of utter hokum left to us, apart from the weekly astrology column. I’m not talking about that. I’m not talking about theological flapdoodle. We’re all entitled to our own variety per the First Amendment. I’m talking about racial venom. I’m talking about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright referring to our country as “the U.S. of KKK-A.” and to the Rev. Manning belittling someone for having a white mama. I will not belabor this but will ask just once, what would happen if a white preacher preached the equivalent and ridiculed Obama for having a black father or perhaps defended slavery? I think we all know it wouldn’t be indulged as barbershop talk. And if a candidate for president were a longtime parishioner of such a preacher, I don’t think he would be pardoned because one doesn’t have to agree with everything the pastor says in order to remain loyal. To apply a different standard for black people strikes me as condescending and patronizing, though that is just my humble view without force of law. FURTHER I look at the Rev. James David Manning’s Web site, and there I find a long list of “bastard churches,” which includes every church I have ever heard of and more besides. I also find a list of “false prophets, deceivers, murders [sic], robbers, drug users and homosexuals,” which includes Jesse Jackson along with every evangelical leader I’ve ever heard of. And I find the statement, “Perhaps the most dangerous and insidious man on the earth today is the Rev. Billy Graham,” which defi - nitely brought me up short. So he is obviously a character, this Rev. Manning, but there he is, a man of the cloth, standing behind a pulpit inscribed, “Jesus is Lord,” and who am I, or who is anyone, to say he’s an idiot? WORD WATCH “Mac daddy” was a new term to me as I educated myself in the thoughts of Rev. Manning. According to various online sources, including urbandictionary.com, it means “top pimp” and probably derives from maquereau by way of Louisiana creole, maquereau being French slang for pimp. Apparently it is used by rappers. So once again this column advances its mission to be educational and brings you information not available elsewhere in the newspaper.
So is pimp a good term or a bad term? as the show states "Pimp my ride"....in which case pimp is good and if equivalent to Macdaddy then that term is also acceptable and palatable for society.....no wonder the penis is always in trouble.....
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
Dreams From My Father, Lame Excuses From My Grandfather by Ann Coulter Posted: 04/09/2008
Since a Chinese graduate student at Columbia University, Minghui Yu, was killed last Friday when black youths violently set upon him, sending him running into traffic to escape, I think B. Hussein Obama ought to start referring to the mind-set of the "typical Asian person."
As of Wednesday, police had no motive for the attack, and witnesses said they heard no demand for money or anything else. The Associated Press reports that the assailant simply said to his friend, "Watch what I do to this guy" before punching Yu.
Meanwhile, let's revisit the story about Obama's grandmother being guilty of thinking like a "typical white person." As recounted in Obama's autobiography, the only evidence that his grandmother feared black men comes from Obama's good-for-nothing, chronically unemployed white grandfather, who accuses Grandma of racism as his third excuse not to get dressed and drive her to work.
His grandmother wanted a ride to work at 6:30 in the morning because, the day before, she had been aggressively solicited by a homeless man at the bus stop. On her account, the panhandler "was very aggressive, Barry. Very aggressive. I gave him a dollar and he kept asking. If the bus hadn't come, I think he might have hit me over the head."
Even Obama's shiftless grandfather didn't play the race card until pretty far into the argument over whether he would drive Grandma to work. First, the good-for-nothing grandfather told Obama that Grandma was just trying to guilt him into driving her, saying, "(S)he just wants me to feel bad."
Next, he complained about his non-work routine being disrupted, saying: "She's been catching the bus ever since she started at the bank. ... And now, just because she gets pestered a little, she wants to change everything!"
Only after Obama had offered to drive his grandmother to work himself and it was becoming increasingly clear what a selfish lout the grandfather was, did Grandpa produce his trump card. The reason he wouldn't get his lazy butt dressed and drive Grandma to work was ... she was a racist!
As Obama recounts it, on Grandpa's third try at an excuse, he told Obama: "You know why she's so scared this time? I'll tell you why. Before you came in, she told me the fella was black. That's the real reason she's bothered. And I just don't think that's right." So I guess I'll be heading back to the sack now!
That makes sense. It certainly never bothers me when crazy white people harass and threaten me.
This is Obama's own account of what happened, which -- as anyone can see -- consisted of his slacker grandfather making a series of excuses to avoid having to drive the sole bread-earner in the family to work.
But Obama says, "The words were like a fist in my stomach, and I wobbled to regain my composure." (It was as if he had been punched by an aggressive panhandler at a bus stop!) And not because his grandfather's sorry excuse reminded him that he came from a long line of callow, worthless men, both black and white.
No, Obama swallowed his grandfather's pathetic excuse hook, line and sinker, leading Obama to a reverie about his grandparents: "I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears." That's true -- assuming his brothers and sisters were menacing people at bus stops.
How deranged would you have to be to cite this incident as evidence that your grandmother thought like a "typical white person" -- as opposed to your grandfather being worthless and lazy? For those keeping score, Obama is aghast at his grandmother's alleged racism, but had no problem with Jeremiah Wright's manifest racism.
If Obama is sent reeling by the mere words of an elderly white woman, how is he going to negotiate with a guy like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? What if Ahmadinejad calls him "booger-face"? Will he run crying from the table?
Your grandmother wasn't a racist, Barack. Your grandpa was just a loser. Can we wrap up our national conversation about race now? I think we'd like to move onto questions about your stupid plan to hold talks with Iran.
“We are called to speak for the weak, the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967. Recently, Sen. Barack Obama has been criticized for his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. From what I have heard, the Rev. Wright is being assailed because of comments from sermons where he suggested that the 9/11 attacks were a response to U.S. foreign policy, and that rather than blessing America (when considering Indian reservations, Japanese internment camps, African slavery, etc.), God might find occasion to damn America. For the life of me, I don’t understand the controversy. Rev. Wright is right. On the other hand, people who are calling for Obama to apologize for Wright have it all wrong. It seems extremely popular to say that as a Christian, the Rev. Wright shouldn’t be making such pretense to politics. The people who say that seem to think it’s appropriate that a prophet’s voice be silenced when confronted with injustices in the body politic. It seems to me that John the Baptist was martyred for criticizing Antipas as the head of Judea, and Jesus Christ himself was executed by order of the mightiest empire of his day. Christianity began in this way as a voice against the domination systems of the day. Rev. Wright’s comments express a historically Christian response to America’s blood from the past and its pretensions to empire today. BEN LAPHAM Glens Falls
In his April 6 column, “One more preacher into the fray,” Carl Strock had some insightful things to say, and it’s evident that he is passionate about what he believes. Unfortunately, as seems increasingly common for him, tacked into the middle of the column was his usual tirade against Christians, calling their beliefs “hokum” and propositions that “would make any clear-thinking 8-year-old squirm.” In line with Strock’s own reasoning that no white preacher would ever be able to say the things that Obama’s Pastor Wright said without being labeled a racist, I must respond that when Strock speaks of “the pulpit,” he speaks of all people of faith. He would not be able to redirect his inflammatory comments about Christians toward Jews without being labeled anti-Semitic, calling their beliefs “hokum” and so forth. There are Jews, Muslims, Buddhist and others who do not believe in evolution, who maintain strict sexual standards according to their scriptures, and who believe that our society is, in many ways, heading in the wrong direction morally. But I suspect that he would never single out moralistic, Hassidic Jews as closed-minded, exclusive, hatemongers, or insensitive, or infer that their beliefs were “hokum.” He would be called anti-Semitic. People would be asking to have his column removed from the paper, or at least be asking, if not demanding, for an apology. When he persists in belittling and haranguing Christians, he does so without regard for all of the others who believe similarly. Again, following his own reasoning, he can’t apply a different standard to himself. If disparaging remarks against Jews is wrong, then disparaging remarks against Christians is wrong. DAVE HART Cohoes
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