The White House Smirks At Easter

I saw the video clip of the White House press secretary smirk derisively in response to questions regarding the lack of any formal Easter statement this year.

Critics have noted that Wonderboy observes 'made up' holidays like Kwanza, but failed to have the White House issue any sort of formal observance of this very important Christian holiday.

Defenders of the First Rookie immediately categorize these criticisms as racism and more attempts to paint him as a Muslim.

To me, as one pundit also contended, the President of the US is both the Chief Executive and the chief ceremonial officer. Thus, for a largely Judeo-Christian nation, it's been customary for years that there have been observances of certain holidays important to the largest segments of the population.

I wouldn't have minded so much if the press secretary had simply said they felt Wonderboy's attendance at a (yet another problematic, but that's a story for another post) Christian church on Easter Sunday was sufficient.

But the smirking and derogatory attitude suggesting that the issue was inane and beneath concern belied a smug satisfaction that such a formal observance of this Christian holiday had been noticed.

Obama Says We're A Muslim Nation, Not a Christian One?

You have to wonder about the sanity of a guy who simply lies about verifiable statistics.

Earlier this week, while pandering to Arabs in his speech in Egypt, Wonderboy declared that America is one of the world's largest Muslim nations, and no longer a Christian nation.

Really?

If you do what I did this morning, and simply Google two phrases, 'american muslim population,' and 'american christian population,' you will find what I did.

The American Muslim population is estimated at between 2-5MM in a country of now over 300MM people. Thus, at most, they are 1% of the nation.

So, no, we're not a Muslim country, and we're certainly not a 'large' Muslim country, if one means by large, 'largely.'

As Glenn Beck noted on his Fox News program earlier this week, two faster-growing groups of Americans are non-denominational Christians ands witches.

As for American Christians, one site provided a 2007 survey result which estimated the various sects to account for 78.4% of Americans.

So how can Wonderboy assert that a nation of 78% Christians and, at most, 1% Muslims, is now one of the world's 'largest Muslim nations?'

Is it purely pandering to Arabs and other Muslims?

Let me put it this way.

If Wonderboy ran last year as a the Muslim he now identifies himself to be, and loudly proclaimed that he would be the president of one of the world's largest Muslim nations, do you think he'd be president today?

Not a chance.

He'd have gotten the 3MM or so adult Muslim votes, and some portion of the usual liberal Democrats. But in an election which he won by less than 7 percentage points, there's no way the broad central swath of largely independent voters would have put him in the White House.

This man is a fraud and a danger to the nation. He's either completely lost touch with reality, simply lies when convenient, or is attempting to radically change an America that never wanted change like this- to be suddenly, wrongly declared to be a Muslim nation.

Wonderboy, The Kennedys & The Vatican

There is good news concerning the Vatican's position on abortion and stem cell research, and those who would seek to be an ambassador to it.

Our First Rookie has further embarrassed himself, and the daughter of a previous president, Caroline Kennedy, by having the latter rejected as the US ambassador to the Vatican.

According to news sources, add the typically clueless John Kerry into the mix for dreaming up the crazy idea in the first place.

Apparently Wonderboy either didn't know, or didn't care, that the Vatican has explicitly made clear to all nations that it will not accept ambassadors who are actively for abortion and/or stem cell research. Kennedy is, of course, stridently in favor of both.

Maybe Kerry is just to stupid to realize that the Vatican has the only version of Catholicism that counts. So Kerry's idea of what should pass for sanctioned behavior is essentially moot.

As a conservative, though, you have to love how the year has begun for Caroline. First bounced out of consideration for Senator from New York, to replace Hillary Clinton. Perhaps because of her tin ear for local politics, or perhaps for the credible stories describing her affair while married.

Now she's been hung out to dry for being an unacceptable Catholic in the eyes of the Vatican.

Looks like the administration can't seem to get anything right. Not even a simple ambassadorship to one of the world's smallest countries.

Unless, of course, Wonderboy wants to flaunt his differences with those who oppose abortion.

Wonderboy Redefines America's Religious Heritage

Our newly-elected First Rookie hit a new low in Turkey on his recent trip abroad.

This time, our First Innocent insulted the majority of Americans by declaring to the Turks that our nation is not Christian, nor Jewish. Rather, according to the guy who fell asleep in the pew of his South Chicago church for 20 years, we are a Muslim and any other kind of religious nation.

But not Judeo-Christian.

Several media outlets hurried out survey results noting that, during this Easter Week and Passover season, Americans remain overwhelmingly religious, primarily in Judeo-Christian denominations.

Is it simply denial, or truly ignorance on the part of Wonderboy?

Or just blatant pandering to the Islamic Turks? As if that were necessary.

This guy doesn't seem to care how much he embarrasses our nation in the eyes of foreigners and their governments. Stooping to alleging America is not Judeo-Christian, merely to score points with the Turkish PM?

Whichever, he seems to be continuing to chip away at his own popularity as he offends more interest groups throughout America with each passing week.

Obama Leaves His Church- Finally

This past weekend's announcement by the freshman Senator from Illinois that he is leaving his church of longstanding membership, Trinity, in Chicago, probably raised as many questions as it answered.

For example, along the lines of questions during the height of the outrage over Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright's racist and anti-American remarks, some now wonder why Obama waited so long to leave the church.

He spent a considerable amount of time and effort attempting to defend the very person and statements over which he now has left.

Further, in his statement announcing his departure, he used words to the effect that he was making no judgment on the church.

Really? That sounds awfully mealy-mouthed and tepid coming from a candidate for our nation's highest office, doesn't it?

He leaves a supposed community of his faith, but attempts to trivialize it by saying he's leaving over nothing.

Either he is separating from the congregation's and ministers' positions, or he's not. Which is it?

Is he so flighty as to leave the bastion of his faith for no particular reason? Or so cowardly that he won't condemn that with which he no longer wishes to be associated?

And, to top it all off, he informed the press that he won't be choosing another church until next year- safely after the voting in November.

As usual, Obama runs from trouble and shows no spine on even the smallest issues.

Is this who you want as President?

Naomi Riley On The Obama Religion Controversy

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a Wall Street Journal writer, penned an insightful column in yesterday's edition entitled "Obama, His Pastor and The Democrats' Religion Problem."

After reading her article, I wonder if Obama and his fellow Democrats will ever truly realize what mistake he has made this past week and twenty years.

Of Obama's choice of a church, Mr. Riley writes,

"For starters: If you join a church, it should have something to do with your faith. The consensus now seems to be that Sen. Obama doesn't really believe all of the hateful and crazy things that Pastor Wright has been saying over the years. As Mr. Obama recounts in his memoir, he went to meet Pastor Wright because he was advised that it would "help your [community organizing] if you had a church home. . . . It doesn't matter where really." So he became a member of the largest black church in the neighborhood, thereby furthering his activism and eventually getting the votes of Trinity's 8,000 congregants. Which is fine, but such an attachment is more utilitarian than religious, and sooner or later its true character will show. We have only to remember how ridiculous it seemed when Howard Dean, in 2004, admitted to leaving the Episcopal Church because his Vermont parish refused to allow a bike path on its grounds. Religious people tend to join or leave churches because of things like theology, prayer and sermons."

If that isn't sufficiently damning, how about this later passage in Ms. Riley's editorial,

"Much has been said, in an effort to excuse the toxic content of Pastor Wright's sermons, about the ways in which his speeches are part of the "black tradition." But most black churches are Baptist, Methodist or independent. They have religious doctrines with a long history. Trinity, on the other hand, belongs to the United Church of Christ, a mostly white denomination defined almost entirely by its social-justice agenda.

This is how the Rev. John H. Thomas, the UCC's (white) general minister and president, recently defended Pastor Wright: "Many of us would prefer to avoid the stark and startling language Pastor Wright used in these clips. But what was his real crime? He is condemned for using a mild 'obscenity' in reference to the United States. This week we mark the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, a war conceived in deception and prosecuted in foolish arrogance. Nearly 4,000 cherished Americans have been killed, countless more wounded, and tens of thousands of Iraqis slaughtered. Where is the real obscenity here?" It's easy to see Mr. Obama's attraction to the UCC, and it doesn't have much to do with faith."

So we see that, for Obama, choice of church and 'religion' is probably not really at all similar to those choices for truly devout worshippers with a solely religious bent. He admits he chose his church for its size and political position, not really because he had a deep need for a religious experience and a home of kindred religious spirits.

At the end of her column, Ms. Riley writes,

"When Sen. Obama does get into the religious thicket, it doesn't turn out well. Here is his recent defense of his position against gay marriage but in favor of civil unions: "If people find that controversial, then I would just refer them to the Sermon on the Mount, which I think is, in my mind, for my faith, more central than an obscure passage in Romans." As a reporter for the Baptist Press noted: "Obama's quote may open him up to further criticism from evangelicals, because it's a common evangelical belief that all of Scripture is inspired by God and equally authoritative."

As it turns out, Sen. Obama wasn't doing all that well among religious voters even before the recent controversy. Mrs. Clinton won 57% of the votes cast by white evangelicals in the Ohio Democratic primary, compared with Mr. Obama's 35%. For Democrats, Hillary's Methodist Youth Fellowship should be looking better and better."

In effect, Obama is no more a 'new style' politician than anybody else. He uses religion flagrantly to gain votes and the acceptance of a political base on the South Side of Chicago.

To most Americans, particularly those with any sort of religious background, this smacks of expediency, cynicism and hypocrisy. Not to mention cheapening everyone else's religious choices by insisting, in his speech this week, that his experiences are just like theirs, and vice versa.

But they aren't. I have heard just this week of two people walking out of a church service, and the congregation, permanently, over a minister's sermon which they found repugnant. One involved criticizing America as justly deserving the 9/11 attacks, the other a tirade from the pulpit of an Episcopalian church against wealth, followed shortly by a plea for more donations to sustain the rector's cushy lifestyle.

Real religious Americans vote on church and minister views with their feet and donations. They don't sit silently, with their children, for ten to twenty years, condoning racist and anti-American hate speech.

Not only does Obama probably not now, or ever will, realize his sin of hypocrisy in attempting to use religion as a mere stepping stone to political power. The liberal mainstream media which supports him continues, with Obama, to try to explain his debacle as one of race, rather than one of judgment and expedient misuse of religion for political gain.

Despite the media's fawning over his speech, including Peggy Noonan's somewhat muddle piece in today's weekend Wall Street Journal edition, this whole affair is not, per se, about race in America.

It is simply about a black candidate using religion in an attempt to curry favor with his core base of racist-leaning voters in Illinois' largest city early in his political career. Having been identified with a racist minister, Obama won't throw away his ticket to his core political support. Instead, he is crying 'victim' over race.

Personally, I don't think Americans will elect a victim, nor a racist. No matter what Obama and his mainstream media acolytes believe and maintain to the voting public.