The right wing media continues its "investigation" into some sermons of the former pastor of Chicago’s Trinity Church, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Wright was once the spiritual adviser to Barack Obama.
Radio personality and right wing provocateur, Sean Hannity, gleefully distorts the facts concerning Obama’s relationship to Wright and to Louis Farrakhan. Here are just a few headlines from Media Matters concerning Hannity’s distortions. But it is not just Hannity who manipulates listeners. Hannity is joined by fellow travelers such as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, and Michael Reagan among others. The spin off from these liars moves on to cable television where Chris Matthews picks it up and questions whether or not Obama ever personally criticized his pastor for views that he, Obama, did not hold. The question hangs heavily in the air. Margaret Carlson on that same show tells us she lived next door to a black church and "heard things" when the windows were open on a summer night.
They didn’t listen to the speech. They have never been in a black church. If Wright is to be condemned we must first start with Martin Luther King and then tick off all the black preachers in all the black churches all over American who have railed against racism from the pulpit.
The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said that advertising is meant to manipulate consumers into buying something they think they need. Galbraith’s theory can easily be applied to right wing talk radio and how Hannity et al manipulate listeners into voting against their own best interests through lies, distortions, misinformation, and mischief.
The Bush White House has lent right wing talk radio credence through purposeful manipulation of the news. The hosts are invited to meet with the President and they receive regular phone calls from Karl Rove. These hosts do not possess original thought or intellect. Rather they are RNC and Bush puppets mouthing whatever they have been told to say. Their listeners, mainly white men of a certain class and age, believe what they hear is true.
They now believe that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright an unpatriotic Black militant and so is Barack Obama.
In his speech on race, Barack Obama spoke to this group and had they been listening to that speech they would have heard that Obama understands that they are angry and suspicious and that in some cases they believe they have been held back due to affirmative action and other initiatives aimed at redressing wrongs. He understands their anger and wants to repair the deep wounds that have had us yelling at one another rather than talking.
But Hannity understands the anger and suspicion of some white people, too, and he along with the rest of his amazingly rich cohorts exploit that anger and suspicion with glee. It keeps them in jobs, gives them a modicum of power and celebrity, and they get to hobnob with the bigwigs in Washington. Life is good for them.
Have they hurt Barack Obama with their continual distortions of his speech on race and his ties to Jeremiah Wright? My hunch is that the regular listeners to right wing talk radio weren’t going to vote for Obama in any case. Now they feel justified. Obama is, they believe, an anti-American Black Muslim.
The liberal blogs are worried that Obama is wounded and over at MyDD Armstrong takes his fellow liberal bloggers to task for not sufficiently denouncing Wright’s comments: "There’s little doubt that most of the blogosphere or online progressives or whatever you’d like to call it, back Obama. It was over 70 percent for those that attended the Take Back America conference. [...] I was disgusted by what Wright said, and didn’t mind saying so. I said that Obama needed to throw Wright under the bus and run him over a few times, to move on from this fiasco. But unfortunately, Obama didn’t, or couldn’t, do it. That’s too bad, and will be costly for his chances. But it’s even worse that, caught up in a presidential contest in which denouncing Wright has been seen only through the prism of supporting Obama, progressives have been silent about Wright’s wrong and divisive words. That’s a terrible precedent to have set."
Conservatives and liberals don’t understand the black church and its history of activism. They didn’t hear or, if they did, they didn’t listen to the speech. They didn’t hear when Obama explained what happens in a black church and that he, a black man, would not reject his church or black Americans because of one man’s words.
Obama rejected those words of Jeremiah Wright. He did not reject the man. That is what white people want him to do. Reject the man. And they are the ones who will wound him for his loyalty to his church, his spiritual advisor, and to black people.