Rick Reuben wrote:fidelista wrote:When you take a sentence Obama said and repeat it without context to make him look like a shitheal, you are doing the same thing the media did to Wright.
How can it be out of context? Obama says exactly what he means right here:
Obama described Wright as a "brilliant man who was still stuck in a time warp."
That's a complete thought. He says that Wright has not caught up to modern times. What context is it missing?
The full quote is: “What they spoke to was, I think, a brilliant man who was still caught in a time warp back in the ’60s, early ’70s and the ’50s, where he grew up, and had a sense of where America was and didn’t have a good enough sense of how it had changed”.
Later on in the same interview he says: "I think he's saddened by what's happened, and I told him I feel badly that he has been characterized just in this one way, and people haven't seen this broader aspect of him."
Obama clearly still has respect for Wright, and defends him as a good person and friend. I don't think you have to agree with every inartful statement your friends make, even if you agree with their larger point, but that's just me. If take the above and reduce it down to "He's stuck in a time warp" it becomes misleading. Just like how they took a sermon about government acting evil towards it's own citizens and reduced it down to "No, no, no... God DAMN America!" and played it in continuous loop night and day. In fact, right-wingers continue to criticize Obama for not throwing Wright under the bus, so it's weird to see Obama criticized for doing exactly that.
If Obama turned it into a fight about how his pastors comments were taken out of context, and that his pastor might have a point, he would just be provoking a fight he can't win. Context is meaningless to the media. He might as well start a fight with a grizzly bear armed with only a short stick. The best thing Obama can do is to point out how ridiculous it is to hold him accountable for every controversial statement anyone he's ever known in his life has said, and disagree with the comments as presented in the media.
The media clearly believe that the US can do no wrong, and any wrongdoing it commits is only in pursuit of some greater good. Even if they don't believe that personally, they are convinced that every bumblefuck out in TV land believes it so it should be reported that way. Even when the "enlightened" newsfolk and pundits in the media say they understand the context, they quickly change the subject and pontificate about how the dumbass rubes in voterland won't understand it. Context and meaning are thrown away, trivial details of the bigger story, all that matters is perception. Defending context and meaning is pointless. It really doesn't matter to the media, and they have no plans to discuss it further, or to allow the "public" discourse to be steered in that direction and have an honest debate about it.
Most likely, they want the public to think that way. They don't want people asking if the government does evil acts, is corrupt, or if our enemies actions and anger are in any way motivated by our previous actions as a nation. If people think that way then, for example, when our president initiates a war that basically murders a million people and turns millions more into hopeless refugees, it's just an "honest mistake" and no should be held accountable for it. Nevermind the vast history of previous US administrations committing the same type of horrible acts, or the numerous piles of evidence indicating that the President is a corrupt shitbag, surrounded by corrupt shitbags, and they should all be rotting in a prison cell for the rest of their natural lives.
“As I have said before, the ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger.”