As I hope to have shown above, another reason to blog about Reverend Wright is that his name lends itself to all manner of good post titles. That, and the fact that every politically aware medium is abuzz with this business.
My replies to Madville Times, and to reader Mondak, have concerned the question whether the criticism aimed at Wright a few weeks ago were unfair. My interlocutors argued that Wright's positions (or at least some of them) were defensible. I disagreed. It appears that Barack Obama agrees with me, for he has now rejected Reverend Wright and his views in a more categorical way.
It is not just Obama. Bob Herbert, vehemently left-wing Bush hater in good standing, writes a scathing piece about Wright.
It’s a twofer. Feeling dissed by Senator Obama, Mr. Wright gets revenge on his former follower while bathed in a spotlight brighter than any he could ever have imagined. He’s living a narcissist’s dream. At long last, his 15 minutes have arrived. ...
All but swooning over the wonderfulness of himself, the reverend acts like he is the first person to come up with the idea that blacks too often get the short end of the stick in America, that the malignant influences of slavery and the long dark night of racial discrimination are still being felt today, that in many ways this is a profoundly inequitable society.
This is hardly new ground. The question that cries out for an answer from Mr. Wright is why — if he is so passionately committed to liberating and empowering blacks — does he seem so insistent on wrecking the campaign of the only African-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency.
That last bit is the most serious indictment of Wright on a personal level. Whatever one may think of the press for its treatment of the Wright sermons when the question hit the net, Wright II, the Sequel, was entirely the decision of the Reverend himself. Whether it was out of narcissism, as Herbert believes, or out of more laudable motive, he had to know that he was playing into the hands of the Clintons and the Republicans. It turns out that a woman who "facilitated" Reverend Wright's appearance between the Washington Press Club was a Clinton supporter. Reverend Wright obviously doesn't care.
Critics of the media and of blogs will argue that all this attention is much ado about nothing of much importance. I dissent. Elections are all about coalition building. The Democratic coalition has already split down the middle. Why stop there? Why not split Black voters, already alienated by the Clintons, into Obama and Wright factions? And while you are at it, why not split the activist core of the party along the same lines? That is what Jeremiah Wright is doing, deliberately or not.
Recent Comments