Ali Eteraz on Obama:
I did not start off as an Obama supporter. I was in Hillary’s camp. I thought Obama was a novelty item. Something Democrats paraded around to give the other wooden candidates a bit of glow. Then I slowly began to feel that things Obama said — and the way he handled himself in the campaign — reduced my political nihilism.
It’s clearly working. Her goal is to defeat Obama by destroying him in the next month or two, not by making a positive argument about herself. By ramping up his negatives, she also has an added threat to the superdelegates: nominate him and you’ll elect McCain. And if she cannot destroy him this time, and he gets the nomination, she will have so anathematized him with a segment of voters that McCain will beat him, and she gets to say "told you so" and run again in 2012. The new Gallup finding shows that it is working. It is Rove-Morris politics at its purest; and she and her husband are as skilled at it as anyone.
And that is one key reason why she must be beaten. A great deal is at stake. And the war is just beginning.
This is simply must-reading for any fair-minded person interested in the full Jeremiah Wright story. There are very, very few people in American religious life as respected as Martin Marty, few scholars as learned, few Christians as sincere. He has been a professor of religious history at the University of Chicago for 35 years, one of the greatest universities in the world. If you do not know of him, here his is Wikipedia page and his own home-page. More here. I have never met the man but I have read a fraction of his over 5,000 articles, was deeply informed by his masterful Fundamentalism Project (co-edited with Scott Appleby) for The Conservative Soul, and know of few more distinguished, principled or decent public figures. Along with Barack Obama, he will not disown Jeremiah Wright, or Trinity United Church of Christ, where he attended services and listened to many Wright sermons.
Read his full defense of Wright in the Chronicle of Higher Education. You will learn this:
In the early 1960s, at a time when many young people were being radicalized by the Vietnam War, Wright left college and volunteered to join the United States Marine Corps. After three years as a marine, he chose to serve three more as a naval medical technician, during which time he received several White House commendations. He came to Chicago to study not long after Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in 1968, the U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia in 1969, and the shooting of students at Kent State University in 1970.
This is a man the Fox News right calls an anti-American, a former marine who volunteered to serve his country in a war he opposed. Marty does not excuse some of the indefensible comments of Wright that have now been bludgeoned into our consciousness to the exclusion of all else. And those comments should not be excused. And they have not been excused by Obama. But Marty does say this:
The four S’s charged against Wright — segregation, separatism, sectarianism, and superiority — don’t stand up, as countless visitors can attest. I wish those whose vision has been distorted by sermon clips could have experienced what we and our white guests did when we worshiped there: feeling instantly at home.
Yes, while Trinity is "unapologetically Christian," as the second clause in its motto affirms, it is also, as the other clause announces, "unashamedly black." From its beginning, the church has made strenuous efforts to help black Christians overcome the shame they had so long been conditioned to experience. That its members and pastor are, in their own term, "Africentric" should not be more offensive than that synagogues should be "Judeocentric" or that Chicago’s Irish parishes be "Celtic-centric." Wright and colleagues insist that no hierarchy of races is involved. People do not leave Trinity ready to beat up on white people; they are charged to make peace.
Read the whole thing. It matters. Because the truth matters. Because in these complex, volatile areas, Martin Marty is a far more reliable guide to it than Sean Hannity.
He’s running media for Democratic congressional candidate, Karen Hartley-Nagle, and he’s … 16. Someone in politics has to understand MySpace, I guess.
The US military is concerned that if security collapses in Basra, it could cause the center-north to unravel, as well (this calculation is correct).
Matt:
…the details remain murky but the broad outline is that we’re continuing to see conflict between the exile party ISCI, which has been cooperating with the US and Iran in post-war Iraq, and the domestic nationalist Shiite movement associated with Muqtada al-Sadr, which has received some backing from Iran and been mostly hostile to the United States. From the point of view of American interests, this seems to be a fight in which we have no dog. Our main interest in this rivalry ought to be simply that it not turn into a bloody fight that leaves our troops in the crossfire.
The claim that “AQI is still Iraq’s No. 1 enemy” strikes me as extremely dubious, especially after months of claiming that the Surge has decimated that force and that Iraqis have long since rejected them.
One would think, too, that we’d have used the relative lull in violence of the last few months to secure the border with Iran, since that has always been a pipeline for anti-government forces.
The story of the Awakening, like that of the Surge and the Iraq War in general, can be boiled down to the way in which tactics got in the way of strategy. More specifically, it’s the story of how tactics meant to reduce our engagement in Iraq ended up having the opposite effect.
For the Bush administration, backing ISCI/Dawa is appealing for a few reasons. First, ISCI/Dawa are amenable to the US presence, whereas the Sadrist current is strongly opposed. So ensuring that ISCI maintains its political power is essential to the goals of maintaining permanent military bases and gaining preferential access to oil residing in the Shiite-dominated south. Ensuring the legitimacy of democratic process is, apparently, not quite as important.
The surge has never achieved its stated purpose: namely, to enable political progress and reconciliation between Shi’a and Sunnis. Violence has gone down, which is a wonderful thing, but it has never been clear how much of that was due to the surge itself, and how much to the fact that we paid off the Sunnis, and Sadr declared his cease-fire. I hope we’re not about to find out.
My thoughts here and here. If you are trying to catch up on the story, TPM has a synopsis.
(Photo: Iraqi Mahdi Army fighters take position during clashes in the southern city of Bara on March 26, 2008. Fighters loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr clashed again in Basra this morning, a day after running battles in Iraq’s southern oil hub killed seven people, an AFP reporter and witnesses said. Iraqi security forces launched raids on Sadr’s Mahdi Army fighters in their strongholds yesterday, sparking the heavy fighting in which around 50 people were wounded. By Essam Al-Sudani/AFP/Getty Images.)
Boys and their balls:
A reader writes:
If there is any "gay" view of Jeremiah Wright, it is that’s he’s seen as the proponent of the highly dubious theory that AIDS is a government plot against black people. Criticizing that theory, and his belief in it, is a perfectly reasonable, indeed essential, thing to do. However, much of the rest of the demonizing of Wright deflect from three items of immediate gay interest:
1) the UCC is probably the most pro-gay Christian denomination outside of MCC;
2) Wright’s church, Trinity, is the largest member of the UCC; and
3) Wright himself has become gay-affirming in recent years, though he wasn’t always.
Very, very few black pastors have confronted homophobia in the black community in the name of Jesus as powerfully as Wright has. His ghastly paranoia about the origins of HIV is indefensible, and wicked. But his Christian defense of the dignity of gay people in a very homophobic subculture is remarkable, as is his outreach to some of the most vulnerable people with HIV. And I doubt that Obama’s unprecedented defense of gay dignity in a black and a Christian context would have taken the form it has without Wright’s influence. Certainly both Wright and Obama have taken more risks and spoken more truth about gay people when it might have hurt them than the Clintons or McCain ever have or ever will. I will not defend Wright, but I do think this is worth putting out there for a fuller picture.
Disney’s subliminal environmentalist agenda revealed.
Chris Orr wonders.
