First of all, I'm still a BO supporter. The fact that I think that he joined Wright's church largely out of political expediency means that I don't hold Rev. Wright's views against him.
Second: Good try, Newman. You did about as fine a job on the chickens coming home to roost thing as anyone could hope for. It's still stupid, since I'm not sure what -- other than setting our infidel feet on the holy sand! -- we did to offend them. I had thought we were there protecting the Saudi oil and, in turn, the Saudi allowances that go to their deadbeat young men, who then come to our country pretending to be students and then blow up our buildings to punish us for having the nerve to, umm ... to protect their allowances? Look, this chickens coming home to roost thing only works if you actually did something bad to someone. Not if you protected someone's most (only) valuable asset for them. Even if it was a mistake for us to do so ("no blood for oil"), it was a mistake that hurt Saddam, not the Saudis. And yet, curiously, no Iraqis signed up for kamikaze duty. When you do this Rev. Wright defense thing, you're really just doing what the Pres does: you're confusing Iraqi/Saddamites (who may very well have a beef with us, since we got involved in a trans-Arab border dispute) with Saudis (who, after all, have absolutely nothing to complain about, particularly with respect to the Bushes who love them so dearly).
But that's probably the easiest one to defend. AIDS as a conspiracy to unleash a virus against black people? I'd like to see someone defend the intelligence of that one.
As I said: when a smart person gives an idiot $25,000 for the pleasure of listening to his idiocy for an hour or two every Sunday, I must assume an ulterior motive.
This all reminds me of one of those John Stossel specials quite some time ago. It was about the whole "conspiracy mill" thing in black America. Remember when Snapple had to take a drawing of an old tall ship off their labels? That's because the rumor was that it was a slave ship. And Snapple supported slavery; after all, the label also had a big "K" on it, for KKK.
Snapple tried to explain: the ship on the label was from the Bettman Archives. It was a picture of the Boston Tea Party. Get it? Tea ... Iced Tea. And the K? That was a symbol showing that it was kosher. And all the rabbis seconded that.
Stossel told his black American focus group that there's a perfectly sensible explanation for the ship and the K. And (this has stuck in my mind ever since) one woman responded: "I don't care what Snapple says, or what your research shows. To me it's a slave ship." And she demanded they change the label. They did.
It's that kind of shameless stupidity -- stupidity of the "damn the facts, I've been a victim of racism and so my truth must be validated," even when that "truth" is a blatant falsehood, that Rev. Wright sells. Some believe it outright; some, like BO, excuse it. That's what his famous "speech on racial unity" was all about. It was a more eloquent version of what the woman interviewed by Stossel said: it doesn't matter what the truth actually is; it matters what I perceive the truth to be."
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