Bill Moyers did his best last night on PBS to put Barack Obama’s controversial pastor into perspective. He succeeded in showing the man’s brilliance but created unease in an observer who, by taste and temperament, is not attracted to apocalyptic preaching about the human condition.
From the interview, it’s easy to see what Obama found in Jeremiah Wright and his church that gave a new dimension to his secular desire to help the poor and dispossessed during his early days in Chicago.
Wright’s church apparently did and does good work in uplifting its community, but the social benefits come with a moral price–the preacher’s selective view of good and evil in the political world.
Consider Wright’s use of Martin Luther King to justify his own history. “Dr. King, of course, was vilified,” he told Moyers, asserting that, after King talked about racism, militarism and capitalism, he was “ostracized not only by the majority of Americans in the press; he got vilified by his own community. They thought he had overstepped his bounds…He was vilified by all of the Negro leaders who felt he’d overstepped his bounds talking about an unjust war.”
Martin Luther King’s opposition to the war made him unpopular with Lyndon Johnson but not the rest of America, least of all African-Americans and, unlike Wright, he did not use it to condemn all of American history, from the mistreatment of Native Americans to plotting drug addiction in black communities.
The Rev. Wright’s need to “damn” America leads him to a peculiar view of history. He goes back centuries to mine our national past for evil but, when asked about Louis Farrakhan’s racist and anti-Semitic speech, dismisses it with “That was twenty years ago” and praises him for getting African-Americans off drugs and giving them self-respect.
Perhaps most troubling of all is his smiling intimation that Barack Obama is only distancing himself from his views for political expedience: “(W)hat happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bites, he responded as a politician. But he did not disown me because I’m a pastor.”
I watched the one hour Bill Moyers interview with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and came away impressed with the Reverend and disappointed that he has been so abused by the media.
To me, in context, the Reverend is passionate, articulate, reasonable and accurate. His comment about “God Dam America” makes sense to me as a condemnation of the selfish and vicious policies of our country that were often justified as with God’s blessing. He was expressing the startling conflict between the promise of America and our actions, and what God might conclude. In his comment that “the chickens came home to roost” on September 11, he said he was actually quoting a former US Ambassador. And the point he was making is that our nation has a history of perpetrating violence on on innocent bystanders who were in the way of America manifesting its destiny.
I am disappointed that Senator Obama felt he had to distance himself from this man to accommodate pervasive small mindedness.
It seems to me that every one of us can have something we said, or did, taken out of context and distorted in a way to make it into something it is not. I have owned a service business for over 25 years. Almost 20 years ago I stopped hugging my staff because one of them filed a legal complaint that my hugging others made her feel uncomfortable and sexually threatened. I was not prepared to spend thousands of dollars to somehow prove that my behavior was not abusive.
It is the nature of media to take items out of context in order to inflame a conflict. But that is handicapping our societies opportunities to progress towards mature discussion of issues.
It is the nature of amoral political operatives who believe that the ends justify the means just to get their candidate or party elected.
And it is the failure of good people to allow themselves to make conclusions based on the flimsiest of information.
I can only hope that the internet and bloggers can be a force to keep expanding responsible public dialog. And that political reforms can be made to create a level playing field for the truth.
What emerges from watching the endless YouTubing of Jeremiah Wright is not the picture of a religious or political fanatic but a world-class attention-seeker. In those operatic video clips, there is a dashiki-dressed performer playing to the crowd, a soulmate, not of Louis Farrakhan, but of Bill Maher, whose imprudent comments on 9/11 cost him his network gig.
Now Obama’s pastor is back on stage, coming out of his recent retirement, with Bill Moyers on PBS tonight and at the National Press Club in Washington next Monday, flamboyantly defending himself to the possible political detriment of his former congregant:
“I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint?”
If Hillary Clinton’s campaign were paying him, the Rev. Wright couldn’t being doing more for them than to keep Obama’s embarrassment front and center in the days leading up to the final critical primaries.
But we may be underestimating him. By continuing to call attention to himself, Wright may be deviously trying to show that Obama is not under the Svengali-like influence of a dangerous man, just bedeviled by the antics of a showoff.
If so, that would be too subtle for most voters. All that may register with them is Obama’s unfortunate choice in a spiritual adviser.
While watching Bill Moyers last night I learned of Catalog Choice - a free service that lets you decline paper catalogs you no longer wish to receive. Reduce the amount of unsolicited mail in your mailbox, while helping to preserve the environment.
August 20th, 2007 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
NOTE: The Moderate Voice runs Guest Voice posts from time to time by readers who don’t have their own websites, or people who have websites but would like to post something for TMV’s diverse and thoughtful readership. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Moderate Voice or its writers. This is the text of a commentary Bill Moyers delivered on the resignation of White House political maven Karl Rove.
My Fellow Texan
by Bill Moyers
Like the proverbial hedgehog, Karl Rove knew one big thing: how to win elections as if they were divine interventions. You may think God summoned Billy Graham to Florida on the eve of the 2000 election to endorse George W. Bush just in the nick of time, but if it did happen that way, the Good Lord was speaking in a Texas accent.
Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious, draft-averse, naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God’s anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits. Using church pews as precincts, Rove turned religion into a weapon of political combat — a battering ram, aimed at the devil’s minions. Especially at gay people.
It’s so easy, as Karl knew, to scapegoat people you outnumber. And if God is love, as rumor has it, Rove knew in politics to bet on fear and loathing. Never mind that in stroking the basest bigotry of true believers you coarsen both politics and religion.
At the same time he was recruiting an army of the Lord for the born-again Bush, Rove was also shaking down corporations for campaign cash. Crony capitalism became a biblical injunction. Greed and God won four elections in a row — twice in the Lone Star state and twice again in the nation at large. But the result has been to leave Texas under the thumb of big money with huge holes ripped in its social contract, and the U.S. government in shambles — paralyzed, polarized, and mired in war, debt and corruption. Rove himself is deeply enmeshed in some of the scandals now being investigated, including those missing emails that could tell us who turned the Attorney General of the United States into a partisan sock puppet.
Rove is riding out of Dodge City as the posse rides in.
At his press conference this week he asked God to bless the President and the country, even as reports were circulating that he himself had confessed to friends his own agnosticism. He wished he could believe, but he cannot. That kind of intellectual honesty is to be admired, but you have to wonder how all those folks on the Christian right must feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a secular skeptic, a manipulator.
On his last play of the game all Karl Rove had to offer them was a Hail Mary pass, while telling himself there’s no one there to catch it.
Bill Moyers is managing editor of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog.
ANOTHER VIEW: Powerline was not pleased by this essay and calls parts of it inaccurate and unsubstantiated. DETAILS HERE.
Media mega-giant Rupert Murdoch is on the brink of owning the Wall Street Journal. And PBS’ Bill Moyers has a few thoughts on that — and what’s happening to the American media in general:
Editor’s note: Bill Moyers delivered this essay on his PBS program Bill Moyers’ Journal.
Begging His Pardon
by Bill Moyers
We have yet another remarkable revelation of the mindset of Washington’s ruling clique ofneoconservative elites-the people who took us to war from the safety of their Beltway bunkers. Even as Iraq grows bloodier by the day, their passion of the week is to keep one of their own from going to jail.
It is well known that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby-once Vice President Cheney’s most trusted adviser-has been sentenced to 30 months in jail for perjury. Lying. Not a white lie, mind you. A killer lie.
Scooter Libby deliberately poured poison into the drinking water of democracy by lying to federal investigators, for the purpose of obstructing justice. Attempting to trash critics of the war, Libby and his pals in high places-including his boss Dick Cheney-outed a covert CIA agent. Libby then lied to cover their tracks. To throw investigators off the trail, he kicked sand in the eyes of truth. “Libby lied about nearly everything that mattered,” wrote the chief prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. The jury agreed and found him guilty on four felony counts. Judge Reggie B. Walton-a no-nonsense, lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key type, appointed to the bench by none other than George W. Bush-called the evidence “overwhelming” and threw the book at Libby.
You would have thought their man had been ordered to Guantanamo, so intense was the reaction from his cheerleaders. They flooded the judge’s chambers with letters of support for their comrade and took to the airwaves in a campaign to “free Scooter.”
