Christopher Hayes has an excellent article on the Obama/Wright issue: Obama, Politics and the Pulpit:
It's hard to imagine, though, that if a Republican presidential candidate were running for president and had a preacher with the views spelled out above, that it would cause much of a stir, or even register a blip in the brain-dead oscillations of the twenty-four-hour, scandal-cycle EKG. And yet here we are, five or six news cycles into an ongoing firestorm over a few seconds of two different sermons delivered by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Barack Obama's (and Oprah Winfrey's) Chicago church, and a man who Obama says "brought me to Jesus."
...
If Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency is derailed by a few intemperate remarks that his retiring pastor gave to a church which did not even contain the senator in its pews, it leads one to think that Wright's skepticism about America's treatment of black Americans and a black presidential candidate is wholly justified. And if, of all things, it is his pastor's heated denunciation of American injustice that undoes the candidacy of an African American with a legitimate chance at the White House, any conscientious observer could be forgiven for thinking: God damn America indeed.
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