A lot of attention in this last news cycle is being rendered to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Obama. Apparently there have been cameras running when he unleashed some of his loonier sentiments, to wit, that the United States government has been actively trying to kill black people by inventing the AIDS virus. This is, of course, loopy, but I was struck by the nature of the Fox News indignation — i.e. holding such a sentiment is apparently absolutely inconsistent with patriotism.
There is something deep here that I have been working on for some time, and I haven’t quite got it sorted out. Plenty of conservative people, yours truly included, believe that the United States government is actively involved in trying to kill black people by means of Planned Parenthood. Look at the eugenics movement, Margaret Sanger’s view of “human weeds,” the enormous amounts of tax money that goes to Planned Parenthood, and the disproportionate number of black infants who are slaughtered. You don’t have to be, as they say, a rocket scientist. So the Rev. Wright and I agree that our government is trying to kill blacks. The difference is that he opposes the way they aren’t doing it, and supports the methods they have actually chosen to get the job done. Wright would have done well as one of Lenin’s useful idiots.
The curious thing to me here is the apparent (general) immunity that conservatives have when it comes to this kind of thing. Both leftists and conservatives are capable of believing that their government is capable of moral outrages. But when conservatives assert it, it is taken as an expression of true patriotism. When leftists do it, the exact opposite happens. I am not bringing this up to object to the different treatment — there is probably a good explanation for it. But it is curious. 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 targeted 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”?
When conservatives believe that their government targets blacks with a revolver, and certain leftists (erroneously) believe the job is being done with poison, what kind of sense does it make for Sean Hannity to wax indignant over the “unpatriotic” sentiment that our government is capable of this kind of cold-blooded murder? Sean Hannity believes that the U.S. government has murdered millions more blacks that Rev. Wright believes they have. There is something here that makes no sense at all.