What would happen if Cardinal George got on PBS and with a Catholic News Host on the tax payer's dime and was allowed to brush away any and all criticism of his influence on a candidate for President?
'Hold the phone, Muriel, it's the Internal Revenue Service! Tell them them Father will get back to them!'
Bill Moyers landed the task of giving Rev. Jeremiah Wright his props in a nationally televised and taxpayer funded interview with more 'Gee, you're swell" gushing than a Van Johnson movie.
I thought Moyers' Man crush bordered on Hannity-esque silliness myself. One bit caught my attention and that was Bill Moyers' 'Our Denomination ' advertisement calling for a national conversation ( read monologue) on race.
I did not see the "this Program was paid for by the United Church of Christ" message. I did pick up on the PUBLIC Television. He's Moyers' and Wright - 'AS You've Never Seen Them Before!'
BILL MOYERS: What does it say to you that millions Americans, according to polls, still think Barack Obama is a Muslim?
REVEREND WRIGHT: It says to me that corporate media and miseducation or misinformation or disinformation, I think we started calling it during the Nixon years, still reigns supreme. Thirty some percent of Americans still think there are weapons of mass destruction. That you tell a lie long enough that people start believing it. What does the media do? "Barack Hussein Obama! Barack Hussein Obama! Barack Hussein. It sounds like Osama, Obama. That Arabic is a language. So that's why many people still think he's a Muslim. He went to a madrasah. What's a madrasah? I don't know, but I know it was one of those Muslim schools that teaches terrorism. The kind of I don't want to think, just tell me what to think mentality is why so many Americans still think that.
BILL MOYERS: Our denomination, the United Church of Christ has called for a sacred conversation on race in America. What are the steps that you think from all of your experience can be taken to move race relations forward?
REVEREND WRIGHT: I think there are many - to start using Bill Jones' paradigm, about how one sees God. Your theology determines one's anthropology. And how you see humans determines your sociology. To look at how we've come to see race, and in others of other races, based on our understanding of God who sees others as less than important. Less than my people. And where in our religious traditions are there passages in our sacred scriptures that are racist? They're in the Vedas, the Babylonian Talmud, they're in the Koran, they're in the Bible. How do we grapple with these passages in our sacred texts? The same way you grapple with Judges:19, where it's alright for a preacher to have a concubine and cut her up into 12 pieces. We gotta argue with our texts that are, as we've been struggling with, battling with, wrestling with, anti-Semitic. The Christian, "The Jews killed Jesus." No, we gotta come to grips with, you know, these texts were written by certain people at certain times with certain racist understandings of others who are different. That different meant deficient. That doing that with adults and starting with kids. that begins the conversation that Senator Obama talked about that we need to have. And re-writing the curriculum in our schools to tell the truth in our schools.
BILL MOYERS: Jeremiah Wright, thank you very much for this opportunity.
REVEREND WRIGHT: Well, thank you for having me Bill. Thank you sir.
BILL MOYERS: That's it for the JOURNAL. We'll see you next week and on line.
I'm Bill Moyers.
Yes, You are!
That's the very same Bill Moyers who who condemned Karl Rove for doing exactly what United church of Christ's former preacher Jeremiah Wright of doing; hence, his Nerf- Ball piece on Wright. PBS - Every American pays Bill Moyers to outsource for his Church.
Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious, draft-averse, naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God's anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits. Using church pews as precincts, Rove turned religion into a weapon of political combat -- a battering ram, aimed at the devil's minions. Especially at gay people. It's so easy, as Karl knew, to scapegoat people you outnumber. And if God is love, as rumor has it, Rove knew in politics to bet on fear and loathing. Never mind that in stroking the basest bigotry of true believers you coarsen both politics and religion. . . . Rove is riding out of Dodge City as the posse rides in.
At his press conference this week he asked God to bless the President and the country, even as reports were circulating that he himself had confessed to friends his own agnosticism. He wished he could believe, but he cannot. That kind of intellectual honesty is to be admired, but you have to wonder how all those folks on the Christian right must feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a skeptic, a secular manipulator.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08172007/watch3.html
Billy, Billy, Billy, Disingenuous hack piece, rather hack pieces.
Click my post title for Bill Moyers' Sermon on UCC. Moyers's almost like a Cardinal in United Church of Christ - Lot's of cattle and No Hat! Need to do something about that. Get Bill a Hat! Tall One!
