Daniel Koffler is a friend as well as my successor at Jewcy, but we have had this disagreement in private so I see no reason not to air it in public.

In his increasingly partisan and silly attempts to define down Barack Obama's disreputable decades-long association with Jeremiah Wright, he has now taken to comparing the fetid sermons of the pastor to statements made by two figures of moral and rhetorical genius: Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Not only has Daniel quoted extracts which are light years beyond the eloquence, probity and suasion of anything Rev. Wright is capable, but he has fashioned a rod for his own back in titling his post "Putting Jeremiah Wright in Context." Let us by all means do just that.

Judging from the first link he provides, it's clear Daniel did not bother to look up Douglass's full speech on July 4, 1852, choosing instead to lazily lift the extract from a reader's email sent to Andrew Sullivan, a blogger who, it is worth reminding ourselves, used to have an award named for Susan Sontag that he'd bestow upon anyone trafficking in exactly the kind of racist, ultra-leftist, anti-American blather he now contorts himself to apologize for on Wright's behalf. That extract reads as follows:

[Y]our celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy--a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Perhaps it was a space-saving measure that excised the first two sentences of this paragraph: "What to the American slave is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim." [Italics mine.]

And who could argue with that in 1852? I would no more have asked a white Northern industrialist to celebrate the birthday of the United States in its incomplete and hypocritical form, in which the Southern economy was based on human bondage and all states operated under a national covenant drawn from the highest principles of the Enlightenment, than I would a freed slave liked Douglass when the above was recited. As Douglass acidly and ironically opened his speech, making it plain that a request for his unbridled display of patriotism was made of him by some arrogant fool beforehand:

"Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodies in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?"

So you might say that the Fourth of July had it coming. It should also be noted that Thomas Paine or John Brown wrote like this in their passionate attempts to erase the foundational stain of slavery. (Douglass himself maintained that his father was white, so I wonder at what point of diluted negritude an abolitionist's sane pleas for social justice would be immune from such sickening analogies to modern-day frauds.)

Here is how Douglass concluded his remarks on that day, offering a course of action that could redeem the young republic on its own terms -- precisely the sort of thing that Rev. Wright, in his unlettered, hate-filled and conspiracist harangues, chooses not to do:

"Fellow citizens! The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a byword to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes.

Oh be warned! Be warned! A horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!"

 

As for Dr. King's noble opposition to the Vietnam War, and his words to that effect -- these pilfered by Daniel from E.J. Dionne's latest column in the Washington Post -- nothing here strikes me as remotely comparable to Wright's effusions:

"God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place." King then predicted this response from the Almighty: "And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."

King is right on the essentials: the U.S. was guilty of war crimes in Vietnam. The above may have been controversial for 1968, but today it is hauntingly close to the conventional wisdom about a disgraceful period in our nation's foreign policy. (I wish King hadn't had recourse to divine retribution, but nobody's perfect.)

I don't think, forty years on, the same will be said of Jeremiah Wright's bull session on international affairs. Here is how he accounts for the American response to 9/11:

"We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed enemies. We want revenge, we want payback, and we don't care who gets hurt in the process."

Wright grounds this malediction in the famous Psalm 137, which relates to the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 B.C and the retroactive Zionism of the Jews, now lamenting the state of their exile. The hymn ends thus:

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you
for what you have done to us- he who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.

Wright quotes the gruesome final couplet (how moral are the teachings of religion) to argue that the United States, under the guidance of its "men of faith" (read: the president), murders women and children deliberately out of cold vengeance. This is indistinguishable from Osama bin Laden's pronouncements about our intentional collapsing of "mud villages" over the heads of Muslim mothers and their babes.

Wright is at once too general and too specific. He cites in this particular sermon -- helpfully added to YouTube by Trinity United Church itself, under the eye-catching heading "FOX Lies!!!" -- that the bombing of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan claimed the lives of "hundreds" of civilians. There was one fatality. And however much the timing of that bombing may have resulted from Bill Clinton's "wag the dog" scheme to distract from the Lewinsky affair, it was later defended cogently by the counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke and David Benjamin and Richard Simon, authors of The Age of Sacred Terror, all of whom showed that viable U.S. intelligence indicated the factory was in fact being used by Al Qaeda to manufacture chemical weapons.

All told, Daniel picked a lousy day to defend Obama on his religious affiliations. Comes the news that on the "Pastor's Page" of the July 22, 2007 newsletter of the Trinity United Church, Wright chose to reprint approvingly an LA Times op-ed written by one Mousa Abu Marzook, the deputy of the political bureau of Hamas. In it, Marzook of course defends the use of terrorism against Israeli civilians (dashing infants heads against the rocks is selectively appropriate, one would assume) and rejects any precondition that Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist. What must have especially caught Wright's eye in this license for mass murder and Judeocide is the passage in which Marzook brings up the Declaration of Independence and American slavery. Good to know how Jeremiah Wright thinks Palestinian self-determination should work.

Context is everything, isn't it? Daniel may wish to argue that, at bottom, Wright is no different than Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, or any number of febrile leftists in our midst. But I suspect he knows what a pickle it would be to explain to voters why such a person has had the ear of, and served as metaphysical counsel to, the Democratic front-runner for president. So instead we get hastily assembled carnival comparisons to MLK and Frederick Douglass; insults to them and insults to history.

Rev. James Meeks: He shall not inherit the earth.However, if Daniel is still not impressed by Jeremiah Wright, I have another humdinger of an Obama religious adviser that might just do the trick.

Meet the Rev. James Meeks. I quote from the gay rights website Queerty*:

Rev. James Meeks is a close friend and spiritual consultant to Sen. Obama. Rev. Meeks appeared in TV ads for Obama’s US Senate campaign; Obama campaigned at his church; and went there for prayer the night he won that primary. Meeks was on his exploratory committee for the Presidency, and his church choir performed at a rally for Obama the night he announced. Rev. Meeks is also an Illinois state senator who has aggressively campaigned against gay rights and complained about “Hollywood Jews for bringing us ‘Brokeback Mountain’.” He ran for governor on an antigay platform. He calls being gay an “evil sickness,” and his gigantic church is one of those which sponsors a Halloween fright night in which, according to the “Chicago Sun Times,” among those “consigned to the flames of hell” were “two mincing young men wearing body glitter who were supposed to be homosexuals.” His church has also launched antigay petition drives for the Illinois Family Institute, and Meeks is also aligned with Antigay Industry powerhouses Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defense Fund, and Americans for Truth that proclaims “fighting AIDS without talking against homosexuality is like fighting lung cancer without talking against smoking.” We do not know if Sen. Obama was also too busy campaign for US Senate to “go after him” as he’s said he can do to get others to do the right thing. We only know that his close friend and advisor, the Rev. & Sen. James Meeks voted against SB3186, against LGBT equality in Illinois, and is apparently, just like Donnie McClurkin, just as homohating as he was before ever meeting Barack Obama.

Here is how Meeks sings the body electric:

Just another angry black preacher. Never fear. I'm sure there's a photograph floating around somewhere of Meeks gladhanding the Clintons to make this sickly Obama association null and void, too.

*Ed note: The reference to Meeks is from a comment on a profile of three gay Obama supporters. His information, however, can be substantiated. The Chicago Sun-Times piece referring to "Fright Night" is available here. An excerpt from Cathleen Falsani's book on Obama's spirituality, which mentions the Meeks connection, is available here. See also David Ehrenstein's brief against Meeks in the Chicago Tribune, here.

Early this morning a photograph surfaced of Bill Clinton shaking hands with Jeremiah Wright. Two separate sources publicized the photo --- a blog dedicated to defending the Trinity United Church of Christ, and the Obama campaign. The implication is that Wright can't be all that far out of the mainstream, if Clinton was willing to associate with him.

Notice the date of the photo: September 11, 1998, "at the depth of the MonicaBill Clinton and Jeremiah Wright Lewinsky scandal" in Ben Smith's words, which is probably a better way of putting it than "at the height." Notice the occasion: a prayer meeting in which Clinton sought absolution for his affair from the assembled Sanhedrin. Amazingly, no one reporting on the Clinton-Wright photo has yet managed to put two and two together. Clinton and Wright weren't photographed on a chance encounter. Clinton can't laugh off the photo as one of the many thousands of random meet-and-greets he did as president. Wright was standing with Clinton in the White House exchanging pleasantries because Clinton wanted him to be there. Because Wright actually is a figure of some prominence and stature in American black Christianity, and Clinton's MO whenever times got rough was to beg forgiveness from a prominent black preacher in order to demand that the rest of us forgive him, too.

So Wright was good enough for Clinton when he needed a confessor. Now the Clintons are engineering a whispering campaign to persuade Democratic superdelegates that Barack Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright should be the grounds on which they overturn the results of the primary. Classy outfit, no?

Two more appalling statements from Jeremiah Wright. Here is how he describes the Fourth of July:

[Y]our celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy--a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Got that? A nation of savages. Small wonder Obama won't wear an American flag lapel pin. And here is Wright's disgraceful theological pretense for his Chomskyite anti-Americanism:

God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war...And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place...[God will say], "If you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."

So the "hateful" rhetoric was hardly out of the ordinary for Wright. Obama must have heard it, or something like it, and continued going to church at Trinity. He should probably quit the race now, right? Except that the first remark is from a Frederick Douglass speech in 1852, and the second from a Martin Luther King, Jr. sermon in 1968.

Now that Douglass and King have been anointed saints in our civil religion, it'sFrederick Douglass: One-dimensional bigot (just look at the text) uncouth, to put it mildly, to speak ill of either of them. But if statements such as these --- and needless to say, there are plenty more where they came from --- were actually Jeremiah Wright's and preserved on celluloid, can anyone sincerely doubt they'd have made it into the media carnival this past weekend? That Fox News hosts would have worked themselves up to sexual satisfaction that much more quickly with the added material for their feedback loop? That Roger L. Simon would have squeezed out a couple more stanzas about how he wouldn't have personally given black people the right to vote if he knew Obama would attend church with such a psychopath? That Charles Krauthammer would have gleefully made use of the extra grist with which to excoriate Obama for "expos[ing] [his] children to...vitriolic divisiveness"? That enterprising radio talk show hosts and McCain staffers would have spliced such damaging goods into their two-minute hate already featuring cameos by Malcolm X and protesting black Olympic athletes?

How much conceptual space is there, really, between thundering "God damn America for killing innocent people" and ventriloquizing a promise from God to "break the backbone of your power," between declaring America guilty of "practices more shocking and bloody" than any other country on earth and framing the 9/11 attacks as "chickens coming home to roost"? And which remark from each pair would count as more "incendiary" under the standards Wright --- but never, under any circumstances, his counterparts in the white evangelical community --- is being judged?

By the same token, we need not suspend judgment about how the Krauthammers ofMartin Luther King, Jr.: Hated America (it's there in black and white) King's and Douglass's generations would have responded to justified angry black rhetoric even in the contexts of slavery and segregation, since we know how they did respond. In the wake of the church bombings in Birmingham, National Review warned darkly that "it now appears that Birmingham's Negroes will never be content so long as the white population is free to be free." As late as 1964, the flagship rag of the conservative movement bitterly inveighed against "the ludicrously named 'civil rights movement' --- that is, the Negro revolt." (This is just scratching the surface.)

The vast majority of those who presently decry "chickens coming home to roost" rhetoric as instrinsically a form of hate speech have concluded on those grounds alone that Wright is a hatemonger with whom no decent person could ever be associated. Would the same crowd have watched King or Douglass denouncing the US in even stronger terms, and then taken a nuanced, holistic view of their lives and deeds? Please.

Barack Obama diagnosed Jeremiah Wright's errors with surgical precision:

[H]e spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow. 

Of course, the contexts in which Douglass and King spoke and wrote were very different from Wright's: slavery and pervasive legalized persecution, respectively. That discrepancy is what's objectionable about Wright's remarks. On the other hand, Wright lived through the latter experience, and was raised in living memory of the former. Moreover, King's comments were about Vietnam and had nothing to do with racial justice; so the context for them is not relevantly different from the context of Wright's denunciations of American foreign policy.

There is no form of reverse political correctness that requires us to feign ignorance about the reason --- not the justification or excuse, but the reason --- for Wright's antipathies. Or to pretend that the cartoon of Wright, devoid of any context or biography, accurately represents reality.

One month ago, John McCain looked set to limp into the general election much like Bob Dole did 12 years ago, only at a much greater financial disadvantage and against a stronger candidate.

Then, just before the weekend, video surfaced of some of Barack Obama's spiritual advisor JeremiahBarack Obama and Jeremiah Wright Wright's best sermonizing, and the media unsurprisingly went to town. Wright's general message had hardly been a secret, but actually seeing him pronounce judgment on the country ("God damn America") and Barack Obama's rivals ("Hillary Clinton ain't never been called a nigger") connects on a gut level that merely reading about his exploits never approaches. Obama hardly helped his cause with an overly broad and frankly unbelievable denial --- "the statements...were not statements I personally heard " --- that has sent reporters trawling through archives to see if they could place Obama at the Trinity church during one of Wright's blame-America-fests.

Suddenly, McCain's general election strategy was written for him: Step 1) Allow the RNC and outside groups to play the Wright videos on an endless loop; step 2) sit back and take the occasional trip to Iraq; step 3) victory. It's hard to imagine how McCain or his supporters could have overplayed the inside straight they'd been dealt.

Leave it to Bill Kristol to overplay a strong hand, and embarrass everyone he's associated with in the process. Kristol's New York Times column today attempts to place Obama at the scene of a particularly noxious Wright sermon. It's a hell of a gotcha; the only problem is that it's blatantly false, as Marc Ambinder showed (given his 7:11 am timestamp) handily despite just having gotten out of bed. Kristol's error begins in describing the Newsmax.com writer, Ronald Kessler, from whom he'd gotten the non-scoop, as a "journalist." Even Kristol's lame correction, which essentially disembowels the whole piece, manages to describe a specimen of writing from Newsmax as a "report."

While it isn't exactly a shock that Kristol would launder fabrications from a sub-tabloid quality propaganda merchant through the Grey Lady, the fact that the Times couldn't be bothered to double-check Kristol, presumably in possession of some knowledge of what their newest hire considers journalism, is at least a mild surprise.

None of this is to deny that Obama really does have a problem, and has some questions to answer. Pace Josh Marshall, there is plenty of material in Wright's preaching "that doesn’t come out of the sermon tradition of African-American Christianity with a 60s twist." (Martin Luther King, for one, never said "God damn America," and there is hardly a better example of African-American Christianity with a 60s twist.) No, it isn't fair to tie Obama to Wright's beliefs --- he plainly doesn't share them --- but that hardly means that projecting Wright's sermons onto Obama won't be an effective tactic.

Still, the takeaway lesson from Kristol's goof applies broadly: Don't credulously buy into "reporting" at websites that routinely make things up, because they routinely makes things up. And if you're a scrivener hoping to damage Obama and you're prepared to bend the truth to do so, be sure that your fabrications can't be instantly exposed. Otherwise you might make the story about you rather than your quarry.

The Audacity of Presidential Hopefuls: Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright"Interested in the world beyond his own" might have been a cute double entendre for a preacher if it didn't actually refer to cuddling up to dictators and Jew-baiting demagogues: 

Mr. Obama was entranced by Mr. Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy. Mr. Obama had never met a minister who made pilgrimages to Africa, welcomed women leaders and gay members and crooned Teddy Pendergrass rhythm and blues from the pulpit. Mr. Wright was making Trinity a social force, initiating day care, drug counseling, legal aid and tutoring. He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Wright said his visits implied no endorsement of their views.

Might I offer a word of fraternal advice to black civil or political leaders who make faith inextricable from their supposed liberalism? It is not quite enough to say that you don't necessarily or always agree with the vile Louis Farrakhan, among whose more memorable animadversions are, "It's the wicked Jews, the false Jews that are promoting lesbianism, homosexuality, [and] Zionists have manipulated Bush and the American government," and, "White people are potential humans — they haven't evolved yet." You should unequivocally repudiate him. (In Wright's case, a few unkind words for Qaddafi and Castro would also be nice.)

This past Martin Luther King Day I attended a service at the New York Synagogue, presided over by Rabbi Marc Schneier, the co-founder of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, which aims to repair any cultural breach that may have developed between the black and Jewish communities. Russell Simmons, the other founder as well as Schneier's friend, was an invited speaker. Simmons isn't known for being the savviest velor tracksuit-wearing mogul alive, but please believe me when I tell you that it was value for money to hear him mention the name Farrakhan as an admirable civil rights leaderamidst a packed house of davening Reform Manhattan Jews. I'm not sure if the congregation misheard him or was just too polite to raise a fuss (itself a sign of just how far black-Jewish relations have improved). But Farrakhan's enduring prestige within ostensibly progressive black quarters is a disgrace, and it should be a bigger one that no amount of race sensitivity or political correctness mitigates.

Rep. Keith Ellison, he of the Thomas Jefferson Koran oath-taking cleverness, lied about his affiliation with the Nation of Islam and its sordid bowtied poobah, and when Ellison was found out on it and offered a feckless and deceitful apology to Minnesotan Jewish groups, which calmly let the matter go and in some cases even endorsed him.

Any national candidate's religion is always legitimate grounds for inquiry but much has been made recently of Mitt Romney's Mormonism. Given that religion's 19th century cult origins and, shall we say, financially informed theodicy, there's good reason to expect the Republican candidate to be taxed on his real thoughts about Joseph Smith, polygamy and the revelations of the Angel Moroni. Romney's evasiveness or attempt to have it both ways will be used against him as evidence that he's loyal first to the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints, second to the U.S. Constitution. Also, that he's easily taken in by hucksters, rogues and con-man -- not the most encouraging sign of one's soundness for high government.

When asked what he thinks of his own reverened and baptizer and spiritual enabler, Obama lamely states that Jeremiah Wright is a "child of the sixties." That may well be true, but even reconstructed hippies should be held responsible for their meretricious alliances. So should candidates for the White House.