As I sit here, I find something eerily similar between the Clinton campaign and what can now only be called the Reverend Wright campaign. Both seem to operate from the view that if they don't get what they want, they get to ruin it for the other guy.

At first, I gave a wide bit of leeway to Senator Clinton: She wasn't in control of her committed surrogates, now was she? In a similar vein, I'd thought that Senator Obama should not be discredited for the things voluntary surrogate, Jeremiah Wright pulled. That is, until I looked further. Clinton has made it clear in her lauding of Senator McCain, that she doesn't want Senator Obama to get the Dem nod and, possibly the presidency, hoping instead for a 2012 run against what, she hopes, is a one-term McCain presidency rather than a possible two-term Obama administration. Her surrogates, clearly members of her inner circle, adeptly do the scut work of character assassination and campaign obfuscation while remaining closely held friends. Wright, as it turns out, is something completely different. No amount of telling the man to stop will put a cork in him. Instead, Wright has made it clear that, because Senator Obama didn't--what, genuflect and kiss is ass--he was going to move unilaterally to ensure that Obama's candidacy was derailed.

For Wright and Clinton, they both posit a larger commitment: God and country, respectively. Wright has come out against what he's called an "attack on the Black Church" though many Black pastors have proclaimed "he doesn't speak for the Black Church." This from NPR:

When Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama's longtime pastor made his flamboyant appearance at the National Press Club on Monday, he returned to one theme over and over again. The controversy, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright said, was not about him or his statements.

"This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright," he said. "It has nothing to do with Senator Obama. This is an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition."

True enough, in no small way. I've heard white pundits and men and women on the street righteously profess that they would never sit in a religous service where the views from the pulpit were so divergent from their own.

Um, that's horse shit, by the way. Whites have beaten their chests and decried evidence they find in the Wright Bytes, little caring that their own pastors have most assuredly waxed philosophical (and wrong) on a number of issues--Blacks are subhuman, women are to serve, homosexuality is a choice, the world is 5,000 years old and Jesus planted those dinosaur bones.... There are Catholic churches (among others) that are rife the sexual misconduct of their officiants--whose silence has been used to cover-up rape and other sexual offences or the bad pastor been moved from parish to parish to keep from having to say that the Reverend, like the fabled emperor, has no clothes--literally.

Some, like Reverend Graylon Hagler, have come out in support of his friend, Wright:

"It is an attack on the black church — to muzzle us to silence the preaching and the power of that form of teaching and preaching and action in the world," Hagler says.

Hagler says many black preachers and congregants echo Wright's assertions. He has preached that the U.S. government invited the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks because it has performed acts of terrorism on other countries.

Hagler says given the government's past actions – for example, withholding penicillin from blacks afflicted with syphilis in Tuskegee, Ala. – many African Americans do believe the U.S. government developed the HIV virus to kill people of color, as Rev. Wright has asserted. 

Yeah. And while all of the offences Hagler sites are true, the Black pastorate has offences of its own to contend with: from the rank refusal to "allow" women to lead congregations--going so far as to march down the aisle on Sunday into a church to which they did not belong and "remove" a woman from the pulpit...during the service, to being the very last on the scene in the AIDS prevention movement. This from Indianapolis' own, Bishop T. Garrott Benjamin, leader of an Indy megachurch:

The most dastardly thing about homosexuality is silly silly homosexuals going around trying to convince people that what they're doing is normal. That’s the sin; the abomination. Instead of saying I have a serious problem and I am struggling with it and I know that it is wrong . . . Homosexuality is a spirit of the underworld and you who collaborate with that spirit collaborate with the devil himself. But be careful on who you think is a homosexual and who is not. Everybody that is effeminate is not a homosexual, they just didn’t have the kind of parenting where a father said ‘son take that switch out yo' walk boy, son we don't walk like that, or bend like that either.’ The first time a father sees his son do his wrist like this he needs to take his hand and say .....uh............uh...........here. Your wrist goes like this. Men don’t talk up here (high). It’s a choice, you can change, you can choose, you can choose. Every effeminate person is not gay and every weight lifter is not straight. He might be the biggest girl in the city.” Uproarious laughter breaks out in the congregation. (H/T to Advance Indiana)

Disgusting and, in a classic twofer move, patently insulting to both gay men and straight women (can't go wrong in the homo-hating hall of fame, if you use womanliness to insult a man). Still, the members of the congregation held pat. No one budged as their minister delighted in selectively mocking (also a sin) human beings he felt were worthy of scorn.

Other pastors aren't as quick to high-five Wright for his stalwart "protection" of the Black Church. Instead, some like this pastor seem to hold that Wright is someone Black congregants many need protection from:

But Bishop Harry Jackson of Hope Christian Church in Beltsville, Md., has another take on Obama's pastor.

"Jeremiah Wright is not mainstream," Jackson says.

Jackson leads a Pentecostal church, which focuses on self-improvement and helping people join the middle class. And while the church cares for the poor, it has little theologically in common with the Rev. Wright's focus on injustice and oppression.

"He doesn't represent the majority," Jackson says. "My guess is maybe 25 percent of black pastors may hold that view. So you've got a gifted communicator with what I would call a flawed world view."

Jackson was also shocked that Wright violated his pastoral relationship with Obama by revealing information about private conversations. And Jackson says he believes Wright knew he was torpedoing Obama's campaign.

"For him to speak up now," Jackson says, "was, in fact, a Judas kiss."

Maybe God needs to add an extra commandment: Thou shalt not spite they neighbor.

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