Wednesday, April 30, 2008
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.
...As Performed by the
I don't feel like making this a long post; anyone who's been watching TV in the last few days, and listening not to Rev. Wright himself, but instead or in addition to essentially every single talking head, be they a newscaster, a "pundit," or a politician, would think that Wright was practically the equivalent of a terrorist, or perhaps had said that whites were an inferior race, or some outlandish remark (other than the understandable and widely shared, though mistaken, comments about AIDS). And, sadly, along comes Barack Obama to help out, calling Wright's comments "outrageous" and "destructive."
And if Obama doesn't think that "equat[ing] the United States' wartime efforts with terrorism" is a valid exercise, I suggest he walk past Ground Zero in Manhattan, and then take a walk through downtown Baghdad, or perhaps visit a mass grave in Fallujah. He could try taking in the sites of Sadr City, where just yesterday the U.S. military, claiming (and probably truthfully) to be firing at "militants" on rooftops who were firing at them, simply fired rockets at the buildings, not knowing or caring who was inside, and killing some unknown number of civilians, including 2-year-old Ali Hussein, who were inside.
Update: Statement from Eugene Puryear, Vice-Presidential candidate of the PSL. One section I'd like particularly to quote here:
In wall-to-wall media coverage, we hear that the message of Rev. Wright has jeopardized the future of Obama’s campaign because it is unpalatable to white working-class voters. The same corporate media that never countenances the language of “working class”—before there was only one big happy America—have now become experts in class politics. The carefully primped talking heads on Fox News and CNN have suddenly become the spokespeople for the blue-collar white worker.
But the corporate media has left out the most important fact: it is they who decide what is palatable. Wright has not come under attack because his message is unacceptable to white workers. Wright’s crime was that he put out a message unacceptable to the white racist bourgeoisie. There are no white workers scripting the text for Anderson Cooper or Sean Hannity. The multinational working class—Black, Latino, Arab, Asian and white—has nothing to do with it. The working class, regardless of nationality, is a subject class, subjected to the media that molds public opinion. It is this ruling class that formulated Obama’s “electability” crisis.