Obama denounces pastor's 9/11 comments By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer
Yahoo News
[excerpt]
WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Friday denounced inflammatory remarks from his pastor, who has railed against the United States and accused the country of bringing on the Sept. 11 attacks by spreading terrorism.
Obama called the statements appearing on television and the Internet "completely unacceptable and inexcusable" in a Fox News interview and said they didn't reflect the kinds of sermons he had heard from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright while attending services at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ.
Obama, a member of the church since the early 1990s, said he would have quit Trinity had such statements been "the repeated tenor of the church. ... I wouldn't feel comfortable there."
Earlier Friday, Obama responded by posting a blog about his relationship with Wright and Trinity on the Huffington Post. Wright brought Obama to Christianity, officiated at his wedding, baptized his daughters and inspired the title of his book, "The Audacity of Hope."
Obama wrote that he's looked to Wright for spiritual advice, not political guidance, and he's been pained and angered to learn of some of his pastor's comments for which he had not been present. Obama told MSNBC that Wright had stepped down from his campaign's African American Religious Leadership Committee.
"I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies," Obama said in his blog posting. "I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it's on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Reverend Wright that are at issue."
In a sermon on the Sunday after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Wright suggested the United States brought on the attacks.
"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Wright said. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
In a 2003 sermon, he said blacks should condemn the United States.
"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."
He also gave a sermon in December comparing Obama to Jesus, promoting his candidacy and criticizing his rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080315/ap_on_el_pr/obama_pastorI wonder how this plays with the left wing base.
If you want to be President, you can't associate with people who cry "G*d damn America."
