Mike Gallagher: Another Fictional Chapter in Obama's Book

I continue to be amused by the flap over the sermon delivered unto Trinty Baptist Church by Father Pfleger. It was, dare I say it, boring. All we have here is a white priest who, for reasons unknown, has decided to parrot all the flawed white entitlement affirmative action arguments as fervently as might Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, who have uttered near identical words more often than I care to remember. Anyone who was shocked by this rhetoric needs to get out more.

Of course, desperate to get something, anything, horrible and mean and nasty to stick to Barak Obama, the right-wingosphere went nuts over this. But where is the substance of the argument? Some, like Mike Gallagher, seem intent to recreate the situation in his own fictional image:

"The only reason [Pfleger] referred to Hillary Clinton as basically a white supremacist is that he thought the cameras weren't working...Is it possible that Sen. Obama condones such ugly language?"

Wow. Ironclad innuendo there. It is an especially dismissible argument since Pfleger did not call Hillary a white supremacist. Again, if you watch the clip, all Pfleger did was say what practically every black activist in the 80's and 90's said when promoting affirmative action: that whites enjoy so many benefits of past racism that they've come to feel entitled to them, thus Hillary crying about Obama coming in and "stealing" the nomination from her.

That anyone thinks this is something Obama needs to explain shows just how warped our political system has become, and just how desperate the Republicans are to "get something" on Obama. They'll have to do a lot better than this.

As an aside, I have a simple solution for politicians who wish to avoid such situations. Stop aligning yourself with ministers. They all, at one time or another, say something completely absurd. That is, after all, the playing field they've chosen. Leave them to it, and get to the job of governing all of us, not just those that share your faith.