I can't figure out what Obama's position is supposed to be. Wright didn't say anything new, only rehashed what he's already said before.

 And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

    I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

    These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

    Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

    But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America - to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that

Post partisanship:  He can not and did not deal with the partisanship with his minister before and during the implosion.  

Who he is:  He claimed: unity is in his DNA.  Now excuse me, what does that mean?  

Iraq & Afghanistan
  Bringing troops home
  The lives lost
  The billions of $$ wasted
Economy
  Gas Prices
  Weak Dollar
  Mortgage crisis
Health care crisis
  Non-insured
  Under-insured
  High cost of prescription drugs
Defending Democracy
  The next set of Supreme Court justices
  Electronic Voting paper audit trail
Protecting the future
  Global warming
  Exporting Jobs
  High cost of Education

THESE are the issues that separate our Democratic nominee from John McCain, whether our nominee is Clinton or Obama.

The tapes of the AID remarks, Hillary and Bill remarks, Goddam etc etc have been out for weeks. The Farrakhan praise has been out longer than that and Obama has already commented on it. How can they let him get away with saying he just got offended yesterday?

CNN...Roland Martin is livid.  Wright crossed th eline by having a press conf.  Wright was disrespectful to Obama.  Obama had to do this.  Borger trying to spin: he needs to get back on message, campaign members she has talked to are worried about the polls (superdeez).  Martin: his audience likes what Wright has to say, versus half say he's hurting campaign.  Wright had phone calls to not go on and will get a backlash from Black radio if he tries to come back on stage again. Unknown woman: political expediency but did not expect Wright to throw him under bus and cause all of this divisiveness.

Obama just practiced the politics of personal destruction...politics as usual...disunity...no change, no hope...

By splitting ways with Wright, and specifically at this juncture, Obama showed that he will "say anything, do anything in order to get elected"

**Wright said (paraphrasing) that 9/11 was a payback for the "sins" of the US and that wasn't enough to denounce.

**Wright made really disgusting references to Hillary and that wasn't enough to denounce.

**But Wright hurt Obama's political campaign and THAT is enough to denounce.

[Farrakhan] did not put me in chains. [Farrakhan] did not put me in slavery.  And [Farrakhan] didn't make me this color.

For Clinton, the best thing to do is not say anything and stay out of the line of fire.  She made a good statement earlier this week about getting past Wright.  If she keeps that line she'll be okay.  I am hoping she will.  

One thing that's 100% obvious from Wright's recent speeches is that he wasn't exactly cool with how Obama had been treating him, and was only rather poorly hiding his resentment of it. The clear message of what he said was that he, Jeremiah Wright, had absolutely nothing to be apologetic for, even if Obama had said that there was something seriously wrong with some of his utterances.

Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect.

Lies.  In his book, Dreams (the one I'm reading now), he relays part of Wright's sermon (which Obama sat in the pews for), "The Audacity of Hope":

"It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs in a world of need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere...That's the world!  On which hope sits!"

1. He never heard Wright make any "divisive" statements.

Believable? Absolutely not, so we'll skip that.

2. He heard (or heard of) the "divisive" statements and disagreed with them, but stayed with the church because he needed it on his resume for political reasons.

But, that's political expediency, aka politics as usual, and we all know that can't be the answer, not for Mr. "new politics" so we'll skip that.

3. He heard (or heard of) the "divisive" statements and disagreed with them, but stayed with the church because he didn't have the backbone to confront Rev. Wright about them and walk out to find another church.

Wait, that's bad, too, so let's see if we can find something else.

4. He heard (or heard of) the "divisive" statements and was too stupid to see how bad they might be to his political aspirations.

Uh, that's not so good either, come to think of it.

4. He heard (or heard of) the "divisive" statements, and agreed with them.

Ouch! that can't be right, can it? Let's hope not.

But, frankly I can't think of any other reasons for him to stay there, and none of these reasons say anything good about his judgment, character, intelligence, or moral fiber.

From what I heard on Moyers the other night, Wright is very much in the black liberation theology tradition, and while I heard aspects of that brand of theology discussed in a very calm and - can I say this? - articulate way, I also heard the underlying anger and the underlying blame that Wright feels deeply toward "the oppressors."  

Now, it simply cannot be that Barack Obama, through his attendance at church, and in what he described as many conversations with Wright about religion and faith, never knew what Wright thought about the things that Wright said to the NAACP, and at the NPC.

Obama claims that it was Wright who helped bring him to faith, and I simply do not know how that happens without advice, for one, and mentoring, for another.  Makes no sense.

I am starting to see a parallel between Obama and Dukakis in kind of a reverse way.  Dukakis made a strategically bad decision to try to dispassionately answer a question about what he would do, how he would feel, if his wife, Kitty, had been raped and murdered.  Dukakis delivered a college-professor answer with no emotion.

Obama started off with the college-professor answers, giving a speech on the larger issue of race in America, and including a paragraph or two about what Obama described as a relationship of mutual respect that had hit a bump in the road over these sermons Obama claimed to know nothing about.  It was a sober and serious speech, and in my opinion, wholly lacking in emotion.

What ever made Barack Obama think that the Reverend Wright, who had been preaching for 40 years, who brought a promising man into the church, who watched as that man rose through the political ranks to stand on the precipice of historic possibilities, would understand being hidden away on the day of Obama's announcement for president?  Who would understand being described as the crazy uncle in the basement?  Who would be accept being chastised in a public arena for being divisive?

What was he thinking?

The moment - the instant - that Obama heard Wright say that "politicians say what they have to say," he should have been on the phone or on a plane to see Wright and find a way for Wright to save face.  Obama shamed Reverend Wright - and in a man with an ego the size of Wright's, that was never, ever going to go unchallenged.

In my opinion, when Wright told the NPC that "you don't make fun of my momma and her religious tradition, you don't make fun of my daddy and his religious tradition," he was speaking to Obama as much as he was speaking to the media, and how Obama didn't know that, or didn't see it coming reflects a pretty significant problem with judgment.

I've said for a long time that I thought one of Obama's biggest problems is that he has no idea who he is or what he believes; I found it painful to listen to him struggle to find a way to explain why he is having to do what he's doing, how to make it all go away, and how to come out of it without ever really being honest with himself or with the American people.

t was the Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds, a former editorial board member of USA Today who teaches at the Howard University School of Divinity. An ordained minister, as New York DailThe Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright at the head table of the National Press Club event Monday which Reynolds helped arrangey News writer Errol Louis points out in today's column, she was introduced at the press club event as the person "who organized" it.

But guess what? She's also an ardent longtime booster of Obama's sole remaining competitor for the Democratic nomination, none other than Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. It won't take very much at all for Obama supporters to see in Wright's carefully arranged Washington event that was so damaging to Obama the strategic, nefarious manipulation of the Clintons.

Hundreds of thousands dead and maimed on your dime; Dynacorp and Halliburton getting clean away with stealing billions that should be going for schools, parks, roads and bridges and all you can talk about is militant, black boogiemen who dare to disturb your entitled, complacent, slumber.