Final Thoughts on Rev. Wright (promise)

I watched a few minutes of the Q&A session in Washington yesterday.

Rev. Wright is clearly a very intelligent man and a very good speaker. But it appears to me that he's been living in an atmosphere were conspiracy theories are engendered and that he is under the illusion that American society hasn't made significant strides to move past Jim Crow. Just as Obama said in his Philadelphia speech, Wright seems to think that American society is static.

The sad thing to me is that, watching his speeches and the vast majority of his comments, I really like the guy. 95% of what he says is good. The problem is, the remaining 5% is talking about how the U.S. government invented AIDS to keep the black man down and that we brought 9/11 on ourselves because our government conducts state sponsored terrorism.

Coming back to Bob Herbert's column, I still don't think that Wright was intentionally trying to hurt Obama. I think he believes that he is charismatic enough that he could just charm the country into liking him, given enough air time. He seemed to be legitimately unaware that claiming the U.S. government invented AIDS might not play well with, well, anybody.

Also, on Farrakhan, Rev. Wright's answer wasn't as bad as Obama made it out to be. When he called Farrakhan "great," he made it pretty clear he that he meant it in the "Time Magazine Person of the Year" sense. I don't know anything about Louis Farrakhan aside from skimming his Wikipedia page, but clearly, he's politically radioactive. Obama doesn't have the luxury to equivocate or speak in shades of gray in that area. I'm not sure if Farrakhan even deserves that consideration, but Wright's point seemed to be that Farrakhan isn't all bad, not that he was one of the greatest (as in a force for good) people of the 20th century.

Anyhoo, I it will be nice when this stuff blows over (if it ever does). It surely can't be helping Obama much in Indiana and North Carolina.