Bill Moyers interviews the Reverend Jeremiah Wright

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04252008/watch.html

It was better than i thought, very smart man. It will probably go over the heads of the average "pennsylvania-type" everyones been talking about lately but it was good.

 

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If there was a left version of Fox, the left version of Fox would have defended Wright even though Obama could not defend Wright. It would have helped Obama if someone defended Wright. And Wright was defendable. All Wright did wrong was tell the truth.

OK the AIDS bit was weird but not as weird as it sounds if you know about Tuskegee/syphilis and know about the history of the scientific debate on Aids including the monkey blood polio vaccine Philadelphia to Africa story. Every other clip I heard from Wright was the truth. Blacks should have the right to say "god Damn America" in the context in which Wright said that without being accused of being anti-American.

How can you call a guy who works so hard to make America a better country anti-American just because he refuses to pretend that the USA is much better than it really is. Every country has it's problems. The USA's accomplishments are great but the USA's flaws are very real and serious. The USA's flaws matter more than other countries flaws because the USA is so much more powerful than any other nation for now.

9-11 was our chickens coming home to roost. Is it really more patriotic to lie about why 9-11 happened, than it is patriotic to face the truth and fix our mistakes?

Moyers already lost his job once at PBS for opposing the Iraq war. Bush may decide to take Moyers off the air again if Moyers keeps doing things like putting Wright on the Air. Conservative Pat Buchanan is the only national TV news/opinion guy that I am aware of who opposed the Iraq war in 2003 without getting fired for opposing the war.

 

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What "context", exactly, were the comments about the CIA creating AIDS and spreading drugs in black communities taken out of? What's a "Pennsylvania-type"? Someone who doesn't agree with Wright and Obama? Would they be some kind of "typical" person?

Best,

Geoff

 

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The CIA did spread heroin and cocaine in black communities, it's what broke up various black power movements in the 60's.

 

Yes, and I am secretly the President of the Galaxy! Shhhh, don't tell Zaphod.

Heroin is a refinement of opium and would have some about anyway. Cocaine was much older and abuded long before the sixties. The CIA had nothing to do with their spread amongst black communities. The same as they had nothing to do with the spread among white communities. It was just the fad of the time free love and drugs.

 

Can anybody find the exact quote of Wright on AIDs? I don't think the "CIA" was part of the quote. The Right wing media and blogs in the USA have extremely low standards for accuracy so finding the original quote won't be easy.

I read a blog quoting some study that said about 25% of blacks in the USA believe that the government and or white people created aids. The blog said an additional 25% of blacks thought that "maybe the government and or white people created AIDs. This idea is also common in Africa.

I read (The New York Review of Books circa 1997) that Consensus Scientific opinion was that AIDS probably came from Monkeys in Congo or nearby parts of Africa. The leading theory was that somebody hunting for Bush meat was bitten by an infected monkey. This Idea is based on the alleged fact that the viruses most similar to HIV are found in monkeys. Some serious scientists resisted the Idea that HIV was the cause of AIDS for decades.

One serious scientist in the 1980s believed he may have traced AIDS to a batch of Polio Vaccine made utilizing monkey blood in Pennsylvania and distributed by health care charities exclusively in Africa. Of course the Polio vaccine manufacturer strenuously denied the allegation.

It seems that AIDs spread from Africa to Haiti; From Haiti to Miami Haitians; From Miami Haitians to American gays; From American gays to IV drug users, and from IV drug users to the heterosexual American Black population. American blacks are currently being hit harder by AIDs than other US ethnic groups are.

I believe that CIA protected Mafia drug traffickers were selling Heroin into Harlem in the 1950s at a time when the Mafia refused to sell drugs to Italian Americans.

CIA protected Nicaraguan drug traffickers sold cocaine to Black LA drug dealers in the 1980s.

The US government conned some American blacks into unnecessarily dying of Syphilis for research purposes from 1932 to 1972 in the Tuskegee experiments. It seems they found it OK to let blacks die unnecessarily of Syphilis but did not do the same thing to whites even though it would have made for a better experiment if they also killed whites.

Given the above I can see why it is correct for blacks to be suspicious about AIDS. Going to the next step and thinking you know that AIDS was created to harm blacks is stupid. Without the actual quote I don't know if reverend Wright was merely expressing suspicions or if he was actually alleging a conspiracy.

When my sister visited Guatemala five years ago she was warned to be careful because Guatemalans were upset at Americans because they believed this crazy rumor that Americans were stealing Guatemalan babies. This year I learned that the rumor was not 100% crazy. Guatemalans were in fact stealing babies to sell to sleazy adoption agencies who then sold them to Americans who wanted to adopt babies. The Americans adopting the babies did not know the babies were stolen. They thought they were orphans. They thought the high fees they were paying to adopt a baby was normal.

Many American conservatives believes that liberals want to confiscate their guns. That seems like an absurd conspiracy theory to me.

That idea that Muslim extremists hate our freedom and therefore want to kill us seems like an absurd conspiracy theory to me despite the fact that President Bush promoted that conspiracy theory.

Every American subculture has their own set of conspiracy theories that they sort of believe.

 

LOL. There is. It's called the mainstream media, PBS, and NPR.

No, they shouldn't. When you ask for God to damn a certain country, you can not reasonably claim that your prayer for divine vengeance upon that nation is because you love it, regardless of your race.

If any pastor where I live said that, he'd soon find himself preaching to an empty church.

 

Free speech is a given right here in America. His opinions are his own. It doesn't have to be right, nor does he have to prove he is right. There are a lot of prominent white people who are wrong about things from racism to science that are in the same boat. Look at President Bush, he thinks he is right but most of us can see through his bullshit. So when someone spouts off about the government, give them the benifit of doubt, they could be right.

 

I never questioned his right to say whatever he wants. I simply said that he can not simultaneously condemn American before God and claim he's a patriot. Or, at the very least, he should not be surprized or indignant when others question his patriotism based upon the things he says.

You are free to say whatever you want. Others are free to make judgements about you based upon what you say. It's a double edged sword.

 

Listen to NPR and watch PBS don't just listen to Limbaugh talk about them.

They are not the PBS and NPR of 1979. They are pro war. They are pro corporate. They favor low tax rates for capital gains. They lie for Bush. They lie for Israel. Listen to Charlie Rose kissing Negroponte's butt. The fluff pieces about gay writers, ballet in the ghetto and dying polar bears have little impact on politics. They do swing a little to the left when they beg for donations.

You probably never heard the sentences that preceded the "damn America" quote.
You don't live in a place where people want to hear any criticism of conservatives. Could you say damn the liberals in your church without losing members? Liberals are Americans too.

Saying Damn America is a tactical flaw. It would be better to accuse every faction you don't like of being unAmerican and unpatriotic and damn them rather than damning America as a code way of expressing anger at all the people who you feel are harming your community.

 

There is freedom of speach, true. Congress can pass no law saying you can;t say such and such. However there are such things as slander and libel. These come about when someone deliberately abuses the spoken word solely to hurt and cause pain. Neither of these are a crime, but they are civil matters. this prevents someone from broadcasting that their exboyfriends has AIDS and does hard drugs, if in truth he does not. the Exboyfrioend can sue for damage based on the grief this brings into his life.

People like Wright, limbaugh, Coultier, Sharpton and so on should be called on their abusive use of language. the public should sue them for the pain and suffering they have brought through false accusation, lies and just general thoughtless words. Then maybe you will see people actually think about what they say, just like they should.

 

That isn't true. The conspiracy theory folks are one thing, but the foundation of thier exaggerations in the actual behavior of the CIA should be recognized. They were complicit in drug smuggling in the US, in ways that - for whatever reason - did preferentially damage black communities.

But so many have, and the churches are still full - Falwell's and Hagee's and Parsley's and Graham's and Robert's and on and on and on - but of course these are Christian churches, in which God's judgment on Ceasar's institutions are common fare.

On the contrary, as a Christian pastor he must do exactly that, whenever warranted. And of course he can praise America before God and claim he's a Christian - somewhat more dubiously.

 

Before one of the Republican debates, a choir sang "why should God Bless America?", and went on to list what they consider as our collective sins. It was really no different than what Wright said, but it wasn't done in the passionate-black-man tone.

 

I listen to NPR all the time. In fact, it's number one on the presets in my car. Hell, I've even donated a few times. I love Car Talk and This American Life. And I'd rather listen to news while I commute (even left wing news) than mindless drivel.

 

Same. I love catching the "BBC World News" in the early morning or "World Have Your Say" during a late commute. I haven't heard "This American Life" (about as liberal as you get, eh?) in a while, though I did hear "Car Talk" this past Saturday. Just those guys' laughter is funnier than anything on TV.

~String

 

Bullshit.

 

You can't trust NPR, even - much less PBS - to avoid quite blatant rightwing and authoritarian bias.

When Pollack brought back his rightwing hackwork on Iraq, for example, both NPR and PBS ran it whole on prime time - he was introduced on NPR as a "former critic of the Iraq War and the surge " , who has been on the ground in Iraq doing investigative reporting, and seen things in Iraq that have changed his mind.

Both NPR and PBS have been employing disproportionate numbers of rightwing and authoritarian associated "experts", from corporate and administration friendly think tanks, for their commentary.

And in this recent Jeremiah Wright controversy, both of them have carried water for the Clinton and McCain campaigns, in defiance of simple accuracy even, let alone honest presentation.

The center-lefty - what would be called the "moderate left" if there were a glimmer of honesty and competence in the national media - casual rule of thumb (used for jokes, etc) is that about 16% of NPR and PBS stuff is delivered from even a slightly left perspective.

The only way you can reasonably refer to NPR or PBS as biased left is if you not only simply accept the extreme right-authoritarian's definition of where the center is and what "left" means (hint: the existence of global climate effects from an anthropogenic boost in atmospheric CO2 is not a left/right issue)

but also go along with a concept of "balance" that involves assuming every controversial issue has two equivalently valid sides, represented by the two political parties or other visible public organizations, and balance consists in giving each side a fair hearing as measured by face time with self-identified spokesmen for those organizations.

 

LOL.

Still got your panties in a wad the Pollack piece? Ye Gods, that was a year ago now wasn't it? I suppose it matters not that Pollack's piece has been backed up by what actually happened on the ground? That things, did in fact, lurch noticeably for the better in the weeks and months after his "hackwork" appeared in a paper that routinely has little or nothing positive to say about the War on its editorial pages.

Tell me, Ice. Is there ANYONE in your mind who isn't "in on it"?