The things people say

To the editor: Jeremiah Wright has certainly committed some remarkably stupid utterances, which got me to thinking: Twenty five years in the pulpit and only one or two asinine remarks? We have a President of the United States who says something stupid every time he opens his mouth. Last week, for example, he said that negotiating with Iran is equivalent to appeasement, this while his administration negotiates with Iran every day, both unilaterally and multilaterally as a signee of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. “Heckuva job, Brownie.” “Major combat operations in Iraq are over.” “We do not torture.” And what about John McCain’s statement that we are better off now than we were eight years ago. I guess it’s true if you are a member of the Republican club that controls Big Oil and Coal, weapons supplies, the war establishment and national pork spending on industrial farming. For the rest of us, no. Hillary Clinton’s ducking for cover from sniper fire in Bosnia was remarkably off kilter, and her assertion that she can win a general election while not being able to carry a majority of her own party doesn’t make any sense at all. Dick Cheney’s infamous “We will be welcomed as liberators and greeted with flowers and sweets [in Iraq]” is notably ridiculous, as is Don Rumsfeld’s “Known unknowns” speech. A whole cadre of neocons have discredited themselves with their claims of weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda connections in Iraq. Not only stupid but devastatingly destructive in human and economic terms, and detrimental, finally, to Israel. But saying one or two idiotic things during a tenure of twenty-five years in the pulpit? Maybe Wright was having a bad day, or remembering Martin King on the anniversary of his death, or mourning the Kennedys, or lamenting the Rodney King or Amadou Diallo or Sean Bell verdict. Not really a bad record for that amount of time in public view. Maybe he deserves a medal for reticence and perspicacity, actually. As for yours truly, I’ve had my share of imbecilities. Once, when asked how Delaware Valley might improve its educational strategies, I told Tom Finan that I thought he was capable of making the necessary changes. That was almost 20 years ago. How stupid was that? Tony Splendora Milford