Andanh.com

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright went to Washington, D.C., Monday not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him. Smiling, cracking corny jokes, mugging it up for the big-time news media -- this reverend is never going away. He's found himself a national platform, and he's loving it.

It's a twofer. Feeling dissed by Obama, Wright gets revenge on his former follower while bathed in a spotlight brighter than any he could ever have imagined.

So there he was lecturing an audience at the National Press Club about everything from the black slave experience to the differences in sentencing for possession of crack and powdered cocaine.

All but swooning over the wonderfulness of himself, the reverend acts like he is the first person to come up with the idea that blacks too often get the short end of the stick in America, that the malignant influences of slavery and the long dark night of racial discrimination are still being felt today, that in many ways this is a profoundly inequitable society.

This is hardly new ground. The question that cries out for an answer from Wright is: Why -- if he is so passionately committed to liberating and empowering blacks -- does he seem so insistent on wrecking the campaign of the only African-American ever to have had a legitimate shot at the presidency?

In my office we're always saying we want to work smarter, not harder. I guess that's how I want to live, too, with challenges squarely faced and overcome.

Let's ditch the shock radio, trash TV and tabloid journalism. Shift our focus away from the celebrities who have done nothing of value to gain that celebrity. Vote out the politicians more concerned with pork than leadership. Readjust our worldview. Provide better stewardship of this finite planet. End war. Through new media, we have newfound power. Let's use it.

Think we can't? Others have. Peace talks are under way to end the war in northern Uganda largely because of three Southern Californian 20-somethings -- Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole -- who traveled there in 2003. They came home haunted by the country's child soldiers and night commuters.

These young men told their story to family and friends and then -- with an online rough-cut video -- the world. From these simple beginnings, they created a movement known as Invisible Children. What began online moved offline with the story told on "Oprah," CNN and more. In 2006 the group hosted an event that drew 60,000 people. Last year's world tour drew millions. Invisible children have been made visible.

The increasing sweep of communications technology is making us more human and, I like to think, more humane. It's tearing down barriers and, in their place, erecting a new mandate: to be authentic.

Just what about total annihilation of the Jews by Palestinian, Arab and Muslim people does Jimmy Carter not understand?

Carter's latest leap into the foreign policy breach resulted in his declaration that the terrorist organization Hamas had accepted Israel's "right to exist" and would further accept the establishment of a Palestinian state on land occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war -- land whose borders had been changed after Israel was attacked by some of the very people who still want the nation's elimination. The working strategy of Israel's enemies is: If at first you don't succeed in killing enough Jews, then try, try again.

Hamas immediately denied Carter's claim it is willing to recognize Israel and introduced the usual caveats about Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, "right of return" for Palestinian refugees and so forth. We've heard it all before. Israel's and our enemies tell us what we want to hear while continuing their terrorist and murderous acts in order to achieve their objectives.

Carter has a history of believing (and smooching) murderous thugs. He expressed surprise that the late Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev had lied to him about invading Afghanistan in 1979 (Memo to Carter: dictators lie, and so do totalitarian groups like Hamas). Carter also has kissed and/or met with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Hamas political leader Khalid Mashaal and North Korea's Kim Jong Il (falsely claiming the dictator had agreed to suspend his nuclear weapons program). In each of these meetings, Carter has served the interests not of peace, or of his own country, but of the dictatorial regimes whose prestige has been elevated by the visit of an American ex-president.

The false premise on which all negotiations with Islamic terrorists have been based is that the terrorists lack something that, if they got it, would bring about instant peace, reconciliation and the study of war no more. This is wishful thinking bordering on self-delusion.