I’ll say it again: Jeremiah Wright is a crackpot, spewing a toxic mix of racial essentialism, conspiracy theory and recycled far-left nonsense. As Barack Obama correctly said, Wright has “a distorted view of America.” But my god, so does Bill O’Reilly. Like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and other propagandists of the rabid right, O’Reilly believes America under Bush to be blameless. He has served as handmaiden to an endlessly corrupt and immoral administration, and his thuggish behavior on the air has done more to damage the American body politic than Jeremiah Wright ever could.
It’s hard enough to stomach people like O’Reilly sounding off about Wright, when they have far more in common with him than they’d ever admit. But to watch Hillary Clinton sit down with O’Reilly and play his game, solely in order to twist the knife into Obama, is certainly one of the most disgusting spectacles of the campaign to date. This unlikely constellation of forces — O’Reilly, Clinton, Wright himself — just might strangle the most viable rebirth of American liberalism in half a century. I can hardly bear to look.
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