5 Feet of Fury

Steyn: “Did Obama consider ‘God Damn America’ as a title for his book but it didn’t focus-group so well?”

It seems hard to believe you could spend 20 minutes in this pastor’s company, never mind 20 years (as the Obamas have), without figuring he’s a race-baiting loon. (…)

“Obama listened to Wright’s bilge week in, week out his entire adult life and by the end was giving this huckster over 20 grand a year to keep him in business. It seems reasonable to assume, given some of her observations on the hustings, that Mrs Obama agrees with the broad thrust of Jeremiah Wright’s ‘theology’. Does her husband?

“Derb wondered the other day whether the Obama campaign was a massive ‘con job’. But it’s worse than that. If he were a con artist, he’d be like every other opportunist pol contemplating a run for the presidency: he’d be slick enough to know from the get-go that the Reverend Wright was a guy he needed to keep at way beyond arm’s length; instead, he named his big pre-campaign hey-world-here-I-am book after one of his sermons. That suggests Obama didn’t even appreciate Wright was a potential problem. Which, in turn, suggests a candidate as disconnected from reality as his pastor is.”

More here (and why Steyn earn the big bucks):

“The song the Reverend Wright won’t sing is by Irving Berlin… Berlin was a Jew and he suffered slights: He grew up in the poverty of New York’s Lower East Side. When he made his name and fortune, his marriage to a Park Avenue heiress resulted in her expulsion from the Social Register. In the Thirties, her sister moved in with a Nazi diplomat and proudly flaunted her diamond swastika to Irving. But Berlin spent his infancy in Temun, Siberia (until the Cossacks rode in and razed his village) and he understood the great gift he’d been given.”