The sadly misnamed Rev. Wright

  Oh, lordie, where to begin with this joker.

Like one of those “groundbreaking” comedians from the late ’70s, Barack Obama’s former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright is now basing entire speeches on the whole “black guys do it like this, while white guys do it like that” schtick, complete with an impersonation of us uptight white people and how uptight we speak. The bit wasn’t funny 30 years ago, and it’s only pathetic now. I mean it’s lamer than jokes about airline food.

(I leave it up to you to see if you can find the hypocrisy in a speech with the premise that “Different doesn’t mean deficient” while making fun of other types of people the entire time. And I’ll leave it up to you to make what you will of Wright’s bizarre and offensive claim that black people use a different part of their brain to learn than white people. And I’ll also leave it up to you to ascertain exactly how long a white person would remain in their job if they made a similar claim in front of a TV camera.)

I usually hesitate to complain about blanket attacks on white people, because let’s face it: Most of the time when white people complain about how they’re being spoken of, the subtext is nasty, i.e, they seem to be wishing that they could also get away with saying nasty things about other groups of people.

Such is not the case with me. I don’t pine away for the ability to treat other groups the way I’ve been treated. It’s a sign of weakness at best, and virulence at worst. I don’t want any part of it, and I emphatically do not claim the right to respond in kind.

No, the only things that truly offend me as an American about Rev. Wright’s embarrassing media tour are his totally bogus claims that A), he represents the black church and B), that an attack on him is an attack on the black church. If anyone is racist in this whole affair, it’s Rev. Wright himself for trotting out a totally inflammatory image of the black church as being at all related to the kind of freak show he puts on at his own “church,” which from what I’ve learned of it is hardly worthy of the title.

I have been in black churches, and have never witnessed anything remotely like Rev. Wright’s over-the-top, self-obsessed, hyper-political screeds. Maybe things are different in Chicago, I don’t know. If so, shame on them.

The only reason the media is not calling Wright out on this obvious slander is because so few people in the media know the first thing about black churches. (That, and they’re also totally in the tank for Obama, but that’s a side issue.)

Quite simply, Rev. Wright is a fraud, a charlatan. No more and no less. I hope his 15 minutes on the American stage is over.

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