Imagine if Bill and Hillary Clinton brought their daughter to the church of a white racist spewing hate for 20+ years, got married by him, gave him money year after year, had him baptize little Chelsea, and then put him on Hillary’s campaign.

Would you vote to help put an end to racism in America or would you brush these actions aside in favor of yet another sip of the sermon?

According to Barack Obama, Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright is more than your average campaign supporter.  Rev. Wright is Obama’s “spiritual mentor,” performed the marriage between Obama and his wife Michelle, baptised his children and inspired the title of Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope.”

Rev. Wright is described as a member of the Obama family. As recent as last night on Fox News, Obama referred to Rev. Wright as an “uncle.” Given his strong family and spiritual bond with the Obama family, it’s hard to believe Rev. Wright wouldn’t be invited to the White House under President Barack Obama.

In Rev. Wright’s most recent speech (watch the video) on behalf of Obama’s campaign, he reminded voters that ”Hillary ain’t never been called a nigga” and implored “negroes” to make race a deciding factor as they choose the Democratic nominee for president. It’s the worst example of hateful and racist rhetoric to date being injected into the 2008 presidential elections by a member of a campaign. Here’s my transcription of the video:

“Jesus was a poor black man who lived in a country and lived in a culture that was controlled by rich white people. The Romans were rich. The Romans were Italians, which means they were Europeans, which means they were white, and the Romans ran everything in Jesus’s country.

It just came to me within the past few weeks, y’all, why so many folk are hating on Barack Obama. He doesn’t fit the model. He ain’t white. He ain’t rich. And he ain’t priviledged. Hillary fits the mold. Europeans fits the mold. Gulliani fits the mold. Rich, white men fit the mold.

Hillary has never had a cab whizzed past her and not pick her up because her skin was the wrong color. Hillary never had to worry about being pulled over in her car as a black man driving in the wrong lane.

I am sick of negroes that do not get it. Hillary was not a black boy raised in a single parent home. Barack Obama was. Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich, white people. Hillary can never know that. Hillary ain’t never been called a nigga. Hillary has never had her people defined as non-persons. Hillary ain’t had to work twice as hard to get accepted by the rich, white folk who run everything, or to get a passing grade when you know you are smarter than that C student sitting in the White House.

Oh I am so glad that I got a God who knows what it is to be a poor black man in a country and a culture that is controlled by and run by rich, white people.”

The list of prominent Tennessee Republicans repudiating their own state party continues to grow this evening. Yesterday, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) joined Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain in explicitly rejecting the TN Republican party’s tactics in attacking Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn and Sen. Bob Corker have condemned the message from their own party spokesman, Bill Hobbs. Meanwhile,  Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey and Republican Minority Leader Jason Mumpower don’t see what the big fuss is all about and believe the state party is doing a great job representing their values.

The inappropriate press release titled “Anti-Semites for Obama” was issued by TN Republican Party Spokesman Bill Hobbs on Monday. It included an image of Obama wearing a turban, referred to him repeatedly as “Barack Hussein Obama” and charged that Obama surrounds himself with anti-Semitic supporters, including Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan. The release hammered a self-destructive wedge between Republican party moderates who support John McCain and the party’s bitter Christian conservative base, many of whom delivered Tennessee for Mike Huckabee in the Republican primary.

Sen. Alexander’s statement yesterday said Tennessee Republican Party Chair Robin Smith “is removing the release and the photo from the website.” Smith, however, spent the day defending the post in various media outlets and did not remove the release. Smith went so far as to refer reporters to Obama’s dead mother as to why Hobbs used Obama’s middle name.

WKRN blogger Adam Kleinheider gave Hobbs an extended opportunity today to explain why the press release was still on the state party website. Hobbs instead refuted Alexander’s statement claiming there was no agreement to remove the release. After seeking reaction from Sen. Alexander’s office, the release quickly disappeared from the state party website.

In a span of 24 hours, both Robin Smith and Bill Hobbs went from launching a widely condemned smear campaign against Barack Obama to bizarre backpedalling clarifications, open insubordination to senior party officials, and total message implosion under still more pressure from prominent state Republicans.

This isn’t the first online posting that has gotten Bill Hobbs into trouble. In 2006, Hobbs abruptly left his job at a Nashville-based Christian university after authoring an anti-Muslim post inviting readers to join him in denigrating Islam. Hobbs was then hired in October 2007 as the spokesman for the Tennessee Republican Party. Whether it was to continue waging a radically divisive agenda on behalf of state Republicans remains to be seen.

This match of Wii Tennis between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is a real nail-biter to the very end.
Vince plays Hillary. I play Barack.

The former leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, praised Barack Obama yesterday comparing him to Nation of Islam founder Fard Muhammad.

“A black man with a white mother became a savior to us,” Farrakhan said. ”A black man with a white mother could turn out to be one who can lift America from her fall.” Farrakhan told the 20,000 gathered for the Nation of Islam Saviours’ Day they should vote “their own self-interest.”

Here’s a chopped up video clip. If you find a better video clip, let me know.

UPDATE 3:39pm - I came across this interesting connection between Louis Farrakhan and Barack Obama. It makes me wonder what Obama thinks about Farrakhan.

Barack Obama is a member of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Its minister, and Obama’s spiritual adviser, is the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In 1982, the church launched Trumpet Newsmagazine; Wright’s daughters serve as publisher and executive editor. Every year, the magazine makes awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to a man it said “truly epitomized greatness.” That man is Louis Farrakhan.
[Obama’s Farrakhan Test - WashingtonPost - 01-15-08]

UPDATE 3:48pm - Obama’s reaction to the paragraph above. Farrakhan has a much stronger relationship with Obama’s spiritual advisor than he does with Obama.

“I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan,” Obama said in the statement. ”I assume that Trumpet Magazine made its own decision to honor Farrakhan based on his efforts to rehabilitate ex-offenders, but it is not a decision with which I agree.”
[Race, Anti-Semitism and a Campaign - MSNBC - 01-15-08]

Hillary Clinton gives me the creeps some times. She doesn’t always connect with a crowd. She can have that bossy presence that can make you feel like you should be looking busier than you really are. Some people say she’s a bitch and that she sounds like she’s angling for a fight in every policy discussion.

But you know what? “Bitches get stuff done.”* The more I think of it, the more I think I like that about Hillary.

In 2000 and 2004, America listened carefully to Gore, Kerry and Bush and decided against the boring, patrician policy wonks. A slight majority of Americans fell in love with Bush’s rhetoric and grew to despise the straw men it defeated. That’s how rhetoric works, and we’ll all pay that bill on top of the mortgage for another 20 to 30 years.

One of the lasting images I have of Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election was his repetitive sighing in response to George W. Bush’s rhetorical responses to Gore’s policy proposals. ”He’s using fuzzy math,” Bush loved to say to the delight of crowds. We now know that’s Bush’s special way of describing real math, just like saying someone is doing a “heck of a job” is his special warning that someone is about to screw things up so bad that a lot of Americans will die.

Each of Al Gore’s sighs was to me a white flag of intellectual defeat to the kind of rhetoric America was desperate to hear. If Gore wouldn’t fight in a debate for what he believed, would he fight for it as President of the United States? America said, “no.” In 2004, John Kerry and John McCain’s herosim was swift boated by George Bush’s something or another. Whatever it was, about half of America that bothered to vote loved it.

But that’s all water under the bridge.

In the past few days, a different side of Hillary Clinton started flickering through the news channel above. In Thursday’s debate, Clinton continued to focus on health care differences between the candidates to the dismay of moderators and showed an emotional side when she spoke of what motivates her to fight. Yesterday, Clinton sought to publicly shame Obama for a mailer she said was “blatantly false.”

“Today in the crowd I was given two mailings that Senator Obama’s campaign is mailing out, and I have to express my deep disappointment that he is continuing to send false and discredited mailings with information that is not true to the voters of Ohio. He says one thing in speeches, and then he turns around and does this. And we have consistently called him on it. It has been discredited. It is blatantly false, yet he continues to spend millions of dollars perpetuating falsehoods. That is not the new politics that the speeches are about. It is not hopeful. It is destructive. Particularly for a Democrat to be discrediting universal healthcare by waging a false campaign against my plan.”
[Hillary Clinton - Obama mailing is ‘desctructive’ - 02-23-08]

* This Saturday was SNL’s first return to live TV after the writers’ strike. Comedian and writer Tina Fey pretty much sums up what seems to be a different mood in the days leading up to primaries in TX, OH and RI: ”Bitch is the new black.”