Seems our newest media celebrity, the Rev.  Jeremiah Wright, is on everybody’s mind these days.  Let me bring some clarity to the issue.

He Has Some Valid Points

He points out that we have bombed people all over the world and then act all shocked when people hate and attack us.  This is a valid point that Americans hate to face.  The only politically correct position to take on the 9/11 attacks is that they were unprovoked, completely out-of-the-blue acts directed by religious crazies.  The fact is, we DID do lots of things that provoked the attacks of 9/11.  We have long supported Israel and marginalized the people that were already living in Palestine when the United Nations “gave” the land to the Jews in 1948.  We support dictatorships all throughout the MIddle East and have military installations in areas that are holy to Islam.  Now, that’s not to say the 9/11/ attacks were right, or justified, but they didn’t happen in a vacuum.  It’s childish that we’re supposed to act like they did, or be branded unpatriotic.  Our government has been supporting dictators all over the world since the beginning of the cold war.  What do we expect to happen to our reputation when we blatantly demonstrate that while we value freedom and liberty at home, we find it expendable in other countries?

Wright also says, when asked about his ideas about HIV being a government conspiracy to eliminate black people, that after the Tuskegee Syphilis study incident, he believes the government capable of anything.  Well, considering the truth about the Tuskegee experiment — where black men with syphilis were studied for forty years, all of them being lied to, and many of them not receiving the life-saving penicillin which would have saved them, because the scientists wanted to see how the disease spread and killed — I have to be a bit sympathetic to the Rev. Wright.  As crazy as the HIV conspiracy theory sounds (and I don’t believe it, by the way), it sounds no more far-fetched than using black citizens as medical guinea pigs.

On the Other Hand, He’s a Dick

As much as I respect the Rev. Wright’s right to pontificate, he’s not doing his old friend Barak Obama any favors.  Alas, Wright has fallen prey to that most American of diseases, the Pathological Desire to Be Famous.  Now that he’s become a media darling, he just can’t seem to shut up.

He should shut up.  Or just start campaigning for Hillary Clinton.