Jeremiah Wright Digs Himself Deeper

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Rod Dreher on Jeremiah Wright’s appearance before the National Press Club (transcript). “In short,” he says, the controversial parson

1. Defended the idea that the US Government could have invented AIDS to kill black people.

2. Refused to criticize Louis Farrakhan, and called him one of the greatest men of the last and current century.

3. Said that US soldiers are like Roman legionaries (which is not terribly controversial if the point you are making is that America is an imperial power, but he’s making the point that our soldiers are oppressors like the Roman centurions were of the Jews in Jesus’s time).

4. Said that Obama is distancing himself from him (Wright) not because he really dissents from Wright’s message, but out of political expedience.

5. Said criticism of him is criticism of the entire black church.

Rod’s conclusion: “The man is an egomaniac, pure and simple.”

Update: Errol Louis writing in the NY Daily News is harsher, calling his remarks “rambling, angry, sarcastic,” and judging that “Wright couldn’t have done more damage to Barack Obama’s campaign if he had tried.” And he thinks that’s the point of the display, because who invited Wright to make that speech? A Hillary supporter.

It’s hard to exaggerate how bad the actual news conference was. Wright, steeped in an honorable, fiery tradition of Bible-based social criticism, cheapened his arguments and his movement by mugging for the cameras, rolling his eyes, heaping scorn on his critics and acting as if nobody in the room was learned enough to ask him a question.

Update: As Tompaul points out below, Barack Obama has now weighed in, and it seems he was just as appalled by Wright’s “performance” and “rants” at the NPC as these others. Obama pulled no punches (Transcript):

Now, I’ve already denounced the comments that had appeared in these previous sermons. As I said, I had not heard them before. And I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia, explaining that he has done enormous good in the church. He’s built a wonderful congregation. The people of Trinity are wonderful people. And what attracted me has always been their ministry’s reach beyond the church walls.

But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS, when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century, when he equates the United States wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses. They offend me. They rightly offend all Americans. And they should be denounced. And that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally here today.

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