Hagee and Wright

This is supposed to be a free country, and Hagee is free to express his dreadful views, as is Wright, and I am exceedingly tired of the hunt to shut people out of political discourse because they or people they associate with do not toe this or that line. Watching certain libertarians pathetically pursue mainstream “respectability” in the wake of the newsletters business with the Paul campaign was enough to make me ill. These are the sorts of people who will abandon their most popular spokesman in over a generation so that they can retain “credibility” in the eyes of people who wish them dead.

Also, there is such a thing as loyalty, and one of the best things that can be said about Obama is that he seems to understand that loyalty entails keeping faith with friends and colleagues after it has become politically dangerous to do so. A lot of people give his church grief for preaching against an aspirational “middle-classness,” and I understand the objections to this view, but at its core this view entails a call to solidarity with your community and a willingness to remain loyal to that community even though better opportunities may beckon beyond the horizon.

I have to ask seriously what kind of man Obama would be if he disowned his spiritual father for the sake of the approval of others (who may not give their approval even if he did what is being demanded). No one that I would want to entrust with any office of importance, that’s for sure.

Hagee is absurdly accepted as a mainstream figure because he strikes the “right” pose on Israel policy, whatever his own reasons for doing so, while Wright receives opprobrium at least in part because he does not.

If Obama is to be judged by the far-left company he keeps, one need only peruse his voting record.

No doubt Obama would be better off politically, and it would help his career, if he dropped Wright like a stone, but he would be a far more respectable and decent man if he refused to throw his mentor under the bus to appease the media, his critics and even his admirers. I still wouldn’t vote for him, but I could have some respect for him as someone with a degree of integrity.

From Eunomia.