Appearing on today’s N&R op-ed page, George Will, himself no fan of McCain, says the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a legitimate issue, in any form:
When North Carolina Republicans recently ran an ad featuring Wright in full cry, McCain mounted his high horse, from which he rarely dismounts, and demanded that the ad be withdrawn. The North Carolinians properly refused. Wright is relevant.
I happened to catch part of Wright’s NAACP speech on CSPAN last night, where the theme was speaking English:
Black children are told they don’t speak English well, when people from Boston or Texas, like the Kennedys or former president Lyndon Johnson, aren’t ridiculed for their accents, he said.
“After Kennedy got killed, Johnson got up to the podium and said, ‘My fellow Americans,’ ” Wright said, imitating Johnson’s Texas drawl. “Well how do you spell ‘fello.’ How do you spell ”Mericans.’ Nobody said to Johnson, ‘You speak bad English.’
As the reporter notes, he similarly mocked JFK’s inauguration speech, wondering how you spell “Isk” when Kennedy said “Isk not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
