Hillary Plays the Rev. Wright Card and Blames Bosnia Lie on Sleep Deprivation

Posted by Chris Bowers, Open Left at 2:08 PM on March 25, 2008.

So, apparently Clinton decided to go there:

Clinton decided to weigh in on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy, telling the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

She continued later, "You know, I spoke out against Don Imus (who was fired from his radio and television shows after making racially insensitive remarks), saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that. I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."

On her sniper gaffe, "I was sleep-deprived, and I misspoke."

Even though it is not the main subject of this post, I really like that last line. I mean, if you are arguing that you are better at answering the red phone at 3 a.m., it seems like a really good idea to claim that you misspoke about national security experience because you were too tired. It really instills a lot of confidence in the 3 a.m. claim.

But anyway, do we really need to be telling other people where they are praying? Is that a pandora's box we really want to open in this country? Does a country built on religious freedom need one of the three people vying to lead the country comment on where one of the other two candidates should be praying? Really? That's a good thing for the country? That's a good thing for Democrats?

And hey, via BooMan Tribune, since we have decided to cross that line, let's see where it could lead us:

Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has "made a fetish of being invisible," former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan.(...)

The Fellowship's long-term goal is "a leadership led by God-leaders of all levels of society who direct projects as they are led by the spirit." According to the Fellowship's archives, the spirit has in the past led its members in Congress to increase U.S. support for the Duvalier regime in Haiti and the Park dictatorship in South Korea. The Fellowship's God-led men have also included General Suharto of Indonesia; Honduran general and death squad organizer Gustavo Alvarez Martinez; a Deutsche Bank official disgraced by financial ties to Hitler; and dictator Siad Barre of Somalia, plus a list of other generals and dictators.

Military dictators and death squad leaders, eh? The elite winning power by the will of God, eh? This all kind of makes me wonder if Clinton's support for the Bush-McCain mission in Iraq is actually based on her right-wing prayer circle.

But you know what? It is Hillary Clinton's business where she prayers and worships, just as it is every American's business to choose where they decide to pray or not pray, worship or not worship. As soon as we start commenting on whether someone's religious choices make them qualified to lead the country or not, we start down a path where we might as well just pry into everyone's religious background. If that is the path that Clinton wants to follow, fine. However, once people start looking into The Fellowship, it will turn out pretty bad for her campaign. Further, it sends us down a pretty nasty path where religious minorities, which in this country technically means everyone, are going to have a hard time holding public office.

Holding a national conversation about religion could put us in a much nastier place than even a national conversation about race, especially if it starts by openly questioning someone else's religious choices. As Hillary Clinton said, religion is indeed a choice, and one that the Constitution guarantees as the right of every American. Once we start to question those choices, rather than a slippery slope, that is pretty much a steep cliff. And once we start falling, there is no going back. There are some things that must always be left private.  

Chris Bowers was a full-time editor at MyDD from May 2004 until June 2007. Some of his projects have included the creation of the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, the first scientifically random poll of progressive netroots activists, the Use It Or Lose It campaign, the nation's most accurate forecast of Democratic house pickups in 2006, and the 2006 Googlebomb the Elections campaign.