Home » More Obama silence—this time on Iran

Comments

More Obama silence—this time on Iran — 11 Comments

  1. Well, he is probably busy with more urgent matters:
    http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1138202.html

    “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to construct an additional 700 apartments in East Jerusalem is another blow to stalled peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, the White House press secretary said on Monday.”

  2. Probably just as well. The last time I saw him in anything close to a church was at Georgetown and there he made them block out the IHS behind the speaker’s podium.

    Besides, anybody who can halt the ocean’s rise and calm the waves probably doesn’t need a church that worships anybody else.

    After your link to the Time story I do wonder, tho, when the smartest guy in the universe is going to snap to the fact that he gave his daughter a Russian boy’s nickname for a moniker. Or maybe it’s in keeping with the Stanley thing.

  3. as a christian myself, i can tell you that obama never was a christian, at least in the sense of the word that other christians use. back in 2006 when he won the senate seat i was reading a magazine at the laundromat and it had this long article about obama and whatever so i was like, who is this guy and i read the article. i could tell right away that he was not a christian. his version of his conversion story goes something to the effect of, “i had always been a spiritual person so then i wanted to join a religion and i picked christianity for social reasons and then joined a church”. an actual conversion story will have something about jesus christ in it, and sin, etc. as in someone realized they were a sinner and needed christ to save them.

    i know that might not fly with some people but it will with others. take it for what its worth.

  4. anna: I am in complete agreement with you. It was a pragmatic, political decision on his part. In the Time piece that I linked, the one that talks about the Obamas not going to church on Christmas, it mentions that: “…[Obama] doesn’t have a childhood church home to attend. His mother wasn’t a churchgoer, and Obama writes in “Dreams of My Father” that his grandparents took him to church infrequently.” The church they attended most was the Unitarian Church, which although nominally Christian, is not Christian in the usual conventional sense, nor even especially religious, and tends to be very leftist politically. So, absent a true conversion experience such as you describe, I would say Obama is Christian in name only, and is such for political purposes.

  5. …when the smartest guy in the universe is going to snap to the fact that he gave his daughter a Russian boy’s nickname for a moniker.

    I’d wondered about this too. Guess that makes us the smartest guys in all the universes put together.

    You’d think that the smartest guy in this universe would have investigated the etymology of any proposed name that was off the beaten track. I understand that Sasha sounds like a girl’s name, but then so does “Diarrhea,” “Chlamydia” and “Syphilis,” each of which comports well with the AA predilection for euphony in given names for girls.

    So it coulda been worse. Much worse.

  6. Except for the fact that there was no Christmas worship, and no presents exchanged.

    Just out of curiosity, Obama didn’t happen to be “dieting” daytimes in late August through mid-September, did he?

  7. anna is right.

    People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.

    — Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father

    This is Obama’s account of his conversion experience in Jeremiah Wright’s church. There is no mention of God, Jesus, love, sin, forgiveness, or redemption.

    Barack Obama converted to an emotional identification of American blacks with the Old Testament stories of the Jews. However moving or life-changing that experience might have been for Obama, it was not a conversion to Christianity. It had nothing to do with Jesus or, apparently, even God.

    The tiny, solitary mention of Christians in the account is Obama’s confusion of Daniel in the lion’s den with Christians in the Roman arenas.

    Obama and his supporters, who parrot the claim of Obama’s Christianity, appear to be illiterate about the barest fundamentals of Christianity. It’s not just going to church, though Obama doesn’t manage that these days, even on Christmas.

  8. “Boy, when that man takes a vacation, it’s really a vacation.”

    I agree up to a point but I’m not sure that the reference to “that man” is appropriate.

    The Blame Duck is not a “man” as he traded his cajones for raisins long ago. He is the Blame Duck and should be referenced in a manner that implies he is acting not as a man but as a wuss!

    I only wish he stayed on vacation full time.

  9. A shame about those brave Iranians putting their lives on the line and all.

    But I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody outside of a small circle of friends.

    — Phil Ochs

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>