Today, in a post­ing on his “Rough Sketch” blog at the Wash­ing­ton Post Dana Mil­bank per­pe­trated one of the most grotesque exam­ples of hatchet jour­nal­ism I’ve seen in a while. I’ll get to the par­tic­u­lars soon enough, but first it’s worth set­ting a little context.

Mil­bank was report­ing on the Rev­erend Jere­miah Wright’s speech at the National Press Club this morn­ing, a speech that marked the third public appear­ance of Barack Obama’s former pastor in the last couple of days. The first appear­ance came on Friday, when Wright appeared in a PBS inter­view with Bill Moyers. The second came yes­ter­day, when he spoke at the Detroit NAACP’s Free­dom Fund dinner.

The Moyers inter­view was so uncon­tro­ver­sial that one com­men­ta­tor had to wonder why we hadn’t heard more about it. But the question-and-answer period after today’s Press Club speech gave the media just the kind of thing it was wait­ing for. Joe Klein of Time said that “Wright’s pur­pose now seems quite clear: to aggran­dize him­self–the guy is going to be a go-​to main­stream media source for racial extrem­ist spew, the next iter­a­tion of Al Sharp­ton–and destroy Barack Obama.” Amy Sul­li­van, also at Time, said bluntly that Wright’s per­for­mance at the National Press Club “can only be described as a polit­i­cal disaster.”

Only small-t time will tell if Sul­li­van is right–one sign she’s cor­rect is that Obama is already inch­ing his way onto the denounce-and-reject road. [UPDATE 4/29: The inches have become miles.] But it only takes one look at the tran­script of Wright’s appear­ance at the Press Club to see that Klein’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of it as “racial extrem­ist spew” is ridiculous.

Milbank’s post is worst of all. It’s some­times hard to keep track, but by my count Milbank’s brush tars Wright in at least six dif­fer­ent ways: as an asso­ciate of drug users, a friend and employer of black mil­i­tants, an anti-​Semite, a self-​aggrandizing ego­ma­niac, a slavery-​reparations fanatic, and, yes, a Com­mu­nist sympathizer.

It’s so mis­lead­ing that I decided, in a for­tu­nately infre­quent fit of pique, that it was worth refut­ing sen­tence by sen­tence–which task, god help me, I’m about to under­take. But first let me say that I have no prior beef with Milbank’s work. When I read him in the Post or see him on TV I gen­er­ally think he has smart and inter­est­ing things to say. Nor do I main­tain any par­tic­u­lar brief for Rev­erend Wright–in fact, given my still-​fervent hope that Obama will win the Demo­c­ra­tic pri­mary, I’d much prefer him to wait to speak until the national press stops lis­ten­ing so closely.

But given Milbank’s influ­ence, I think it’s worth step­ping through the whole piece to show exactly where and how it goes awry. (And in case you doubt the extent of that influ­ence con­sider this: when Andrew Sul­li­van says “I actu­ally read what [Wright] said,” he links to Milbank’s sum­mary, not to the read­ily avail­able transcript.)

So here goes. In what fol­lows, Milbank’s words are in ital­ics, mine in roman.

++++++++

Wright’s Voice Could Spell Doom for Obama
Dana Milbank

The Rev. Jere­miah Wright, explain­ing this morn­ing why he had waited so long before break­ing his silence about his incen­di­ary ser­mons, offered a para­phrase from Proverbs: “It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

In most other set­tings, I’d be inclined to grant Mil­bank the metaphor­i­cal usage of the word “incendiary”–after all, Obama used it in his Philadel­phia speech–but read in the light of what’s to come, one has to wonder if Mil­bank didn’t mean to at least sug­gest a more lit­eral reading.

Barack Obama’s pastor would have been wise to con­tinue to heed that wisdom.

Should it become nec­es­sary in the months from now to iden­tify the moment that doomed Obama’s pres­i­den­tial aspi­ra­tions, atten­tion is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morn­ing at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama’s long­time pastor, reignited a con­tro­versy about race from which Obama had only recently recov­ered - and added lighter fuel.

Another two gra­tu­itous fire ref­er­ences. Why? It’s Rush Lim­baugh who’s talk­ing about riots in Denver, but appar­ently Mil­bank wants us to believe that it’s angry black min­is­ters like Wright that we really ought to be wor­ried about.

Speak­ing before an audi­ence that included Marion Barry, Cornel West, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Pan­ther Party and Nation of Islam offi­cial Jamil Muhammad…

The guilt-by-association parade begins. Never mind that we’re talk­ing about the audi­ence of the National Press Club here, Mil­bank makes it sound like he’s describ­ing a meet­ing of The Most Dan­ger­ous Black Men in Amer­ica: let’s see, we’ve got one crack-​smoking ex-​mayor, a leader of a Black Pan­ther fac­tion, and an offi­cial of the Nation of Islam. Oh, and Cornel West, who, you know, may be a philoso­pher, but he’s got that crazy Afro!

Here’s how the mod­er­a­tor of the Q-and-A ses­sion described the series of which Rev. Wright’s speech was a part:

First of all, let me remind you of our future speak­ers. This after­noon, we have Dan Glick­man, chair­man and CEO of the Motion Pic­ture Asso­ci­a­tion, who is dis­cussing trad­ing up movies in the global mar­ket­place. On May 2nd, Bobby Jindal, the gov­er­nor of the state of Louisiana, will dis­cuss bold reform that works. On May 7th, we have Glenn Tilton, CEO, United Air­lines, and board member of the Amer­i­can trans­port association.

…Wright praised Louis Farrakhan…

This is not false, but it is a com­pletely ten­den­tious read­ing of what Wright said about Far­rakhan. Wright’s praise of Far­rakhan was strictly lim­ited to the latter’s orga­ni­za­tional abil­i­ties: “How many other African-​Americans or European-​Americans do you know that can get one mil­lion people together on the mall?” For the rest, he nei­ther approved or denounced any­thing about Farrakhan:

He is one of the most impor­tant voices in the 20th and 21st cen­tury. That’s what I think about him.

I’ve said, as I said on Bill Moyers, when Louis Far­rakhan speaks, it’s like E.F. Hutton speaks, all black Amer­ica lis­tens. Whether they agree with him or not, they listen.

Now, I am not going to put down Louis Far­rakhan any­more than Man­dela would put down Fidel Castro. Do you remem­ber that Ted Koppel show, where Ted wanted Man­dela to put down Castro because Castro was our enemy? And he said, “You don’t tell me who my ene­mies are. You don’t tell me who my friends are.”

Louis Far­rakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains. He did not put me in slav­ery. And he didn’t make me this color.

…defended the view that Zion­ism is racism…

This is com­pletely untrue. Here’s the exchange from which Mil­bank draws the false paraphrase:

MOD­ER­A­TOR: You have likened Israeli poli­cies to apartheid and its treat­ment of Pales­tini­ans with Native Amer­i­cans. Can you explain your views on Israel?

REV­EREND WRIGHT: Where did I liken them to that? Who­ever wrote the ques­tion, tell me where I likened them.

Jimmy Carter called it apartheid. Jere­miah Wright didn’t liken any­thing to any­thing. My posi­tion on Israel is that Israel has a right to exist, that Israelis have a right to exist, as I said, rec­on­ciled one to another.

…accused the United States of terrorism…

This is true.

…repeated his view that the gov­ern­ment cre­ated the AIDS virus to cause the geno­cide of racial minorities…

This is not true–though when asked about it, Wright did not deny the claim, which he should have done. Here’s the exchange:

MOD­ER­A­TOR: In your sermon, you said the gov­ern­ment lied about invent­ing the HIV virus as a means of geno­cide against people of color. So I ask you: Do you hon­estly believe your state­ment and those words?

REV­EREND WRIGHT: Have you read Horowitz’s book, “Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola,” who­ever wrote that ques­tion? Have you read “Medical Apartheid”? You’ve read it?

(UNKNOWN): Do you hon­estly believe that (OFF-​MIKE)

REV­EREND WRIGHT: Oh, are you — is that one of the reporters?

MOD­ER­A­TOR: No questions…

(CROSSTALK)

REV­EREND WRIGHT: No ques­tions from the floor. I read dif­fer­ent things. As I said to my mem­bers, if you haven’t read things, then you can’t — based on this Tuskegee exper­i­ment and based on what has hap­pened to Africans in this coun­try, I believe our gov­ern­ment is capa­ble of doing anything.

In fact, in fact, in fact, one of the — one of the responses to what Saddam Hus­sein had in terms of bio­log­i­cal war­fare was a non- ques­tion, because all we had to do was check the sales records. We sold him those bio­log­i­cal weapons that he was using against his own people.

So any time a gov­ern­ment can put together bio­log­i­cal war­fare to kill people, and then get angry when those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.

…stood by other past remarks (”God damn America”) and held him­self out as a spokesman for the black church in America.

Both are true.

In front of 30 tele­vi­sion cam­eras, Wright’s audi­ence cheered him on as the min­is­ter mocked the media and, at one point, did a little vic­tory dance on the podium.

In front of 30 tele­vi­sion cam­eras? At the National Press Club? No… And mock­ing the media, can you imag­ine? After how kind gen­er­ous atten­tive the media has been to the good Rev­erend Wright?

It seemed as if Wright, jok­ingly offer­ing him­self as Obama’s vice pres­i­dent, was actu­ally trying to doom Obama…

Or maybe, as Wright repeated over and over again, he was actu­ally trying to defend his church and his reli­gious tra­di­tion from attacks by an ill-​informed national media. In his words, “How long do you let some­body talk about your faith tra­di­tion before you speak up and say something?”

…a member of the head table, Amer­i­can Urban Radio’s April Ryan, con­firmed that Wright’s secu­rity was pro­vided by body­guards from Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.

See? More Angry Black Men! [UPDATE 4/29: Actu­ally, no: according to Lynn Sweet, Mil­bank and Ryan have this wrong. The Nation of Islam did not pro­vide secu­rity for Wright.]

Wright sug­gested that Obama was insin­cere in dis­tanc­ing him­self from his pastor. “He didn’t dis­tance himself,” Wright announced. “He had to dis­tance him­self, because he’s a politi­cian, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American.”

Another highly ten­den­tious read­ing, and we don’t even have to go back to the tran­script for this one. Mil­bank says “Wright sug­gested that Obama was insin­cere in dis­tanc­ing him­self from his pastor.” But Wright sug­gested no such thing. He stated plainly that Obama dis­tanced him­self not from the man Jere­miah Wright but from “what the media was saying I had said.”

And this, remem­ber, is exactly the dis­tinc­tion that Obama made in his famous Philadel­phia race speech. On the one hand, he reit­er­ated his con­dem­na­tion of Wright’s con­tro­ver­sial state­ments, “I have already con­demned, in unequiv­o­cal terms, the state­ments of Rev­erend Wright that have caused such controversy.” On the other, he said of Wright, “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”

Explain­ing fur­ther, Wright said friends had writ­ten to him and said, “We both know that if Sen­a­tor Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.” The min­is­ter con­tin­ued: “Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on elec­tabil­ity, based on sound bites, based on polls.”

Mil­bank adds this as evi­dence of Wright’s belief in Obama’s insin­cer­ity. I add it as evi­dence of Wright’s capac­ity for stat­ing the obvious.

Wright also argued, at least four times over the course of the hour, that he was speak­ing not for him­self but for the black church.

This is the bit that Joe Klein couldn’t get over, either. Imag­ine the nerve: a promi­nent min­is­ter with a 30-year record of ser­vice speak­ing for the black church!

“This is not an attack on Jere­miah Wright,” the min­is­ter said. “It is an attack on the black church.” He posi­tioned him­self as a main­stream voice of African Amer­i­can reli­gious tra­di­tions. “Why am I speak­ing out now?” he asked. “If you think I’m going to let you talk about my mama and her reli­gious tra­di­tion, and my daddy and his reli­gious tra­di­tion and my grandma, you got another thing coming.”

That sig­nif­i­cantly com­pli­cates Obama’s job as he con­tem­plates how to extin­guish Wright’s latest incen­di­ary device.

More fire! And now it’s an incen­di­ary device! Which, you know, is like a second cousin to an impro­vised explo­sive device, those things they rig up in Muslim coun­tries to kill Amer­i­can troops!

Now, he needs to do more than express dis­agree­ment with his former pastor’s view; he needs to refute his former pastor’s sug­ges­tion that Obama pri­vately agrees with him.

Done (via Jeff Zeleny via Ben Smith):

I think cer­tainly what the last three days indi­cates is that we’re not coor­di­nat­ing with him, right? [Obama said in a late-​scheduled presser on the tarmac in North Car­olina]. He’s obvi­ously free to speak his mind, but I just want to empha­size that this is my former pastor. Many of the state­ments that he has made to trig­ger this con­tro­versy are not state­ments that I’ve heard him make pre­vi­ously. They don’t rep­re­sent my view and they don’t rep­re­sent what this cam­paign is about.

Wright seemed aggrieved that his inflam­ma­tory quo­ta­tions were out of the full “context” of his sermons…

Given what we’ve seen so far, I can’t imag­ine why.

…yet he repeated many of the same accu­sa­tions in the con­text of a half-​hour Q&A ses­sion this morning.

Here we go again…

His claim that the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks mean “America’s chick­ens are coming home to roost”?

Wright defended it: “Jesus said, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ You cannot do ter­ror­ism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples, not Jere­miah Wright bom­bas­tic divi­sive principles.”

I still don’t under­stand why this is a con­tro­ver­sial opin­ion. People like Mil­bank want Wright to be saying that the attacks on the World Trade Center were spe­cific responses to spe­cific U.S. foreign-​policy actions. But that word “never” in the quote makes it clear to me that Wright is talk­ing about gen­er­al­ized reci­procity: he’s saying that you do enough bad stuff out in the world and even­tu­ally some part of the world is going to come back on you for it.

His views on Far­rakhan and Israel? “Louis said 20 years ago that Zion­ism, not Judaism, was a gutter reli­gion. He was talk­ing about the same thing United Nations res­o­lu­tions say, the same thing now that Pres­i­dent Carter’s being vil­i­fied for and Bishop Tutu’s being vil­i­fied for. And every­body wants to paint me as if I’m anti-​Semitic because of what Louis Far­rakhan said 20 years ago. He is one of the most impor­tant voices in the 20th and 21st cen­tury; that’s what I think about him. . . . Louis Far­rakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slav­ery, and he didn’t make me this color.”

Okay, I’ll quote it again:

My posi­tion on Israel is that Israel has a right to exist, that Israelis have a right to exist, as I said, rec­on­ciled one to another.

Have you read the Link? Do you read the Link, Amer­i­cans for Middle East­ern Under­stand­ing, where Pales­tini­ans and Israelis need to sit down and talk to each other and work out a solu­tion where their chil­dren can grow in a world together, and not be talk­ing about killing each other, that that is not God’s will?

My posi­tion is that the Israel and the people of Israel be the people of God who are wor­ry­ing about rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and who are trying to do what God wants for God’s people, which is reconciliation.

He denounced those who “can wor­ship God on Sunday morn­ing, wear­ing a black clergy robe, and kill others on Sunday evening, wear­ing a white Klan robe.”

And this is prob­lem­atic how?

He praised the com­mu­nist San­din­ista regime of Nicaragua.

Here’s the entirety of Wright’s com­ments on Nicaragua:

Our con­gre­ga­tion stood in sol­i­dar­ity with the peas­ants in El Sal­vador and Nicaragua, while our gov­ern­ment, through Ollie North and the Iran-​Contra scan­dal, was sup­port­ing the Con­tras, who were killing the peas­ants and the Miskito Indi­ans in those two countries.

I sup­pose Mil­bank thinks that “peasants” is a euphemism for San­danistas. But that’s a pretty seri­ous hermeneu­ti­cal leap–at least the dis­tance from “trade unionist” to “Communist,” if not more. Why not inter­pret Wright to mean what he says, that they stood with the peas­ants who were being killed by the Con­tras and the Sal­vado­ran government?

He renewed his belief that the gov­ern­ment cre­ated AIDS as a means of geno­cide against people of color (”I believe our gov­ern­ment is capa­ble of doing anything”).

See above for what Wright said about the first part of this. But it’s worth includ­ing the full con­text of the quote Mil­bank cites, which makes it sound much more rea­son­able: “Based on this Tuskegee exper­i­ment and based on what has hap­pened to Africans in this coun­try, I believe our gov­ern­ment is capa­ble of doing anything.”

And he vig­or­ously renewed demands for an apol­ogy for slav­ery: “Britain has apol­o­gized to Africans. But this country’s lead­ers have refused to apol­o­gize. So until that apol­ogy comes, I’m not going to keep step­ping on your foot and asking you, does this hurt, do you for­give me for step­ping on your foot, if I’m still step­ping on your foot. Under­stand that? Capisce?”

Again, I’m a little con­fused as to what the object of Milbank’s cen­sure is. Does he think that the gov­ern­ment shouldn’t apol­o­gize for slavery?

Capisce, rev­erend. All too well.

Ital­ian sole­cisms are the least of Milbank’s prob­lems, but for the record, that should be “Capisco, reverend,” or pos­si­bly “Capiamo, reverend.”

And “All too well”? Can’t help you there, captain.