Category: The Dish

I guess I am late to the party, am I not? I didn’t watch Jeremiah Wright’s National Press Club performance live this morning, as every other blogger seemed to. Wright is not on the ticket of any major party, he is not Barack Obama, and I’m not going to be baited into making this campaign about him, or the boomer cultural racial obsessions that so many want this vital election to be about. But then I actually read what he said. I knew he was an exhibitionist; many of his sermons at Trinity, read in their entirety, do fall within the tradition of some prophetic teaching; I can forgive occasional outbursts from fiery preachers; he has done much good in his own neighborhood and his interview with Bill Moyers struck me as defensible; parts of his address at the Press Club were completely uncontroversial and even contained some important truths. But what he said today extemporaneously, the way in which he said it, the unrepentant manner in which he reiterated some of his most absurd and offensive views, his attempt to equate everything he believes with the black church as a whole, and his open public embrace of Farrakhan and hostility to the existence of Israel Zionism, make any further defense of him impossible. This was a calculated, ugly, repulsive, vile display of arrogance, egotism, and self-regard:

His claim that the September 11 attacks mean "America’s chickens are coming home to roost"?

Wright defended it: "Jesus said, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles."

His views on Farrakhan and Israel? "Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion. He was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter’s being vilified for and Bishop Tutu’s being vilified for. And everybody wants to paint me as if I’m anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago. He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century; that’s what I think about him. . . . Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn’t make me this color."

He denounced those who "can worship God on Sunday morning, wearing a black clergy robe, and kill others on Sunday evening, wearing a white Klan robe." He praised the communist Sandinista regime of Nicaragua. He renewed his belief that the government created AIDS as a means of genocide against people of color ("I believe our government is capable of doing anything").

This is an outright attack on the stated beliefs and policies and values of Barack Obama in a secular setting.

I can well understand why Obama has not disowned the man who helped bring him to Christ. God knows I have had some spiritual mentors whose views I cannot accept in their entirety or some allies in the struggle for gay equality who are not my ideological confreres in many other ways. I have been in a movement where many others – most others – hold views very alien to my own. Obama is a decent human being, and cutting off someone who has nurtured and sustained his faith and been a father figure to him is not in his character. If I believed for one second that Obama shared any of this bile, I couldn’t begin to support him. But Wright’s cooptation of Obama for his own agenda – his assertion that Obama’s distancing from him is insincere – requires, in fact demands a response from Obama.

Obama needs not just to distance himself from Wright’s views; he needs to disown him at this point. Wright himself, it seems to me, has become part of what Obama is fighting against: the boomer, Vietnam era’s obsession with its red-blue, white-black, pro and anti-America fixations. That is not what this election needs to be about; and Wright’s massive, racially divisive and, yes, bitter provocation requires a proportionate response.

We need a speech or statement from Obama in which he utterly repudiates this poison, however personally difficult that may be, however damaging the impact will be. The statement today will not do it. This is no longer about cynics trying to associate one man’s politics with another. It is  now about Wright attempting to associate himself and some of his noxious, stupid, rancid views with the likely Democratic nominee. Wright has given Obama no choice – and he has also given him another opportunity. He needs to seize it.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

The Rove meme, dutilfully dictated to Fred Barnes, is that Obama’s talk of bipartisanship is belied by his three years in the Senate. Anyone who believes that should read Hilzoy’s post here. It’s the definitive account based on the actual facts, which is why you won’t hear much about it in the MSM. They’re busy covering Jeremiah Wright, a man who, last time I checked, was on no ticket for public office. Money quote:

His legislation is often proposed with Republican co-sponsorship, which brings me to another point: he is bipartisan in a good way. According to me, bad bipartisanship is the kind practiced by Joe Lieberman. Bad bipartisans are so eager to establish credentials for moderation and reasonableness that they go out of their way to criticize their (supposed) ideological allies and praise their (supposed) opponents. They also compromise on principle, and when their opponents don’t reciprocate, they compromise some more, until over time their positions become indistinguishable from those on the other side.

This isn’t what Obama does. Obama tries to find people, both Democrats and Republicans, who actually care about a particular issue enough to try to get the policy right, and then he works with them. This does not involve compromising on principle. It does, however, involve preferring getting legislation passed to having a spectacular battle. (This is especially true when one is in the minority party, especially in this Senate: the chances that Obama’s bills will actually become law increase dramatically when he has Republican co-sponsors.)

In many ways, it’s hard to find any of Obama’s thoughtful legislative initiatives that did not involve outreach to Republicans.

A hospital worker stands over bodies of young children on April 28, 2008 in Beit Lahia, Gaza. According a medical source, their home was shelled on April 28, 2008, resulting in the deaths of six Palestinians including four children, their mother and a Palestinian gunman. By Abid Katib/Getty Images.

Deep throats in Switzerland.

McCain’s abandonment of fiscal conservatism and support for an open-ended occupation of Iraq is not, to my mind, a shrewd strategy for the fall, or the right policy for the country. If he wants to keep the Bush tax cuts or even deepen them, he has to show how he would cut military spending or entitlements to pay for them. And if he wants support on his Iraq policy, he has to explain how his strategy would lead to swifter withdrawal than Obama’s. Otherwise, this reader (who seems to be channeling my own views) will join many others in backing the Dems this year, however many qualms we might have about them:

I’m a staunch independent (I’ve never been a member of a political party and likely never will) who thinks progressively about issues like video games, gay marriage or getting the hell out of Iraq, but conservatively about big-government programs, earmarks and the budget. So far, the left is the only side I think indies like me hear these days that’s saying anything we can get behind (but even that’s started to sound kind of empty, lately, too). The right just wants me to come to Jesus (and by "come to Jesus", I mean "blindly accept their myopic, cynical, Machiavellian view of Christianity, in which torture is okay").

I want fiscal conservatism. I want a Goldwater-esque Republican candidate who says he is going to let people live their lives, whether he agrees with them or not. Unfortunately, I’m not going to get that, because the Republican party has forgotten what their party was built upon.

The true shame of the right is that they no longer have any message whatsoever beyond, "Democrats are traitors" and "America is a Christian nation". There is a tremendous hollowing out of the right going on right now, which I think is why Ron Paul got as much press as he did, since he was the only Republican with more to say. (There were things about him I liked, but he did always come off as kind of a nutter to me.)

I’m backing Obama this year, because I can’t see a Hillary Clinton presidency being any less divisive and hateful than the current administration. Obama, while light on the details of his plans, has the look and feel of a guy who can rebuild some of the grace that once existed between the parties. He seems like the kind of guy who can be a role-model President again and who can build bridges. I liked McCain in 2000 and I wish I could have him back, because I don’t recognize this one who stands in his place today. (Perhaps he was abducted by aliens and replaced with a robotic simulacrum?)

I hope that things get dramatically better next term, because they have to get better. The country simply can’t take much more of this.

Clark Stooksbury calls out Glenn Reynolds. Less dishonesty, I’d say, than lazy partisanship and base-pandering. Like we’re surprised?

Even "Free Tibet" flags.

He once believed in balancing the budget as well:

The American people did not support the goals of nation-building, peacemaking, law and order and certainly not warlord funding. For us to get into nation-building, law and order, etc, I think is a tragic and terrible mistake. But the argument that somehow the United States would suffer a loss to our prestige and our viability, as far as the No. 1 superpower in the world, I think, is baloney. The fact is, what can hurt our prestige, Mr. President, I’ll tell you what can hurt our viability, as the world’s superpower, and that is, if we enmesh ourselves in a drawn-out situation, which entails the loss of American lives, more debacles like the one we saw with the failed mission to capture Aidid’s lieutenants, using American forces, and that then will be what hurts our prestige."

That was 1993 with respect to Somalia. Different, of course. But not so different that conservatives now have to believe in an open-ended commitment to nation-buidling with the bulk of our entire active military in the middle of one of the most fractious non-states in the Arab Middle East. The McCain I believe in does not appear to be the McCain who is running in 2008.

Someone has added another part of a Merton lecture on four passions: love, joy, fear and sorrow. It’s an eight-minute continuation of this:

A tip – disguise yourself:

To post her blog, Sanchez dresses like a tourist and slips into Havana hotels with Web access for foreigners. It costs about $6 an hour and she can’t afford to stay long given the price and the possibility someone might catch her connecting without permission.