I just wrote a letter to the editor of the Philadelphia Daily News in response to one of the more despicable columnswritten by Christine Flowers. Here's just one of the many piles of dreck in her column:
On Tuesday, Barack Obama had an opportunity to disassociate himself from a racist demagogue who presides over a church where, apparently, the white man is the enemy. He could have fulfilled the promise he made early in his campaign to "transcend" race, but he didn't.
Truth be told, Fowers has written a lot of despicable columns, but this one is undoubtedly one of the worst.
I've included my letter below the fold for your reading pleasure (at least I hope it's pleasure), but what is really needed is for a whole host of people as disgusted as I am with Flowers' tripe to lend their pens to the task of holding her and the Daily News accountable for spreading such damnable lies.
Please join me in denouncing Flowers and praising a truly amazing politician, Barack Obama. Send your LTEs to the Daily News at mailto:views@phillynews.com.
I am appalled at the unabashed lies strewn throughout Christine Flowers column. The video of Pastor Wright lifted from the muck of right-wing web sites by cable news networks unable to differentiate between important issues and swift-boat garbage is a small amalgam of tiny snippets of sermons spread across literally years. They are no more indicative of the great majority of his sermons than they are of the vast good works of the six thousand of members of the Trinity UCC church.
Christine Flowers is way beyond wrong when she says that Trinity UCC is a "church that preaches hatred for the white man." The truth is that "Trinity United Church of Christ is a great gift to our wider church family and to its own community in Chicago," according to UCC General Minister and President John H. Thomas, the white leader of an overwhelmingly white federation of mainstream Protestant churches. Reverend Thomas goes on to say, "At a time when it is being subjected to caricature and attack in the media, it is critical that all of us express our gratitude and support to this remarkable congregation, to Jeremiah A. Wright for his leadership over 36 years, and to Pastor Otis Moss III, as he assumes leadership at Trinity." Barack Obama is far from alone in his belief that the good works of Reverend Wright far outweigh the angry hyperbole that seeped into a small handful of the many thousands of his sermons.
Barack Obama didn’t play politics with the grossly distorted caricature of Reverend Wright being used in classic swift-boat fashion to sabotage his candidacy as Flowers purports with her out of context quotes. On the contrary, he tackled the entire issue head on in an incredibly honest, insightful and optimistic fashion. As is so typical of Barak Obama he took a bucketful of lemons and made sweet lemonade.
Rather than accept the utterly contemptible perspective of Christine Flowers, I urge your readers to watch Barack Obama’s Constitution Center speech ("A More Perfect Union") in its entirety and decide for themselves if it is one they will remember, as I expect they will, for the rest of their lives as an example of the very best a politician can offer.
FYI, I got the Reverend Thomas quote at http://www.ucc.org/... the article has many more quotes praising Trinity you can use.
PS I'm a member of the PA branch of the Rapid Response Network, yet another morph of the myriad of Dean for America volunteer groups. If you're in PA, or the general vicinity, please consider joining our merry band of LTE writers at http://groups.yahoo.com/...