Obama's answer to the latest phase of the smear campaign:
Quote:
Times Tribune:
"I think there will be people who don't vote for me because of race; there will be people who don't vote for me because of ideology; there will be people who don't vote for me because I got big ears. But you know, what I'm confident about is the overwhelming majority of voters in Pennsylvania and across the country are looking for someone that will deal with the real problems that we face as a country."
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Rev. Wright’s version of speech is typical among ethnic groups who have suffered at the hands of others. Listen to what Armenians have to say about the Turks, read what Native Americans had to say about European settlers. The saddest part of this story is how many people have been shocked by Rev. Wright’s comments—as if this is the first time they have ever heard anyone who had the gall to say such things.
It may help to point out that Martin Luther King was once vilified by the same sector of the American electorate that is now denouncing Obama for his ties to Rev. Wright. In an interview on the Jim Lehrer News Hour on Jan 18, 2000, Michael Eric Dyson, the author of a book on MLK titled “I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King” argued that we have done MLK a disservice by “sanitizing” his image in our history books. Here’s the final comment from the interview:
“King’s admirers want to protect King from the assertion that he was an unpatriotic American. And in the minds of many Americans, if you are a radical democrat or a socialist, you are automatically a Communist. And if you are a Communist, then therefore you are an anti- American person and a person who is not a patriot. But nothing is further from the truth. But King's friends, in attempting to shield him, have really left him more vulnerable to rebuff, and have also tried to really reproduce this image of King as this perfect icon of American patriotism by neglecting his radical viewpoints, his embrace of democratic socialism, his insistence that maybe race is a big thing, but class is even a huger dimension and a huger obstacle to be overcome for black people and other poor people to realize economic equality in America. So I think his friends have done him a great disservice as well.”
What we need to say to the hate speechers from all sides: We shall overcome.