TWO WRIGHTS STILL MAKE A WRONG
or, why that lunatic egomaniac still
matters.
Before we move on to even more controversial matters, let's talk once
more about the star-crossed, now-mercifully-divorced relationship between
Senator Breath of Fresh Air and Reverend
Race-Baiter.
First, let's give credit where it's due: despite an over-reliance on his favorite vowel and at least a couple of slippery equivocations -- more on those in a moment -- Senator Obama yesterday wisely dispensed with the emotional aloofness and rhetorical sleight-of-hand that have so far characterized his remarks about Reverend Wright and, avoiding the airy rationalizations (a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice) of his wildly overpraised (if occasionally dissected) More Perfect Union speech, got right down to business:
When he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS; when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century; when he equates the United States' wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses. They offend me, they rightly offend all Americans, and they should be denounced. And that's what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally here today.
That's well-said and well-crafted. It hits right at the dark heart of Wright's paranoid absurdities, exposes them to the lights of sense and reason, and does not attempt to do anything but heap upon them the scorn they so richly deserve. It is precisely what he should have done last month: rather than teeter on an oratorical tightrope as he did in Philadelphia, Senator Obama went underground in Winston-Salem and stopped playing co-dependent to his former pastor's whack addiction. He did the same thing in the Q&A a few minutes later:
I want to make absolutely clear that I do not subscribe to the views that he expressed. I believe they are wrong. I think they are destructive.
From a candidate and a campaign that have repeatedly addressed political "distractions" with little more than rhetorical dissertations, this felt, finally, like one of those much-vaunted, little-delivered breaths of fresh air. It took a lot more hot air and a few personal attacks to provoke it, but the result was refreshing nonetheless.
Less refreshing was Senator Obama's claim that he hadn't heard Reverend Wright's AIDS comments until Monday...
Q: Have you heard the reports about the AIDS comment?
BO: I had not. ... And so when I start hearing comments about conspiracy theories and AIDS... then that goes directly at who I am and what I believe this country needs.
...when they were, in fact, a matter of public record (and video infamy) weeks ago. They emerged, after all, long before the Philadelphia speech in which they were not addressed or even acknowledged. Does Senator Obama expect us to believe that, in all of the earlier eruptions over Reverend Wright's comments, he had never once heard, not even from his own aides, that Reverend Race-Baiter made those accusations? And if we do believe it -- which I don't -- then what does that say about Senator Obama's ability be informed on even the most simple and sensational of cultural matters? I mean, it's not like Bush and Brown and Chertoff failing to know about the evacuees at the New Orleans Convention Center, but neither is it a reassurance that Senator Obama will know even the most obvious facts of the problems to which he must respond.
Which leads us, finally, to why Senator Obama's Better Late Than Never Remarks yesterday still qualify as a Too Little Too Late Response today. It leads us to why the Reverend Wright, in all his loony, egomaniacal vainglory, still matters today just as he has mattered all along: because of what he suggests about the judgment of a man who, lacking enough experience or accomplishment to make his case, has repeatedly told us to trust his judgment.
And yet there he was yesterday, in the second paragraph of his opening statement, admitting that he may have erred in his (twenty years) of judgment of Reverend Wright:
And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought either.
If you don't well know a man who, in your own words, has been like family to [you,] a man who officiated [your] wedding and baptized [your] children and strengthened [your] faith and was a part of your life for the past twenty years, then who or what do you know well? What does that say, in the end, about your ability to see and to judge and to divine the true heart of a person, the true power of a moment, the true importance of an issue? If your judgment has been that intimately and consistently wrong for the last twenty years, how can you expect us to trust it for the next four? And how can you expect us to believe that you will not, as our current president so often has, be swayed by the thoughts and mistakes and sometimes even rank incompetencies (or, in this case, lunacies) of the men and women in your administration to whom you turn for counsel?
The closest Senator Obama comes to an answer, and it is hardly a reassuring one, appears earlier in the paragraph:
The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago.
That is fair enough. And almost certainly true. But surely that change did not occurr just this week. Or month. Or year. Surely that change occurred, as all metamorphoses do, in distinct stages, with marked and obvious differences, with such sight and sound and occasional, irrational fury that someone whose great judgment, whose acute ability to assess a situation and divine a solution, is repeatedly being touted as Oval-Office-worthy, would have noticed, and then duly reacted, sometime between 1988 and the day before yesterday.
First, let's give credit where it's due: despite an over-reliance on his favorite vowel and at least a couple of slippery equivocations -- more on those in a moment -- Senator Obama yesterday wisely dispensed with the emotional aloofness and rhetorical sleight-of-hand that have so far characterized his remarks about Reverend Wright and, avoiding the airy rationalizations (a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice) of his wildly overpraised (if occasionally dissected) More Perfect Union speech, got right down to business:
When he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS; when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century; when he equates the United States' wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses. They offend me, they rightly offend all Americans, and they should be denounced. And that's what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally here today.
That's well-said and well-crafted. It hits right at the dark heart of Wright's paranoid absurdities, exposes them to the lights of sense and reason, and does not attempt to do anything but heap upon them the scorn they so richly deserve. It is precisely what he should have done last month: rather than teeter on an oratorical tightrope as he did in Philadelphia, Senator Obama went underground in Winston-Salem and stopped playing co-dependent to his former pastor's whack addiction. He did the same thing in the Q&A a few minutes later:
I want to make absolutely clear that I do not subscribe to the views that he expressed. I believe they are wrong. I think they are destructive.
From a candidate and a campaign that have repeatedly addressed political "distractions" with little more than rhetorical dissertations, this felt, finally, like one of those much-vaunted, little-delivered breaths of fresh air. It took a lot more hot air and a few personal attacks to provoke it, but the result was refreshing nonetheless.
Less refreshing was Senator Obama's claim that he hadn't heard Reverend Wright's AIDS comments until Monday...
Q: Have you heard the reports about the AIDS comment?
BO: I had not. ... And so when I start hearing comments about conspiracy theories and AIDS... then that goes directly at who I am and what I believe this country needs.
...when they were, in fact, a matter of public record (and video infamy) weeks ago. They emerged, after all, long before the Philadelphia speech in which they were not addressed or even acknowledged. Does Senator Obama expect us to believe that, in all of the earlier eruptions over Reverend Wright's comments, he had never once heard, not even from his own aides, that Reverend Race-Baiter made those accusations? And if we do believe it -- which I don't -- then what does that say about Senator Obama's ability be informed on even the most simple and sensational of cultural matters? I mean, it's not like Bush and Brown and Chertoff failing to know about the evacuees at the New Orleans Convention Center, but neither is it a reassurance that Senator Obama will know even the most obvious facts of the problems to which he must respond.
Which leads us, finally, to why Senator Obama's Better Late Than Never Remarks yesterday still qualify as a Too Little Too Late Response today. It leads us to why the Reverend Wright, in all his loony, egomaniacal vainglory, still matters today just as he has mattered all along: because of what he suggests about the judgment of a man who, lacking enough experience or accomplishment to make his case, has repeatedly told us to trust his judgment.
And yet there he was yesterday, in the second paragraph of his opening statement, admitting that he may have erred in his (twenty years) of judgment of Reverend Wright:
And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I may not know him as well as I thought either.
If you don't well know a man who, in your own words, has been like family to [you,] a man who officiated [your] wedding and baptized [your] children and strengthened [your] faith and was a part of your life for the past twenty years, then who or what do you know well? What does that say, in the end, about your ability to see and to judge and to divine the true heart of a person, the true power of a moment, the true importance of an issue? If your judgment has been that intimately and consistently wrong for the last twenty years, how can you expect us to trust it for the next four? And how can you expect us to believe that you will not, as our current president so often has, be swayed by the thoughts and mistakes and sometimes even rank incompetencies (or, in this case, lunacies) of the men and women in your administration to whom you turn for counsel?
The closest Senator Obama comes to an answer, and it is hardly a reassuring one, appears earlier in the paragraph:
The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago.
That is fair enough. And almost certainly true. But surely that change did not occurr just this week. Or month. Or year. Surely that change occurred, as all metamorphoses do, in distinct stages, with marked and obvious differences, with such sight and sound and occasional, irrational fury that someone whose great judgment, whose acute ability to assess a situation and divine a solution, is repeatedly being touted as Oval-Office-worthy, would have noticed, and then duly reacted, sometime between 1988 and the day before yesterday.
Posted: Wed - April 30, 2008 at 10:15 AM
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Published On: Apr 30, 2008 03:37 PM
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Published On: Apr 30, 2008 03:37 PM