Give Rev Wright a chance to convince you

Friday, March 21, 2008 by Dave Winer.

Melroy Hodge, from Queens, NY, a contact on Twitter, sent a pointer to a YouTube video of a longer excerpt of Jeremiah Wright's post-911 sermon, one of the speeches that soundbites were shown repeatedly on cable news this week. I guess it's not surprising that the cable news excerpts gave a very misleading impression. (Next time this happens we must do an immediate fact-check.) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOdlnzkeoyQ  

This is a must-watch video. Stop what you're doing, right now, and watch it. 

I found myself captivated by Wright's ideas and the way he expresses them.  

I agree with everything he said.  

I would have been willing to cut him some slack, because this was less than a week after the attack, and those were crazy days, who knew what was coming next. But he was right, we have done what they did to us, and we're doing it again in Iraq.  

The US was led by despotic people and we followed; we wanted to punish someone, anyone, and it didn't matter if they had anything to do with what happened to us. And we did.  

Lots of people don't want to acknowledge this, esp the cable news networks who led the charge to war, but if you compare what Wright said to what they were saying, and why shouldn't we, I think we'll find that Wright was a rational and calming alternative to the lunacy that was dominating discourse in the US in the years following 911. And this video was taken mere days after the attacks.  

The news networks don't have standing to criticize Wright for his post-911 speech. Let's dig up some of their oratory from that timeframe and see if we want them involved in our political process in the future. 

As Wright says, the chickens. Have come. Home. To roost.