Please Excuse Our Progress

Monday, March 17, 2008

The comments made by Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's pastor, five days after September 11th give a more accurate account of why the attacks happened than anything I've heard from Obama or Hillary Clinton.

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.
"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4443788&page=1

Maybe the connection between the specific events he cites and 9/11 is tenuous, but the general thrust of his remarks that 9/11 was largely a result of the U.S.' militaristic and economically exploitative foreign policy seems to me right, although it is not discussed by any prominent politician besides Ron Paul.

Despite Obama's denunciation of Wright's remarks, I'm encouraged by the fact that they've had a long-standing relationship. For some reason I've always had this mystical feeling that Obama just lies about his foreign policy views to make them palatable. For example, I'm inclined to accept as a true reflection of his beliefs his statement at a small political event last year in Iowa that "no one is suffering more than the Palestinians," although he subsequently qualified it by saying that he meant "under the Hamas government." So I was encouraged last week when Obama's economic advisor Austan Goolsbee said that Obama's criticisms of NAFTA were just political posturing.

I conclude with some Tom Waits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkJUIVfHq2s

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

There's all the obvious to say for this; but at least we're not calling it a crusade anymore.