This 9:53 video quotes Barack Hussein Obama reading the audio book version of his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, and his pastor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, on racial attitudes, providing an interesting comparison to the sentiments expressed in his more recent (presidential campaign period) Philadelphia speech.

Obama supporters will try to say that it’s just a partisan attack piece, but when his opponents have simply taken the words out of the candidate’s own mouth, they are not so easily dismissed.

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.

One normally doesn’t expect Ann Coulter to supply serious commentary and analysis. Her specialty is a stinging barb at the liberals’ expense, often playfully crossing the line into the realm of prohibited speech.

Her latest column in Human Events, however, discussing Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, features some essential insights pertaining to the heart and mind and the fundamental methodology of a major candidate.

As Ann Coulter rightly notes, virtually no one has read Obama’s book.

Has anybody read this book? Inasmuch as the book reveals Obama to be a flabbergasting lunatic, I gather the answer is no. Obama is about to be our next president: You might want to take a peek. If only people had read “Mein Kampf” …

Peeking into Obama’s Dreams, Coulter finds the tone is significantly different from what one would have expected. Obama is really an angry black man. A very angry black man.

Nearly every page — save the ones dedicated to cataloguing the mundane details of his life — is bristling with anger at some imputed racist incident. The last time I heard this much race-baiting invective I was … in my usual front-row pew, as I am every Sunday morning, at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Then Coulter strikes gold, finding the key to Obama’s entire political methodology and personal style, right there in black and white.

When his mother expresses concern about Obama’s high school friend being busted for drugs, Obama says he patted his mother’s hand and told her not to worry.

This, too, prompted Obama to share with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people: “It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.” …

This technique seems to be the basis of Obama’s entire presidential campaign.

And Coulter warns:

Forget Rev. Jeremiah Wright — Wright is Booker T. Washington compared to this guy.

Ann Coulter may very possibly be right. All this would certainly explain the Jeremiah Wright-Trinity Church connection. The 2008 Presidential Election may very possibly feature as the current front-runner an extreme black nationalist, harboring a pathological psychic collection of racial animosities, deliberately spoofing the American public with an emollient facade: Malcolm X hiding behind the mask of Sidney Poitier. What on earth would someone with such views actually do in office?

Poor Reverend Jeremiah Wright has led a life of constant victimization by White America’s racism and discrimination. Denied opportunity all his life, now he will be condemned to live in retirement in the above dreadfully tacky $1.6 million 10,340-square-foot, four-bedroom home in suburban Chicago, currently under construction in a gated community, with a $10 million line of credit, presumably intended for furniture and other incidentals.

Fox News

A number of commentators on the Right (mostly chicks) responded to Obama’s speech with adulation.

But curmudgeonly old Victor Davis Hanson does not get misty quite so easily. In fact, he is enough of a spoilsport to undermine all those rapturous cries of admiration from the establishment punditocracy by remarking, sotto voce, that the Emperor Obama’s rhetorical wardrobe of political change amounts to no clothes at all.

The latest polls reflecting Obama’s near-collapse should serve as a morality tale of John Edwards’s two Americas — the political obtuseness of the intellectual elite juxtaposed to the common sense of the working classes.

For some bizarre reason, Obama aimed his speech at winning praise from National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Harvard, and solidifying an already 90-percent solid African-American base — while apparently insulting the intelligence of everyone else.

Indeed, the more op-eds and pundits praised the courage of Barack Obama, the more the polls showed that there was a growing distrust that the eloquent and inspirational candidate has used his great gifts, in the end, to excuse the inexcusable.

The speech and Obama’s subsequent interviews neither explained his disastrous association with Wright, nor dared open up a true discussion of race — which by needs would have to include, in addition to white racism, taboo subjects ranging from disproportionate illegitimacy and drug usage to higher-than-average criminality to disturbing values espoused in rap music and unaddressed anti-Semitism. We learn now that Obama is the last person who wants to end the establishment notion that a few elite African Americans negotiate with liberal white America over the terms of grievance and entitlement — without which all of us really would be transracial persons, in which happiness and gloom hinge, and are seen to do so, on one’s own individual success or failure.

Instead there were the tired platitudes, evasions, and politicking. The intelligentsia is well aware of how postmodern cultural equivalence, black liberation theory, and moral relativism seeped into Obama’s speech, and thus was not offended by an “everybody does it” and “who’s to judge?/eye of the beholder” defense. But to most others the effect was Clintonian. Somehow Obama could not just say,

There is nothing to be offered for Rev. Wright except my deepest apologies for not speaking out against his venom far earlier. We in the African-American community know better than anyone the deleterious effects of racist speech, and so it is time for Rev. Wright and myself to part company, since we have profoundly different views of both present- and future-day America.

The more the pundits gushed about the speech, the more the average Americans thought, “Wait a minute — did he just say what I thought he said?” It’s not lost on Joe Q. Public that Obama justified Wright’s racism by offering us a “landmark” speech on race that:

(1) Compared Wright’s felony to the misdemeanors of his grandmother, Geraldine Ferraro, the Reagan Coalition, corporate culture, and the kitchen sink.

(2) Established the precedent that context excuses everything, in the sense that what good a Wright did (or an Imus did) in the past outweighs any racist outburst of the present.

(3) Claimed that the voice of the oppressed is not to be judged by the same rules of censure as the dominant majority that has no similar claim on victim status.

What is happening, ever so slowly, is that the public is beginning to realize that it knows even less after the speech than it did before about what exactly Obama knew (and when) about Wright’s racism and hatred.

Even elites will wake up to the fact that they’ve been had, in a sense, once they deconstruct the speech carefully and fathom that their utopian candidate just may have managed to destroy what was once a near-certain Democratic sweep in the fall.

Read the whole thing.

Lee Culpepper sees the light, or at least the Wright.

Watching the “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright gesticulate like a horny peacock and spew out ignorance, hatred, and bitterness towards America truly inspired my religious faith. …

I don’t know about you, but I feel liberated now that I realize that my own stupid decisions and selfish actions are no longer my fault. Now that I won’t have to accept responsibility for my thoughts, my words, or my decisions, I am thanking God for creating rich, white people for me to blame all my problems on. I’m also thanking God for justifying my sin whenever I allow myself to think something I shouldn’t about other people — just as Reverend Wright has taught me to do. …

I also realize now that rich, white people are responsible for poor children growing up in single-parent families. I used to think that the irresponsible sexual behavior and lack of commitment between the children’s parents were responsible. But I guarantee these parents feel a lot better knowing their fornication is someone else’s fault. Thanks to the Wright kind of reverend, I now have a totally new respect for sexually immoral people – unless they are rich and white, of course.

Despite the conflicting medical evidence, I now know too that AIDS and drug abuse are rich, white people’s fault. Individual’s who choose to abuse drugs and engage in deviant sexual behavior are merely victims driven to bad decisions by rich, white people. Certainly being a victim of evil people feels better than thinking of one’s self as just a pathetic drug addict or a promiscuous sexual deviant. “Oh, I am so glad” that Reverend Wright worked “twice as hard…to get a passing grade” and that he knows he is “smarter than that C-student sitting in the White House.” Otherwise, I would have never known the truth about drugs and AIDS.

I can’t tell you how relieved I was Tuesday concerning Obama and Wright’s twenty-year relationship. Obama said, “Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms.” Praise the Lord for prepositional phrases like “in my conversations with him.”

When Obama said, “I can no more disown [Wright] than I can disown the black community,” I was glad Obama didn’t actually mean, “If I disowned Reverend Wright because he’s a racist, I would instantly become one of those ‘Negroes who just don’t get it.’”

I finally swooned (actually, I cringed) at Obama’s hopeful audacity when he eloquently humiliated his white grandmother for political gain because “she once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion [had] uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made [Obama] cringe.”

I haven’t figured out, however, how rich, white people caused Obama’s father to abandon his responsibilities as a dad and a husband – thereby forcing someone else to provide for and care for his child. Perhaps Mr. Obama strategically deserted his family so Reverend Wright could preach that Barak “fits the mold” of a poor, black man — even though Obama was raised by his generous and loving white grandparents.

More importantly, I’m just grateful that Barak refocused our country on “the real culprits” related to racial hostilities. Obama targeted “a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed,” as well as “economic policies that favor the few over the many.” Yes, Obama, if America’s evil corporations and economic policies were not preoccupied with causing greater suffering in the world, perhaps they could find time to develop medications to treat AIDS and continuously improve technology to better our lives.

Obama has reminded all of us that we have a choice. We can examine disturbing evidence in order to draw the right conclusions. Or we can simply ignore it and have the audacity to hope it just goes away.

Charles Krauthammer explains, slowly and carefully so that even liberals can understand, what Obama actually said, and what he didn’t say.

But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

Read the whole thing.

The Boston Herald’s Michael Graham listened to the speech and does not think it succeeded in persuading voters that there is not something more than a little peculiar about his choice of churches and that there is not a problem with his relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

As a former speechwriter myself, I was looking forward to Obama’s remarks yesterday because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how anyone could talk themselves out of Obama’s predicament. How does Obama – the Kumbaya Candidate – explain his 20 years at the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s black power church? How does a uniter spend every Sunday in the pews where anti-white, anti-Semitic and anti-American conspiracies and kookery are preached on a regular basis?

It’s like discovering that John McCain is a closet pacifist, or that Hillary Clinton is Rush Limbaugh’s Client No. 9.

Yesterday I got my answer. Blame everyone.

I knew we were in trouble when Obama compared the hapless but harmless Geraldine Ferraro with the Rev. Wright on the “racial insensitivity” scale. And invoking the memory of the O.J. Simpson trial in a speech on racial unity left some of us wondering if the Tawana Brawley references were cut at the last minute.

Obama did say that some of Wright’s comments were “wrong” and “divisive.” He also admitted that he had in fact been in church for some comments that “could be considered controversial – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagree.”

Uh, no.

As a graduate of Oral Roberts University who grew up attending church five times a week – including tent revivals, healing services and the handling of less-than-friendly reptiles – I can honestly say that I never attended a service where the minister preached race hatred, anti-Israel paranoia or used the phrase “ridin’ dirty” in a theological context.

And other than Obama, I don’t know anyone else who did, either.

Disagreeing with your pastor about transubstantiation is one thing. Debating whether government scientists are secretly trying to infect you with AIDS – that disagreement is a bit more profound.

At least it is for me.

Not Obama, who went out of his way to embrace the irrational Rev. Wright, saying, “I could no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”

That says quite a bit about Obama’s opinion about the black community. Then again, Obama had very little positive to say about anyone in his “I have an excuse” speech.

America is still a nation suffused with racism, Obama insisted. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition (Racists!). Politicians exploited fears of crime (Double racists!). Talk show hosts and conservative commentators unmasking bogus claims of racism (Super double extra racists!).

To paraphrase the Disney movie “The Incredibles,” “If everybody’s racist, then nobody is.”

So determined was Obama to declare us all guilty by racial association, he even compared Wright to his own grandmother, “who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.”

C’mon, Barack, do you have to pick on your own grandmother?

Shelby Steele offers the most intelligent analysis of the psychology of Barack Obama’s magical appeal, explaining why his lack of specificity and precision is essential to his role, and why the myth is currently dissolving.

Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer’s race against him. And whites love this bargain — and feel affection for the bargainer — because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama’s extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.

His actual policy positions are little more than Democratic Party boilerplate and hardly a tick different from Hillary’s positions. He espouses no galvanizing political idea. He is unable to say what he means by “change” or “hope” or “the future.” And he has failed to say how he would actually be a “unifier.” By the evidence of his slight political record (130 “present” votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much.

Race helps Mr. Obama in another way — it lifts his political campaign to the level of allegory, making it the stuff of a far higher drama than budget deficits and education reform. His dark skin, with its powerful evocations of America’s tortured racial past, frames the political contest as a morality play. Will his victory mean America’s redemption from its racist past? Will his defeat show an America morally unevolved? Is his campaign a story of black overcoming, an echo of the civil rights movement? Or is it a passing-of-the-torch story, of one generation displacing another?

Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans — black and white — Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America’s very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama’s candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton’s or Jesse Jackson’s. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama’s run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were “challengers,” not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don’t know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . .” And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama’s Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a “blank screen.”

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama’s political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage (“God damn America”).

How does one “transcend” race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn’t thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to “be black” despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn’t this hatred more rhetorical than real?

But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one’s blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America’s television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.

Mona Charen searches for the real Obama, concealed behind the pink cloud of rhetoric about “Hope” and “Change,” by actually reading his book.

Barack Obama’s words are often attractive but oddly concealing. His speeches are all balm and mood. It’s all very well to seek, as Obama claims, to transcend old categories, to reject the “old politics.” But then what? This graceful rhetorician leaves you wondering: Who is he really? What does he want for himself and for his country?

In search of answers that go deeper than the Congressional Record, I read his first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.” Once you get past the happy surprise of finding a politician who can actually write, the book contains some disquieting elements. …

Left-wing ideas are not so much articulated in this memoir as presumed. Obama has claimed that his experience living abroad gives him a valuable perspective for a chief executive. Yet his reflections on the effect Western capitalism has had on Jakarta and Chicago’s south side sound like warmed over Herbert Marcuse. “How could we go about stitching a culture back together after it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars? … The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their [Indonesian] culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that’s been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns.”

Obama’s self-portrait in this book is that of a searching, nonjudgmental young man attempting to find his rightful place after a confusing start in life. But he is attracted by the harshly ideological Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose church he joins. Wright peddles racial grievance religion. Following 9/11, he said, “[W]hite America got a wake-up call … White America and the Western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”

Obama says he doesn’t agree with Wright about everything. Fine. And maybe he doesn’t agree with his wife when she (twice) said that she’d never been proud of her country until its people began to support her husband. But then, what did he mean when he said on March 4 that making a little girl proud to say she is an American is the “change we are calling for”?

One suspects that beneath the soothing talk, there is bitterness in the man that we’d best learn more about before voting.

Obama is the product of two unions between an alienated leftist white American woman and a pair of dark-skinned foreigners. Her liaisons with Obama’s father and stepfather were explicit attempts at rejecting her own identity, family, economic system, and country in favor of the fraught-with-symbolism Other. Obama was consequently brought up in a thoroughly leftist and anti-American domestic culture and social matrix.

His autobiographical writings indicate that he went farther than his mother, disapproving of her interracial unions, and choosing instead to embrace a personal black identity and nationalism, which undoubtedly includes the Kwanzaa-style Western interpretation of the African identity as different from Europe by virtue of inclusion of collectivist and socialist ideals and values.

Barack Obama is going to end America’s racial nightmare and take us beyond the divisions of the past is the promise. But, as Brit Hume reports, the Obama campaign’s behavior differs considerably from the rhetoric.

Some African-American superdelegates who support Hillary Clinton are reporting threats and intimidation from people wanting them to switch to Barack Obama.

Pressure on black superdelegates has intensified since civil rights icon John Lewis switched his allegiance from Clinton to Obama earlier this week.

Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver II tells The Politico some superdelegates are receiving what he called nasty letters and phone calls, along with threats that they’ll now be opposed by other Democrats in reelection bids. Cleaver says some even report being called an “Uncle Tom.” Adding — “This is the politics of the 1950’s. A lot of members are experiencing a lot of ugly stuff. They’re not going to talk about it, but it’s happening.”

California Congresswoman Diane Watson reports she also has received threatening mail — but says she would rather lose her seat than violate her principles. She says she cannot switch her vote simply because Obama is black.

Andrew Sullivan is currently running the above photograph captioned only:

US President George W. Bush (C) leans over to talk with a girl (R) after Bush participated in a lesson for young children on the importance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day during a tour of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC, 21 January 2008.

But, at Free Republic, Andrew Sullivan’s post is linked (by a correspondent signing himself america4vr) with the following text which appears to have been originally Andrew Sullivan’s.

This picture will forever be branded in my memory as one of the most disturbing images ever. What child would not be thrilled, ecstatic to meet the President of the United States, particularly one with the goofy,likable charm of President Bush? Here you see him greeting, warmly embracing this child in the loveliest, purest of emotions. The look of revulsion, of vehemence, of utter contempt for the President on this child is one of the most haunting, disturbing images I have ever seen.

Certainly the family was aware that the president would be coming to the school in celebration of the holiday.This child has been brainwashed, her palpable prejudice is not one that can be ingrained overnight, one that requires an extended period of incubation.

What an absolute utter disgrace.

It’s possible that that comment is actually by america4vr, but one wonders if Sullivan may not have first posted it and then later removed it.

In any event, it is the interpretive comment which supplies the crucial food for thought and makes one look seriously at the picture.

Failure of school authorities to impose discipline on unruly minority students due to political correctness has led to a legal award of damages to a white female teacher subjected to verbal obscenities in Charleston.

Real Clear Politics:

In a new twist in American race relations, a federal court has ruled that a white teacher in a predominantly African-American school was subjected to a racially hostile workplace.

The case concerned Elizabeth Kandrac, who was routinely verbally abused by black students at Brentwood Middle School in North Charleston. Their slurs make shock jock Don Imus look like a church deacon.

Nevertheless, despite frequent complaints, school officials did nothing to intervene on Kandrac’s behalf, arguing that the racially charged profanity was simply part of the students’ culture. If Kandrac couldn’t handle cursing, school officials told her, she was in the wrong school.

Kandrac finally filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and subsequently brought a lawsuit against the Charleston County School District, the school’s principal and an associate superintendent. Last fall, jurors found that the school was a racially hostile environment to teach in and that the school district retaliated against Kandrac for complaining about it.

The defendants sought a new trial, but U.S. District Judge David C. Norton recently affirmed the verdict. However, he did not support the jury’s findings of $307,500 in damages for lost income and emotional distress.

Although Kandrac clearly suffered — she was suspended from her job shortly after a story about her EEOC complaint appeared in the local newspaper, and her contract was not renewed — her case didn’t meet evidentiary requirements for damages. The judge said a new trial would have to determine damages, but the school district and Kandrac settled for $200,000.

Complete article