So apparently angry black pastor Jeremiah Wright gave a speech at the NAACP and to the National Press Club this morning, and the right wing blogs are up in arms.
Well, I concur. If Jeremiah Wright ever runs for President, I won’t vote for him, and I think it would be stupid to make him the Secretary of Education.
Consider this an open thread.
TheFountainHead
Man, the talking heads really can’t stand this guy….and yet they can’t get enough of him.
TR
This is such a shame. If Wright hadn’t spoken, the right-wing blogs certainly would have been calm and happy.
TR
Yep. CNN ran a viewer poll asking if they wanted to hear more about Wright, and the results were something like 75% against. And then John Roberts immediately segued into yet another segment on Wright.
nightjar
When asked if he was unpatriotic, Wright responded that he served 6 years in the military, adding the rhetorical question of how many years did Cheney serve.
How about Secretary of Snark?
Bubblegum Tate
I’m kinda starting to like this Wright guy–he’s like wingnut catnip.
TheFountainHead
I actually enjoyed his riff on the Chris Rock question. “This is like the press. I’m not 75.”
Incertus
I really enjoyed his interview with Bill Moyers–not a shock since I’m a mushy liberal–though as an atheist I was glad to see that Wright doesn’t run away from some of the ickier parts of the Old Testament, but instead finds ways to make them relevant to a contemporary audience. And I especially liked the way he talked about the racism that’s found in the Bible.
mrmobi
Yeah! Watched it all, including some really stupid questions, all of which he handled nicely.
The man is passionate about his ministry, and very powerful in his delivery. His continuing to defend his church is probably bad for Obama, but there are more important things than whether Obama wins the nomination.
Why in the world should he stand by as his church is painted as racist and “separatist?”
After seeing both the speeches in the entirety, reading the interview with Bill Moyers and seeing this speech at the National Press Club, I like him more than ever, and wish him well.
Good for him, and good for his church.
TheFountainHead
Hard to argue with that…unless of course it means McCain or Clinton end up in the white house and the whole country, white churches and black churches included, ends up in the dumpster.
vwcat
I thought Wright’s speech last night was very intelligent and engaging. I liked it.
I did not like his arrogant attitude this morning.
But, it’s not just the rightwing blogs but, the msm having a field day with this. The media is obsessed and titalated by Wright and cannot let it go.
Even though the man has shown himself not to be the cartoon they have portrayed him as, they just cannot help themselves. They are positively giddy over the possibility of doing damage to Obama even more and helping out Hillary in this effort.
Svensker
They were running part of his Press Club talk this morning on Fox. When he started talking about patriotism and how his goddaughter is just heading off to Iraq and is serving, unlike most of the people fomenting war, my husband and I both jumped to our feet and started cheering — as did many of the people in the Press Club.
The guy is smart and quite inspirational. If we lived in Chicago, I’d go to his church.
Garrigus Carraig
Wake me up when he outcrazies Hagee & Parsley. Now those guys I’d like to hear more about!
Balconesfault
Some breakthrough? This morning on the drive time AM show I listen to … it’s actually a Sports Talk channel, but in the AM they have a format with a black ex-jock/ex-coach paired with a super-white guy who’s always been allied with the conservative/developer good-old boy network here in town …
Anyway – the conservative/developer good-old boy network guy kept wanting to play long snippets of Wright’s NAACP speech – and was really visibly impressed by Wright’s message. He really got into some of Wright’s wordsmithing and delivery talking about how black culture is diminished as inferior. Still doesn’t like some of what Wright says (which puts him in camp with a lot of us) but no longer just sees him as a radical lunatic.
Funny enough, his biggest complaint – he apparently listened live, and at one point Wright says “Barak Hussein Obama” three times in a row … and he says he thought “that’s what they’ll be playing tomorrow”.
Sure enough, he said – this morning that was the ONLY sound clip available from the speech over the morning wire feed. Nothing else Wright said was being passed out in easy to include in news show format. Even white-guy conservative/developer sort was appalled.
vwcat
Clarify: the arrogance during the q and a. I could just see how the media, the Clintons and McCain and gop will go on and on about it and hurt Obama more.
I like the man, myself but, it’s the way he is portrayed even now in the news that upsets me. He is a stand in for them to attack Sen. Obama.
zzyzx
I don’t think it helps Obama, but I haven’t heard of a killer clip in it that will get played over and over again. Without that, we then move on to Tuesday’s stupid issue.
I’m so glad I’ll be in New Orleans (Jazz Fest!) next week so I’ll be forced to miss out on the build up to the election.
Zifnab
And if only John Kerry hadn’t been on that Swift Boat, the Republicans wouldn’t have anything to hold against him.
We all knew Obama was going to get smeared – and smeared hard – for some bullshit irrelevant right-wing whine fest. If America takes the bait yet again, it deserves 4 years of McPain.
Let Wright get as much media exposure as he can handle. Seeing the man up before interviewer after interviewer might make the country sick of this meme being trouted out over and over again. But once the audience discovers Wright isn’t some fringe radical as portrayed in 2-second video clips, the “OMG! LIEBRUL PREACHER!” effect will fade. That will help Obama in the long run.
On top of that, Obama’s mentor is getting top tier media treatment from a variety of outlets to – effectively – campaign for Obama for President. I’d argue that this is a very slow blow up in the GOP’s face. Once Wright is finished with his media circuit, not only will the fear factor have faded away, but Obama will be left with a high profile and able-spoken campaigner and fund raiser.
How many people came home from that NAACP fund raiser and dropped another $25 in the Obama jar?
Buck
The interview with Moyers was wonderful. How anybody could watch it and then label Wright as some kind of wack job is beyond me.
It would be an honor to have a man as President who sat in that pew for 20 years.
flyerhawk
It’s not just Right Wing Blogs that are in a tizzy over Wright.
b. hussein canuckistani
I was impressed by his NAACP speech last night, but I never saw him as a red-toothed enemy of democracy to start with. I think any right-winger who sat through the speech ought to be reassessing his view of Wright at this point, but I nexpect most of them will just hear out-of-context sound bites.
nightjar
An uncomfortable discussion on race was bound to happen once Obama became a real contender for the nom. Maybe it could have happened in a little more PC way, but after Wright’s speeches the last couple of days, I’m not so sure it won’t, in the end, be an asset to Obama.
Whether you agree with what he says or not, he has a way making you think. If the public could see some of the lesser known speeches by MLK, they would also be shocked. I think most white Americans these days are open to being challenged about their notions of race, even with provocative language , provided the vessel delivering the lesson is being honest and has reconciliation as the end goal. I think he accomplished this with his talks.
The people being outraged by this discussion weren’t going to vote for Obama anyway. It remains to be seen how many that will be.
Billy K
I thought Liebruls didn’t have preachers or churches. How can you have a church when you don’t believe in God!?
Next you’re gonna tell me Liebruls have been in the Army.
Zifnab
Um… duh they’ve been in the Army. That’s where they build up their creds as phoney soldiers so they can run on hippie capitulation platforms that lead to defeat and retreat from our enemies.
Reverend Wright doesn’t believe in God. He’s a muslim. But that’s beside the point.
cmorenc
Wright IS a distraction for Obama, but that would have been true had Wright NOT stepped forward the last few days. Wright would have continued all the way to November to be a live part of the campaign even had he personally tried to keep the most silent, low profile possible, but the only Wright the public would know would be the image from a few seconds of out-of-context sound bytes. What the last three days of high profile have accomplished is that while there’s a segment of the public that wouldn’t care for Wright no matter what, a huge segment of the public has seen a far more impressive three-dimensional image of an extremely bright, articulate man of faith who is light-years from being the cartoonish monster of an angry, unpatriotic bombastic black man the media and Obama’s opponents and critics tried to make Wright out to be.
It will be far more difficult to falsely twist and distort Rev Wright now, or to tie Obama and Wright together as neatly or closely as before. Not that they won’t try – but there will also now be film clips of a far different, more positive Wright gaining positive viral traction. Even many conservatives who have heard his Moyers interview or his NAACP speech have been impressed with the man.
4tehlulz
>>It’s not just Right Wing Blogs that are in a tizzy over Wright.
>>http://www.talkleft.com/
lol Talk “Left”
Andrew
nightjar, you sure could fool a lot of people by posting MLK Jr. speech excerpts under Rev. Wright’s name. They’d rant and rave about how horribly racist and socialist he is, but then you could set off a massive wave of cognitive dissonance.
Xanthippas
Good old TalkLeft. Notice, no commentary as to whether they agree or disagree with anything Wright says. Only endless blogging about his every move, with a bonus “this continues to hurt Obama” here and there. That is of course a wish, disguised as a statment of fact. But they’re doing their part to make it true.
Martin
It helps. The right wing blogs and 5 minute hate radio aren’t the big mobilizers. They weren’t able to stop McCain from getting the nomination even though there were unified against him. They’re the fringe and while they might carry a decent sized vote, they’re against the Democrats no matter what.
The big mobilizer in 2000 was the churches. They did the most to get Bush elected, and that’s where Wright is being played. There will be many sermons about Wright and how the media and the people in power use the church to do harm. This is where the swing voters often get reached.
Plus, the more Wright goes out there the more independent he looks. Previously people only saw Wright through Obama and couldn’t separate the two. More and more they look like different people to voters.
Rasmussen daily shows Obama pulling away slightly today. Nothing notable, but if this was working against Obama, it’s be showing up. It’s not.
Billy K
It’s gotten so that MLK is to Civil Rights as the Easter Bunny is to the Resurrection. He’s now just a blurrily defined figurehead for something most people know they should believe in, but really don’t pay attention to.
TheFountainHead
Oh man, if I had more time on my hands today that’s what I’d be doing for the rest of the day at The Corner and Hillaryis44.com. What fun!
libarbarian
Any other younger siblings out there?
At first, when I would hang out with my other brother and his friends I was “S.’s little brother”. As they got to know me on my own, however, I eventually became “T.” – a full person in my own right.
Up till now J. Wright has just been “Obamas pastor” who is automatically associated with Obama in our subconscious. The more he establishes his own public identity in areas not automatically linked to Obama, the more people with think of him as “Jeramiah Wright” and the less they will think of him as “Obamas pastor”.
flyerhawk
Apparently today’s stupidity is that Obama said He’s bored with the campaign. Of course he didn’t actually say that. Some staffers apparently think he is which, in TalkLeftLand, is the same as a direct quote.
ThymeZone
I watched his Moyers interview Friday night, and found him, in a conversational setting and tone, to be a thoughtful and intelligent man with interesting ideas.
Then I watched is appearance Saturday before the NAACP meeting in Detroit and saw a completely different person. Everything about him was different, his tone, his language, his body language, his rhetoric. And I found him profoundly annoying, exactly the kind of voice and presentation that would drive any middle class white audience right out of the room.
He has important things to say, but I think he says them in a way that is tailored to a black audience and in a way that will confuse a white audience. His words, his message taken in its entirety, speaks to unity, but his style calls up division. It’s a deliberately provocative style, which may play well in some circles but not in others.
My last thought on this guy is that he either has, or does a great imitation of someone who has, an ego the size of Jupiter.
Interestingly, every word I’ve said here can also be said about John Hagee, if you just swap the white and black references. Hagee is the mirror image of Wright, except for one key difference: Wright’s rhetoric is laced with factual references to history, where Hagee’s rhetoric is laced with imaginary nonsense.
However, my point on Hagee is that nobody is following Hagee around and making an issue of his insane views and the fact that John McCain hugs him and welcomes his endorsement. I find this extremely disturbing. Here’s a guy who preaches that American sin brought Hurricane Katrina to New Orleans, pimping a presidential candidate …. and NOBODY TALKS ABOUT IT.
What.The.Fuck.?
Billy K
We need a BSG thread. I just watched S04E03 last night, and I’m terribly scarred by the events in the last 10 minutes.
(Also pissed off at Lee. Every time I think he’s figured it out, he pulls another boneheaded move.)
Dreggas
A couple things first:
Pink floyd (or at least roger waters) endorses Obama
Second WRT Wright.
As with Obama, the more Wright speaks the less there is to use against him or Obama. Rather than foaming at the mouth and acting like a rabid pitbull (like people wanted Obama to do in the fox interview) both Wright and Obama are disarming the opposition one cudgel at a time by NOT being what everyone seems to expect them to be, angry.
Wright has completely exploded the caricature of what the press tried to make him and Obama, in many ways, did the same thing yesterday in the Fox interview. People expected a slug-fest form of gotcha, instead they got the cerebral gotcha of Obama not leaving a single opening. It’s a defensive Offensive so to speak.
jake
He is brown and raises his voice.
NSSA2NSSQ.
mrmobi
I’ve been an Obama supporter from the day he declared his candidacy. Being a Chicagoan, I’ve gotten a close look at him, and I like what I see.
That said, Hillary would not send the country to the dumpster.
There simply is no comparison between John McCain and Hillary Clinton. God alone knows what would happen to this country were McCain to implement “voodoo economics, part III.”
Hillary is someone who has spent her life advocating for progressive policies, and has worked tirelessly in support of those first for her husband, and then for the people of New York State. She is well qualified to be POTUS, just as Obama is.
Just as I don’t believe either Clinton or Obama would substantively change NAFTA, I don’t believe Clinton would bomb Iran, or rush us into a needless war. I believe the things she has said (and perhaps even her Iraq War Vote) have been because her advisers believe that because she is a woman, she has to over-compensate in the area of perceived “toughness.”
I don’t like any of this, just as I don’t like the fact that Obama had to distance himself from the comments of his pastor, which, upon a fuller reading, are really not controversial. Hysterics and racists will insist they are, but a full reading simply does not support that view.
As opposed to this manufactured Rev. Wright “controvery,” there is actually a pastor (and McCain supporter) out there who believes that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment against gays in New Orleans. Rev. Hagee also thinks Catholicism is a “cult.” The response from the media?
{crickets}
Don’t fret, though, just as long as Rev. Wright continues to defend his church we’ll have daily substance-free reports about Obama’s “angry” black pastor.
So… this is our politics. Surely we all understand here that all candidates say things during campaigns that they don’t really mean, no?
Let’s not lose sight of just how bad for this country a McCain presidency would be.
ThymeZone
As I posted yesterday, it was a masterful performance, and even garnered praise — or what passes for it — from the Faux talking heads. The worst of it was from the odious Bill Kristol, who said, it was an “eloquent performance, but lacking in substance.” Whatever the fuck that means, coming from that full-on sociopath.
Obama hit line drives throughout, and several home runs. I got the impression that as the interview wore on, he even won over Chris Wallace, who sounded early on like he had prepared himself to kill and skin a prey animal, and sounded later on like he wanted to be Obama’s pal and have a cigarette with him.
flyerhawk
TZ,
I think you know why Hagee isn’t mentioned. His is a comfortable form of religious hate. He isn’t much different than Pat Robertson.
Wright, on the other hand, is a scary black man preacher saying scary black man stuff that most white people don’t want to hear.
John Cole
You guys think I am kidding? Yuck it up all you want.
There is no way in hell I am voting for Jeremiah Wright this fall.
Hey- do we know who Hillary’s preacher is yet? I wanna watch some youtubes and take some shit out of context. Is he black? Is it a she? God, this could be fun. I wonder what Talk Left think about Hillary’s minister.
I honestly do not care if Wright is hurting or helping Obama’s campaign. What I like is that finally someone stood up to the national press and the right wing phonies and gave them the middle finger. Repeatedly. That it can from an OMG ANGRY BLACK MAN makes it even better. If I had a national platform, I would spend every day telling right-wing bloggers to go fuck themselves.
I watched his speech to the NAACP last night, and I saw the Press Club bit this morning. I am not religious, so I think the whole God thing is kind of silly to begin with, but Wright didn’t seem like a bad person, a hateful person, or even an angry person. Just seemed like a guy I may not agree with on everything who has strong opinions, but who sure as hell has done more for this country and more for a lot of people in Chicago than I ever will.
So fuck all the people who have their panties in a bunch about this guy. To hell with all the concern trolls telling us that he should just shut up and he is hurting Obama. Rev. Wright was a Marine and then spent his entire life trying to make things better for people. He can say whatever the fuck he wants. And he sure as hell didn’t send the economy into the shitter while villifying half the country and sending 4,000 people to their deaths while presiding over a torture regime. Some perspective, please.
cleek
also, McCain didn’t attend Hagee’s church for years and years. right or wrong, Obama did attend Wright’s church. the link is much more direct.
seeking and getting Hagee’s endorsement is probably just one of many required sub-quests a GOP nominee has to fulfill before he gets to battle the evil Democratic Boss at the end of the game.
DFD
Oh noes!
Billy K
You’re a Democrat now. You’ll vote for whichever unelectable candidate you’re told to vote for. Wright/Osama 2012!!!
You know, the funniest (saddest) part of this Wright “flap” is that after Monica-Gate, do you know who the Clintons turned to for marriage counseling? Jeremiah Wright. Yet, Obama won’t bring it up, even while Hillary tars and feathers him with the “radical preacher” bullshit.
John Cole
I have now seen all three. I have to say I enjoyed the NAACP speech the best. He puts on quite a show, and to hell with the delicate sensibilities of people who already hate him.
ThymeZone
Exactly. And it appears that the GOP is quite happy to have this situation, which amounts to a carefully crafted contest between the safe white guy and the scary negro.
What’s more disturbing to me is that the Clinton campaign seems perfectly content to go along with this while it serves their purposes.
Just a few sound bytes from Hillary Clinton on this subject would basically blow the GOP strategy here right out of the water.
mrmobi
Billy, could I get a link from you on that… somone should post it over at Talk Left today.
eglenn
Don’t hold back, John! :)
jake
Holy Blue Dress Batman! For a mind-blowing experience, try to imagine a Republican candidate who could keep his mouth shut about that one.
Ha ha, made your ears bleed.
Nellcote
Since the TUCC is getting bomb threats it is Rev.Wright’s DUTY to explain the church to people who may be frightened by the media coverage. And since Rev. Wright is personally getting death threats it is is RIGHT to explain his ministry.
Billy K
I read it at Sully’s place a couple weeks ago, I believe.
cleek
i think it’s safer to say the Clintons used Wright, among many others, as spiritual “cover” after Monica. they invited a bunch of preachers to brunch and Bill poured his heart out to them.
NYT.
mrmobi
Amen!
eglenn
Can’t vouch for the source, but it seems that dog won’t hunt.
He was one of 100 clergy invited to provide air cover…
Billy K
Link 1
Link 2
Oh, and here’s Hillary’s preacher. He likes Wright.
georgia pig
Right on, John. Jeez, why can’t all the conservatives out there who constantly whine about “PC” take Wright’s strongly-worded views? Hell, Wright’s not much different than my old man, and has done a hell of lot more to help other people than my old man ever did. While his NAACP speech relied a bit too much on stereotypes, he’s not Louis Farrakan. The stereotypes were more for effect than anything else, and it’s clear the guy is well read. He’s also a pretty entertaining speaker, if you’re into that style. Like you, John, I’ve never been too much for the Jesus stuff because of the magical thinking that often accompanies it, but at least Reverend Wright gives you the feel of someone who takes it seriously.
tjproudamerican
Talk Left has posted these speeches. And Jeralyn, who is in denial over the racism of many of her comment-posters, expresses surprise at all the “hostility” her readers have to Wright. That is her word.
Then she and Big Tent print every comment that could possibly be twisted against Obama. Jeralyn is sad, because her blog gets few posts when she or her other Official Bloggers post on the Supreme Court and other decisions that continue the War on The Poor, and her readers are just slightly less rabidly anti-Obama than Taylor Marsh’s actual endless racists.
The whole thing is sad, because it used to be a principle of progressives that Guilt by Association=McCarthyism. Now, Hillary Dittoheads proudly proclaim
Guilt by Association=Hillary and Clintonism.
Billy K
OK, not a counselor.
mrmobi
TZ, don’t hold your breath.
tjproudamerican
Talk left Up In Arms=Right Wing Blogs Up In Arms.
Meanwhile, Talk Left endorses Hillary’s stated intention to “obliterate” Iran, women, men, children, babies, animals, plants, air, buildings, culture, as being “deterrence”.
Crazy world.
nightjar
Ha, ha. This primary is rapidly becoming a Shakespearean comic tragedy. Lady Macbeth meets Othello
the black one, of course.
To be or not to be, that is the question?
p.lukasiak
there will be no discussion of race. Unfortunately, this will be “all about Obama by proxy”
The media is acting wholly irresponsibly here. Basically, they are creating another Al Sharpton in Wright — someone whose positions are well outside the mainstream of the leadership of the AA community, but who winds up defining the nature of any discussion of race in this country.
When the question becomes “Is Wright right?” you’ve already lost the opportunity for a serious discussion of race. Of course he’s nuts — I mean the whole “right brain/left brain” nonsense should disqualify him from being taken seriously.
Buck
Hagee is as crazy as a shit house rat.
After listening to Wright I can understand why a person might be a frequent visitor to his church or even a member.
After listening to Hagee I would not even want to be caught in the same zip code with him.
Zifnab
Wow. That’s just… epic. Mega points for that fun fact.
nightjar
The troll speaketh and says nothing.
ThymeZone
Knowing the Clintoons now as I do, I’m inclined to think that this contact was a crass move designed to solidify black support for Clinton at a critical political moment.
Dreggas
No shit sherlock, it was a swaggert moment.
ThymeZone
Whatever. I’d like to see a month or two on the subject “Is Hagee Right?”
Let’s see where that leaves us.
shera
Billy K, I just rewatched the most recent episode. Intense, and scary, as you say. It wouldn’t be fair to have a thread here if everyone hasn’t caught up. I wish Hulu would just upload the previous 3 seasons already.
John Cole
While I agree the media is acting wholly irresponsibly, I don’t think Wright’s positions are way outside the mainstream. I think the caricatures of his positions, and the “bombastic” aspects that get all the media attention appear to be outside the mainstream, but Wright does not strike me as an Al Sharpton.
Dreggas
Oh, saw Stephen King’s “The Mist” over the weekend, highly recommended.
Velvet Elvis
Hillary’s preacher? You really don’t know?
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/hillarys-prayer.html
That’s why she wants Iran to go ka-boom, so Jeebus can come home.
mrmobi
P.luk, nice work on being so consistently wrong. If you were paying attention a month or so ago, you might have read this:
Who said this?
Dean J. Snyder, Foundry United Methodist Church, March 19, 2008. Snyder is Hillary Clinton’s pastor…
P.luk, I don’t agree with Rev. Wright about right and left brain matters, but I do agree that unlike you, he has a brain.
Good job by your candidate of denigrating and demeaning members of black churches all over America. Must be strategery, huh?
Zifnab
So, p.lukasiak, will you be lambasting the Clintons for turning to Wright for marriage counciling? Yeah, I thought not.
The joke here is three-fold, though. Firstly, Wright isn’t Al Sharpton. Both have their virtues and their flaws, but trying to draw this parallel simply because they are both black and religious is going to piss a great number of religious people in-the-know off from the whole discussion.
Secondly, in the middle of economic crisis, when the government has been helpless when it has not been pro-actively destructive, airing footage of a man who is loudly damning the country isn’t going to win you the support you think it does. Kinda like the explosion over Obama’s “bitter” remark, you’re going to see a fair amount of backlash as people start taking a look at the GOP and the Bush Administration – swaddled in the flag like newborn babies – who have been labeling everyone from environmentalists to immigration opponents as “Anti-American”. When they start asking the question of what “hating America” really means, the GOP is going to find itself in a losing game.
Thirdly, even if Hillary does – somehow – manage to regain king-of-the-hill status as Democratic Nominee Front Runner, she’ll have ties to Reverend Wright too. She’s openly expressed interest at taking Obama as VP. Hillary will be no less exposed than Obama was to the exact same right-wing smears being thrown now.
So, either the smears are effective – in which case Hillary is no less screwed – or the smears aren’t effective – in which case Obama is fine. But the end game looks better for Obama than for Hillary regardless. Obama’s been taking the high road since this campaign began. Now he’s developing a kind of Teflon coating against smears and attacks. How long until the next round of “Oh My Bama!” smears lands on an increasing pool of deaf ears?
No one wants to hear this crap anymore. As Wright steps up and dispels the bogey man myth that wingnuts have erected, the nuts are going to appear that much more foolish and that much more irrelevant.
bartkid
> I think it would be stupid to make him the Secretary of Education.
I agree.
Given that Rev. Wright has six more years’ experience as a Marine than Mr. Cheney, he should be Secretary of Defense.
Andrew
And so the circle is complete. p.luksiak has become Victor David Hansen.
Those of us who aren’t eager to sacrifice our liberal, rational thinking in desperate pursuit of political power will actually go and read the speech. Wright is entirely correct about there being significant cultural differences between Africans and Europeans in learning, education, and music.
mrmobi
Hey guys, if you check the links above, you’ll see that Rev. Wright did not provide any marriage counseling to the Clintons.
He simply was asked to come to a prayer breakfast at the White House. He did speak with Wright, and send him a thank you note, but it looks like that’s all that happened.
ThymeZone
Yes he is. I have enjoyed the company of black family members in my family (I’m white myself) who were related to me by marriage … and I am very familiar with the cultural differences in a rather up close and personal way.
A sizeable chunk of white people in this country either fear, or just outright don’t like, those cultural differences. And they don’t like to hear any mention of them, much less discussion of them.
I personally don’t find that Wright’s presentation is helpful outside of the audience he is catering to. I find it off-putting, and I am about as inclined to agree with him intellectually as any white guy you can find out there. I guess I look for reaching out to others … like Barack does very effectively … and when I hear Wright, I hear chiding and challenging instead.
Zifnab
If by “highly recommended” you mean “epic fail”. That movie was good, bordering on great, right up until the very end when they through out the hands-down lamest conclusion imaginable. I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say the last 5 minutes of the movie was a textbook example of “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!”
Omg, total waste.
Dreggas
in other words, he was as much a token as the other ministers there.
Andrew
There was a good, succinct analysis by a professor on NPR this weekend:
Obama says the things that MLK Jr. said to white people.
Wright says the things that MLK Jr. said to black people.
Same coin, different sides.
ThymeZone
Hmm, not sure about that. I have pretty clear recollections of MLK, saw him in person. What I remember is the evenness of his message to different audiences, and the intellectual integrity of not only the message, but the presentation. King never had to resort to the heh-heh-heh sarcastic delivery that Wright uses. This guy is no MLK, as far as I am concerned. He seems to have chosen a theatrical, entertaining method of delivery that I am sure works in his church. Outside of that church, not so sure.
I like what Wright says. It’s smart, funny, provocative. I don’t care for his style of saying it.
flyerhawk
Thanks for the link, Andrew. So Wright spends a considerable amount of time arguing that African and Europeans are different in certain ways particularly with regard to education, language and music and Mr. Lukasiak manages to twist that into some weird claim about genetic differences between the 2 groups.
Perhaps had Mr. Lukasiak bothered to read the speech he would have realized that Mr. Wright was specifically talking about education techniques and not genetics, which he makes no reference to whatsoever.
Of course that wouldn’t really help him with his “Reverend Wright is crazy” narrative.
Svensker
Sing it, brother.
orogeny
Oh c’mon, mrmobi! It’s just one more fun fact about the Clintons. If it says something bad about them, especially if it can be interpreted to show either hypocrisy or racism, it HAS to be true.
ThymeZone
Yeah, they’re such nice, regular folks. Like your uncle Ned and Aunt Bertha, or your nice neighbor couple who retired from their factory jobs and now spend their time travelling around in their RV following the gem show circuit and collecting stamps.
Who would want to think badly of those nice Clintons?
mrmobi
Well, I didn’t say I don’t want it to be true. However, after weeks of reading the nonsense over at Talk Left, I can’t bring myself to slam the Clintons for this item, sweet as it might have been.
The Other Steve
It’s interesting, because there are huge cultural differences between different groups of white people, but we don’t seem to focus on that.
Talk to someone from a Prosperity Gospel church, and it’s almost like talking to the Amish, only the Amish actually know what they are doing and are sane about it.
TR
So Wright got up this morning and said the media had done a horrible job covering him and had badly distorted his points of view.
This afternoon, the media has issued its considered judgment that the media did not do anything wrong. Shocking, I know.
This is reminding me more and more of the Stephen Colbert routine at the White House Correspondents Dinner. He mocked the media, and they said that his mockery just wasn’t funny.
The media is still a joke, and everyone but the media realizes it.
ThymeZone
Well, the political machine doesn’t want you to do that.
If you did, you’d have to confront the fact that a large demo in this country is an insane bunch of ignorant idiots.
6000 year old earth? Hurricanes brought by God as punishment for American sin? Terri Schiavo just a snack away from finishing her PhD thesis? If we really look at this, the entire American political system gets taken apart.
What they want us to do is focus on differences that are defined by a small, relatively powerless demo that is so different you can SEE them on the street. You can’t see a person who goes to the Creation Museum in the car next to you, but you can see the negroes. And the negroes have fewer votes than the Hagee followers.
This ain’t rocket science, it’s just vote counting.
Rick Taylor
The whole brouhaha over Wright is ridiculous, but there’s still a big difference between having a man as your pastor for 20 years, and inviting him over with a group of pastors for a photo opportunity. And contrary to what you said, the Obama campaign released a photo of the event with Clinton back when Wright first became an issue. I though that was a low blow on Obama’s part, especially since up to then Hillary Clinton had kept quiet about Wright.
mrmobi
I must correct myself. I’m remembering during my college years (before automobiles) I was studying education, and one of my professors had us read A.S. Neill’s “Summerhill.”
It is the inspiring story of a teacher who was able to reach the most difficult students, using techniques which were widely ridiculed at the time.
As I remember it, one of the things Neill acknowledged was that students learn at very different rates and in different ways, and should not be forced, like a square peg into a round hole, to learn at a pace, or in a way, they cannot sustain.
He was hugely successful with students who had been thrown out of many schools before his.
Of course, we now know that the best way for students to learn is to give them tests all the time, and teach nothing but how to pass the test.
That’s worked out well so far, hasn’t it?
So, to summarize, there is virtually nothing Rev. Wright has said that this 61 year old white guy disagrees with. If I were a church-goer or a believer, I’d go to that church in a minute. In fact, I might just go to listen to the music.
However, P.luk, you still don’t have a brain. I should be forgiven my mistake about the right- and left-brain comment because I’m sleep deprived and I was under sniper fire while writing this. (It’s tough here in Chicago.)
Rick Taylor
I sometimes post at Talk Left under RickTaylor. Who are you there? And I agree with your point.
Conservatively Liberal
I think the difference is that with Moyer he is ‘interviewing’, and up on stage he is ‘orating’. In the one-on-one talk, he is engaging, contemplative and yet direct, but this is because of the discourse. But when he is ‘speechifying’, he has a style that he has developed over many years. Many churchgoing people will recognize the differences and understand them as they know that their ministers are like that. They are real people with real life experiences, and Wright has had a full life. No doubt about that. IMO, he has earned the right to say what he believes.
It is ‘hillaryous’ to read the posts at Hillaryis44. One post is decrying that Hillary is getting 30 second news bites and Wright is getting the full attention of the press. Another poster states ‘What is Wright trying to do, ruin Obama’s campaign?’, as if they would actually be concerned about that…lol! Overall, they are pissed that Wright is getting positive attention, yet they are convinced that this will hurt Obama.
But the fact that Bill Kristol has ‘endorsed Hillary’ has made their day! Yup, they are screaming batshit insane.
I think that Wright speaking out will help Obama. If all the public had going in to November was the sound bites of Wright that are played over and over, that would hurt Obama no matter what. But the more that Wright is out there and showing people the man that Obama has admired, the more this is defused. Just my opinion, I think it helps but I hope they don’t overdo it. There is the danger of that IMO.
Squelch it good now, and move on.
Jeff
Since this is an open thread…
How The Candidates Would Address The Foreclosure Crisis
KRK
I’ve never understood why this isn’t seen as being more reprehensible on McCain’s part. McCain went out of his way to solicit the endorsement of a crazed bigot for purely political gain. For 20 years, Obama attended one of the largest and most active churches in Chicago, which was headed by a pastor who pushes the oratorical envelope past many people’s comfort zones. Which one are we concerned about?
People interested in the Wright “issue” really should watch this on-the-street interview with Chicago priest Michael Pfleger, who repeatedly pwns a Fox interviewer trying to get an outrage soundbite. The priest even hits on the bunnyfication of MLK, Jr. at the end of the clip.
ThymeZone
True enough, but “ministers” are not a homogeneous lot.
I’m spoiled, I think, by MLK. I never once had the impression that he was being sarcastic or talking down to his audience or any segment of his audience. I always felt that he was calling me up to his level, and not kicking me in junk for not already being there. I think Wright is a very poor imitation of a good preacher, really, and while I admire his chutzpah and agree with him intellectually, I want to slap his face and say, hey man, you are smart enough to do a lot better job than that on that stage. If this were American Preacher Idol, you wouldn’t last past the second week compared to some of the preachers I’ve heard in my day.
But as I say, I’m spoiled, and I am hard to please.
If MLK were alive and Obama were going to his church, I seriously doubt that the media would be having so much fun with Obama’s “Reverend King problem.” That’s the difference between really good and really gratuitous preaching, in my book. Even in 1968 the media wouldn’t go after King. It’s 40 years after King, and Wright is rich material for the noise machine. Surely Wright, being the smart guy he is, could have learned something in that 40 years? Surely he studied King’s sermons and speeches?
I think Barack did, and listen to him. His presentation calls you out of your seat up to the front of the auditorium. Barack is better than Wright at this stuff, and that’s why the machine wants you to be listening to Wright and not Obama.
ThymeZone
Well, it is. The other assertion (the one you blockquoted) is just a lie. It’s one of those lies that nobody wants to challenge.
orogeny
Nothing nice about ’em. Both Hillary and Bill are politicians and, like every politician since the beginning of time, will say and do the things that they think are necessary in order to get elected. Problem is, you holier-than-thou Obama kewl kidz have decided that you’re going to take every thing that they say and twist it into the absolute worst possible interpretation. Hillary says that King couldn’t have accomplished all he did without the backing of Johnson…she’s a racist who is dissing MLK. Ferraro says that being black has been a net plus for Obama in the Democratic primary, a fact that he himself has mentioned in the past, she’s a card-carrying KKK member.
From the Lewinsky affair to Whitewater, from Rose Law billing records to health care reform, I’ve heard and read Obama supporters spouting the same lines that used to be found in the American Spectator. Nothing good happened in the Clinton years, it was just part and parcel of the horror that Obama is going to save us from. Hell, I read the other day that Hillary’s comment about retaliating in kind if Iran were to ever nuke Israel is responsible the rise in gas prices!
You talk about how horrible the Clintons are, but the tactics that have been employed by Senator Obama’s supporters have been far nastier than anything either of the actual campaigns have done. Racist, sleaze, liar, bitch, psychopath, sociopath, scum…these are only a few of the things I’ve read describing the Clintons.
I understand and expect it from John, he’s a Clinton-hater from way back. He just refocused his hatred from one side to the other.
mrmobi
OMG! That was the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long, long time.
But the media was right, it wasn’t funny… to them. There was a profound discomfort in the room with Colbert’s savage satire. Clearly, the media present thought Colbert had crossed a line. The stones on that guy must be huge, saying what he did standing just a few feet from the sociopath himself!
Unlike the appearance of Don Imus, several years earlier, in which he bludgeoned Bill Clinton, Colberts’ performance was both a political masterpiece and a true un-masking of the vile criminal conspiracy the George W. Bush administration had become, and of the complicity of the media in that conspiracy. No wonder they didn’t laugh!
Of course, it was ignored by the media. If You Tube hadn’t existed at the time, we wouldn’t be talking about it now.
cleek
whine whine whine.
i’m not planning on voting for anybody’s supporters. are you ?
Martin
Well, like it or not, the race discussion is happening. Not on a national level but in corners here and there. There’s no question of that and that alone is an improvement. Inside the progressive sphere there will be a nasty one happening once this nomination is done as many Clinton supporters really don’t understand how their arguments, non-racial as they are, are damaging across race lines. In reply, I expect to get some new perspectives here as well.
And as Andrew points out, Wright is correct. The wingnuts are choosing to distort the message, making left/right to not be a learning distinction but a narrow biological one. Anyone who has worked in this field understands the reference is simply one of learning styles (an outdated one that definitely needs to be retired) and has little to do with biology. Educators have focused on differences in learning styles for decades and the origins of those differences in each individual is a hodgepodge of biology, personality, and social environment and where social environment comes into play, only someone truly dishonest with their words could claim that an irish catholic household is going to look like a black baptist household to a child raised in it. Our schools are too often dominated by teaching approaches that favor certain kinds of learners. There’s a renewed debate going on now of segregating boys from girls for this very reason.
But the kinds of differences here are really quite boring and non-controversial. Generally white students are more comfortable in a competitive learning environment and black and native american students in a cooperative one. That’s also a good reflection of the cultural differences in which students tend to be raised. Those more social, cooperative cultures found among minorities also lead to more of a vocal vs written communication style and learning style. So you see much more expression and innovation in music and speech there. It’s not hard and fast by any means, but it shows the need to provide options for students.
There’s nothing terribly controversial about the observation that these differences exist. There’s controversy about *why* they exist, though. Wright certainly shouldn’t be held up as an expert on such things, but he’s correct in saying that there are differences and that these differences are deserving of attention. The wingnuts don’t want to hear about differences and as usual have chosen to skip over the point and attack the fine details just as they denied that our troops in Afghanistan might be poorly supplied using the evidence that how many soldiers are found in the reported rifle squad didn’t precisely match the field manual. It’s sad that the Clinton supporters are willing to attack progressive ideals for the sake of a single candidate, though.
Billy K
Straw Man much?
ThymeZone
Oh please, mount a defense of the Clintons and their handling of the Rose Law Firm records. Go ahead, I double dog fucking dare you. If anyone ever needed an example of people — people who should know, and do, better — putting their own interests ahead of the interests of their country and their party, you couldn’t find a better example than that. The Clintons are all about the Clintons. That’s the whole point about them.
John Cole
This reminds me of the bullshit ebonics flare-up when the right was claiming educators were going to teach ebonics, when what they were actually doing was recognizing a dialect and working to create teaching strategies to deal with those who used that dialect.
ThymeZone
Anyone remember just a year ago when the talk was that Obama wasn’t “black enough” to appeal to black voters?
Looks like the machine just kep pushing buttons until it found one that was wired to the cable news ratings box.
The Populist
Cleek,
Yep McCain didn’t go to Hagee’s church but this is the same “Rebel” that went after what he called the “Agents Of Intolerance” only to beg them for support when he needed to win the nomination.
To many Americans, if that ever comes out who will be viewed as worse? McCain who says one thing and does another or Obama who attended the same church for over 20 years and seems to be a decent man who means what he says?
Hagee is hate personified. The fact that McCain actively sought out his endorsement says a lot about McCain the man than Obama and his “preacher.” The thing Americans are tiring of is the right’s fascination with divisive b.s. In the end, that could hurt McCain rather than help him.
mrmobi
Same handle, Rick, but I haven’t posted there very much. I mostly just lurk in despair as Democrats savage the person who is probably going to be their nominee.
As someone who has a lot of respect for Hillary Clinton’s progressive credentials, I find the crowd over there very difficult to understand.
As far as the Wright “controversy” goes, I’ve actually been at black Baptist services a couple of times, and I understand what a different experience that is from most (not all) white churches. As soon as I got the full context, I realized that this was another ginned-up controversy that, of course, would not have happened if the pastor were white.
But in a political campaign, shit like this is going to happen. What is so very disappointing, given the Clintons’ long support from and for the black community, is that Hillary would not take a pass on the opportunity to make it into a full-blown savaging of the black church experience. Because the fact is, Trinity is very much in the mainstream. Shame on her for that. Couldn’t she just have referred us to the comments of her own pastor and be done with it?
You might remember that Obama was given the chance to slam her on her Tuzla lies during the last debate, and he didn’t. I thought that was great.
cleek
Obama. McCain is a saintly, affable, humble war hero.
D-Chance.
I just wonder if liberals would have been so gushy today if it had been a white guy who had said “blacks are different; they ain’t like us whites”. I doubt we’d see the same lovefest on all these blogs. The two-faced responses are rather amusing.
orogeny
OK
Josh E.
How come Richard Pryor can say “nigger” but Don Imus can’t? Huh? HUH?!
orogeny
That’s one of the dumbest statements I think I’ve ever read from you, Thymezone. But typical of the hyperbolic OMYGAWD THE CLINTONSARETHEWORSTEXCUSESFORHUMANBEINGSTHATEVEREXISTED!!!! framing that ya’ll use whenever talking about them.
Even if one assumes the absolute worst case scenario, that the Clintons delayed the release of the records to impede the Whitewater investigation, it hardly seems to rise to “putting their own interests ahead of the interests of their country and their party.” I;m sure if you had to endure to the kind of non-stop, well-funded personal and professional attacks to which the Clintons were subjected, you’d have been a real pussycat in dealing with your inquisitors. Remember, when the records were found, they supported Hillary’s account of her involvement.
Calouste
Fixed.
ThymeZone
Yeah, orogeny, great defense. It basically says that the records supported the Clintons’ claims.
But the games they played with the records tied up investigators, and courts, and lawyers and the public’s attention, and unless the facts as laid out in the Frontline story are wrong, which I believe they are not, then it appears to have been deliberate.
In other words, like everything else these shitheads do, it was just a big Fuck You to the world. The access to the records was not justified only if the records revealed malfeasance. The access was legally sought and, apparently, deliberately resisted for reasons we will surely never know.
Resisted for no apparent good reason other than whatever self-interested reasons the Clintons had for resisting.
Your link is to what amounts to a Rose Mary Woods defense. Nice lady makes mistake, whoops. So the Clintons throw a monkey wrench into the process by just acting like there is nothing they could do. For example, they just couldn’t have had someone go through all those old boxes of papers and look for those records, right?
Yeah. That clears it all up, and the all the rap that these assholes have accumulated over the years for being sleazy liars and evaders and spin artists is just … unjustified. They’re just folks, just like you and me. Why, their doggone ol’ records just got lost in the storage shed, is all.
orogeny
You’re absolutely right, Thymezone. The millions of dollars that the right wingers caused the government to spend investigating one bullshit charge after another against the Clintons was actually the Clinton’s fault. If they had just simply cooperated with the investigators, bent over and let them stick their noses into any hole they wanted to, they would have said “Oh sorry, and the persecution would have stopped.”
There was no fucking reason on the face of the earth for the Clinton’s to do anything to cooperate with the investigators. They knew that no matter what documentation they provide, no matter how cooperative they were, the assholes who were driving the campaign against them would have just found something else to go after. The sanctimonious, mean-spirited motherfuckers would have just said the Clintons were nothing but “sleazy liars and evaders and spin artists” and that justified anything that was done to them. I’m sure they would have found a way to throw in some sort of slimy, sarcastic remark about how “They’re just folks, just like you and me” as well.
Martin
If you look inside the education community, it happens all the time. Context matters.
Andrew
TZ:
I don’t think this is true at all. The media did go after him, especially when he started focusing on economic populism after 1965 (and his anti-war stances). The Poor People’s Campaign came in for a lot of reactionary criticism.
Of course, the FBI was also on his case… so I’d say King had it worse.
Andrew
The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV
Sasha
To be fair, satire is rarely, bust-your-gut-laughing funny. I know of no one who split their sides reading A Modest Proposal.
But damn if Colbert wasn’t dead-on target.
Wilfred
To his credit, Wright won’t play the Stepin Fetchit knee-grow to the vapors crowd, those champions of freedom who are responsible for this
I mention this onky because on a site that is supposed to be read by ‘progressives’ there are precious few concerns about the systematic elimination of dissent, even when it is innocuous. This is the age of the execrable Pipes, and his crowd.
When you start shutting down schools, with nary a whimper of protest, the next step is to stifle opposition from the pulpit.
John S.
Unfortunately that tends to happen when you decide to go for the ‘what the definition of is’ defense rather than simply be an adulterer. And the Clintonian parsing has been in full effect so far in the primary, too.
That doesn’t justify anything that is ‘done to them’, but neither does what is being done to them justify their bullshit. The ‘ends justify the means’ approach is bad whether it is practiced by a Clinton [D] or a Bush [R].
Zifnab
*Shakes Sasha’s hand*
Now you know one person. Seriously, eating babies? Freaking hilarious.
Martin
It’s called two wrongs don’t make a right. And you cooperate with the investigators because the law says you need to.
Isn’t that exactly what happened? The problem with fighting against irrationality is that it’s impossible to win on their terms. The only thing you can do it fight rationally and hope that people can tell that you were playing checkers while they were playing global thermonuclear war.
My mom still thinks that Hillary killed Vince Foster. There’s nothing the Clintons could have done one way or another to prevent some people from believing that, but now my mom has a shitload of other, true things to point to that shows how evasive the Clintons were. She justifies the crazy assertions from the non-crazy facts. That’s pretty normal, even in these parts. I think the best move is to deny them the bridge from one to the other. It’s a longer leap and some will always make it but it won’t be as many.
Andrew
A Modest Proposal is merely a precursor to dead baby jokes.
What do you call a dead baby with no arms and no legs in a swimming pool?
Bob
Dreggas
Actually I thought the ending was absolutely perfect. The ultimate in irony and a better ending than how the story ended. IIRC it ended with them just driving aimlessly through the mist.
John Cole
I think I speak for everyone when I say I am thrilled the Clintons learned how to co-opt the tactics of the VRWC for their own uses.
/vomit
orogeny
John, you hated the Clintons before your had your “conversion” and you hate them now…is that supposed to be a surprise?
montysano
On Bill Maher’s Real Time, 2 weeks ago I think, he did a segment where he asked random folks on the street: “Who are we fighting in Iraq?” The answers very terrifyingly vacuous: “umm…….. the Terrorists, right?” In other words: “Yeah, I know we’re killing someone, and I don’t really give a fuck who or why.”
Rev. Wright’s message is very simple: if you’re a Christian, or even if you just consider yourself a decent human being, and you stand idly by while innocents are slaughtered, then God will be pissed. It’s among the most basic characterizations of evil: complacency in the face of innocent death.
orogeny
Some people are just fighters…they absolutely will not give in if they think they are right. In the case of the Clinton investigations, I was cheering every time they stuck it to Ken Starr and the rest of their persecutors. Personally, I wished at the time that they would have found the records one page at a time over a two or three month period.
As far as the “definition of is,” Bill Clinton was, in my opinion, unfairly forced to testify under oath about a situation that should have never been the publics business.
He had an affair…that should have been between him and Hillary. The only reason he was forced to testify was to humiliate him. The affair had no connection or bearing on the Paula Jones case, it was simply a way for the right wingers to smear a little bit more dirt and to reduce his effectiveness a bit more. That’s one of the reasons that it is coming up now, except it’s the Obamaites (Obamians?) who are using it.
Doug H. (Fausto no more)
IOKIYAC
Josh E.
He was being sued for harassing a state employee. The judge ruled that Jones was entitled to evidence concerning his relationships with other females who had worked for him. The judge was not a member of the VWRC. Clinton made me ashamed to be a Democrat in 1997-98. Thank God his wife won’t have the opportunity to repeat the process.
Martin
I agree. But their game is fighting, not being right. They’re gonna win because forcing you to fight is the whole point. You need to make being right your game and win at that and skip the fighting part.
Clinton and her backers want to fight. It doesn’t matter what about – they’ll happily say that black voters don’t matter and that Fox News is the most fair and balanced in order to further that fight. Fighting makes them relevant and they’re desperate for Obama to screw up. He’s more likely to do that while fighting, so they fight.
You lost me there. I spend quite a bit of time at DKos and I’ve never seen anything but the random nutter say anything about Whitewater/Lewinsky and they usually get shouted down pretty fast if they use it as an attack. People there don’t like the Clintons and have long been suspicious of them. Hillary never broke 10% in straw polls on the site – ever. And if you want to see the rank-and-file Obama supporters good and bad, that’s the place to look.
Honestly, I see it mentioned somewhat often at mydd as an example of how Hillary is unfairly treated and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used as an attack supported by anything more than a lonely few. The other day someone on mydd pointed to a few such comments as ‘proof’ of unfair attacks at DKos and when I clicked through to the comments they were well on their way to being troll-rated into oblivion.
wobbly
Yes, but WHY did the NAACP and the National Press Club…suddenly invite Reverend Wright to speak?
And Bill Moyers?
Are they totally in the tank for Hillary?
And why did the Reverend accept all these invitations?
He may be in the tank for her, also.
There’s a LOT more going on here than you newly converted can understand.
AkaDad
The opponents of change are so desperate that they’re persecuting a man of faith.
Brachiator
And William Ayers didn’t teach Obama how to build a bomb, but the right wing media is eager to cast Obama as a stealth commie leftist radical separatist black muslim extremist simply because he knows Ayers and has served on board with him — as has numerous non-black politicians.
And both Clintons and the right wing are eager to create a picture which says, “Over here are the good white people who never have anything to do with radicals, and over there are Obama and Jeremiah Wright and all the Angry Negroes.”
The image is totally false. And you are correct in noting that Wright did not provide any actual counseling to the Clintons, but it is odd that there is no taint of guilt by association sticking to Bill and Hillary over this. If anything, people chuckle that Bill was exploiting black people for political gain, just business as usual.
Similarly, Bill Clinton not only endorsed former Black Panther Bobby Rush in his 2000 congressional race, but created radio spots praising him. And yet, neither the media nor the right wing are contending that Hillary is a dangerous radical who really hates America and cannot be trusted (yet).
In 1996, the Council on Foreign Relations cried like little babies over Bill Clinton’s totally reasonable support for the Irish (An Irish Policy Born in the U.S.A.: Clinton’s Break with the Past):
But I don’t see anyone, not even Rush Limbaugh, declaring Hillary Clinton to be the Senator for the IRA.
And of course, the Democratic Party itself somehow can’t acknowledge that they embrace former radicals, and that this is one of the most important legacies of the party. You know, radicals like people who advocated 40 hour work weeks, health and safety rules, pay for overtime and other notions that at one time seemed downright anti-American. But somehow now, instead of representing the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, Obama now represents everything that they want to run away from. And on the other side, Hillary has shed her progressive credentials the way a snake sheds its skin, and basks in the glow of a cautious, almost reactionary America that wants to bowl, toss back a few shots, and pretend that everything can be just like it was before.
By the way, I don’t blame Senator Clinton entirely for this (although they gleefully take advantage of this), but there is something truly despicable about how various outlets of the mainstream media love playing the game of marginalizing Obama over Rev Wright, William Ayers and other trivial matters, while composing stories which ask, in all mock seriousness, “Is Obama too black for America?”
Just Some Fuckhead
The reason it’s coming up now is because this is the kind of campaign HRC is running. If you can’t stand the heat get the fuck out of the kitchen. Politics ain’t beanbag. Sorry you are so naive about the kind of campaign the Republicans are going to run. If you can’t defense it against a few anonymous internet folks you don’t have a prayer in the general.
There.. all the Clintarded cliches trotted out in one succinct paragraph. Feels great.
Just Some Fuckhead
Some random driveby on the information superhighway who could be anyone from Brent Bellmore to Jill Bains said something unkind about the Clintons’ sordid past. This is equally atrocious – no worse! – than the Clinton’s declared campaign strategy of “throwing the kitchen sink” and completely eclipses any of the atrocious tactics and statements by HRC, Wolfson, Penn, Garin, Ickes and gang.
If you don’t believe that then you need to have some more Clintard koolaid. Did you know Obama is black and was eight years old when his neighbor blew up a building?
mrmobi
Thanks for the link Wilfred. That’s one depressing article, though. For a lot of the very extreme right, Arabic does in fact equal terrorist.
That guy Pipes sounds like a piece of work. Calling a school named after a Lebanese Christian a madrassa. Fuck these people, seriously.
The Kahlil Gibran School. Do you know his work? Some very beautiful poetry about life and love.
We (the U.S.) seem to be going through a bad patch here, dont we? Racism, sexism, homophobia and suppression of dissent.
Did we suddenly get transported back to 1958 last week?
One good thing, I don’t see Rev. Wright backing down in fight against the people trying to denigrate his church. I look forward to watching him speak about what is really happening.
Svensker
Daniiel Pipes is a bigoted nutjob with, unfortunately, more power than anyone that awful should have. A pastor friend was working with Almontaser and said she was a thoughtful, lovely person. He was outraged that Pipes got away with smearing her — he actually said some things pro-Almontaser to the NYT a few months ago, and got absolutely deluged with hate mail. Really disgusting. But also very disturbing. Can you imagine the outcry if Pipes were an Arab and Almontaser was trying to form a Jewish school?
Mylegacy
I like the Rev. Ike…er the Rev. Wright. This is a guy I’d like to sit with for a few hours and shoot the breeze over a case of Corona.
The guy came out punchin’ to defend his honour, his career and his reputation. KUDOS! While I disagree with a lot of what he said – I really took a strong liking to the MAN. This is a guy that I’d like to know better.
On one thing he is 100% correct – we have to learn to embrace our differences – see our differences through new lenses or we’re doomed to misunderstand, hate and kill each other. Someone, somewhere in this messed up world has just got to turn the cheek first. Let the first insult slip by and start to understand our neighbours. This is a very tiny blue spot in space we live on – please, lets try to live here with some respect for each other. Amen.
Now if only I wasn’t a: gay, Canadian, athiest, white man with a lisp – my views might have made some constructive contribution.
Andrew
Do you enjoy recreational abortions?
If so, I think we’ve just found Obama’s running mate!
Martin
I don’t think the Clintons are doing that at all. I think some of her supporters are, but not them.
The Clintons are saying “These are the people we feel you need to win in the general election and their say should carry more weight.” I think it’s a purely pragmatic argument to them, but unfortunately if they said “the opinion of black voters shouldn’t matter as much” they would be describing precisely the same thing – and they don’t get that. I agree with Obama that they aren’t intentionally playing racial politics, but the ‘some animals are more equal’ argument boils down into all kinds of ugly situations even if that’s not how your introduce it. They’ll hit Obama where they think he’s sensitive, but I don’t think it has anything objectively to do with race – it’s just that the media has made the race things the sensitive things to hit and the Clintons just reflexively hit there. It’s like the ‘change you can xerox’ line. That was a disaster but she couldn’t help herself. And its almost as though she knew it might be a disaster trotting out a canned line half-heartedly like that, but she did it anyway. Ring the bell and watch her drool.
The surprisingly broad campaign by Wright here makes clear there was some strategy at play. Let everyone tar the shit out of the guy (which everyone was probably powerless to stop anyway) and when they run out of gas turn the table and make the big presentation as broadly as possible to clearly show what complete asshats the media, the GOP, and to some degree Clinton is. We’ll see if it’ll work. I doubt the media will give in and play along, but I bet it will work in a lot of other communities – notably the churches.
The story on the Clinton side isn’t that Bill turned to Wright in any meaningful spiritual way, because he didn’t. The story is that the Clintons used TUCC as all politicians used TUCC – they take their trip there like every other prominent black church during campaign season to show how much they care about the community. So her ‘I would have walked out’ is marginally hypocritical in that she and Bill were perfectly happy to use the church for political points when it suited them – and you can be damn sure that they wouldn’t have walked out even if Wright had done his best Tyrone Green impersonation. But I’m still certain that they looked the other way to let Ferraro serve as the catalyst to bring Wright forward from the backwater of Hannity’s show to the mainstream. They were trusting the media couldn’t resist themselves either and they couldn’t – and Clinton could mostly stay back from the fray and still benefit from it. And to Clinton’s credit she stayed off of Wright more than almost everyone else, but still she couldn’t resist in the end when the whole thing wouldn’t stick.
Wilfred
Thanks to you and anyone else who read the article. Pipes is a menace to academic freedom in the United States, up to and including post-graduate departments. He is heavily funded and extremely well connected, which is how he got away with this and numerous other attacks and smears – including his early and intense campaign against Barack Obama.
I’ve posted here several times about academic organizations trying to resist this pig and his friends and will continue to do so.
MGK
[I haven’t read every comment so maybe it’s already been said]: This lunatic Wright is going to make Hillary the next president.
zoe from pittsburgh
Meanwhile, as we’re getting a thorough “vetting” of everything that would be thrown at Obama in the GE, we have no idea what the GOP has up their sleeve to throw at Hillary. And don’t think for a moment that everything Bill has ever done won’t be thrown at her, especially since she has defined herself as a member of Bill’s administration. Anyone here remember Bill’s 11th hour pardons? or his FALN terrorists pardons? Anyone want to get in line to defend that crap? We’ll have to if she’s the nominee.
While Hillary might have been attacked by the VRWC in the 90s what about the past 8 years? Do Hillary’s supporters remember the noxious stuff they said about her? It’ll all come back with stuff from the past 8 years on top. And it will be treated as “new” unlike the Wright crap that we’ve all heard ad nauseum.
zoe from pittsburgh
Thus far all we’ve heard from the GOP/right-wing about Hillary is OPEN PRAISE(!) about how great and strong she is– from none other than the likes of Pat Buchanan. They’re not even attempting to hide how much they want to run against her, after all, it has been their assumption and their game plan ever since she first ran for the senate. They know that she is all they need to unite their party– and raise much needed money– for McCain.
Hillary might be throwing the kitchen sink at Obama but she’s going to have the whole damn neighborhood thrown at her and we have no idea how she or the MSM will spin it because the GOP/right-wing has been noticably silent.
4tehlulz
But but Bill Kristol luvs teh Hil now everything will be OK.
/Talk Left
*vomits*
Martin
Senator Clinton, two questions: Where were you on July 20, 1993? And why did you just lie to us about your whereabouts when everyone knows you killed Vince Foster that day?
libarbarian
God Damn! That was a PWNing!!!
Conservatively Liberal
I think a large part of the press coverage is solely driven by their view that the Obama/Wright ‘controversy’ is a potential gold mine for them. The role of the traditional media in its current iteration is to find news ‘stories’ that fit the current narrative of that ‘news’ outlet. Failing that, they need to create a story that fits their narrative. In their view, this ‘issue’ has the potential to ruin a presidential campaign, further divide whites and blacks (and other minorities) along racial lines, divide people by their religion and generally get everyone at each others throats again like it is the late 50’s again. In other words, if they can shape the story and get the players to go along with it, then they have won.
The problem is that Obama and Wright are not responding like the typical politician/’bad guy’ have normally responded in the past. Obama refused to throw Wright under the bus, and Wright refuses to sit back and let people misrepresent his words. This runs counter to the conventional train of thought that ‘if this guy is bad for me, I must toss him under the bus‘ that has prevailed in the past.
So the press is insistent on making a story out of any straw that they can grasp that justifies their view that Obama is ‘doing the wrong thing’. If they can get him to revile Wright, they will have succeeded in destroying a 20+ year relationship and causing a new division where none existed before. AA’s will believe that Obama was unfairly attacked and they may be bitter enough to sit this election out, and other ardent Obama supporters may do the same.
Basically, the traditional media may be able to destroy the chances of any Democrat winning this fall, and they are going to milk this gold mine for everything that they can. Obama and Wright need to stand firm and not let the traditional media set the narrative. Wright coming out and speaking was necessary as all people really knew about him was selected sound bites taken out of context. The only people who are going to care about what was said are those who are genuinely concerned and want to understand what is behind this, and those who who think they can milk this for some more negative press.
It is a bit of a highwire act for Obama, but so far I think that he has handled this about as well as can be expected. In the past, this would have been enough to end a campaign. But Obama is not the typical politician, he does not fixate on pandering to public opinion. He presents himself as who he is and what he represents, and he wants people to base their decision on that.
We all knew that the opposition would do everything they can to take down Obama, but this time we have a way to try and counter the bullshit. In the past, everyone got fed the pablum the traditional media spewed, and there was little large scale societal interaction in politics at the national level due to the problem of the public freely communicating. The internet has changed that, but it is still immature and growing. If it is enough to counter the strength of the traditional media remains to be seen. It may have had its first round of ‘teething’ in 2006, so it will be interesting to see if the netroots has any effect in November.
I hope it does. If so, it means that the traditional media are losing their stranglehold on public opinion. We need to defang the traditional media beast, and I hope we are able to do it.
libarbarian
Amazing. I thought that the campaign against the school was stupid and unnecessary but I was willing to believe some of the stuff about it being backed by cultural radicals. I didn’t suspect that they had so thoroughly misrepresented it.
I know they are liars and yet I still underestimate the extent of their lies. When will I learn?
Just Some Fuckhead
And Tool Blitzer’s show covered the latest Wright stuff with provocative soundbites not once, not twice but three times, with Tool himself, Clintard Crowley and Dumbasa Moos.
Incredibly Jeanne Moos had the most balanced piece; a spectacular showing for an uninteresting and unfunny hack who has the sisyphean task of putting together three minutes of funny and interesting a week.
The political system is broken because it’s oversight is being tended to by silly and unserious courtiers. We aren’t going to fix Washington until we destroy the so-called fourth estate.
And I haven’t even digested how awful the Chris Matthews show was on the subject. That the spittle-flecked rotting mouth dry drunk was stunned into silence and near non-rebuttal by Ryan Lizza pointing out that Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright were, in fact, two different people, only one of whom was running for President, well.. that says it all.
But wait.. they’re both black aren’t they? Nevermind!
zoe from pittsburgh
If Chris Matthews runs against Specter I’ll be HAPPY to campaign for Specter. Seriously. That’s how repulsive and intellectually bankrupt I think Matthews is– and I’ve never voted or worked for a republican in my life. Matthews seems to confuse being a loud, ignorant, interrupting asshole with winning an argument.
Agreed. I think if Obama gets the nomination and becomes president the 4th Estate will have to reinvent itself. Maybe they should just stop talking about politics altogether and keep to the stuff they’re prepared to talk about– missing white women, Brittany Spears, etc.
Conservatively Liberal
Tweety was almost foaming at the mouth about Wright today, and it had me wondering if I missed something in what Wright said. Wright made it clear that he viewed this attack as one against his church, and that is why he is responding to it. He is not responding for Obama, he is responding to the misrepresentation of himself by the press. But they have twisted that to mean that Wright has thrown Obama under the bus, thus Obama must shun the man.
That is some convoluted logic on their part. Wright is not responding for Obama, it is that simple. He stated this was not about Obama or himself, in his opinion. It is all about his church and his congregation, that in the opinion of the press, his congregation is complicit in ‘America hating’. Obama is part of that congregation, and that is it.
In other words, Obama responds for Obama and Wright responds for Wright. That they are two separate people, and neither has the responsibility to respond for the other. But the press can’t accept this as it does not fit the narrative of a ‘scary black guy and his scary radical black preacher’, so they have to try to refocus the narrative with the latest drivel.
Listening to the news today, you would never guess that Hillary is still running. I guess that is one good consequence of this coverage…lol
Cain
Check out Sully, he has some stuff about it. I don’t think he’s particularly pleased about Wright. Other people he’s been quoting thinks that Wright is screwing Obama over with his performance this morning. Partially because he didn’t throw Farakhan under a bus, and also that he still was anti Zionism (as opposed to anti judaism)
I haven’t heard it, so I don’t know what my opinion is. I frankly, don’t give a shit. Wright can say whatever the hell he wants it’s a free country. I know who I’m supporting and I know the two men are not the same.
As for Zionism, I suppose if you’re against Israel’s policy and what not, does that make you anti-zionist? Certainly doesn’t make you anti-judaism…
cain
cain
montysano
As another commenter noted above, it’s just damn refreshing to see someone, when they’ve been Swiftboated, come out swinging. It’s refreshing to see someone speak their mind, consequences be damned. It’s nice to hear challenging statements that weren’t filtered through dreary hacks like Shrum or Rove or Carville, et al.
Hannity was positively foaming at the mouth about Wright’s characterization of some American acts as “terrorism'”. Umm…. when you name a military attack “Shock & Awe”, you might as well let the other shoe drop and just call it “Terror from Above.”
Our politics, our media, indeed our country has become so shallow, so craven. Wright has his flaws, but he’s not shallow, and he’s certainly no coward. He’s real, he’s authentic, and I’m not sure that Tweety and the other bobbleheads know how to deal with that.
zoe from pittsburgh
Zionism is quite different from the actual policies of Israel or even the establishment of the state of Israel.
Zionism is the Bible-bound belief that the Jews should have a homeland. The 60-year old state of Israel is the current incarnation of that belief. To oppose some of Israel’s policies or its right-wing government is the same as criticizing America’s government– it doesn’t automatically mean that one is anti-American.
However, things get dicey when anti-Semitic stereotypes leak into criticism of the Israeli government, which it often does because anti-Semitic stereotypes have been around for a long time. Or people mistakenly assume that the actions of Israel are supported by all Jews everywhere– they’re not. There are plenty of Jews who take issue with many of Israel’s tactics and the overall treatment of Palestinians.
So, no, in a nutshell, opposing some of the actions of the Israeli government is not necessarily anti-Zionist.
zoe from pittsburgh
Right now we have the Rev. Wright finally appearing in person, in a 3-day media blitz, removing the only mystery left in this “controversy.” I’ve come to realize that we do need to see if endless yammering about Wright can destroy Obama BEFORE he officially becomes the nominee.
Now we just have to wait and see what happens in this very unscripted moment, soon we’ll see just how much the MSM’s framing of the “Wright controversy” really matters. If it does, well, it’ll be a very sad day, but at least we knew early enough. More importantly though is if it doesn’t…
Then the GOP’s biggest weapon in its demagoguery arsenal– FEAR THE ANGRY BLACK MAN– has been tested, retested and still failed. Isn’t this THE BIG ATTACK we’ve all worried would hurt him later? What happens if it doesn’t? What if the tail isn’t wagging the dog?
montysano
Then I’ll be hopeful for the first time in quite a while. Hope you’re right, zoe. Excellent comment.
Cain
In a way, this is all good. Keep vetting the pony. Ride pony! RIDE!
cain