Here’s something interesting. The pastor at Foundry United Methodist Church, which Bill and Hillary Clinton attended during their White House years, has expressed sympathy and respect for Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s ministry:
Last week, Dean Snyder, the senior minister at the Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington D.C. — which the Clintons famously attended while in the White House — released a little noticed statement offering a sympathetic defense of the totality of Wright’s work.
“The Reverend Jeremiah Wright is an outstanding church leader whom I have heard speak a number of times,” Snyder wrote. “He has served for decades as a profound voice for justice and inclusion in our society. To evaluate his dynamic ministry on the basis of two or three sound bites does a grave injustice to Dr. Wright, the members of his congregation, and the African-American church which has been the spiritual refuge of a people that has suffered from discrimination, disadvantage, and violence. Dr. Wright, a member of an integrated denomination, has been an agent of racial reconciliation while proclaiming perceptions and truths uncomfortable for some white people to hear. Those of us who are white Americans would do well to listen carefully to Dr. Wright rather than to use a few of his quotes to polarize.”
Snyder, it should be noted, was not the pastor at Foundry during the Clinton years. That was the previous minister, J. Philip Wogaman. Moreover, there seems to be confusion as to exactly what church Clinton now attends. Her campaign did not return requests for comment.
However, Foundry was cited on numerous occasions as a steady presence during the first couple’s time in the White House. And in January 2001, Bill Clinton gave a farewell speech to the congregation, thanking the church for its work in the city as well as for its “courage” to welcome gay and lesbian Christians.
And talk about false moral equivalence!
… a member of Hillary’s finance committee and a longtime ally of the Clintons has made some very explicit statements about Barack Obama’s ties to his controversial minister, Jeremiah Wright, saying that it’s “legitimate” to raise questions about those ties, comparing Wright to David Duke, and claiming that Obama has “used race where it suited him.”
The finance committee member, Niall O’Dowd, made the comments on Saturday in an unnoticed interview with RTE Radio in Ireland. The Wright issue has been raised by Hillary surrogates Lanny Davis and Joe Wilson, making O’Dowd the third Hillaryite (or fourth, if you include Hillary herself) to hit Obama over Wright.
Here is something else that the Clinton campaign apparently considers legitimate: circulating an article published in the American Spectator that accuses Obama’s foreign policy adviser, Merrill McPeak, of being anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic (yes, all three), and an alcoholic (although they use a less formal term).
McPeak has a long history of criticizing Israel for not going back to the 1967 borders as part of any peace agreement with Arab states. In 1976 McPeak wrote an article for Foreign Affairs magazine questioning Israel’s insistence on holding on to the Golan Heights and parts of the West Bank.
Marc Ambinder, who broke the story yesterday, comments:
As one keen observer pointed out to me, if advocating the pre ’67 border map makes one an anti-Semite, just about every iteration of the U.S. government since 1967 would qualify. Tony McPeak’s verbal gymnastics do not make a “Jewish problem” for Obama.
More “proof” of McPeak’s anti-Semitism:
- He says that Israeli policies toward the Palestinians help explain why there is no peace.
- He says that the relationship between Israel and the U.S. is too uncritical and one-sided.
- He says that neoconservatives are not true conservatives.
- He says that right-wing Jews and Christian Zionists are working together to influence U.S. policy toward Israel, each for their own reasons.
- He says that there are a lot of peace-minded Israelis who genuinely want to resolve this conflict in a way that is just for both sides, but that these tend to be Israelis who are more secular and liberal — i.e., not neoconservatives.
All of this makes McPeak more than anti-Semitic; it makes him a McCarthyite. In fact, it makes him worse than a McCarthyite.
And it is this article that the Clinton campaign is shopping around to the media.
And in case you’re wondering how we know that Clinton is responsible, it’s because one of her spokespeople said so:
Watching from 12 time zones away, I’ve tried to stay out of campaign blow-by-blow.
But if, as I assume is true based on Marc Ambinder’s report, the Hillary Clinton campaign is circulating a hit job from the American Spectator, this is simply disgusting. (Marc has just confirmed to me that indeed the article came in an on-the-record email from Phil Singer, the Clinton campaign spokesman.)
That the Clinton family would dignify the American Spectator, of all publications, is astonishing to anyone who was alive in the 1990s.
That they would bless this attempt to paint Merrill McPeak as an anti-Semite is grotesque.
Here is something else that’s grotesque: That comment Clinton made that Wright would not have been her pastor? She said it in response to a question while being interviewed by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. But as Josh Marshall wrote last night, there’s a twist:
Later in the afternoon she repeated the same comments at a press conference and when asked why she had chosen to engage Obama on the Wright controversy she seemed to suggest that rather than being intentional she was only providing an answer to a direct question. “Well I answered a question in an ed board today that was very specific about what I would have done,” Clinton told the reporter, “And you know I’m just speaking for myself, and i was answering a question that was posed to me.”
Now obviously, Hillary’s been in the political big leagues for a while. She knows how to deflect a question. But it’s actually much richer than this. This afternoon Greg Sargent and I were talking this over and one of us realized that this wasn’t just any Pittsburgh paper. It was the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the money-losing, vanity, fringe sheet of Richard Mellon Scaife, funder of the Arkansas Project, the American Spectator during its prime Clinton-hunting years and virtually every right-wing operation of note at one point or another over the last twenty years or more.
In fact, what I only discovered late this evening, when Eric Kleefeld sent me this link at National Review Online, is that not only was it Scaife’s paper. Scaife himself was there sitting just to Clinton’s right apparently taking part in the questioning.
This alone has to amount to some sort cosmic encounter like something out of a Wagner opera. Remember, this is the guy who spent millions of dollars puffing up wingnut fantasies about Hillary’s having Vince Foster whacked and lots of other curdled and ugly nonsense. Scaife was the nerve center of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Those of us who spent years defending the Clintons from all that malarkey learned this point on day one.
But there’s more.
Let’s game this out. Hillary’s saying this wasn’t some planned thing. She just got hit with this question and she answered it. But here’s my question. You think Richard Mellon Scaife might want to dig into the Jeremiah Wright story? This is sort of like, ‘Hey, I go on Hannity and next thing you know he’s asking me about Wright and Farrakhan. How was I supposed to see that coming?’
I don’t know just how this went down. But the idea Sen. Clinton and her staff went into an editorial board meeting with Scaife and his lackey reporters without a clear sense that they were going to get at least one choice Jeremiah Wright question just somehow doesn’t ring true to me.
Kathy
Liberty Street 