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.

Wright, Jefferson and the wrath of God
By John Nichols, The Nation, April 29, 2008

The right response to the controversy that has been generated with regard to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. is not to run away from the United Church of Christ pastor, to condemn him, or to try to apologize for him.

Rather, it is to listen to him and to recognize that Wright’s not the disease that afflicts our body politic.

Indeed, this former Marine who became an remarkably-successful and widely-respected religious leader is in possession of the balm that has frequently proven to be the cure for what ails America — an eyes-wide-open faith in the prospect that this country can and will put aside the sins of the past and forge a future that is as just as it is righteous.

As Wright has illustrated over the past several days, in a remarkable appearance Friday on PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal and in speeches to the Detroit NAACP and the National Press Club in Washington, he is the opposite of the caricature of an angry, America-hating false prophet that has been so crudely attached to him. Deeply grounded in biblical tradition, nuanced in his understanding of race relations and historically experienced in his assessments of America’s strengths and weaknesses, he has much to say to this country at this time.

Not all of what Wright says is comforting.

Nor are his views universally appealing or entirely unassailable.

But they are very much within the mainstream of American religious and political discourse.

The problem is not Jeremiah Wright.

The problem is a contemporary political culture that has come to rely on character assassination as an easy tool for reversing electoral misfortune — and a media that willingly invites manipulation. [complete article]

Obama’s touch of class
By Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2008

It is a stereotype you have heard many times before: Besotted with latte-fueled arrogance, the liberal looks down on average people, confident that he is a superior being. He scoffs at religion because he finds it to be a form of false consciousness. He believes in regulation because he thinks he knows better than the market.

“Elitism” is thus a crime not of society’s actual elite, but of its intellectuals. Mr. Obama has “a dash of Harvard disease,” proclaims the Weekly Standard. Mr. Obama reminds columnist George Will of Adlai Stevenson, rolled together with the sinister historian Richard Hofstadter and the diabolical economist J.K. Galbraith, contemptuous eggheads all. Mr. Obama strikes Bill Kristol as some kind of “supercilious” Marxist. Mr. Obama reminds Maureen Dowd of an . . . anthropologist.

Ah, but Hillary Clinton: Here’s a woman who drinks shots of Crown Royal, a luxury brand that at least one confused pundit believes to be another name for Old Prole Rotgut Rye. And when the former first lady talks about her marksmanship as a youth, who cares about the cool hundred million she and her husband have mysteriously piled up since he left office? Or her years of loyal service to Sam Walton, that crusher of small towns and enemy of workers’ organizations? And who really cares about Sam Walton’s own sins, when these are our standards? Didn’t he have a funky Southern accent of some kind? Surely such a mellifluous drawl cancels any possibility of elitism.

It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America – the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one – perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world – the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity – become jes’ folks, the most populist fellows of them all. [complete article]

Obama at the helm
By Peter Beinart, Washington Post, April 8, 2008

Deep into a primary campaign that was supposed be over by now, Barack Obama must still answer one fundamental question. Jeremiah Wright notwithstanding, it’s not whether he’s too black. It’s whether he’s too green. Hillary Clinton has made Obama’s inexperience her chief line of attack, and if she goes down, John McCain will pick up where she left off. Luckily, Obama doesn’t have to rely on his legislative resume to prove he’s capable of running the government. He can point to something more germane: the way he’s run his campaign.

Presidents tend to govern the way they campaigned. Jimmy Carter ran as a moralistic outsider in 1976, and he governed that way as well, refusing to compromise with a Washington establishment that he distrusted (and that distrusted him). Ronald Reagan’s campaign looked harsh on paper but warm and fuzzy on TV, as did his presidency. The 1992 Clinton campaign was like the Clinton administration: brilliant and chaotic, with a penchant for near-death experiences. And the 2000 Bush campaign presaged the Bush presidency: disciplined, hierarchical, loyal and ruthless. [complete article]

The strange case of Robert Malley
By Gershom Gorenberg, The American Prospect, March 27, 2008

Of all the recent efforts to smear Barack Obama, none strikes me as stranger than the claims that one of his informal advisers on foreign affairs, Robert Malley, is anti-Israel. This, in turn, is supposed to prove that as president, Obama is liable to institute dangerous changes in U.S. policy toward Israel.

As a campaign trope, the calumny may have begun with Ed Lasky, news editor of the right-wing Web site The American Thinker, who posted a fervid attack on Malley in January. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America has taken time off from its hawkish media-bashing to post a blast at Malley on its Web site. Journalists regularly speculate on whether the Malley connection will hurt Obama among Jewish voters, though there’s no evidence of that. Meanwhile, Malley’s diplomatic colleagues — including Sandy Berger, Dennis Ross, and Martin Indyk — have issued an open letter defending him.

There’s more at work here than the usual, nearly boring, attempts to slime a liberal candidate as anti-Israel for the “sin” of supporting what Israel needs most — determined diplomatic efforts to achieve peace. Lurking in the background is another of the battles over how Israel-Palestinian history is told. In that fight, the original furious critic of Barack Obama’s adviser is former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. There’s also a lesson about Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy: Besides settling the practical questions, it requires resolving the conflicting narratives about the past. To approach this task, the next president will need not just hard work but a gift with rhetoric, with words. [complete article]