Wright and ridiculous
By Sebastian Mallaby, Washington Post, May 5, 2008

Of all the strange features of this presidential race, the tarnishing of Barack Obama has got to be the most ridiculous. First Obama was accused of anti-religious elitism. Then he was accused of identifying with the underclass anger of his spiritual mentor. Excuse me, but which is it? Am I supposed to believe that Obama is a supercilious elitist or a menacing ghetto radical? Is he contemptuous of religion or too close to a religious leader? Obama’s critics don’t bother to say. Meanwhile, real character issues go relatively unheeded.

Start with Obama’s turbulent preacher. Yes, Jeremiah Wright says some disgraceful things. But can anyone explain how that changes Obama’s qualities as a candidate? Is anyone suggesting that an Obama administration would view AIDS as a government plot to kill African Americans? Or that it would govern from the perspective that the United States is a terrorist nation? Obviously an Obama administration would do no such thing. Which makes the storm over the preacher an absurd digression.

The Wright affair tells us that Obama bonded with someone whose political views are sometimes toxic. But as a young man trying to make sense of his mixed heritage, Obama looked to Wright for spiritual guidance, not political tutorials; as a community organizer, Obama focused on Wright’s admirable social work, not his resentment of the white establishment. Indeed, Obama’s own views on race and politics were diametrically opposed to those of his pastor. This is the candidate who campaigned for as long as possible as though race were irrelevant — as though the tantalizing prospect that the United States might elect its first black president were merely incidental. A few months ago, there were those who suggested that Obama was not black enough. Now he is too black? This is preposterous. [complete article]

Clinton camp considering nuclear option to overtake delegate lead
By Thomas B Edsall, Huffington Post, May 4, 2008

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has a secret weapon to build its delegate count, but her top strategists say privately that any attempt to deploy it would require a sharp (and by no means inevitable) shift in the political climate within Democratic circles by the end of this month.

With at least 50 percent of the Democratic Party’s 30-member Rules and Bylaws Committee committed to Clinton, her backers could — when the committee meets at the end of this month — try to ram through a decision to seat the disputed 210-member Florida and 156-member Michigan delegations. [complete article]

How Hillary Clinton botched the black vote
By Thomas F. Schaller, Salon, May 5, 2008

If Hillary Clinton fails to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from Barack Obama, there will be plenty of second-guessing about how she ran her campaign. What if her loyalty to campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle and chief strategist Mark Penn had not prevented her from demoting them sooner? What if her electoral strategists had better understood the power of caucus states and the way in which votes cast there translated into delegates? What if she had actually planned for the month following Super Tuesday, thereby preventing Obama from posting the 11 straight wins after Feb. 5 that provided him the pledged delegate lead he enjoys today? But beyond these questions, one little-discussed factor (with direct or indirect relation to all of the above) appears to have had fatal consequences for Clinton’s campaign: She failed to mount a strong enough challenge to Obama’s claim on the African-American vote. [complete article]

Hillary Clinton doesn’t listen to economists
By Robert Reich, May 4, 2008

When asked this morning by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos if she could name a single economist who backs her call for a gas tax holiday this summer, HRC said “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.”

I know several of the economists who have been advising Senator Clinton, so I phoned them right after I heard this. I reached two of them. One hadn’t heard her remark and said he couldn’t believe she’d say it. The other had heard it and shrugged it off as “politics as usual.”

That’s the problem: Politics as usual. [complete article]

The all-white elephant in the room
By Frank Rich, New York Times, May 4, 2008

Bored by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive.

What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race. [complete article]

Essay on Jeremiah Wright
By Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, May 2, 2008

I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam, “Who’s telling the truth over there?” “Everyone, he said. “Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.” That’s how people see Jeremiah Wright. In my conversation with him on this broadcast a week ago and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. Over 2000 of you have written me about him, and your opinions vary widely. Some sting: “Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American hating radical,” one viewer wrote. A “nut case,” said another. Others were far more were sympathetic to him.

Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I’m not a psychologist. Many black preachers I’ve known — scholarly, smart, and gentle in person — uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course I’ve known many white preachers like that, too.

But where I grew up in the south, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else; a safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed. I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed, “We the people.” Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Connor, and Jesse Helms. Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard about and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — At this point, the media’s lack of interest in Hagee is proportionate to its lack of interest in McCain. The election story for now is above all else the Clinton-Obama fight. And this begs a different question on double standards: Why has the Doug Coe/The Fellowship story been so resolutely ignored?

It hasn’t even generated that much interest in the hyper-reactive blogosphere, and even when NBC News picked up the story a month ago, no one followed. Is it because delving into The Fellowship is going to open up such a big can of worms that involves so many leading figures from both parties that no one wants to take the risk? Or is it because The Fellowship has inserted itself so deeply into the establishment that its powerful defenders make it well nigh invulnerable to public scrutiny?

Obama has been pummeled with questions about his relationship with Wright. Isn’t it time for Hillary to answer a few on what she thinks about Doug Coe’s views on Hitler’s approach to leadership?

One last thought on the Wright issue: Everyone is a captive of their own form of parochiality and in one respect, Jeremiah Wright is in the same company as the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Each has demonstrated an apparent ineptness in handling the media, but the explanation for why they could so easily be misrepresented may be quite obvious: The privilege of those who preach is that they can expect an attentive audience, willing to listen to fully formed statements that take an hour to hear and several more to digest. They have polished their communication skills in a form that does not lend itself to the reductions that the media demands.

Fair play for false prophets
By E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, May 2, 2008

Do white right-wing preachers have it easier than black left-wing preachers? Is there a double standard?

The political explosion around the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was inevitable, given Wright’s personal closeness to Barack Obama and the outrageous rubbish the pastor has offered about AIDS, Sept. 11 and Louis Farrakhan. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — No doubt E.J. Dionne felt like he’d be on wonderfully safe territory in calling for even-handed denunciations of white right-wing preachers and black left-wing preachers.

Following in the footsteps of editorials in the Washington Post and the New York Times, Dionne sees no need to delve into the substance of Wright’s “outrageous rubbish.” After all, it was Obama himself who provided the talking points. Everyone else has happily taken cover under the insinuation that Wright’s statements were so far beyond the pale that they did not merit discussion. The effect has been that the misrepresentation of what he said has largely gone unchallenged.

These were Obama’s talking points for the media:

…when [Wright] states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS, when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century, when he equates the United States wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses. They offend me. They rightly offend all Americans. And they should be denounced.

Yet amidst all the outrage and the denunciation in the current flareup of The Wright Issue, if most Americans were asked if they knew exactly what Wright had said this time around, they would mostly have nothing to say. This time we didn’t get, nor apparently need, any sound bites to be shocked by – we could be shocked by simply being told that he had uttered “outrageous rubbish,” no hard quotes required.

But let’s consider more carefully what so many others have blithely dismissed. Let’s look at the three specific outrages and see whether they fit the level of denunciation they’ve provoked.

1. The US government and AIDS:

… based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.

In expressing his suspicions about what the US government is capable of doing, Wright cited Medical Apartheid, by Harriet A Washington, published in January, 2007. This is the opening passage from the Washington Post‘s review:

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study remains an ignominious milestone in the intertwined histories of race and medical science in U.S. society. Initiated in 1932, this tragic 40-year long public health project resulted in almost 400 impoverished and unwitting African American men in Macon County, Ala., being left untreated for syphilis. Researchers wanted to observe how the disease progressed differently in blacks in its late stages and to examine its devastating effects with postmortem dissection.

A fresh account of the Tuskegee study, including new information about the internal politics of the panel charged by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare with investigating it in 1972, lies at the center of Harriet A. Washington’s courageous and poignant book. The balance of Medical Apartheid reveals, with arresting detail, that this scandal was neither the first chapter nor the last in the exploitation of black subjects in U.S. medical research. Tuskegee was, in the author’s words, “the longest and most infamous — but hardly the worst — experimental abuse of African Americans. It has been eclipsed in both numbers and egregiousness by other abusive medical studies.”

Although medical experimentation with human subjects has historically involved vulnerable groups, including children, the poor and the institutionalized, Washington enumerates how black Americans have disproportionately borne the burden of the most invasive, inhumane and perilous medical investigations, from the era of slavery to the present day.

Among those outraged by Wright’s suggestion that the US government could have been involved in the creation of HIV, I imagine few could counter his suspicions with any factual information about the real origins of the virus. How many of the pundits could even explain what a retrovirus is, let alone where this particular one came from? Can E.J. Dionne say when and where the first natural reservoir of HIV was discovered?

Wright was rebuked as though he were a flat-earther among enlightened Copernicans.

Whether Wright’s suspicions are baseless, in the light of Tuskegee, the fact that he has them should be neither shocking nor terribly surprising.

2. Wright’s views on Louis Farrakhan:

… how many other African-Americans or European-Americans do you know that can get one million people together on the mall? He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century. That’s what I think about him.

I’ve said, as I said on Bill Moyers, when Louis Farrakhan speaks, it’s like E.F. Hutton speaks, all black America listens. Whether they agree with him or not, they listen.

Now, I am not going to put down Louis Farrakhan anymore than Mandela would put down Fidel Castro. Do you remember that Ted Koppel show, where Ted wanted Mandela to put down Castro because Castro was our enemy? And he said, “You don’t tell me who my enemies are. You don’t tell me who my friends are.”

Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains. He did not put me in slavery.

Suppose Wright made the observation: William F. Buckley was one the most important voices in America. Would anyone have said that he was praising Buckley? Or would they have merely recognized the obvious: that he was drawing attention to the extent of Buckley’s influence?

Wright’s view of Farrakhan is really a response to those who want to minimize Farrakhan’s influence by treating him as a marginal figure. The marginalization of Farrakhan is proscription dressed up as description.

Is Wright correct in saying that when Farrakhan speaks, black Americans — whether they agree with him or not — listen?

As someone who is not a black American, I don’t know, but neither I imagine do most of those white pundits who repeated the claim that Wright had “praised” Farrakhan.

3. Terrorism and the US:

You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you.

For seven years, public discourse in America has conspired to sustain the notion that the term “terrorism” has an unambiguous and objective meaning. Although in theory it is possible that we could all agree on what terrorism is, in practice it has become the prerogative of the US government to determine what are admissible and inadmissible applications of the term. “Terrorism” has become a proprietary brand and the US government holds the copyright.

On April 30, 2008, five Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched from a U.S. naval vessel off the Horn of Africa, aimed the town of Dusa Marreb in central Somalia. According to the Washington Post, the strike “leveled a house belonging to the reclusive leader, Aden Hashi Ayro, who was inside at the time with at least one of his top commanders, according to his followers.” Aryo is accused of having ties to al Qaeda. A witness said he counted 16 bodies around the crater where the missile(s) had exploded. On February 29, 2008, the US government granted itself legal authority to blow up Aryo and those in his vicinity by designating the group to which they belong, Al-Shabaab, as a terrorist organization.

Although the Pentagon cannot confirm the number or identities of all the people killed in the missile strike, anyone who would have the audacity to refer to a military action such as this, as an act of “terrorism” is sure to be denounced. Among respectable commentators, the act itself is just as sure to receive little if any comment. Somalia is a lawless state; America’s role in contributing to that lawlessness is a subject supposedly of no interest or concern to the American people.