I honestly don’t think that anything Obama can say or do can sufficiently distance himself from Wright. After all, what is to prevent them from making up if Obama is elected and then we have the marvelous specter of the Rev. Mr. Wright being the president’s spiritual advisor, mentor, counsellor and foreign policy advisor?

Since a Hillary supporter actually got Wright to the National Press Club, isn’t Wright really a surrogate for Hillary? A lot of what I’ve heard takes the angle that Barack Obama is a boy who has no brain of his own and does everything his daddy tells him. Well, if this Clinton-hosted media circus proves anything, it’s that Obama was done with all this mess quite some time ago. There are too many OLD MINDS (Joan Walsh comes to mind) who feel everyone you’re associated with defines you in a narrow dimension. Whether one agrees with them or not. People who live at all know you have friends who do not agree with you, and who have done things you cannot condone. Did people renounce or denounce or wash off the cooties from friendships with Gingrich (divorced wife on deathbed) or Billy Graham (http://www.rense.com/general20/billy.htm “Graham mentions that he has friends in the media who are Jewish, saying they “swarm around me and are friendly to me.” But, he confides to Nixon, “They don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country.”) ( http://www.beliefnet.com/story/102/story_10213.html “As a biographer of Billy Graham, I found his association with Nixon to be the most troubling and disappointing of his long and generally admirable career. And nearly 20 years after Watergate, one of Graham’s close associates confided that, “for the life of me, I honestly believe that after all these years, Billy still has no idea of how badly Nixon snookered him.”) (“At that, Nixon talked for several minutes about Jewish domination of the media, asking rhetorically, “Now what does this mean? Does it mean that all the Jews are bad? No. But it does mean that most Jews are left-wing. Particularly the younger ones are like that, way out. They’re radical. They’re ‘peace at any price’ except where support for Israel is concerned. The best Jews are actually the Israeli Jews.”) Yet anti-semitism is not in the way we think of Nixon or Graham. Double-standard treatment like this is part of why all this recent attention on Jeremiah Wright – versus or and – Barack Obama sounds like a media wishing to control both men, and finding itself, well, outfoxed and out of touch.

“This is no longer about cynics trying to associate one man’s politics with another.”
Of course it is. You cynics have simply not clue #1. Wright is not running for the Presidency. This All God All The Time nonsense has grown more thn tiresome. Over on the God-o-rama (or is it God-a-palooza, or God-a-licious, whatever) blog, poor Dan Gilgoff has averaged 1.2 responses per Wright post over the last 3 weeks. It is beyond yawn-making – it is irrelevant. (Heck, gilgoff even had to write a blog to convince people (all 1.2 of ‘em) that Wright matters. I, for one, am NOT convinced.
Why do you not get it – no one gives a damn about Wright. We would much rather her about candidates’ policies than their pastors. (For that matter, who here could even NAME Clinton’s pastor or McCain’s pastor, let alone the subject of their sermons???)

“then we have the marvelous specter of the Rev. Mr. Wright being the president’s spiritual advisor, mentor, counsellor and foreign policy advisor?”
Would you rather have John Hagee as “spiritual advisor” to the President? Or Hillary’s pastor – you know, what’s his name. (I haven’t a clue what his name is, or even if it’s a “he”. How come that in this spirit-filled Godelection? Selective much?

“You cynics have simply not clue #1. Wright is not running for the Presidency.”
This is a rather stupid comment, of course we know that. But you can’t run as a candidate of hope and change and then be part of a racist and divisive church for 20 years. The two don’t add up. And obviously Obama realizes that and has finally distanced himself from the pastor.
You may not get it but your candidate got it. It’s a good thing for him that he’s more politically savvy than you.

By November Mr. Wright will be lining the kitty litter box & anyone who tries to revive this ludicrous topic will be pelted with the clumps.
AND Obama will be our next president. It’s a slam dunk!
http://tarheelblue.cstv.com/sports/m-baskbl/spec-rel/042908aab.html
(Obama shoots hoops with the Tar Heels. Word has it he nearly scored over Player of the Year Tyler Hansborough. Guess that puts his bowling score into perspective. Personally, I like his de-fense.)

I agree trying to rehash Rev Wright does not put food on American tables. Rhetoric during a recession will back fire on the culprits.

Let’s see.. the shelter I work in is being closed due to all the cutbacks, they can no longer (let’s see if I can remember the line) ‘serve the homeless and disabled’ in the community.
Hamburger here is up to 4 bucks a pound, eggs to over 2 dollars a dozen, milk is over 4 dollars a gallon. (More expensive than gas!) And there’s a chance in hell they’ll manage to sell the buildings that used to be the shelter in this housing market.
Jobs are down, businesses are closing, rent and utilities still have to be paid and prices for daily necessities go up daily.
And we are supposed to care about a few inflammatory sermons some candidate might’ve sat through several years ago that aren’t any worse in theme or language than what I can hear from tv political pundits or tv preachers any day of the week.
I’ll see if I can muster any ‘give a cr@p’ for this issue.

karen, thanks for helping everyone keep perspective. some around here think the solutions to our world problems are held up with lapel pins.