Week of April 28, 2008

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Jeremiah Wright has just been awarded a construction contract. And that's the best case scenario -- in light of his weekend blitz of media appearances there are many doubting that Wright's intentions were benign. Assuming they were, the reverend's appearance before the National Press Club highlighted his naive belief that he could redeem his reputation by talking to the same people responsible for distorting it.

[Mark] Rudd was leader of the campus SDS chapter, and the protest made him a media star. Afterward, he said, the spotlight pushed him to be ever more radical.

"My friends and I took the success at Columbia and felt it could be replicated, not only on university campuses, but in the society as a whole," he said.

He helped form the Weather Underground, but after three comrades died when a bomb they were making exploded, Rudd became a fugitive."I went too far," he said."I've spent the past 25 years trying not to be Mark Rudd."