Chris Hedges: The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Recalls Obama’s Fall From Grace

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_rev_jeremiah_wright_recalls_obamas_fall_from_grace_20110919/

“Do you know what successful ministry is?” he asked. “When you change and touch the lives of people, when you make a difference in their lives, when you give them hope, when you help them go back to school and get an education. That’s successful ministry. But even seminarians I teach are looking at ministry like it’s a “be like Mike” basketball role model they are pursuing. Instead of important and life-changing questions being addressed, the questions one hears are: How many members do we have? How many CDs and DVDs have we produced? How much money do we make? That’s not a successful ministry. Too many seminary students aren’t interested in making things better. They’re interested in becoming like T.D. Jakes, in building a megachurch. They’re not interested in being in the hood, with those who have lost hope.” [...]

“President Obama was selected before he was elected,” Wright said, “and he is accountable to those who selected him. Why do you think Wall Street got the break? Why do you think the big three [financial institutions] were bailed out? Those were the ones who selected him. We didn’t select him. We don’t have enough money to select anybody. You’re accountable to those who select you. All politicians are. Given those constraints, he is doing the best he can because he is accountable to the ones that put him where he is. Preachers, pastors, ministers, we are not accountable to these people. I’ll never forget one of the most powerful things he said to me in my home, second Saturday in April 2008. He said, ‘You know what your problem is?’ I said, ‘What is that?’ He said, ‘You have to tell the truth.’ I said, ‘That’s a good problem. That’s a good problem.’ ” [...]

In November and December of 2008 during the ethnic cleansing of Gaza one of the news media persons put a microphone in front of Barack’s face and asked him what do you think about what’s going on in Gaza? He said, ‘We can’t have but one president at a time.’ I told my wife he needed to be on ‘Dancing With the Stars’ the way he danced around that question. That was like a preview of coming attractions in terms of the pragmatist, center-of-the-road, conciliatory, not-speaking-from-principle person the world sees today.” [...]

“King would be saying to us the same thing today he was saying in 1967 and 1968,” Wright said. “He would be condemning our nation’s utter disregard for the poor. A strong nation cares about all of its citizens regardless of their color or their race or their religious beliefs. Malcolm, once he broke with the Nation of Islam, and found that God, or Allah, really does have children that don’t look like you, would be appalled by our buying into a military option as a way to peace, as a way to finding common ground. The military option is not an option. King and Malcolm would agree with that.”

“I was walking through the airport a few weeks ago,” Wright said. “I saw on the cover, I think, of Time Magazine, Osama bin Laden’s picture. The caption on the cover said ‘Justice.’ I said, ‘How about murder? It was an assassin’s hit.’ What really bothered me as I read more about it was that Barack and Hillary [Clinton] and the war folk were sitting in the war room watching the hit. There were cameras in the field. It was a hit, two right above the eyebrow. Why, why, why did you murder that man? We have international courts. We have trials like the Nuremberg trials. Why did you murder him? Why not put him on trial? And I sat up in the middle of the night, about 10 days later, with the answer. I said, because you didn’t want him to talk. If he starts talking on the stand everything comes unraveled. We will have to look at the Cheney war machine. A trial would rip to shreds the lies we have been telling ourselves and our American public. We can’t afford that, so we murder him. We murder him and call it justice. That one really hurt. I said to myself, this is the Barack you once knew who cared enough about humankind to work in Altgeld Gardens with the poor, to not run against an African-American female, who now calls for a professional Navy SEAL assassination, a hit, and watches it. It’s like that story you heard your dad preach and you know from seminary in Acts, where the demons said to the seven sons of Sceva, Jesus I know and Paul I know, but who are you? Who have you become?”