The Michigan, Florida compromise at the DNC rules committee is the big news today, but the other headline creeping onto the front pages is Barack Obama and his family's resignation from Trinity Church in Chicago:
Barack Obama has resigned his 20 year membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in the aftermath of inflammatory remarks by his longtime pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and more recent fiery remarks at the church by another minister.
Obama campaign communications director Robert Gibbs said Obama had resigned from the church "over the last few days."
Campaign aides said they werehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifn't immediately certain how the resignation took place, whether by letter or in some other fashion, and were trying to find out.
Roland Martin on CNN just read from a letter sent from Trinity's leadership expressing their sorrow for the loss of the Obamas, and asking their parishioners to keep the family in prayer. The resignation follows the latest dust-up, over a sermon mocking Hillary Clinton by a visiting priest, Father Pfleger. My initial reaction was that it was a shame that Obama had to cave to craven, idiotic media types who feel it's their place to vet a politician's pastor, but that it was probably necessary from a pragmatic point of view. The real shame here is that American politics has become so trite, so obsessed with sidebars, that a man standing for political office has to answer for every utterance by his pastor. Next, we'll be vetting the pre-school teachers, choir directors and high school basketball coaches for any views that don't conform to a manufactured, homogenized version of phony patriotism. The media's complicity in creating this ridiculous litmus test (flag pins, platitudes and other tripe) that substitutes for a true and interactive love of country, has been nothing short of shameful.
Enough with this crap. Now that Obama has appeased "middle America" (will he be forced to join a nice, majority white, Presbytarian church next, in order to further bow to this brand of idiotic, "God bless America, civics-free nonsense?) can we please move on to real issues?
UPDATE 8:07 p.m.: Obama is holding a news conference about the Trinity resignation, and the DNC decision, right now. He made the very valid two-fold point, that had he remained at Trinity, he would continue to have to answer for every utterance from the pulpit, even by guest pastors, and the church was being unfairly inundated and scrutinized by the press, which was subjecting every sermon to its own vetting, harassing members, calling shut-in and ill people associated with the church, and generally harassing its membership. So for his own sake, but also the church's, he felt it best to resign. That's a sound explanation, and I think he's absolutely right, as well as prudent, to do what he's doing. It won't appease the right, which will continue to hang his 20 years of membership at Trinity around his neck, but it should calm the rational portions of the mainstream press.
UPDATE 2 10:22 p.m.: Politico has the transcript of Obama's presser.... almost like the kind of thing you'd find on whitehouse.gov...
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
