Monday, March 17, 2008

An Obama video that you won't see on Olbermann

There's a lot to this story, so please stick with me.
A pastor named Jerimiah Wright has a long history of making anti-American rants from the pulpit. O'Reilly put together a selection of his comments on a video that you can watch for yourself.
Its pretty amusing stuff to see a pastor say "G--damn America" for bombing Iraq, 9/11, and Nagasaki. Its a bizarre thing to see a relic from the black panther days suggest that if we don't find WMDs in Iraq, we will plant them there 'like the cops in LA' plant drugs on people. That's all part of Mr. Wright's patter.

On the Huffington Post,
Obama tried to distance himself from his pastor:
When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.

So keep that in mind for a second... that Obama said that he knew about Wright's comments at the beginning of the campaign.

Obama further tried to distance himself on Olbermann's Countdown, and you can watch the
video of it here. But he's careful to simply distance himself from Wright's comments, rather then the man himself. After all, Wright was his "spiritual guidance" counsler, and part of his actual campaign.
Obama has to make this small distinction of separating himself from Wright's comments, rather then the actual man, because even though Obama has said that he learned about Wright's comments at the beginning of the campaign, he praised the man as late as June of 2007.

Thanks to YouTube, you can see the video of Obama praising him.
If Countdown had any consistency, Keith Olbermann would play this video and then spend the next twenty minutes excoriating Obama for his outright lying.
But Countdown won't, because they aren't really a news program. They are Obama's cheerleaders, clear and simple.

The rest of the media still has a chance to show themselves as unbiased. Let's see what they do with the video, and if they cover this story as it should be covered.

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