An auspicious beginning:

On his radio show yesterday, Hugh Hewitt played excerpts of Barack Obama reading from his autobiography, Dreams of My Father.

Journalism: you’re soaking in it! On my internet weblog today, I will excerpt Mickey excerpting Hewitt excerpting Barack excerpting Rev. Wright:

It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, aprtheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere … That’s the world! On which hope sits.”

Deep thoughts by Mickey Kaus:

unibrowkaus.jpgSounds … controversial! Keep in mind: a)Obama isn’t disapproving of this sermon. In the book he weeps at the end of it; b)Demonstrating that at least some blaming of “white greed” for the world’s sins–which Obama now criticizes– isn’t an exceptional topic for Rev. Wright in a few wacky sermons (”the five dumbest things“) that Obama may or may not have missed. It’s at the quotidian core of the Afrocentric philosophy that Obama says drew him to the church; c) Indeed, in his big Feb. 18th race speechObama reads the passage from his book that describes his emotional reaction to this very sermon (his “first service at Trinity”)–how it made “the story of a people” seem “black and more than black.” d)This is also the sermon that gave Obama the title of his next book, The Audacity of Hope. e) The “profound mistake” of this sermon is not that Wright “spoke as if our society was static”–Obama’s analysis on Feb. 18th. The problem is that “white folks’ greed” is not the main cause of a “world in need.”

Well, that’s one problem. The other problem is that God/gods is/are made up hooey; religion as cosmology insults the intelligence of anyone over the age of 7; that most people use church to catch up on their sleep; that they aren’t missing anything; that nobody ever reads the Bible because it’s so God-awful dull; that they aren’t missing anything, either; and that nobody actuallybelieves any of it, or even really knows what it is they are claiming to believe on pain of eternal sermonizing. Oh, and also Rev. Wright conflated “rich people” with “white people”, much like you conflate “people who share my opinion that Obama voters are voting for a skin tone” with “white voters in heartland states I’ve read about in David Brooks’ Adventure Tales for Aristocratic Boys“. Or like you appear to have - judging by the well-digested passage above - conflated claims of rich/white people’s indifference to suffering with their creation of suffering. Although it’s very hard to tell, as you haven’t done even the minimal work of actually reading the book and determining if maybe - perish the thought! - talk radio Hugh Hewitt might not be the most objective source of information on the planet. (Imaginary Kaus counters: well why don’t you do the ‘minimal work’, then? A: I learned it by watching you!) Better yet, why not pay attention to something that isn’t the most overexposed who-fucking-gives-a-shit fad/story of the moment?

Darling Mickey is at this, I believe, because he wants someone to call him “a racist”. He wants someone to point out, for example, how Tom DeLay - at the time one of the most powerful figures in government - regularly blamed all the worlds’ sufferings on uppity wimmins and public schoolin’, and Mickey and his ilk all pretended nobody farted, and he wants someone to believe this discrepency is do to racial bias, rather than, say, being a hack who everyone should [continue to] ignore. I believe he wants this to happen so someone will pay attention to him, so that he can finally move on from Slate.com, the Home for Wayward “Sensible” Wing-Nuts Who Can’t Even Get Gigs At The Atlantic. Or maybe he’s just as bored as his readers. Unfortunately, I can’t very well call him “a racist” until he says something racist, so I’m going to have to continue to call him “a very boring person with silly eyebrows and a wholey unnatural interest in talk radio sillyperson Hugh Hewitt’s interpretations of the sermons of the Right Rev. Some Black Guy I Don’t Fucking Care About.” Or you could find something more useful to do with your time than novelizations of Hugh Hewitt shows. (Someone needs to do a sermon about the spiritual and moral costs of boring me to death. God will Smite and Damn America if she persists in being such a wicked snore!)

Full disclosure: I tried to read Dreams of My Father a while back. It was awful. Nobody should write an autobiography at the age of 30. Nobody. Not as dire as the Bible, but still pretty tedious. Note to authors: more and better dick jokes!

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