Along with the Fox story about Rev. Jeremiah Wright (the now-retired pastor of Barack Obama’s church), ABC News is also running a doozy. Like Fox’s, this one includes a video — but the kickback here is going to be massive.
For instance:
“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” he said in a 2003 sermon. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
As it happens, I see his basic point here. Our criminal justice system, generally, and the drug laws specifically, have negatively impacted black Americans profoundly.
If you are psychologically what you eat (as I wrote in the prior post), then it’s fair to say that what he describes in the first part of the paragraph has been part and parcel of the African-American formative diet.
What Wright was referring to is a real problem.
But along those same metaphorical lines, Wright’s damning of America suggests he’s been dining heavily on something toxic.
And then there’s this:
In addition to damning America, he told his congregation on the Sunday after Sept. 11, 2001 that the United States had brought on al Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism.
“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.
“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” he told his congregation.
Wright’s statements that the US brought 9/11 on itself is hardly a unique view (though his historical connections are pretty unusual). Personally, I think it’s a radically simplified, linear, and ultimately unhelpful conclusion, but the fundamental basis for that type of thinking isn’t fiction.
So — inflammatory rhetoric from a sometimes racially-hostile preacher means what, exactly?
Normally nothing, but — he’s been the head of Barack Obama’s church, and his spiritual advisor, for many years. To use the prior metaphor again, Wright’s world view has been part of Obama’s diet, and we (Americans) need to know how much affect this has had.
I firmly believe that Barack Obama’s feelings and views about race are precisely as he’s presented them — both on the campaign trail and in his books. However, I also think Obama’s going to have to draw very strong, clear distinctions between himself and Jeremiah Wright for the citizens of this country — much more than he’s thus far done.
And he needs to do it soon.
(Cross-posted to TMV)