My particular distaste for Obama came when I discovered he lacked empathy – was a “user” of people – a hallmark of the narcissist. First evidenced in his state senate years – getting Emil Jones to put his name on legislation that others had worked on for years. Repeated again in the US Senate when he took to the microphones to take credit for an immigration bill (he hadn’t even attended any of its formulative meetings). This lead one US Senator to remark, “There are work horses in the senate, and there are show horses.”

Uglier still are the examples of putting his own children in Wright’s pews and throwing granny under the bus. Now he divorces Wright. It’ll be interesting to see how this one sits with the Rev. There’s a guy who has some power – and a very loud voice. Not so with his own flesh and blood.

I just don’t know if he is the one motivated to achieve all this – and in such a short span of time – or if someone or something much larger is behind it all.

He is without accomplishment (beyond education, which may have been achieved without much work on his part anyway – he’s certainly bright enough). And I read his year as Editor, Law Review was the least productive ever. Maybe we can be comforted with the thought that he might not achieve anything should he actually be elected. But his absolute blindness to evil is no comfort whatsover.

What I can’t figure out is if this is just a tale of an uncaring (except for “self”), marginally harmless narcissist, or something far more destructive yet to be realized.

genuine insight is as rare as egotism is pervasive. but there is the salon and its accoutrements. the salon is the smart set. people want to be in the salon. they acquire the accoutrements in hopes of admission. the purpose is to gratify their egos, not achieve insight. when met with success, it threatens to become narcissism. the subject believes they wield the authority insight confers.

what are the relevant accoutrements here? 60s soft socialism and the particular decadence attending the civil rights victory. from MLK Jr. we get Malcom X and Elijah Muhammad, whence Louis Farrakhan and Wright. from freedom and discipline we get license and fantasy. the popularity of the views, however inherently idiotic, provides the salon. but we also have the victory of the 60s in the universities, where the victors exploited the university’s previous, earned reputation for excellence and truth – now they have the universities, and therefore truth.

obama has all the credentials and therefore all the accoutrements. but these accoutrements, never mind their glamour, are like dorian gray – beautiful and seductive, but vampiric and ghoulish. this is decadence. and it slipped into decadent because it is in reality narcissism. it is parasitic, not symbiotic. the “reconciliation,” for example, posited by Wright is obviously not a reconciliation – the reconciliation has already taken place, it continues to take place, we live in actual fact in a constant attitude of racial reconciliation. but the conflict is preserved in the black and post-60s intellectual imagination, kept alive by those who require them for the inegrity of their decadent acoutrements, without which they would suddenly realize they are not in a salon, there is no private heroism, their is no glamour. their narcissistic little odyssey of social-heroism-by-affiliation would (probably) collapse. and then they would simply be – bourgeois, capitalists, Americans. the establishment.

just look at Wright – the guy is from a middle or upper-middle class community in Philadelphia. he served in the marines. and then he went to college and divinity school and found that his blackness Really Meant Something. it made him An Apostle. his color was the vindicated stain of injustice corrected. he was the slave in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, where the slave is wiser and more moral than the master, and is destined to win, has even already won because of this superior insight his mere position confers on him.

and so with obama. it is self-evident that the only thing he is interestd in “transcending” is George Bush and what he represents. clearly his blackness serves him in the same way it serves Wright and others who believe that their race is beatifying – who use the language of reconciliation and overcoming only as a rhetorical stick with which to beat whitey.

obviously this tendency is not as pronounced in obama, but that is the basic aesthetic-intellectual center of gravity in my opinion, and its basis is narcissism.

honestly, i bet obama’s a pretty good guy. it’s not as though most of my friends aren’t like this in one way or another. in fact i probably am too. but i just don’t want this guy to president. this kind of stuff screws up the better natural emotional reaction to things like Islamist aggression and fiscal responsability. and the fact is one of our biggest domestic problems is exactly this kind of race hucksterism, and its biggest victims are black people, for too many of whom it apparently provides too much of an intellectual temptation.

I’ve been thinking how it applies to Obama as well. And at first I thought it was more “malignant” in Wright, but perhaps it’s actually worse in Obama. With Wright, it’s obvious; with Obama, it’s been more successfully hidden. All Wright seems to need to feed his ego is attention and approval. Obama needs more: the most powerful position in the world.

Obama spoke in the slowest, most halting manner today before the press as he finally threw Wright under the bus. We knew he would finally have to do it. It was halting, IMHO, because he was taking the greatest care to hide his true motivation: self-interest. He doesn’t want to reinforce the (correct) perception that it is politically motivated.

Self is all the narcissist cares about. And that explains many (if not all) the decisions (poor judgments) Obama’s made for as much of his life as I’ve studied.

I agree with your comments. What saddens me is to see the reaction of those in the audience cheer on this hate from the pulpit. We are taught to listen to the ministers and throw out what does not line up with the word of GOD and the stuff this guy preaches is not of GOD. There is an evil in this man’s heart and unfortunately the person who had 20 years to help show him the error of his ways either kept his mouth shut or agrees with the message. Keep on fighting the good fight Bilbo Baggins.

Revelation of St. John: “and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands” (20). I believe in God of Love. I agree with you. I know that hate and ignorance are destructive for all living beings. Obama, Wright, Farrakhan (and many others like them) are worshippers of the beast that “had received his mark upon their foreheads”. I don’t feel hatred for anyone but I think that to fight Evil is a duty of every man who believes in God. Excuse me for my poor English: I am not American, but like Bilbo I fought also against the forces of darkness in the country where I was born.

The quick excuse for black on black brutality in Africa (or anything else going on, past or present, on that continent) being, of course, that the vestiges of “colonialism” are the root cause.

And that the guy running Sudan (Omar al-Bashir) who has actually hired people to kill many inconvenient “too black and not enough Muslim” souls in his own country is just a victim of white oppression.

Just as Reverend Wright will not condemn the heinous Louis Farrakhan, so none of these dissembling blamers can find an unkind word for Robert Mugabe, either.

Bottom line, whether you’re talking Reverend Wright, Farrakhan’s Muslim Brotherhood/Nation of Islam (or the view of George Clooney, for that matter), it’s all America’s fault, wherever and whatever “it” might be.

There may be validity to the idea that the Reverend Wright is such a jerk and self-aggrandizement junkie that he is willing to use his own current notoriety to even throw Barack Obama under the bus.