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AND NEITHER DID THE PRESS

By absentee Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Obamafiles | swooning press | Trinity United Church of Christ — Comments (17) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The media machine is quite something to behold. The process of taking an untruth, an exaggeration, or a misstatement, and turning it into a Known Fact™ is fascinating, if frightening. Take Scott McClellan, for example. Once you thresh the narrative, sort through the interviews, headlines and hype, you find there's nothing there. Here's a business plan for you.

Thank me later.

It's been the same throughout Senator Obama's storied campaign. The idea is that he's a transformative figure. He's a Christ for politics, healing the sick with his perfected health care, turning oil to wine, and making the rivers run clear and blue.

Of course, the truth is slightly less divine. His campaign has been a series of surrogate scandals, personal scandals, gaffes, mistakes, and oopsies to have easily warranted dumb guy treatment on shows like Saturday Night Live; Quayle's potato has nothing on Obama's 10,000 dead. Nevertheless, he yet glides on a soft cloud of adoration. He is the untouchable, the unassailable. He is the Obama. At least in the press it is so.

So now we have another "narrative" spreading. Witness an LA Times editorial from this morning. The dismayed tone is regretful, shaming the rest of us for hurting this poor church, for separating the Obama from his flock. The Washington Post ran a story that is filled with a number of interesting facts, but which too has a tone of mournful sadness. The New York Times reports on the "battered" congregants of Trinity, who, we are assured, will "go on worshiping as ever."

Poor Barack, pushed from his church home by an evil nation. Poor Trinity, suffering at the unjust, unseen hand of infamy. Tragic.

There is a lot that isn't being said in these obituaries. Reporters and columnists have happily jumped on the new meme that it's all a big, unfair, out of context comedy of errors. It is immediately being taken for granted that the church really hadn't done wrong in the first place. Victims of circumstance and the cruelty of selective YouTubery. Wright was really right most of the time. Moss is mostly benign. Father Pfleger is a friendly but infrequent visitor, not representative. Yes the press is leaving out a lot of information, and why not? They take their cues from the Obama, and the Obama had a lot to not say as well.

Senator Obama did not say, for example, that America is not the "greatest sin against God." Father Pfleger thinks it is. Senator Obama, and the press, instead emphasize that the fired up Father is but a guest. Nevermind the hearty reception he received from the congregants, he's a guest speaker. Nevermind the many times he's previously been a guest speaker, or his warm receptions then. Nevermind his press statements during the early days of the Wright controversy, wherein he reinforced the closeness of the church to Louis Farrakhan and was sought as a voice of the church. He's a guest. Nevermind that the church reflects their philosophy in their choice of their frequent guest speakers, and that Senator Obama's philosophy is reflected in his choice of church. Nevermind that he's a candidate for President who is tied by any string to such comments and should condemn them by name and specifically. No no, Pfleger was just a guest ... a divisive, backward-looking guest, that's all.

Of course, despite that he couldn't bring himself to condemn any remarks specifically, he managed to praise Father Pfleger specifically, calling him a friend and someone who has done "tremendous" work in Chicago. He could no more condemn him, in other words, than he could condemn any correct friend who is tremendous. Still, though, just a divisive, backward-looking guest speaker who, if anything, is suffering from Obama's campaign.

Senator Obama, and by extension the mainstream media, also did not say that the congregation, including he and his family, ought to have spoken up in the twenty years of Reverend Wright's offensive conspiracy-theorizing and America-bashing, rather than cheering and applauding. He doesn't say that the congregants and he and his family should have spoken up against anti-Semitism or racism in twenty years of enduring it, rather than waving their hands triumphantly and shouting "Amen!" Instead, he and the press want the church to be allowed to worship in "peace."

Nevermind that the various Reverends and guests repeatedly name America "the enemy" and accuse both the nation and the people of current ongoing atrocities in anything but peaceful tirades. Nevermind that the church posts letters from radical Palestinian activists and echoes radical Palestinian groups that are the enemies of peace in the Middle East and the world. Nevermind that Louis Farrakhan, friend of the church and personal security provider to the Wright Reverend preaches the need for a holy war against the American government. Obama wants them all to worship in peace, free from the violence of being accurately quoted and videos of their actual sermons shown publicly.

What Senator Obama continues not to say is something he cannot say. Trinity United Church of Christ has a pulpit of division and hate. The Church, its pastors and guests, have spent twenty-plus years excitedly spewing what Obama is supposedly eschewing. What Obama doesn't say, what he can't say, is that he has associated with anti-Semitic, anti-American and racist rhetoric for most of his adult life.

A friend asked me what Obama can say at this point about Trinity. She thought he'd said enough, that he'd been clear, that he left the church, what more can he possibly do? It's simple really. There's nothing he can do. He sat there and shared in Trinity's guilt for twenty years. He can't transfigure his way out of it.

Judging by the press, he probably won't have to. They've already bought in to the new story. Trinity is a battered congregation, huddling together, trying to make it. It's an assault on them, you see. Soon enough, the motivations of those who question Trinity will be boiled down to good old fashioned American racism. Obama, then, will be the magnanimous man who made the ultimate sacrifice. The hero who cut himself off from his own church, set himself free in the world to battle on without his support structure, alone against mean America ... to save them from us.

The story is being rewritten and rewritten. They want their story to become The Story; and their press acolytes are ready to sanctify and testify. The Obama has made his great sacrifice, beatification at eleven.