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"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - John 8:32
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Author:  Michael J. Gaynor
Bio: Michael J. Gaynor
Date:  April 30, 2008
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Obama's Fantastic Flip Flop Won't Help

People are finding out that Rev. Wright privately prayed with Obama before Obama publicly announced his presidential campaign, but was "disinvited" from appearing on stage because his sermons were "rough."

Fittingly, rookie United States Senator and presidential hopeful Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. used a tactic of Senator John Kerry, the man who gave him a national stage in 2004 by inviting him, then a state senator, to give the keynote address at the Democrat national convention: flip flopping.

After the national media called attention to some of the incendiary comments of Rev. Jeremiah A. "God damn America" Wright, Jr. and Obama took a hit in the polls, Obama chose to deal with the political problem posed by his twenty-year relationship with Rev. Wright by taking about race in America, disassociating himself from Rev. Wright's incendiary statements but refusing to "disown" Rev. Wright, equating that with disowning the Black community or his white grandmother.

In that speech, Obama threw his white grandmother under the bus, telling the world that she had made him cringe by saying that she was concerned about her physical safety when she encountered black men whom she did not know.

Obama did not explain WHY he equated that private grandmother-grandson confidence with Rev. Wright's incendiary statements from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Illinois, including his call for God to damn America, his claim that America invented the AIDS virus to destroy black people, his claim that the terrorist attack on America on September 11, 2001 was explainable as "the chickens coming home to roost and his claim that America is using drugs to incarcerate blacks.

Obama was NOT willing to throw Rev. Wright under the bus that night.

On the morning of April 29, 2008, however, Obama flip flopped bigtime and denounced Rev. Wright, as a matter of political necessity.

Rev. Wright had been on his own campaign explaining himself, beginning with a very friendly interview by Bill Moyers broadcast on April 25, 2008.

During that interview Rev. Wright unambiguously asserted that to the extent Obama had publicly distanced himself from Rev. Wright, he had done so for political purposes, because he is a politician.

Stated otherwise, Rev. Wright essentially said Obama really was with him on the same page and publicly pretending otherwise on the political stage.

Obama did not respond.

Last weekend Rev. Wright addressed an NAACP meeting in Detroit, defending himself

Obama did not respond.

On Monday morning, April 28, 2008, Rev. Wright answered questions before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.. and received the media's full attention. He explained that the United States is capable of anything, including inventing the AIDS virus to exterminate blacks, reiterated that Obama was a politician who had publicly distanced himself from Rev. Wright to placate the public.

That night Obama responded, mildly.

The next day, however, Obama angrily condemned Rev. Wright.

Rev. Wright had not said anything new on his current "tour" or anything public since Obama's mild response, so Obama'a anger the next morning seemed to be attributable to the grievous political damage to him that resulted from much greater public attention being paid to the same old Rev. Wright.

To be sure, Obama did NOT own up to flip flopping.

Instead he said that Rev. Wright is not the same man he met twenty years ago.

But Rev. Wright's religious and political views did not change significantly over that score of years.

Of course, it was politically necessary for Obama to finally did, but now Obama has two more problems: (1) if he needed twenty years to realize what sort of man the pastor who brought him to Christ, performed his wedding ceremony, baptized his two daughters and gave the sermon from which Obama took the title of his second book (The Audacity of Hope, he's much too oblivious to be President of the United States; and (2) since Obama is generally regarded as very intelligent and perceptive, people are going to conclude that he joined Rev. Wright's church for political advantage, stayed quiet about Rev. Wright's incendiary statement to avoid offending Rev. Wright and finally broke with Rev. Wright for political purposes.

Bottom line: Obama is not a "new" politician who transcends race, but a typical politician who put opportunism before principle and has been the net beneficiary of both race and gender in his race with Hillary Rodham Clinton for the 2008 Democrat presidential nomination, as 1984 Democrat vice presidential nominee Geraldine A. Ferraro honestly said (for which she promptly was vilified by outraged Obamaites who pretend otherwise).

Pundit Dick Morris:

"...if Wright has come to be the poster child for what America fears in a black public figure, he gives Obama an opportunity to be the opposite."

"By playing off Wright, by attacking his views in depth and detail, Obama can define himself as the un-Wright, reassuring Americans and carving out his identity in opposition to the reverend’s rantings."

The big problems with that analysis are that it presumes a clean slate and if and as Obama does what Mr. Morris suggests, it will become more and more obvious to more and more people that he's doing it as a typical political opportunist who finally HAD to do it.

Mr. Morris: "The key to surviving the Wright challenge does not lie in the history of Obama’s 20-year involvement with his church. That story is a quagmire from which he will have difficulty extricating himself. The answer is, rather, to speak out in the here and now against Wright’s weekend comments in Washington and, thereby, tell us who he is and in what he believes."

That would be true if the Wright challenge was survivable; it's not.

People are finding out that Rev. Wright privately prayed with Obama before Obama publicly announced his presidential campaign, but was "disinvited" from appearing on stage because his sermons were "rough."

People will realize that they were fooled and not be fooled again.

Earlier Obama appeared to be a stronger general election candidate than Hillary.

Now the reverse is true, thanks to the national focus on the long-term Obama-Rev. Wright relationship and Obama being caught on tape disdaining Americans who believe in God and exercise their Second Amendment rights as bitter people who "cling" to "religion" and "guns" because they don't have more money.

Mr. Morris: "If Obama continued to base his defense on history, he [would] just wade into deeper trouble. The 'I wasn’t there; I didn’t hear him' defense just invites journalists to interview thousands of members of the congregation to find one who sat next to Obama during one of Wright’s racist and anti-American sermons."

That defense is not comforting to voters either. If the Obamas never learned that there pastor was asking God to damn America and saying other hateful things, how disconnected were they?

Mr. Morris:

"Nor will Obama solve his Wright problem by subtly distancing himself from his pastor and condemning his views, in general, as 'offensive' or 'not representative of my campaign.'

"Rather, he needs to seize the opportunity Wright presents and rebut the pastor’s views, point by point — as he began to do Tuesday — and, in the process, define himself and his candidacy. He needs to rebut all of the spurious points Wright raised in his now-famous 'chickens coming home to roost' sermon and speak up for America, our record and our values. He needs to explain why we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to save millions of American and Japanese lives, which would have been lost in an invasion. He should defend our support of Israel and take issue with Wright’s characterization of our backing for its efforts to protect itself as 'terrorism.' He needs to speak out about America’s moral role in the world and differ sharply and publicly with Wright’s worldview.

"By playing off Wright, he can recapture his identity as the personification of white hopes for a color-blind politics rather than white fears of anti-American and anti-white public figures."

Now it would be too little, and much too late.

It's obvious that such laudable white hopes were misplaced when placed in Obama.

The Obama myth has been exploded.

Michael J. Gaynor

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Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.


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