Error And Judgment
Bill Kristol, recently grafted onto the New York Times op-ed page, may be bringing a little Fox to the henhouse.* If a neoconservative commentator pulls citations out of some of the least credible corners of the right-wing media, and floats them in his national column, and then, at some point later, appends an “I regret the error” message… does anyone hear it? Beside the scrofulous and vaguely hydrophobic bloggers, I mean.
He’s had to back up this truck at least once already and he’s only been there since January. Can he get away with this once every… month? Six weeks? How long does he get to play this game of “oops, I did it again”? I’m guessing he’s good through the election at least.
Similar quality control issues are in play at the LA Times, as well, of course. This is not about accuracy.
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*Not that there are many hens left, of course. In fact, it seems like this particular henhouse has been turned into a sort of Vulpine Social Club where the foxes play dominoes and disappear into the back room from time to time.
March 17, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Newsmax? Wow. And, I thought that was fringe media. But, the larger issue here is whether what a pastor says, and whether Obama was there, matters worth shit. This morning on the CBS Early Show (not regular viewing, blame it on near insomnia) there were three professors featured discussing the entire issue. It was honestly the best few minutes I’ve seen in the MSM in ages. Of course, the stupid right is up in arms…I was able to get a transcript from a conservative site up in arms…here it is:
MAGGIE RODRIGUEZ: Joining us now to talk about this, Debra Dickerson, columnist for Mother Jones and professor of journalism at the State University of New York at Albany. Dr. James Peterson, professor of English and African-American studies at Bucknell University and Randall Balmer, professor of American religious history at Columbia University and also the author of “God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. Good morning to the three of you.
JAMES PETERSON: Good morning.
MITCHELL: Thanks for coming in.
RODRIGUEZ: Do you think, Debra, that it is right that this has gotten so much attention?
DEBRA DICKERSON: I think it’s — the only strange thing is that it’s taken so long for these comments — what’s being said in black churches to get — for people to start to actually listen to them. And I — it’s not that it’s wrong or it’s right, it’s just that black religiosity is such a given and yet there’s sort of a ‘Joe sent me’ aspect, you know, where you knock on the door and things that are said in the church that are common knowledge, people who are pretending to be shocked by this sort of thing.
RODRIGUEZ: Well, Barack Obama is pretending to be shocked. He says he’s never heard this before. Do you think he’s pretending?
DICKERSON: Yes. He’s — I think he’s surprised because the things that get said in church tend not to, you know, sort of what happens in church stays in church. And we’ve never been called on the carpet before. We’ve never been at — you know what it is, it was a vestige of racism. Nobody cared what we were saying in our churches unless it had sort of popular resonance, you know, when we were in the civil rights movement and that sort of thing. But the regular day-to-day Sunday sermons, this is not unusual.
MITCHELL: Well James, let me ask you, did Reverend Wright, in your mind, cross the line there by making some of the statements that he made?
JAMES PETERSON: I don’t think so. I think we need to understand that the pulpit is like a rhetorical space. And so, If we put that back into its context and saw the sermon develop over time, I think we might have a different take on it now. And when you pull certain comments out, it seems very sensational. But, I would agree that the black church is a kind of a bastion of sort of segregated culture, and there’s a way in which we just are not having access to that. But what the Reverend is saying fits into a certain kind of context. And I’m not defending it or not defending it, I’m just saying that we’re pulling it out of its rhetorical context. The pulpit is someplace from which we have to persuade people. And sometimes, whether it’s a black persuasion or a white persuasion, those words are going to be very, very strong, very, very powerful and their designed to incite, designed to make us have the kind of conversations that we’re having right now.
RODRIGUEZ: Now, Barack Obama has rejected these words and distanced himself from the Reverend, but is he guilty, in your opinion, by association? This is someone he’s been close to for 20 years, married him, baptized both of his daughters.
RANDALL BALMER: I don’t think so. I — I mean, I’ve been attending church for the better part of 53years. If I believed everything every minister ever told me, I’d probably be in analysis for the next 20 years. I mean that’s just not a fair thing. And I think we’re asking the wrong questions. The real questions should be to all of the candidates, how does your religious faith affect your policies, affect the way you govern. For example, eight years ago when George W. Bush declared that Jesus was his favorite philosopher, suppose somebody had followed up with a question ‘Governor Bush, your favorite philosopher calls on his followers to be peace makers and turn the other cheek, how will that affect your foreign policy in the event of, say, an attack on the United States? Or how does Jesus’ sentiment about expressing concern for the tiniest sparrow affect your environmental policies?’ Those are real questions.
PETERSON: And that’s how — that’s how Reverend Wright has affected Obama is that his rhetoric is about transcending those racial lines discourses. And so it has had an impact on him. I think — the impact is he wants to move beyond that. His whole campaign has been about that.
MITCHELL: Let me ask you this, because I just talked to Reverend Calvin Butts about this morning — Reverend Butts, let me ask you as well. Do you expect black pastors to dial back a little bit in this era of YouTube, in this politically-charged era that we live in?
DICKERSON: I think that’s going to happen. If you remember there was a minister in D.C. a few years back, who said some of things he’d been saying for a long time about homosexuals, and The Advocate or the local D.C. gay paper picked up on it, and he was surprised there was this kind of backlash. The things he was saying were really out there, but his congregation was clapping and applauding. I think now that ministers who want to be — who are political, are going to have to do some thinking about how they’re going to present themselves because it’s not an echo — it’s not an amen corner anymore. People are paying attention. Now we’re being taken seriously. And I do think that ministers will and should think about if they really, really mean what they’re saying and maybe what they need to do is up the level. ‘Okay, I say this in anger, but maybe I need to step back and say this in a more responsible way’ because you can hear things in church every Sunday in a black church.
PETERSON: That are crazy.
DICKERSON: They’re off the hook.
PETERSON: But I mean we have to keep those things in their proper context. I mean, the sermon is designed to persuade. I mean, that’s what it’s supposed to do. And also designed to incite, to exhort.
DICKERSON: It’s cathartic, it’s a place of catharsis, where somebody goes in and is very, very forceful and says things in a way that are maybe, you know, are hyperbolic because there was no penalty for that anymore. It was an amen corner. But now I think that people are going to have to say — do I — and maybe he’ll keep saying it. Maybe Pastor Wright will keep saying it.
PETERSON: I think he will. I don’t think Pastor Wright’s going to change at all.
MITCHELL: Debra Dickerson, James Peterson, Randall Balmer, thanks a lot for coming in.
March 17, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Right. The whole premise of this outrage fandango is the obliteration of context and the subsequent battle over the reconstruction of that context.
The real questions should be to all of the candidates, how does your religious faith affect your policies, affect the way you govern.
I suppose it’s too much to hope for the answer, “Not at all”?
March 18, 2008 at 2:38 am
In Bush’s case, I wish it had though.
March 18, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Unfortunately, at this juncture it IS too much to ask that a candidate answer “Not at all.” Atheists are the most distrusted group in America. Moreover, while you can avoid discussions of particular theological points that guide one’s policies, you have to say that your “faith” gives you “moral judgment” in certain spheres of your life. If you’re as specific as Bush, you should get called on it, and I agree with Joe that it’s too bad he wasn’t.
As for obliterating/reconstructing context: we’ll see how it plays out, but I have the feeling that among people who would actually seriously consider voting for him in the first place, Obama made headway today. He didn’t do EVERYTHING he needed to do, but he was sufficiently impressive in other respects, that he’ll get a pass from people who might have turned away from him.
In the general, will it really be a battle of Wright vs. Parsley & Hagee? Perhaps, but that’s a dicey game. Maybe I’m crazy, but I think that there are a lot of “mainstream” whites out there who may harbor racial resentment, but who don’t want to–they’re tired of this sort of bullshit.
So…I don’t see this having legs, not really. I hope I’m right.
March 18, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Well, when I say “not at all,” I’m not arguing for an atheist coup, but it would be nice for the Christians in government to be satisfied — I mean, considering the nation’s history and everything — relying on human laws rather the bible. The Huckster wanted to solve this problem by just amending the Constitution, of course, which would be a deft fix. But an absence of faith-driven governance isn’t atheism. It’s governance.
And what’s with this meme-pimping about atheists being the most distrusted group in America? I know people ranked them low on their list of potential presidential candidates, but there has to be a group less trustworthy than atheists. Lawyers? Meth dealers? Kidnappers? I mean, I don’t have unreasonable expectations, but come on. Bloodthirsty pirates? Plague-fleas?
March 19, 2008 at 12:20 am
Are they Christian (at least God-fearing) bloodthirsty pirates? If so, the atheist doesn’t stand a chance. A single man or woman stands a better chance than an atheist, and that’s no chance at all.
March 19, 2008 at 1:33 am
Oh, my god…. what if I”m single… and an atheist! And a pirate!
March 19, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Plague fleas are not trusted, and they are also hated and feared but plague fleas did not abandon God by choice, they’re just God’s terrifying creatures, after all. (See this for a theological comparison here, haha: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooaGhYFHIzg)
Anyway, the poll was about “groups” in America. Pirates I think might actually poll better. I know it’s shitty (I’m an atheist too, ya know), but that’s the way things are right now.
Christians in government used to be satisfied with secularism. Not so many of them any more, apparently. And they have a real victim’s complex about it. But this could change at the end of the impending fundie civil war over global warming and CEO bonuses.