Showing posts with label jeremiah wright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jeremiah wright. Show all posts
Monday, April 28, 2008
The fight for the Presidency
Howard Dean in his Meet the Press appearance of 04/27/08 not only did a good job of preventing Timmy Russert from turning it into 30 minutes of trivia and "gotcha" points, but also did a good job of discussing the Democratic Party Presidential campaign from a partisan perspective but not taking the side of either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Definitely worth a look.
Also addressing the intra-party issues and the analogy to the 1972 election is someone who knows quite a bit about that election, former Senator George McGovern, in a Huffington Post interview reported by Sam Stein in George McGovern: Still Backing Clinton, But Going Way Off Script 04/25/08.
I've tried to step back and look at the state of the race in a bit of a new light myself. My own basic preferences haven't changed since the California primary, when I sent in my absentee ballot for John Edwards about two days before he dropped out of the race. Between Clinton and Obama I'm marginally more in favor of Clinton. Obama has a better position on pulling out of Iraq and Clinton's health plan is more likely to achieve universal coverage, which is essential.
When either of them is elected President, the Democratic base will have to keep the pressure on them over both the Iraq withdrawal and the health care plan because they will face powerful opposition to both, despite the very unpopular nature of the Iraq War. The peace movement will also need to bring pressure to make sure that the new President makes a full withdrawal of American troops, which neither has clearly committed to doing.
And also to avoid continuing the escalation of the Afghanistan War - which both are saying should be done - and instead find a near-term solution to that situation so that NATO troops (including US troops) can leave. Pulling out of Iraq but escalating in Afghanistan could destroy the Democratic Presidency because the Republicans will howl in outrage about every problem that occurs in both places and blame it all on the deficiencies of the Democratic administration.
But for that problem to arise we have to get a Democratic President instead of 100-Years-War McCain.
Obama is slightly ahead in the delegate count right now. But for all practical purposes Clinton and Obama are tied at this point. I think Dean in his Meet the Press appearance made very reasonable points about the outstanding delegate controversies. On the question of the superdelegates, he made a good point that even though they aren't elected in primaries or caucuses, almost every one of them are elected officials who are there precisely because they won actual general elections as Governor, Member of Congress, or other office, and they were selected as superdelegates by their state parties. The whole idea of the superdelegates is that they are not required to simply ratify the decisions of the primary and caucus delegates. They are supposed to make their own choices based (in theory) on their best judgment. Good or bad, that's the rules the Party is operating under this year. As Dean put it, "My personal belief is they're going to vote for the person they think ... can beat John McCain, which is what I think a lot of these voters [in the primaries and caucuses] are voting for."
On the question of the Florida and Michigan delegations, it doesn't make sense to simply allow the delegates elected in those primaries to be seated. The state parties knew, and the Presidential candidates knew, that the Party would not recognize the results of those elections because they were in violation of the Party rules. He reminded the viewers of the reason for the problem:
For the - this year, for the first time, we balanced the early primaries with ethnic and geographic diversity. We included a state from the South and a state from the West, because we think we can win there now. And we included states with significant numbers of minority groups who the Democrats can't win without, and those folks ought to be allowed to say early on who they think should be the president.That was why the Michigan and Florida primaries were disallowed by the national Party. Dean goes on to say, "I believe Michigan and Florida should be seated in some way because it was their - their voters did not cause this problem. This was caused by a political problem, not the voters' problem." No doubt this is a sticky problem. But the eventual resolution is probably going to be providing some representation to Florida and Michigan so that they are totally disenfranchised at the convention but not to seat the full delegates as elected in the illegitimate primaries.
A couple of comments on the Jeremiah Wright issue. I was happy to see the report that Clinton is reaming the bold Maverick over the Floyd Brown ad against Obama featuring the most inflammatory of the controversial Wright snippets.
Salon's Joan Walch blogged her reaction to Wright's appearance with Bill Moyers in Why Jeremiah Wright is so wrong 04/27/08. But after more research, she posted I was wrong about Wright 04/28/08. But the latter isn't a more generous evaluation. She says she's going to blog more about ways Obama can deal with the issue.
It seems to me that his best response is to keep responding that he's made his disagreements with Wright clear, to remind everyone that they don't agree with everything their own pastor says, and to use it as an opportunity to jam McCain on his association with the warmongering radical cleric John Hagee and others like him.
But nobody should be under any illusions that we won't see sleaze like this and worse slung by the Establishment press and the Republicans from now through the fall election. I'll bet there's rightwing bloggers who have already typed up the accusation that Clinton's attacking McCain over the Floyd Brown ad with Wright in it shows that she, too, wants God to damn America.
Obama needs to keep the discussions around focused on his own positions and the destructive positions of 100-Years-War McCain, so he doesn't need to defend Wright. Wright is not his running-mate.
Having said that and being clear that Wright does not speak for Obama and vice versa, I did like a line that Wright used at the National Press Club Monday when asked if he was patriotic. "I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?"
I'll say it again. In every Presidential race since 1964, the Republicans have been running again black people. It's what they do. As Dean said:
Republicans have scapegoated minority groups for a long time. First they pointed the fingers at African-Americans by calling what - affirmative action as a quota system. Then they pointed the finger at gay Americans with an anti-gay marriage stuff on all the ballots where gay marriage was already illegal anyway. Now they're pointing the fingers at immigrants and, by extension, Hispanic and Asian-Americans.If we lived in one of those alternative universes where the Republican Party hadn't absorbed the values of Southern segregationists and didn't support torture and had enough decency not to constantly attack the patriotism of the Democrats, then we could reasonably hope to have a campaign free of that. Assuming that universe also has a national press corps that practices actual journalism. But that's not the universe we live in.
So I don't like the blame-the-victim approach of, oh, Obama should have foreseen this and done something to prevent it. Walsh writes, "Clearly it was bad judgment [for Obama] to stay with the church, given Wright's divisive views, once Obama knew he had national political ambitions." But she at least goes on to acknowledge that such an observation is water under the bridge now.
Yes, we probably all regret that we didn't foresee the problem that something we were doing would cause us problems in the future. But there is no way Obama or Clinton is going to avoid being accused of being somehow unpatriotic or associated with scary black people. Both are poisonous accusations. But a party that supports the Cheney-Bush torture policy is poisoned. They have to hit back against race-baiting and radical-baiting and throw it back in the Republicans faces. There is no way to prevent the Reps from making the charges. That's who they are. That's what they do.
Also on Meet the Press (see link above), Timmy Russert (not carrying water for the Republicans, you understand; yeah, right) referred to a Nation piece by Tom Hayden, who Timmy called "the former radical from the '60s", Why Hillary Makes My Wife Scream 04/22/08, in which he notes that Clinton also was in the same room at times with people who had views with which she might not agree with every word, then or now. I don't think Hayden was carrying water for the Reps, though he is an Obama partisan and I wouldn't word everything he says in his article that way, this is a valuable observation:
All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn't she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists?That's why it's good to see Clinton taking a different tone on the Wright issue, criticizing McCain over sleaze-slinging politics. Neither of them can avoid these kinds of attacks. But they shouldn't be saying things now about each other that would partially validate the inevitable Republican and press corps versions. As McGovern says, "I don't want to see Hillary or Barack giving McCain ammunition in the general election. It is more important that we not have another four years of Bush government."
Tags: barack obama, hillary clinton, howard dean, jeremiah wright, tom hayden
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Jeremiah Wright
Lord help me, I just listened to Bill Moyers' hour-long interview with Obama's now-famous former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. And I'm going to write down and post my reactions here without consulting what any other commentators have to say about it.
I watched it because I was curious at what he had to say. After watching it, I can say that I'm genuinely impressed with the man. He's an obviously intelligent man with a serious theological background. Surprisingly, he did not come off as defense or hostile, nor did he back down from the sermons from which the most controversial sound bites have been extracted. Moyers also broadcast several minutes from the two most controversial ones, the "God damn America" and the 9/11 chickens coming home to roost one, to give a better feel for their actual context.
Wright also gave a theological sophisticated description of the concept of liberation theology, which recognizes that oppressed peoples understand God through their own personal and collective experiences of oppression. As he pointed out, the Christian Bible, from Genesis to Revelations, was written to a large extent by those giving voice to the experiences of the Jewish people under Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonia, Persian, Greek and Roman domination.
This is actually a very important point to understand about the Christian and Jewish religions and their effects on Western civilization. Frederick Nietzsche, with his idealized pagan sensibility and his provocative style, did some very perceptive work illustrating the same theme. Aristocratic morality as he saw reflected in Greek and Roman religion, fundamentally understood morality as a matter of good and bad. When Homer talked about about something being κακόσ (kakόs), bad, it was primarily understood as "non-aristocratic". While αγαθόσ (agathόs) meant doing things the way aristocrats did them.
Nietzsche argued that the Jews of the Hebrew Bible formed their moral concepts from their experience of slavery and oppression and reversed the aristocratic morality. In that system, the slaves are the source of good, but their opposite, the rulers and slaveowners, are not simply bad, but evil, despicable, to be utterly rejected. And he argued that the Christians elevated this "slave morality" of good and evil to an even greater intensity.
The most interesting part of the interview was the part in which he discussed with Moyers the theology of Psalms 137, a nine-verse psalm, quoted here in full from the Revised Standard Version. The first verse is quite well-known in English for its opening phrase. Verse 5 provided the title of one of William Faulkner's novels, If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem.
Wright called attention to the progression of emotions on the part of the Israelites in this psalm, from sadness and mourning to anger to hatred to desiring the murder of the enemy's children. As Wright put it, this process it begins with hating the armies who took them into exile, and ends with desiring that little babies brains be bashed out on a rock.
He discussed toward the end the need for all religions to confront the ugly aspects of our own holy books. And his view of Psalm 137 provided a good example of how to do that. He did not treat it as God somehow declaring that this was the right attitude for his people to take, or that God was declaring that He wanted the enemy's babies killed. Wright read it as a perceptive description of the process that people can go through in reaction to evil deeds inflicted on them, a process that can lead them to commit unjustified and ungodly acts, as well.
Psalm 137 was the text Wright used on the Sunday after 9/11/2001. And in the longer excerpt of his sermon that Moyers showed, he talked about some of the more notable acts of war that the United States had carried out against other countries, including the decade-long off-and-on bombing of Iraq during and after the first Gulf War. He talked about how something like that process described in the psalm had led to the hatred driving the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. And he said that the US was now on the verge of possibly committing the same kind of wrong in response to the attack.
Looking at it now, I still wouldn't like the "chickens coming home to roost" metaphor because of my own view of the high importance of assigning responsibility to the perpetrators who actually commit bad acts, including in international conflict. And I think that particular metaphor blurs it.
But Wright's framing of the events otherwise holds up well, so far as I saw in the program. This Bush/neocon/Christianist business about how "they hate us for our values" is just goofy. It's a deliberate attempt to get American citizens not to look at our policies and how those affect conflict situations, but instead to shut and follow moral monsters like Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft and the rest of those high officials who sat in dozens of meetings meticulously designing torture procedures to be applied to individual victims. And since when did trying to understand our enemies and their motivations become a sign of weakness? That's just nuts.
Wright was doing what religious leaders and our political leaders as well needed to be doing at that point: to try to help people understand what was happening and the context in which it was happening, and to call on people to exercise responsibility in talking and thinking about how the US should respond. When I look at the disaster Cheney and Bush and their fellow torture enablers created by their foolish, spectacularly misguided war in Iraq, a war for which they cynically exploited the anger and war fever from the 9/11 attacks, it makes me wish we had had far more leaders who were willing, as Wright was, to speak in a "prophetic" voice and to help us all keep our moral bearings.
My own Catholic parish held a series of presentations on Islam after the 9/11 attacks, in which Muslim speakers came in to talk about their faith. They also invited other speakers to talk about the issues involved with some kind of religious and ethical perspective. I honestly don't see anything scandalous about Wright's use of Psalm 137 to try to help his church members, who I'm sure were dazed as almost everyone was from the events of that weeks, to understand those events in a Christian and Scriptural context.
Moyers also dealt with Wright's "God damn America" soundbite. That one came as part of a lesson about Biblical teachings on God passing judgments on nations that fall into sinful ways. As many others have pointed out, white fundamentalist preachers routinely make similar similar denunciations of the sinful ways of decadent America, somehow without Republican talking heads being endlessly outraged at their supposed lack of patriotism.
Here again, I don't feel comfortable with that particular phrasing, and I also differ on the particular framing of the issue. But that's because I think the notion that God works through history by bringing benefits and calamities to nations based on their spiritual worthiness, which was a common belief in Near Eastern religions in the time much of the Hebrew Bible was written, is deeply problematic from today's perspective. But I also recognize that it's a perspective that is widely shared by present-day Christians, even in non-fundamentalist denominations.
Moyers asked Wright about his feelings about his long-time member Obama making highly critical statements about him in response to the infamous sound bites. Wright didn't express any resentment that was obvious to me. He said a couple of times that Obama is speaking in his role as a politician, and he (Wright) speaks as a pastor and continues to see his role as speaking in that vein. And he clearly sees a "prophetic" role in the Biblical sense as part of his message.
He also quoted from Joseph in Genesis - one of my favorite Biblical stories - saying that what people may do intending evil, that God can turn to good. And he saw Obama's impressive speech on race in America, given in response to the initial brouhaha over Wright's sermons, as possibly a way that what were meant as political attacks to embarrass Obama may have already provided the occasion for something positive to occur.
I won't speculate on what soundbites might be plucked out of Moyers' interview to attack or defend the Rev. Wright. I was unexpectedly impressed by Wright in that interview. And he came across not at all as some kind of hate-monger but rather as a thoughtful and serious pastor and conscientious student of the Scriptures.
And if some trolls think my take on it is also scandalous: bite me! (I'm not so gifted with Christian diplomatic skills as the Rev. Wright.)
Tags: bill moyers, jeremiah wright, liberation theology
I watched it because I was curious at what he had to say. After watching it, I can say that I'm genuinely impressed with the man. He's an obviously intelligent man with a serious theological background. Surprisingly, he did not come off as defense or hostile, nor did he back down from the sermons from which the most controversial sound bites have been extracted. Moyers also broadcast several minutes from the two most controversial ones, the "God damn America" and the 9/11 chickens coming home to roost one, to give a better feel for their actual context.
Wright also gave a theological sophisticated description of the concept of liberation theology, which recognizes that oppressed peoples understand God through their own personal and collective experiences of oppression. As he pointed out, the Christian Bible, from Genesis to Revelations, was written to a large extent by those giving voice to the experiences of the Jewish people under Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonia, Persian, Greek and Roman domination.
This is actually a very important point to understand about the Christian and Jewish religions and their effects on Western civilization. Frederick Nietzsche, with his idealized pagan sensibility and his provocative style, did some very perceptive work illustrating the same theme. Aristocratic morality as he saw reflected in Greek and Roman religion, fundamentally understood morality as a matter of good and bad. When Homer talked about about something being κακόσ (kakόs), bad, it was primarily understood as "non-aristocratic". While αγαθόσ (agathόs) meant doing things the way aristocrats did them.
Nietzsche argued that the Jews of the Hebrew Bible formed their moral concepts from their experience of slavery and oppression and reversed the aristocratic morality. In that system, the slaves are the source of good, but their opposite, the rulers and slaveowners, are not simply bad, but evil, despicable, to be utterly rejected. And he argued that the Christians elevated this "slave morality" of good and evil to an even greater intensity.
The most interesting part of the interview was the part in which he discussed with Moyers the theology of Psalms 137, a nine-verse psalm, quoted here in full from the Revised Standard Version. The first verse is quite well-known in English for its opening phrase. Verse 5 provided the title of one of William Faulkner's novels, If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem.
By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.This psalm recall the bitter days of the Babylonian exile (586-538 BCE), in which the Babylonian armies conquered the southern Israelite kingdom of Judea and took most of the population into exile in Babylon.
On the willows there we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"
How shall we sing the LORD'S song in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!
Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said, "Rase it, rase it! Down to its foundations!
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us!
Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!
Wright called attention to the progression of emotions on the part of the Israelites in this psalm, from sadness and mourning to anger to hatred to desiring the murder of the enemy's children. As Wright put it, this process it begins with hating the armies who took them into exile, and ends with desiring that little babies brains be bashed out on a rock.
He discussed toward the end the need for all religions to confront the ugly aspects of our own holy books. And his view of Psalm 137 provided a good example of how to do that. He did not treat it as God somehow declaring that this was the right attitude for his people to take, or that God was declaring that He wanted the enemy's babies killed. Wright read it as a perceptive description of the process that people can go through in reaction to evil deeds inflicted on them, a process that can lead them to commit unjustified and ungodly acts, as well.
Psalm 137 was the text Wright used on the Sunday after 9/11/2001. And in the longer excerpt of his sermon that Moyers showed, he talked about some of the more notable acts of war that the United States had carried out against other countries, including the decade-long off-and-on bombing of Iraq during and after the first Gulf War. He talked about how something like that process described in the psalm had led to the hatred driving the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. And he said that the US was now on the verge of possibly committing the same kind of wrong in response to the attack.
Looking at it now, I still wouldn't like the "chickens coming home to roost" metaphor because of my own view of the high importance of assigning responsibility to the perpetrators who actually commit bad acts, including in international conflict. And I think that particular metaphor blurs it.
But Wright's framing of the events otherwise holds up well, so far as I saw in the program. This Bush/neocon/Christianist business about how "they hate us for our values" is just goofy. It's a deliberate attempt to get American citizens not to look at our policies and how those affect conflict situations, but instead to shut and follow moral monsters like Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft and the rest of those high officials who sat in dozens of meetings meticulously designing torture procedures to be applied to individual victims. And since when did trying to understand our enemies and their motivations become a sign of weakness? That's just nuts.
Wright was doing what religious leaders and our political leaders as well needed to be doing at that point: to try to help people understand what was happening and the context in which it was happening, and to call on people to exercise responsibility in talking and thinking about how the US should respond. When I look at the disaster Cheney and Bush and their fellow torture enablers created by their foolish, spectacularly misguided war in Iraq, a war for which they cynically exploited the anger and war fever from the 9/11 attacks, it makes me wish we had had far more leaders who were willing, as Wright was, to speak in a "prophetic" voice and to help us all keep our moral bearings.
My own Catholic parish held a series of presentations on Islam after the 9/11 attacks, in which Muslim speakers came in to talk about their faith. They also invited other speakers to talk about the issues involved with some kind of religious and ethical perspective. I honestly don't see anything scandalous about Wright's use of Psalm 137 to try to help his church members, who I'm sure were dazed as almost everyone was from the events of that weeks, to understand those events in a Christian and Scriptural context.
Moyers also dealt with Wright's "God damn America" soundbite. That one came as part of a lesson about Biblical teachings on God passing judgments on nations that fall into sinful ways. As many others have pointed out, white fundamentalist preachers routinely make similar similar denunciations of the sinful ways of decadent America, somehow without Republican talking heads being endlessly outraged at their supposed lack of patriotism.
Here again, I don't feel comfortable with that particular phrasing, and I also differ on the particular framing of the issue. But that's because I think the notion that God works through history by bringing benefits and calamities to nations based on their spiritual worthiness, which was a common belief in Near Eastern religions in the time much of the Hebrew Bible was written, is deeply problematic from today's perspective. But I also recognize that it's a perspective that is widely shared by present-day Christians, even in non-fundamentalist denominations.
Moyers asked Wright about his feelings about his long-time member Obama making highly critical statements about him in response to the infamous sound bites. Wright didn't express any resentment that was obvious to me. He said a couple of times that Obama is speaking in his role as a politician, and he (Wright) speaks as a pastor and continues to see his role as speaking in that vein. And he clearly sees a "prophetic" role in the Biblical sense as part of his message.
He also quoted from Joseph in Genesis - one of my favorite Biblical stories - saying that what people may do intending evil, that God can turn to good. And he saw Obama's impressive speech on race in America, given in response to the initial brouhaha over Wright's sermons, as possibly a way that what were meant as political attacks to embarrass Obama may have already provided the occasion for something positive to occur.
I won't speculate on what soundbites might be plucked out of Moyers' interview to attack or defend the Rev. Wright. I was unexpectedly impressed by Wright in that interview. And he came across not at all as some kind of hate-monger but rather as a thoughtful and serious pastor and conscientious student of the Scriptures.
And if some trolls think my take on it is also scandalous: bite me! (I'm not so gifted with Christian diplomatic skills as the Rev. Wright.)
Tags: bill moyers, jeremiah wright, liberation theology
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Are Republican white folks really this thin-skinned?
Now, it wouldn't be the kind of speech I would give. But this clip of Barack Obama's pastor freaks good Republican white folks out? Good grief, no wonder they fall the hoo-ha that Cheney and Bush have been pushing in the name of the "Global War on Terrorism".
This really freaks people out? What, do these folks only leave the house to go to all-white fundamentalist church meetings? Wow, talk about thin-skinned!
FOX News floated this thing, with Politico following loyally up. This is pretty sleazy stuff on the part of the right wing. But that's what they do. Obama is going to have to smack them down over some of this stuff or they'll tag him in the minds of many independent voters as a scary, bizarre, weirdo black man.
Tags: barack obama, jeremiah wright
This really freaks people out? What, do these folks only leave the house to go to all-white fundamentalist church meetings? Wow, talk about thin-skinned!
FOX News floated this thing, with Politico following loyally up. This is pretty sleazy stuff on the part of the right wing. But that's what they do. Obama is going to have to smack them down over some of this stuff or they'll tag him in the minds of many independent voters as a scary, bizarre, weirdo black man.
Tags: barack obama, jeremiah wright
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