As Media Ogles, Stanley Kurtz Trumpets the Obviously Deep Obama-Wright Connections

PRECEDING POST:
- May 12 — Attention Stanley Kurtz Re Obama, Wright, Trumpet: I’ve Got You Covered
FOLLOW-UP POST:
- May 14 — Trumpet Newsmagazine: Cover Pic Highlights (Farrakhan, Sharpton, Jackson, Others)

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Stanley Kurtz of the Weekly Standard has done yet more of the investigative work into Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), and Barack Obama that the not merely fawning, but moaning and ogling press (originally on CNN; link is to YouTube; HT Michelle Malkin) won’t do.

I have been arguing for weeks that “it seems inconceivable” that Obama would never have looked at the contents of TUCC’s weekly church bulletins. Kurtz gets to the same place in his review of the issues of Trumpet Newsmagazine that he could get his hands on.

Kurtz reports that he obtained the 2006 issues of Trumpet, “from the first nationally distributed issue in March to the November/December double issue.” In “Jeremiah Wright’s ‘Trumpet,’” Kurtz reaches the only conclusion anyone still left thinking, instead of swooning, can reach (bolds are mine):

To the question of the moment–What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it?–I answer, Obama knew everything, and he’s known it for ages. Far from succumbing to surprise and shock after Jeremiah Wright’s disastrous performance at the National Press Club, Barack Obama must have long been aware of his pastor’s political radicalism. A careful reading of nearly a year’s worth of Trumpet Newsmagazine, Wright’s glossy national “lifestyle magazine for the socially conscious,” makes it next to impossible to conclude otherwise.

Wright founded Trumpet Newsmagazine in 1982 as a “church newspaper”–primarily for his own congregation, one gathers–to “preach a message of social justice to those who might not hear it in worship service.” So Obama’s presence at sermons is not the only measure of his knowledge of Wright’s views. Glance through even a single issue of Trumpet, and Wright’s radical politics are everywhere–in the pictures, the headlines, the highlighted quotations, and above all in the articles themselves. It seems inconceivable that, in 20 years, Obama would never have picked up a copy of Trumpet. In fact, Obama himself graced the cover at least once (although efforts to obtain that issue from the publisher or Obama’s interview with the magazine from his campaign were unsuccessful).

….. There can be no mistaking it. What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it? Everything. Always.

As would be expected of a preacher skilled at conveying his message, Wright has long been a multimedia purveyor of his radical “Black Liberation” theology and politics. That Trumpet has been yet another extension of those efforts should surprise absolutely no one.

As also might be expected in a slicker, more expensive production, Kurtz clearly documents that Wright’s Trumpet rhetoric is in some respects even more strident and radical than what we’ve seen in his videotaped sermons, and in the rants of Wright and others in TUCC’s weekly bulletins.

Though he doesn’t identify its title, Kurtz refers frequently to a Wright-authored opinion piece (”Looking Back, Looking Around, Looking Ahead!”) in Trumpet’s May 2006 issue to exemplify that stridency and radicalism. That very article happens to be the one Trumpet item I have been able to obtain in my search efforts. I have uploaded it to my host (first and second pages; third page; OR click on mini-pics below; images will open in separate windows) for fair use and discussion purposes:

Among the choice items you will see, some of which Kurtz also excerpted in part or full, are these (items do not appear in the same order as in original):

• “(There can be no such thing as black racism because) “Africans do not control the military, the police, the legal structure or any of the means to enforce their race prejudice.”
• “White supremacy undergirds the thought, the ideology, the theology, the sociology, the legal structure, the educational system, the healthcare system, and the entire reality of the United States of America and South Africa!”
• “Hurricane Katrina gave us some important images that are analogous to the future that our children have to learn how to navigate. When the levees in Louisiana broke alligators, crocodiles and piranha swam freely through what used to be the streets of New Orleans. That is an analogy that we need to drum into the heads of our African American children (and indeed, all children!).
          In the flood waters of white supremacy that our children have to negotiate economically, educationally, culturally, socially and spiritually, there are not only sharks in those waters, there are also crocodiles, alligators and piranha!”
• “Educating our children to the reality of white supremacy becomes crucial for African Americans and for all Americans. Educating our children is a term that I use pointedly. I do not mean “training” our children. That is a part of our problem now. We have trained our children and not educated them!”
• “We need to educate our children about the white supremacist’s foundations of the educational system, the educational philosophy and the very curricula that immerses them in a culture of white supremacy from kindergarten through graduate school!”

Readers will want to know that, at least at that time, Wright had grand plans for meeting the education “need” he identified in the last of the excerpted items above:

We are on the verge of launching our African-centered Christian school. The dream of that school, which we articulated in 1979, was built on hope. That hope still lives. That school has to have at its core an understanding and assessment of white supremacy as we deconstruct that reality to help our children become all that God created them to be when God made them in God’s own image.

I do not know whether TUCC has opened the school Wright said was “on the verge” of opening, or, if it has opened, whether Barack Obama’s daughters, Malia and Natasha, have ever attended.

I do not have the missing covers to which Kurtz refers, but as I noted Monday, I have three examples of the those covers as they were presented in related TUCC church bulletins (each opens in a new window here [May 2007; Obama alone on cover], here [roughly Jan. 2005; Obama and Wright on cover], and here [roughly March 2006; Obama is in a pantheon of roughly 15 civil-rights “leaders,” many historical, two of whom include Wright and Louis Farrakhan]).

As Kurtz concluded, “What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it? Everything. Always.”

When is someone in the traveling press going stop ogling long enough to call Barack and Michelle Obama out for the poison they have at best acquiesced to, or at worst bought into, for two decades?

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ADDENDUM: Still to come — interesting others who have graced the cover of Trumpet.

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Previous Related Posts:
- May 12 — Attention Stanley Kurtz, Re Obama, Wright, Trumpet: I’ve Got You Covered
- May 5 — The Obamas and the TUCC Bulletins — A May 5 Series:
— May 5 — Selected Quotes from Others in the Wright - TUCC Bulletins
— May 5 — MORE Selected History and Economics Lessons from the Wright-TUCC Bulletins
— May 5 — Selected History and Economics Lessons from the Wright-TUCC Bulletins
— May 5 — The TUCC Bulletins: ‘European Dominance’ and the Church’s Black-Power Roots
- May 1 — Obama Bulletin Blowback: Wright’s Stated and Sanctioned Equations of US War Efforts with Terrorism Are Nothing New, and Have Been Frequent
- April 18 — Obama’s Ongoing Nightmare: Wright’s Rants, Church Bulletin Bombshells, and More
- April 17 — Hillary Clinton Channels March BizzyBlog Wright-TUCC Bulletin Post
- April 15 – Per Rev. Wright: Jefferson a Pedophile AND Rapist, Washington Also Fathered a Slave Child
- April 8 — The Objectively Unfit Barack Obama
- March 26 — Another Bulletin Bomb from Obama’s Pastor, Plus Helpful Campaign Assistance from BizzyBlog
- March 24 — JPost Picks up Obama Condemnation of TUCC Bulletin’s Hamas Column
- March 21 — Obama (Shhh) Blasts Hamas Op-Ed in Church Bulletin, Silent on Other Bulletin Items
- March 21 — Did The New Republic Out Obama As a TUCC Bulletin Reader in March 2007?
- March 20 — Church Bulletin Bonus: Omid Safi and the Progressive Muslim Union (PMU)
- March 17 — TUCC’s Church Bulletins from July 2007 Probably Make Whether Obama Was Present on July 22 Irrelevant