Dorothy Rabinowitz, Pulitzer-prize winning columnist (and nominated 3 other times) for The Wall Street Journal, pens an editorial on the recent controversy over the ABC-moderated Democratic presidential debate:
"Mr. Obama's apparent inability to confront, forthrightly, the pastor's poisonous pronouncements and his own relationship with him is, of course, the cause of all the continuing questions on the subject. It had not been in him, for instance, to say publicly that for a pastor to have preached that the U.S. government had embarked on a project to inject blacks with AIDS was an outrage on truth and decency. He delivered a celebrated speech on race, one generally hailed as a masterwork, that was supposed to have explained it all. It was a work masterly, above all, in its evasiveness. Even its admirers, prepared to swallow his repeated resort to descriptions like "controversial" for the pastor's hate-filled rants, couldn't quite give Sen. Obama a pass when it came to his beloved white grandmother, or to the not so beloved Geraldine Ferraro, both of whom he suggested were racists in their own right.
These issues – the unanswered, the suspect – which outraged press partisans have for days attempted to dismiss as trivia and gossip, largely forgotten by the public, are unlikely to be forgotten, either today or in the general election, nor are they trivial. This, Messrs. Gibson and Stephanopoulos clearly understood when they chose their questions. Mr. Obama's answers told far more than he or his managers wished.
Offered a chance to explain the meaning of his remarks about the reasons people living in small towns cling to guns and religion, he went on to repeat them all over again in different words. What there was in those remarks, what attitudes shown, that had offended people, he had still not grasped. In short, what he had said that day he'd meant to say. "What you are, picks its way," as Walt Whitman told us...." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120891044439036617.html?mod=special_page_campaign2008_mostpop
Columns that earned Ms. Rabinowitz her Pulitzer (Read the one on McCain): http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2001/commentary/works/
In addition to her Pulitzer, Mr. Rabinowitz has earned the following distinctions: Ms. Rabinowitz is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. She re ceived the 1997 Champion of Justice Award from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in recognition of her journalistic achievements and commending her in particular for her writing on false sexual abuse charges. In 1993 she won the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors in the commentary category. http://www.opinionjournal.com/medialog/bio.html/
3 comments:
It's worth noting here, though, that Rabinowitz is a conservative Wall Street Journal columnist. Everyone could have predicted years in advance that she would be criticizing the Democratic frontrunner this year. It's her job.
Re Jeremiah Wright, I can't think of anything he said that was so horrible. People criticized him mainly for being "unpatriotic," not for being racist--i.e. for saying "God damn America" (so are we supposed to be Christian Wahhabists who believe that America is our version of Mecca?), the "chickens coming home to roost" remark post-9/11 (which was pulled WAY out of context--listen to the rest of the sermon), and for suggesting that the government spread AIDS (false but not far-fetched--google "Tuskegee experiment").
So this is not so much a race controversy as a patriotism controversy, and rather than pretending that Wright's sermons were "hate-filled," I wish his critics would just admit that the real problem for them is that he has the audacity to criticize the government.
Donna Ladd could've written that comment, that is how shallow it is and frankly, it doesn't deserve a response. I'll let it stand on its own merits.
Fair enough. I would still like to see folks admit that the problem with Jeremiah Wright is not racism--it's the fact that he's a radical rather than a liberal, and our country doesn't know what to do with radicals.
There's no "kill whitey" dimension to his sermons at all, and I feel like what he has said has been completely misrepresented as being racially insensitive when the issue is not race at all, but rather patriotism and the degree to which people are supposed to "watch what they say, watch what they do" in the aftermath of 9/11. In some ways, Jeremiah Wright and Bill Maher represent two sides of the same rhetorical coin--the difference being that Maher was trying to entertain, while Wright was dead-on serious.
I don't agree with every single word Wright said, but I can't see anything he said in a sermon that showed his heart wasn't in the right place. The closest he comes is the "chickens coming home to roost" remark which, again, needs to be placed in the context of the sermon. Preachers don't talk in soundbites like politicians do.
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