Barack Obama’s ex-pastor defended his controversial criticism of white America in a defiant speech Monday that analysts said could prolong a political backlash against Obama.
During a freewheeling appearance at the National Press Club, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright defended his “God damn America!” exhortation and reiterated his belief that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to wipe out black people. He also accused America of terrorism, which he said prompted retaliatory attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
“You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you,” said Wright, who recently retired as pastor of Obama’s church in Chicago, Trinity United.
Wright praised Obama for giving a speech on race six weeks ago and shrugged off the fact that Obama used the speech to distance himself from Wright’s incendiary rhetoric.
“He had to distance himself because he’s a politician,” Wright said. “Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.”
Wright added: “I said to Barack Obama last year, ‘If you get elected, November the 5th, I’m coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.’ ”
“Wright is contradicting the very nature of Obama’s post-racial appeal,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “Non-black voters are put off by Wright, and they wonder whether the relatively unknown Obama has hidden views similar to some of Wright’s.”
Civil rights author and journalist Juan Williams likened Wright on Monday to “a kid in a schoolyard without any sense of what he was doing or saying.”
“It seems to me to be a tremendous exercise in ego and self-gratification on the part of Reverend Wright,” Williams said. “He’s not looking out for Barack Obama; he’s not looking out for the ambitions of the first black man to have a serious opportunity to become president of this country. He’s looking out for himself.”
Wright, a former Marine, used the speech to excoriate Vice President Dick Cheney for not serving in the military. He called Louis Farrakhan “one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century.” He said, presumably tongue in cheek, that he is “hoping to be vice president.”
Wright also accused the media of “making a fool out of itself” by taking his controversial quotes out of context to create an uproar. Yet he defended the most inflammatory of those quotes, including his exhortation, “God damn
America!”
“God doesn’t bless everything,” Wright said Monday. “God damns some practices. And there is no excuse for the things that the government, not the American people, have done.”
Defending his assertion that the U.S. created AIDS to destroy blacks, Wright said: “I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”
