Since all hell broke loose last month regarding Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons, a great deal more has happened in America. Most of us swore, cussed, all but called for the burning torch. Fingers were pointed, self-righteous accusations made, and a candidate was forced to not only renounce and denounce, but also rise up to a near-death challenge and deliver one of the most memorable speeches in our history.
However, by allowing Rev. Wright to be thrown under the bus instead of pushing back, did we make a very costly mistake for which Democrats stand to pay a very high price this year? If so, how and what must we do to avoid the otherwise inevitable reprisal?
So, a few snippets were extracted from the sermons of one of America's most respected evangelists, strung together in a diabolical loop, and thrust on the nation like a bloody bait in a seafull of sharks. Again and again we saw a man declaim: Damn America! An angry nation snapped at the bait and bayed for more blood. We demanded the culprit's head on a platter wrapped with the flag. Death threats came from every quarter and were handed out by the hour. The preacher was driven underground, like the Apostles in Corinthia, and forced to retract his itinerary and cancel scheduled evangelical work.
With Fox News as midwife, a poster traitor was born, worse than any that we've known, worse than Benedict Arnold, worse than those so-called communists who were hounded out of jobs in Hollywood and on the Hill and hung on street corner lamp posts by Senator McCarthy and his hound dogs at mid-century. Nary a voice said: hush! Let's get this right. Who is this guy and what does he mean? What exactly is it that this man is saying and why?
Not before we had renounced and denounced and announced how we could never have sat down to listen to such vile sermons or subjected our young children to 20 years of supposedly hateful drivel or allowed ourselves to be associated with it rather than shifting our silly asses elsewhere as if churches are after hour coffee houses or stocks on the New York stock exchange.
Senator Obama was wedged between a rock and a hard place and for one brief moment it seemed as if his candidacy would capsize like a swift boat and drown our man with it. He fought back, but he also paid a huge price. He was forced to distance himself from his mentor, the very man who gave us the slogan of hope that everyone this election year has latched unto and felt inspired by, and Obama found himself having to describe Wright's statements as "stupid", "crazy", "misguided", "angry". He was forced to make excuses, to appear desperate to save his neck. It is difficult to imagine a worse moment in anyone's life. He couldn't even attend Easter service with his family.
And we stood by. Democrats by and large did not put up a fight and say, wait a minute, what exactly are we talking about here? What is the precise reason that this man and his parishioner must be crucified for? We seemed to be caught in a shock, paralysed, like deer with headlights flooding our eyes, we swung with the rest, doubted ourselves, lost our composure, and sang with the chorus. We watched as Jeremiah Wright was thrown under the bus for quoting Ambassador Ed Peck and the Bible. We watched him villified for what were, in most part, rather deep and thought-provoking sermons.
Other than very, very few voices here--pastordan being the first--it took another pastor, surprisingly one from the right, a conservative minister, to speak up for Jeremiah Wright while we simply made excuses for Jeremiah Wright, forgetting that here was a worthy marine and naval officer who served his country when many of our beloved Democratic leaders were ducking out of military service and running over to England to smoke but not inhale, and Republican leaders either took up posts as army typists or got scholarships and then got married all in order to avoid serving their country. Democrats ran as far as they could from the whole affair believing that we were doing a wonderful job of crisis management.
Even when former Republican candidate Mike Huckabee was busy defending Rev. Wright, Hillary Clinton chipped in on the other sider to earn a handful of votes. She wouldn't have stayed in United Church of Christ if Wright had been her pastor. But here's what Hillary Clinton's pastor had to say about that and about Wright:
When the Jeremiah Wright sound bites appeared this week, I wish white Americans could have said, "Tell us more, Dr. Wright. Explain to us what you are trying to tell us. Let’s see the videos of the entire sermon. We want to understand your perspective. We are going to try to not be defensive. We may end up disagreeing with you, but we are going to take some time to try to understand what you have to say." What a wonderful thing that would have been for white America to do.
But instead we became afraid. We can choose between fear and great joy, because in America today, in the place of our deepest oppression, we are experiencing the shock of resurrection.
In a letter from Hillary Clinton's pastor, The Rev. Dean Snyder, that was reported and quoted at length by Jack Beaird in the Minneaplois-St Paul Star Tribune ("Letter of the Day", Star Tribune, March 27, 2008), Rev. Snyder wrote:
"The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is an outstanding church leader whom I have heard speak a number of times. He has served for decades as a profound voice for justice and inclusion in our society. He has been a vocal critic of the racism, sexism, and homophobia which still tarnish the American dream.
"To evaluate his dynamic ministry on the basis of two or three sound bites does a grave injustice to Dr. Wright, the members of his congregation, and the African-American church, which has been the spiritual refuge of a people that has suffered from discrimination, disadvantage, and violence. Dr. Wright, a member of an integrated denomination, has been an agent of racial reconciliation while proclaiming perceptions and truths uncomfortable for some white people to hear.
"Those of us who are white Americans would do well to listen carefully to Dr. Wright rather than to use a few of his quotes to polarize. This is a critical time in America's history as we seek to repent of our racism. No matter which candidates prevail, let us use this time to listen again to one another and not to distort one another's truth. "
The latest we heard, even Fox News has compared Jeremiah Wright to Jesus.
I wrote numerous comments on this here as elsewhere, and yet I felt that most of us did not grasp the significance of our unconditional disavowal of Rev. Wright, which is that in simply turning our back on him, we opened the door through which the Republicans will return this Fall to haunt and taunt us especially if Barack Obama is our nominee.
ATLSandlapper wrote a diary earlier today on how the Clinton camp is continuing to use the Wright issue as a cudgel to hack at Superdelegates and the Party, alluding to "what the Republicans will do" with it come Fall. And the Clinton surrogate in question, though disingenuous, wasn't simply talking. The Republicans were the first to mention that they'd use the Wright controversy. In a blog at Politico on March 19 titled: GOP sees Rev. Wright as path to victory Jonathan Martin reported that the Republicans were already at work with the Wright debacle, feverish 527s with dud web sites hacking away at their taser of fear with which they plan to tase the Democrats come Fall.
But the reason any of that could possibly happen is because we fought shy like we always do. We ran, we ducked, we covered our faces and cried: no, we don't know that man. We didn't say, wait a minute, but he's also talking about poverty and injustice. He's talking about how the 2004 elections were stolen through the Supreme Court. He's talking about the havoc that Bush has wreaked on Iraq in our name and with our tax payer funds and the blood of our young men and women. He's talking about all the bad things that our leaders have done abroad while decent Americans are working so hard to do good in the world. He's saying the same thing about our foreign policy that Ron Paul has said on national television in presidential debates: that we sometimes make the rest of the world hate us by doing some of the stuff that we do. Paul might have been mildly booed for it, but nobody called for his head, and he's a Republican. He ain't no liberal or Black racist. So, Wright might have said some stuff that we think is way out there, but he's also talking a lot of sense, as he has earned the right to both as a citizen and as a man who honorably served this country.
We didn't push back affirmatively. We doubled back into defense, our comfort zone, that zone where we and Kerry lost the last time thanks to spurious, scurillous nonsense that could have amounted to nothing had we fought back immediately.
And that's how we let our flank open and vulnerable to further attack. That's where we went wrong.
Perhaps it is time that we rearranged the cards on the Wright issue, especially now that even Fox apparently appears to be seeing clearer, lol. And it is time that we learnt to stand and fight back, rather than run with our tails between our legs whenever the right and their agents and mouthpieces try to tase us or use fear to place a wedge between us and the rest of the American people. As they will again and again the rest of this year. With false allegations about taxes. False charges about big government. Silly arguments about abortion. Fear mongering about religion. All manner of nonsense about patriotism and the flag. And son on. Like they went after Wright and Obama in the early hours of this race, they'll come back for us sooner than later.
How we allowed the villification of Jeremiah Wright is something that we must learn from and hopefully not allow to repeat. If we can get to a place where we are able to turn this around and not simply hope that it's gone away thanks to one speech, then we would perhaps be able to take on that evil machine that's lying in ambush waiting to drown our message of hope and re-empowerment in a cauldron of diabolical bile.
We can avoid that by standing and fighting. Not tit for tat but with the force of truth and courage. Not by making excuses and washing our hands clean. Yes, we can.
UPDATE: I'd like to acknowlege the many Kossacks who have diaried about this issue and mostly in support of Rev. Wright and Senator Obama's response (the latest being Sheddhead). When I use "we" here, I'm obviously referring to Democrats as whole. For those who've taken a stand, we still need to get our position out in the media till we turn this around. Thanks for all comments.