The would-be “bombshell” release of a photo showing a smiling Barack Obama standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is getting a fair amount of attention this morning. Guy Benson of Townhall reports that the photographer, Askia Muhammad, “deliberately hid” the picture “from the American public for well over a decade, for the explicit purpose of shielding Obama from political backlash. Writes Benson:
Talking Points Memo has the details, including the story of a ‘panicked’ phone call placed by a Congressional Black Caucus representative … desperate to prevent the photo from going public.
The story reveals more about the character of the Congressional Black Caucus than it does anything else. Which is to say that this photograph reveals little about Obama that voters in 2008 didn’t know, and in many cases chose to ignore at the urging of the mainstream media.
“There’s nothing to see here,” the press admonished when the story of Obama’s 20-year spiritual relationship with another black nationalist kook surfaced.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
First, the Obama campaign explained that by some remarkable coincidence Barack Obama was not present in church when Jeremiah Wright delivered any of his hate-filled sermons. In one these, he intimated that the U.S. brought 9/11 on itself, while in another claimed that the CIA had imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Then there was this all-out assault on the nation as whole:
When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton field, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing “God Bless America”. No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that’s in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme.
When pressed about this, Obama initially defended himself by telling ABC News’s Charles Gibson, “It’s as if we took the five dumbest things that I’ve ever said or you’ve ever said in our lives and compressed them and put them out there,” adding that “words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue.”
The day after that interview, news that Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago was reprinting and distributing to parishioners Hamas literature surfaced. Obama conceded that was wrong.
Finally he dumped his mentor of twenty years and left the church. Yet, this seemingly open admission that Wright was the racist firebrand that his words portrayed him as was not enough to unseat Obama as a candidate or ultimately president of the United States for eight years.
It’s hard to imagine that a photo of him cozying up Louis Farrakhan would have made a shred of difference.
