Poor Reverend Wright. In an interview with Bill Moyers to run tomorrow–I wonder if he asked whether white people really created AIDS ?–Wright says he’s been maligned. The New York Times reveals this snippet of accusation:

It’s to paint me as something — ‘Something’s wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with this country . . . for its policies. We’re perfect. Our hands are free. Our hands have no blood on them,’” he said. “That’s not a failure to communicate. The message that is being communicated by the sound bites is exactly what those pushing those sound bites want to communicate.

Hmm. Weren’t these his own words? Has he moved on, seen the error of his ways? In a word, no:

He did not apologize or back away from his remarks in the interview, instead saying that people wanted to paint him as “some sort of fanatic.”

Somehow “those people” (Americans? Republicans? Karl Rove, with an assist from Hillary Clinton?) made him out to be “unpatriotic,” “un-American,” and “filled with hate speech.”

But then he lets on that just maybe Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech was, you know, a contrived political response: “So that what happened in Philadelphia where he had to respond to the sound bytes, he responded as a politician.”

All this makes me wonder why Obama thinks this man is “brilliant:” He seems like a garden-variety demagogue. But Andrew Sullivan needs to amend his out-to-sink Obama conspiracy theory: I think Wright is in on the plot.