This is a longer-than-a-comment response to carldavidson's diary, which is here, and in which Tom Hayden asks, via carldavidson, who stirred the Wright pot in the first place.
Who obtained the tapes from Trinity Church?
Who spliced and edited those tapes?
Who took them to what media outlets?
Who in the media received the tapes?
Who decided to play those tapes over the air?
The simple answer: Erik Rush. And he's very proud of himself.
Rush happened to have appeared just last Sunday on Fox's "Hannity's America" to boast about his achievement. Here's an excerpt of that conversation:
HANNITY: All right. I am looking at a column. I've got it here in my hands and the date is February 20th, 2007 and the author is you. And it's called "Abomination." And you brought my attention to this which resulted in a March interview with Rev. Wright. And you pointed out the black value system. Did you ever think this issue would become so dominant in this campaign?
RUSH: No, I had absolutely no idea it was going to go this far.
Here's Rush on his blog in January, 2008:
I broke [the Wright] story last February . . . and as I said two weeks ago in this space, it had its fifteen minutes and fizzled, which was somewhat expected given the mindset of the establishment media.
The story of presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s controversial church and pastor has been given new life for a few reasons:
- Obama is now a serious contender for the Democrat nomination,
2. The recent media-driven story vis-à-vis certain remarks made by Hillary Clinton,
- Obama’s church (Trinity United in Chicago, www.tucc.org) honoring racist Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan and its exalting him in their magazine Trumpet, and
- Trinity United’s pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s big mouth.
[emphasis mine.]
Rush did bring the media's attention to Wright in that February 20, 2007 column, which was actually called "Obamanation." He's a schlocky writer with a small, extremely right-wing audience (he believes we should annex Mexico, just for instance). But Fox News took the bait, and invited Wright on the show to talk about his church on March 1, 2007. The YouTube video of that was posted here by an Obama opponent.
Two weeks later, a blogger named Adam Graham reported on March 13, 2007 that:
African American Columnist Eric Rush purused the Church's website and was alarmed by what he found: One could argue that Obama's church "worships things African to a far greater degree than they do Christ," Rush contends. Meanwhile, he says the writings and speech of Trinity United's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, appear to be more Marxist than Christian. Rush formed this opinion of Wright "after doing some digging and then seeing him appear on Fox News the night after I did," the columnist points out.
But the story went nowhere. It had already gone nowhere. Plenty of people had already been trying to make a case of Wright, including Tucker Carlson. ("Opposition research is a growth industry," Former Congressman Tom Andrews snapped back at Carlson's baiting. "So fasten your seatbelt Obama, it's coming at you.")
And as for who circulated the videos, YouTube was already full of them. Trinity has its own Web presence there, and evidently tapes every last thing that happens. Right-wing Web sites were already airing the 9/11 sermon.
Still, when Wright's name came up, as late as December, 2007, pundits defended him. Orange County, California megachurch pastor Rick Warren called him a "great, Godly man." Juan Williams on FOX put him "right in the mainstream of Christian practice here." (Mormons, on the other hand -- Romney was still darkening the airwaves -- had a history of racism.)
But then we get to those "certain remarks" Clinton made, which Rush refers to. An article from the London Sunday Times by Sarah Baxter, which ran in mid-January, 2007, talks about the 9/11 video, and also hints that Clinton was trying to make an issue of it:
WHEN Hillary Clinton warned that Barack Obama had not been thoroughly "vetted", as she has been, she was hinting darkly at trouble to come over her rival's radical pastor and shady patron in Chicago, the Illinois senator's home town..
[stuff cut]
`Swiftboating'' has become a metaphor for attacking a candidate's strengths head-on, instead of their weaknesses.
In Obama's case, it means calling into question his multi-layered racial and religious background and his reputation for scrupulous integrity. The smear that he is secretly a Muslim, or too close for comfort to that religion, has already taken hold.
``We have to peel back his identity,'' said one elderly white voter in South Carolina, a state Obama must win on January 26. ``Did you know his middle name is Hussein? He is a Muslim and was raised in an Islamic school.''
Obama was not raised to follow any religion, although his African grandfather and Indonesian stepfather were Muslim.
He became a Christian in Chicago and -- in the late 1980s -- joined the Trinity United Church of Christ, an African-American mega-church with an 8000-strong congregation.
The same southern voter, who asked not to be named, then threw another piece of Obama's biography into the frame.
``I looked at his church's website. It said it was `unashamedly black'. They don't want any whites there. I wouldn't feel real comfortable if I tried to worship there.''
Evidently ABC News spent three months vetting not Obama, but his pastor. The network purchased videos from the church, and assiduously combed through them for "repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as a reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans." And then it put together a story, which aired on March 13, 2008 -- more than a year after Rush started beating his little tin drum.
A commenter in carldavidson's diary shared the link to the ABC story, but here it is again:
And the rest is recent, and to me, tragic history.
ABC must have worked hard those months watching videos. I imagine the reporters and producers found it entertaining, because Wright's sermons, and the goings-on in his church, always are. But I hope they found some beauty there, too, because there was plenty of that as well.
Here, for example, is church service held December, 2007, in which Reverend Jeremiah Wright demonstrates to his congregation how an HIV test works with just a swab (evidently some of them were fearing having blood drawn):
Would that we were a different people, guided by compassion and tolerance. Alas, as the national response to Wright's message proves, we are led around by the nose by the likes of Erik Rush. It's a vast, right-wing nutjob conspiracy indeed. The astonishing thing to me is how well it still works.