Still, there is the idea that he brought his kids along for the Get Whitey sermons. And that this man who wants to be there to pick up the Red Phone took 20 years to figure out that Revrun Wright is one maraschino cherry short of a fruit salad.

In a sad sort of way. Beware of those whom you step on on your way up the ladder, because they will be there to watch you as you come down at a faster pace.

EDIT: The New York Times article is from April 30, 2007, so they may not have known what they had.

Perfunction: Awaken the Giant Within

It [Trinity United Church of Christ] also helped give him spiritual bona fides and a new assurance. Services at Trinity were a weekly master class in how to move an audience. When Mr. Obama arrived at Harvard Law School later that year, where he fortified himself with recordings of Mr. Wright’s sermons, he was delivering stirring speeches as a student leader in the classic oratorical style of the black church.

One understands why that might not seem obvious to black people of a certain age: Condi Rice, for example, has childhood memories of a segregated south and racial violence. But that’s what makes Obama’s association with Wright so significant. He’s not from Alabama. He’s a biracial middle-class Kenyan-Kansan Hawaiian-born Indonesian-raised Columbia and Harvard graduate who chose to immerse himself in the most corrosive and paranoid end of a racial-grievance ghetto mentality that is nothing to do with him, his family or his upbringing. He doesn’t have the same excuse as a Jackson, Sharpton or Farrakhan.

Why would he do such a thing? I wouldn’t expose my kids to the four-letter ravings of Jeremiah Wright because I wouldn’t want them to grow up loathing their country. I find it hard not to think less of a man who does.

Mark Steyn

They are instead seeking to read their own psychological realities into a handful of his words taken out of the context in which they were spoken.

So I asked you what was the missing context that would supposedly make Wright’s assertions less outrageous? You appear to concede that there is no missing context; your claim is, rather, that Obama can’t control what his pastor says.

True enough — but he can choose where to go to church. And any claim that analogizes the Obama/Wright relationship to the McCain/Hagee relationship is, frankly, bullshit. Obama/Wright is a much closer relationship, by several orders of magnitude.

And, we’re left with a major party’s presidential candidate showing his appalling inability to speak out against racial lunacy until someone points out that it’s … well, lunacy. Where was Barry’s finely tuned sense of outrage when Wright dissed his white self?

I know, context. At least he didn’t blame white people for spreading AIDS in the black community.

Oh wait. He already did that, too.

Exactly the same context that McCain’s campaign has given, which is that you cannot control the opinions of everyone that supports you. Considering the fact that Wright has been dissed and dismissed, as was completely predictable to me, we are left with nothing, I think, but suspicion of some unknown fraction of America as described in comment #31.