Howard Kurtz uses Michael Medved on CNN yesterday to analyze Obama's speech from Tuesday and to give his most expert and serious opinion on the situation.
Yes, I think it was a courageous speech in some ways, and yes -- but it was also an attempt to change the subject. Because the truth is that people responded indignantly to Reverend Wright not because he's black. It's not about race, it's not because of the racial outlook of the church, which very specifically defines itself as an afrocentric church and emphasizes blackness, blackness, blackness.
They didn't respond to it that way. If a white pastor had made the comments that Jeremiah Wright had made, people would have been equally indignant.
Race had no part in this discussion in Medved's eyes. Hmmm, how did he draw that conclusion? I don't know about you, but it would seem he has a somewhat confused and warped view on slavery. I guess this op-ed makes him a right wing expert for Reliable Sources though:
So Michael Medved, semi-famous movie reviewer and radio host, who has of late morphed into a weird “Hollywood vs. America” right-wing concern troll, has published an op-ed at Townhall that says that slavery in America just wasn’t as bad as all that. No, seriously
1. Slavery was an ancient and universal institution, not a distinctively American innovation.
2. Slavery existed only briefly, and in limited locales, in the history of the republic - involving only a tiny percentage of the ancestors of today’s Americans.
3. Though brutal, slavery wasn’t genocidal: live slaves were valuable but dead captives brought no profit.
4. It’s not true that the U.S. became a wealthy nation through the abuse of slave labor: the most prosperous states in the country were those that first freed their slaves.
5. While America deserves no unique blame for the existence of slavery, the United States merits special credit for its rapid abolition.
6. There is no reason to believe that today’s African Americans would be better off if their ancestors had remained behind in Africa.
You see it's not so bad. Blacks have had it soooo good in this country...And that other very nice and unbiased man from the Nixon White House, <snark>Pat Buchanan thinks so too.
