For the NYT, Wright's "God DAMN America" Becomes Simply "Goddamn America"

Not content with comparing Barack Obama's pastor with… the Dalai Lama (!) in a New York Times article (seemingly only published by its sister paper, the International Herald Tribune), Howard W French manages to go on to water down the former marine's key controversial sermon. (Of course, if this were a one-time occurrence, it might hardly be blog-newsworthy; but with the MSM, it happens to fit into a pattern…) The Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr, French writes,

seems to have drawn the most ire for the phrase "Goddamn America," for what he perceives as his country's abuses of power around the world.

But of course, it was not an almost innocent, off-the-cuffish adjective that the pastor used impulsively in a relatively insignificant part of a sentence ("That goddamn son of (y)ours has again failed to take the garbage out"), but a (proper) noun (God) followed by a verb, i.e., a desire, a directive, a decree to the Deity in one single sentence, a single solitary sentence that served as the pinnacle of his sermon and message.