Pontificating Pundits

Charles Krauthammer holds forth on hatred and healing:

The beauty of a speech is that you don’t just give the answers, you provide your own questions. “Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes.” So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.

An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which “controversial” remarks?

Wright’s assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented HIV “as a means of genocide against people of color”? Wright’s claim that America was morally responsible for Sept. 11 — “chickens coming home to roost” — because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?) What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them?

Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: “There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?”

But that is not the question. The question is why didn’t he leave that church? Why didn’t he leave — why doesn’t he leave even today — a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) “God damn America”? Obama’s 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.

Krauthammer has no standing to rail against bigotry or racism:

It’s no secret to any of my readers that I despise Charles Krauthammer. I never liked his writing. He is a neocon. He’s vicious (he ridiculed Christopher Reeve for giving seriously disabled people “false hope). And his views of the Israeli-Palestinian question are repulsive. He hates the Palestinians and would fight to the last Israeli to defeat them.

And then there was that experience with him in my synagogue in 2001. It was Yom Kippur. The rabbi was giving his sermon only to be interrupted by a bellowing obnoxious Krauthammer who was shouting him down for expressing a hope for peace between Israelis and Arabs.
[...]
The irony here is that Krauthammer is every bit as racially paranoid as Wright. He hates the Arabs and says so publicly and privately. He believes that Israel must triumph in every situation because it is innately right while the Arabs are innately wrong.. He views the world as divided between Jews and gentiles and it is us Jews who are always the victims.

In short, he sees the world much as Wright does. It is just that with Krauthammer the actors assigned to the role of oppressed and oppressor are different.

Krauthammer is also deplorably ignorant of the history that gives context to Rev. Wright’s seeming paranoia about the federal government enslaving black people with drugs and deliberately spreading the AIDS virus in the black community. The government may not have deliberately spread the AIDS virus in the black community, but it did deliberately all but ignore AIDS and the HIV virus as a serious public health problem while it was confined to gay men and IV drug users, and has continued to grossly underfund research, treatment, and — arguably most important — prevention programs as the epidemic reached crisis proportions among African-Americans.

But there is much worse than this. For 40 years, beginning in 1932, the U.S. government actually did knowingly, and quite intentionally, withhold life-saving treatment from 399 black men in the Tuskegee Experiments:

For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,” their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”

These experiments on living human beings, without their consent, ended in 1972 only because a participant tipped off the media — and then only because that participant decided that the experiments were not going to “prevent, find, or cure a single case of infectious syphilis or bring us closer to our basic mission of controlling venereal disease in the United States.”

Perhaps Charles Krauthammer is not familiar with the Tuskegee Experiments. I can assure him that most African-Americans are.

Explore posts in the same categories: Politics

Tags: Kathy

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.