The best analysis I’ve seen of the hypocrisy of Barack Obama’s longtime membership in the church of hate-mongering Reverend Jeremiah Wright was Shelby Steele’s oped piece in The Wall Street Journal last week. Steele called Obama a “bargainer.”

“Bargainers,” Steele wrote, “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.”

But Obama broke his part of the bargain when he chose to remain a member of Rev. Wright’s church all these years, hoping that the whites he was comforting with the bargain never would find out.

In a column I wrote nearly three years ago, I criticized the hypocrisy of Obama doing a hatchet job on California Supreme Court Judge Janet Rogers Brown, a black woman and a principled conservative who had been nominated by President Bush to the federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.Advertisement
“[S]he stands for principle and he stands for nothing,” I wrote. “Obama doesn’t want to be tied to any specific ideology. . . . He’s free to morph into anything he wants the public to see.”

Once the public saw what Obama’s pastor had been saying for more than 20 years about whites and about America, the senator’s hypocrisy was plain even to liberals. Read more…

Z. Dwight Billingsly is a principal of Branford Gateway Investment Co. and a financial services industry specialist for the Missouri state Department of Economic Development. He serves as co-chair of the Missouri Spectrum political action committee, an auxilary of the Missouri Republican Party that supports African-American Republican candidates.

Related:

Billingsly on the Paula Zahn Show: (5/03/07) Should the Queen Apologize for Slavery?

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