Laura Washington — interesting, intelligent, pertinent — belongs in the Sun-Times more frequently.  She tells us things we don’t know, as today about PBS black talk-show host Tavis Smiley implying on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” on 3/28 that White House staff members shot MLK. 

Smiley labeled criticism of [Rev. Jeremiah] Wright the “worst sort of racism.” He went on to add that Wright “has been thrown under the bus.” Obama, it seemed, should have defended his pastor, not condemned him.

Smiley added a historical analogy, noting that during the Vietnam War, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. opined that America was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

“The minute he said that,” Smiley proclaimed, “[King] fell off the list of the most admired Americans. In 1967, they disinvited him to the White House. … In ’68, they shot him dead. Part of being a patriot means to stand as a truth teller.

Uh-oh.  Is this what PBS subsidizers Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, Verizon, Wells-Fargo, McDonald’s, Allstate Insurance (named by Washington), and others want?  Is it what Maher wants?

As the audience applauded, Maher tried to clean it up: “The ‘they’ that disinvited him from the White House is a little different from the ‘they’ who shot him dead,” Maher nervously offered

— rather than calling it a dumb thing to say.

“I could debate you on that,” responded Smiley. 

Smiley has a big audience.  He is “public television’s Numero Uno black guy,” says Washington. 

Comment: A slippery fellow, he can keep his audience while talking that way, which says a lot about his audience, as Jeremiah Wright’s rants say a lot about his, the one that is buying him a golf-course mansion in a posh white suburb.

* In the 3/28/08 Times Lit Supplement, reviewer David Miller says of Mary Ann Gillies’s The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920 (U. of Toronto):

Her book “makes a strong case for a book bigger and better than her own.”

Sometimes we do have to settle for faint praise.