Below The Beltway

It’s the story that Barack Obama needs back in the news about as much as he needs a whole in the head.

But, thanks to PBS’s Bill Moyers, Jeremiah Wright is all over the news today:

In a rare interview, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. told journalist Bill Moyers that media organizations circulating controversial sound bites of his sermons on the Internet wanted to paint him as “un-American” or “some sort of fanatic” to bring down Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama.

“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,” Wright said in the first interview he has granted since comments critical of U.S. policies surfaced on television and the Internet.

” ‘And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint?’ That’s what they wanted to communicate. They know nothing about the church.”

(…)

In the interview, Wright told Moyers that people who heard the entire sermons understood his message, and those who chose to air the sound bites had a “devious” agenda.

“The persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly,” he said. “When something is taken like a sound bite for a political purpose and put constantly over and over again, looped in the face of the public, that’s not a failure to communicate. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic or as the learned journalist from The New York Times called me, a ‘wackadoodle.’ “

The problem for Wright, and, it seems, Obama, is that Wright sounds like even more of a radical when you do put the so-called sound-bites into context:

Rev. Jeremiah Wright says his sermons were deliberately taken out of context by the news media “for a political purpose” and to “paint me as some sort of fanatic.”

“When something is taken like a sound bite for a political purpose and constantly over and over again, looped in the face of the public, that’s not a failure to communicate,” he told Bill Moyers in his first interview since ABC News’ “Good Morning America” first broadcast portions of his sermons. The Moyers interview will be broadcast tomorrow evening on PBS.

Wright says the use of his controversial statements — saying the U.S. brought on the 9/11 attacks and that black Americans should sing “God Damn America” instead of “God Bless America” — were “unfair” and “unjust” and were used “for some very devious reasons.”

But, as ABC goes on to show is in the full text of the speeches in question, that ain’t necessarily so.

Here, for example, is the speech he made the Sunday after 9/11:

I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday, did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox News, this is a white man, and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out, did you see him John, a white man, and he pointed out, an ambassador, that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Mohammed was in fact true, America’s chickens&are coming home to roost. We took this country by terror, away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arowak, the Comanche, the Arapahoe, the Navajo. Terrorism. We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism. We bombed Granada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers, and hardworking fathers. We bombed Qaddafi’s home and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against a rock. We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to payback for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hardworking people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye. Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children from school, civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.

We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

In other words, those 3,000 Americans deserved to die.

And the famous, or should I say infamous, “God Damn America” speech:

The British government failed, the Russian government failed, the Japanese government failed, the German government failed, and the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese decent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. The government put them in chains. She put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in sub-standard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law, and then wants us to sing God Bless America&no, no, no

Not God bless America, God damn America. That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent. Think about this, think about this.

For every one Oprah, a billionaire, you’ve got 5 million blacks who out of work. For every one Colin Powell, a millionaire, you’ve got 10 million blacks who cannot read. For every one Condoskeeza Rice, you’ve got 1 million in prison. For every one Tiger Woods, who needs to get beat, at the Masters, with his cap, blazin’ hips playing on a course that discriminates against women. God has his way of bringing you up short when you get to big for your cap, blazin britches. For every one Tiger Woods, we got 10,000 black kids who will never see a golf course. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.

Ed Morrissey responds to that one nicely:

The government gives blacks drugs? This is the conspiracy theory that the Reagan administration’s CIA acted to flood American cities with crack cocaine so that the wave of violence it inspired would give the government an excuse to imprison black men. Somehow in that same thought, the government has conspired to keep black kids from golf courses. While it’s mostly true about illiteracy — in 2003, it would have been closer to 7 million than 10 million — Hispanics had a far higher illiteracy rate (44% to 23%) and illiterate whites were double the number of illiterate blacks (over 14 million).

Wright is a conspiracist, a demagogue, and at heart someone who doesn’t much like America. Like William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, he spends his venom on the US and embraces dictators like Fidel Castro and terrorists like Hamas, whose screeds he publishes in Trinity’s weekly newsletters. Far from absolving Obama, the context once again forces Obama to answer for the company he keeps.

And, unlike last time, there are only two weeks until Indiana meaning that this may just be the story going forward.

Which is exactly what Barack Obama doesn’t need right now.