Return with us to the days of yesteryear when it was cool to ask God to damn America If you don't remember, I'll be glad to remind you.
A preacher stood in his pulpit on the south side of Chicago and shouted the words three times.
"God damn America!...God damn America!...God damn America!"
The Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ had for 25 years been the pastor to community organizer, state and U.S. Senator Barack Hussein Obama.
It was not the first, nor was it the last time preacher Wright slammed the U.S.A. In terms of extreme prejudice, he criticized to his heart's content, enjoying the full protection of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Senator Obama was then in a red hot primary race opposing Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States of America in 2008.That is probably the only reason the national media took any note of Rev. Wright's intemperate remarks entreating deity to damn our nation. After all, we all became accustomed to expressions of black rage not too long after the mid-point of the previous century. By 2008, it had become old hat following the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the deaths of dozens of black activists who chose to shoot it out with lawmen – and lost.
The Legendary merely made the remark on-line that it was difficult to predict just how the Obama organization would counter the objections of conservative, God-fearing, Christian America in the face of the candidate's own pastor calling upon the Almighty to damn their very own nation.
After all, it was on television - ABC, NBC, CBS, whatever. Google it on YouTube if you really want to listen to the whole thing again. It's still there on the boob tube.
In the fallout that followed, The Legendary was banned from that particular website. The vitriol and abuse to which I was subjected was formidable, to say the least.
All I had to do was mention the peanuts on the breath of the elephant sitting in the living room. I mean, the two-ton johnny was sprawled out in the middle of the wall to wall carpet, swinging its trunk from side to side, flapping its ears and blowing dust up on its back, and I merely remarked that not only was the experience rather oppressive, but the beast had gone so far as to call upon God Almighty to damn the nation in which I was born, educated, had fathered a child and enjoyed being a grandfather.
But that's all it took to unleash the hounds of hell. The Legendary was way, way, way out of line for even opening his racist trap and mentioning the fact that the old boy was pastor to a man who wanted the very same job originated by General George Washington, a man who was known to kneel in the snow and pray with his troops.
After all, they were men whose feet had left bloody prints in the snows of Valley Forge during the bleakest winter of his revolutionary struggle for freedom, for liberty, for his very life.
What do you think the Red Coats would have done to General Washington if they had ever gotten him in their custody in The Tower of London?
Disembowelment, hanging, drawing and quartering was a favored punishment of the day, if history serves us correctly.
Certainly, he never called upon God to damn the United States of America, nor did President Roosevelt or President Nixon, President Truman or President Thomas Jefferson. No matter their failings and personal shortcomings, they had better sense than to let anyone know they had called upon God to cause any harm to their nation, or even attended worship services led by an individual who had done so while wearing the symbolic cloth of a pastor's surplice.
By that point in our nation's history, we had all begun to hear that type of rhetoric from imams and mullahs in even the best neighborhoods, places like Teheran, Baghdad, Kabul – hell's bells, man, even Brooklyn and Detroit have preachers wearing funny-looking hats who like to castigate and vilify America.
Of course, Mr. Obama quickly moved to denounce the pastor's remarks, resigned his membership in the church and otherwise made noises to the effect that he very much regretted this alarming turn of events.
Now that his approval rating among voting age Americans has fallen to an all-time low of 44 percent, conservative pundits are starting to make political hay out of the type of electronic on-line chatter and fancy footwork that occurred at the time among liberal political journalists who wished to soft pedal the untoward incident and protect Mr. Obama from the inevitable backlash.
Fox News Network is chronicling events that transpired on a now defunct list serve – Journ-o-list – in which various scribblers wondered in semi-private correspondence if the government could be persuaded to simply fail to renew News Corporation's broadcasting permit.
Somehow, Fox and The Daily Caller, a Washington, D.C., blog updated daily by conservative reporter Jonathan Strong and publisher Carlson Tucker, have decided they were calling for a forcible removal of Fox from the airwaves.
Oh, well, they said I was a racist because I mused about how the Obama camp would spin the outrageous remarks of a holy man standing in a Protestant sanctuary on a Sunday morning and cursing the very nation in which he was born by asking God to damn it.
Even Sarah Palin has weighed in, calling the entire affair typical of the way liberal jouralists operate in some vast and supposed conspiracy to suppress the truth and the way and the light of conservative values.
Hot, ain't it?
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