Posted by
LibertyWorld on Monday, June 02, 2008 12:33:25 PM
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, June 02, 2008
Visiting Chicago’s St. Sabina parish this March, it was impossible to quell the suspicion that the resident pastor, firebrand activist Rev. Michael Pfleger, was bound to spell trouble for Barack Obama.
Immediately striking were the parallels between Pfleger and Obama’s soon-to-be ex-spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Like Wright, Pfleger enjoyed a friendship with the candidate stretching back twenty years. Like Wright, too, he was an unreconstructed political radical, preaching an abrasively Afro-centrist gospel of oppression that takes white “racism” as a powerful and pervasive fact of American life – a liturgical bent all the more noticeable for the fact that Pfleger, while ministering to an overwhelmingly black congregation, is himself white. It was only a matter of time, surely, before Pfleger’s penchant for off-the-cuff ad hominem – he dedicated one Good Friday service to waxing apoplectic about “the stupid people” in the media who dared to disparage his friend Jeremiah Wright – landed him in the national spotlight.
Pfleger’s moment of infamy finally arrived last week. While putting in a guest appearance at Trinity United Church of Christ, led until his recent retirement by Rev. Wright, Pfleger struck up a familiar theme: railing against alleged white racism, personified, in this instance, by Hillary Clinton. Purporting to expose “white entitlement and supremacy wherever it raises its head,” Pfleger claimed to see it in Clinton’s stymied campaign:
“I really believe that she just always thought, 'This is mine! I'm Bill's wife, I'm white, and this is mine! I just gotta get up and step into the plate.' And then out of nowhere came, 'Hey, I'm Barack Obama,' and she said, 'Oh, damn! Where did you come from? I'm white! I'm entitled! There's a black man stealing my show!’”
Sensing that he had gone too far, Pfleger tried to step back from the brink. “Sorry,” he said, “don’t want to get you into any more trouble.”
By then, of course, it was too late.