Obama Ipsum

He was nominally a Muslim since there were a number of Muslims in the village where he was born. Too much blood has been shed.

For part of what has been lost these past eight years can't just be measured by lost wages or bigger trade deficits. And I've seen it in this campaign. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.

That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. And it's around this time that some pastors I was working with came up to me and asked if I was a member of a church. It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. We will all have to make concessions to achieve this. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias. The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society.

I have made a solemn pledge that I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family's premiums by up to $2500 a year. But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. "People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. More of you have cars you can't afford to drive, credit card bills you can't afford to pay, and tuition that's beyond your reach. Because in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle-class. The attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights.

There is real evil and hardship and pain and suffering in the world and we should be humble in our belief that we can eliminate them. As Commander-in-Chief, I will never hesitate to defend this nation, but I will only send our troops into harm's way with a clear mission and a sacred commitment to give them the equipment they need in battle and the care and benefits they deserve when they come home.

Thank you, God Bless you, and God Bless the United States of America.