Complete transcript of Tim Russert’s April 5 interview of Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens
[Hitchens, on the Pastorgate scandal] —
“Russert: …Christopher Hitchens, you wrote some time ago that Reverend Wright was going to create some problems, difficulties for Barack Obama. What did you say?”
“Hitchens: Well, I said that he was going to have to answer for his rather — well, not rather, distinctly dubious choice of a family pastor, because the man was not just a big mouth and a bit of a sinister windbag, because a certain amount of that can be, and often is, forgiven. But he’s a crackpot.
“[Hitchens:] I mean, he believes that AIDS is the result of a white power structure conspiracy to commit genocide in the African-American community, for example. He believes the drugs are in the ghetto for the same reason — the CIA puts them there to mess up black America.
“[Hitchens: Now,this is well, well, well beyond the limit of what’s not just unthinkable or sayable, but credible. I mean, and it goes — it takes the axe directly to the root of what Senator Obama is supposed to stand for, which is responsibility and dignity in the black community, not victimhood and paranoia, and not blaming whitey for all the pathologies of the ghetto.
“[Hitchens:]So, it was not an amiable (ph) business. But it still seems to me that the coverage of it hasn’t fully emphasized that for two reasons.
“[Hitchens:] One, the tapes we have of Wright, the more memorable ones of him saying things about America’s chickens coming home to roost on 9/11 and so forth. And the second is that in a rather, I think, contemptible way, Senator Obama has never said which of the many statements of the reverend he disagrees with. He just says there are some he finds controversial. Well, there’s nothing wrong with being controversial. He declines to say which ones he repudiates. But he’s so far, by our profession, being given an almost completely free pass on this, as on almost everything else.”