Here are two theories about the Obama passport breach situation:
1. It was a witting attempt by an opposing political operative to flesh out the scurrilous Obama as Islamic Manchurian Candidate rumors–i.e. did he travel to rogue states like Libya, make a hajj to Mecca, spend a summer vacation as a mujaheddin in Afghanistan? There is a precedent for this: the Bush attempt to scour Bill Clinton’s passport file in 1992
2. It was stupid, but essentially innocent, consular joyriding by low-level idiots, curious about Obama…which is, for now, the official story. In these paranoid times, that seems a stretch. But there’s a precedent for a non-paranoid explanation as well: I remember the FBI files non-scandal of the 1990s, when it was alleged that the Clintons had pulled a multitude of personal security files on former Republican White House staffers to spy on them. Turned out to be an innocent, low-level screwup. (The files were, if I recall, even scoured for Bill or Hillary fingerprints.)
Meanwhile, on the Jeremiah Wright front, Charles Krauthammer lays out the emerging conservative argument that the speech was a massive cover-up and evasion.
But it seems to me that the problem with this argument is the telescoping of Wright’s obnoxious remarks into one overpowering reel of hate speech (and yes, Swampland commenters, calling America “the US of KKK A” qualifies as black racist hate speech). The question is, how often did Wright rail against America? Every week? I doubt it. I’d bet that most weeks he’d be doing what most ministers do: ruminating on some passage in the Bible that has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with personal morality. In my limited–but exhilarating–experience in black churches, I’ve heard far more sermons about the lessons of Exodus (especially the chapters where the Jews, wandering the desert, become nostalgic for the more predictable drudgery of slavery) than I have about the alleged evils of America. I have attended more than a few funerals for blacks killed by whites in racial incidents–and the sermon almost always has been about God’s forgiveness and the peace of heaven.
I’d guess that there were weeks when events in the world–nooses in a tree in Louisiana, James Byrd dragged to his death in Texas…or maybe even just the AIDs-related death of another heroin junkie on the south side of Chicago–led Wright into fits of Godless fury. But how often did that happen? Five times a year? Given the Obama family’s admittedly intermittent church attendance, how often did they hear the bilge–and how often did they hear about the beatitudes?
Let’s say that the Obamas went to church the week after 9/11…and they heard Wright railing about the United States being punished for past military actions. How is that different from, say, the white politicians who dutifully trooped into Jerry Falwell’s or Pat Robertson’s or a thousand other white evangelical churches and heard that 9/11 was punishment for America’s licentiousness and tolerance for abortion or homosexuality? How is different from the evangelicals who thought Hurricane Katrina looked like a fetus? What if John McCain had popped into his supporter John Hagee’s church after Katrina and heard that New Orleans was being punished for its sins? My guess is that McCain would have winced and rolled his eyes–just as Obama probably did whenever Jeremiah Wright went off the deep end. Ministers tend to see Acts of God in the fall of every sparrow.
But who among us–certainly not Charles Krauthammer, certainly not me–can calibrate the importance of the spiritual balm that Wright provided Obama most weeks, and privately as well, against the embarrassment that Obama felt on the five or six, or even 10 occasions during a 20-year span that he heard Wright spew hateful crap from the pulpit?