To be fair, I've been doing a lot of reading about Barack Obama and I find his story quite compelling. In fact, I am very impressed with his intellectual depth and his steady temperament, and I think he'd make an excellent president.
However, last night on "The Daily Show," I saw a brief clip of Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright preaching from the pulpit. He was talking about America's racial intolerance and he said something like, "It's not God bless America, it's God damn America..."
Oh, fuck. He said God damn from the pulpit.
With McCain already having cinched the GOP nomination, you have to know the Republican slime machine is focusing full-time on decimating Sen. Obama in as many ways as possible.
This fiery preacher man is not going to be ignored by them, hear me now and believe me later. He's going to be the biggest chink in Obama's armor, and it scares me.
I once had the privilege of living next door to a Black Baptist church in Venice, California. How I loved opening my upstairs balcony doors on Sunday mornings and hearing the angelic choir and the deep, resonant cadence of the preacher's sermon.
As a lapsed Catholic, I was impressed with the depth of emotion I heard wafting from that little church through the ocean breezes. I envied the all-Black congregation, but I didn't attend any services because I didn't want my ruddy white face to stick out and cause me or them any discomfort.
While I am pretty tolerant of most religions, I do not like churches like San Antonio's mega Cornerstone Church, where their porcine preacher John Hagee laces his messages from the pulpit with neo-con hatred and intolerance.
The Republicans seem to love these kind of white supremacist fanatics, but they do not tolerate fanaticism in religions that aren't centered around pews filled with shiny Caucasians who find justification for their own proclivities and biases within the Bible.
The dashiki wearing Rev. Wright is the kind of Black firebrand preacher who can and will be unflatteringly compared to Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown and Louis Farrakhan and the Black Panthers by the GOP. Wright's clearly not crazy about Jews, either.
Obama has either attended or been associated with Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for the last 20 years.
This association is going to hurt Obama.
In fact, I think this association will prove to be his Achilles heel.
I just hope he's assembling the country's best PR team to help him diffuse the shit-storm his association with Wright will surely cause.
A preacher just can't say "God damn America" from the pulpit. If it shocked me, well, you get the picture.
