And He Always Had Some Mighty Fine Wine

Though he's obviously a tremendous kook, I've found myself a bit uneasy about much of the reaction to the Jeremiah Wright controversy that's been reverberating for several news cycles now. Doug Wilson is putting a finger on the problem in a couple of very insightful posts.

Writes Wilson:

...the most damaging clip was the one in which Jeremiah Wright was railing against the United States, saying, "God damn America for . . . God damn America for . . ." followed by a litany of of die-hard leftist complaints. But what is the real problem here? I recall Billy Graham's wife once saying, "If God doesn't judge America, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah." The real reason for the indignation directed at Wright was because he simply said God damn America, not for the screwed-up reasons he had for saying it. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson got a similar reaction when they said something similar after 911. Suppose Wright had said, "God damn America for the abortion carnage. God damn America for sodomite marriages." Now what? Wright is being condemned, not for having the list of sins wrong (which he did), but for being un-American with a camera running.

In another post he writes:

During the Clinton years, it was de rigeur for conservatives to assume that the government was actively involved in cold-blooded murder -- Vince Foster, Ron Brown, not to mention a large percentage of the people connected to Bill's Arkansas drug-running ring. But if someone on the left makes a charge like this, the central problem for the Fox indignants is not the craziness of the charge itself -- pretend the Rev. Wright had said that the CIA had embedded microwave transmissions in iPods that targetted blacks specifically. That kind of thing is what seems to me to be the real problem -- not charges per se, but nutjob charges. But the reaction to this is "how dare he believe our duly-elected government is capable of this?" But our duly-elected government has the blood of forty million infants on its hands, and counting. Why are we talking about "capability"?

I think Wilson's got it exactly right. The problem with Wright shouldn't be that he thinks something is wrong with America. It's that he's so bass ackwards on what is wrong with America.

Jeremiah Wright Doug Wilson