Meghan Clyne of the Weekly Standard reports that President Obama has appointed Reverend Dr. Otis Moss Jr. to serve on the President's Advisory Council established as part of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (did you get all that?). Moss is the father of Reverend Otis Moss III, who succeeded the infamous Jeremiah Wright as the spiritual leader of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which Obama attended for something like 20 years.
Moss Jr. himself has close ties to Wright. According to Clyne, they shared a mentor in Samuel DeWitt Proctor, who helped give rise to black liberation theology. Ironically, it was the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference that sponsored Wright's appearance at the National Press Club last April -- the one that finally caused Obama to break with his racist, anti-American pastor.
Moss is full of praise for Wright. Last February, after Wright's anti-American ravings had come to light, Moss said he had been blessed by Wright's "genius, his creativity, his scholarship, his discipleship, his sensitivity as a prophet, and. . .his rhythmic poetry." Moss' own rhetoric is less deranged than Wright's but, as Cline shows, it is inflammatory enough. And Moss is the co-author, with Wright, of a book that refers to U.S. education and health care policy as "weapons of mass destruction."
Moss should fit in well on Obama's new Advisory Council. Other members include black liberation theologist Vashi McKenzie, who has preached at Trinity, and Jim Wallis a former (?) Marxist and a defender of Wright.
Even before breaking with Wright, Obama argued (in his Philadelphia speech) that his pastor and those like him didn't get that America had changed from when they were young. Yet Obama has now selected a misguided (according to him) "race man" to advise on spiritual matters.
Apparently, Obama finds it useful to keep the grievances of Wright and Moss alive even though he knows, and his election confirms, that they are seriously outdated.
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