Latest Modified Obama Hangout

Doesn't Obama get it? Every time he contextualizes Wright, he loses. Every time Obama impugns the motives of those who worried over the relationship, he loses. Every time Obama suggests that Wright was a healer whose words were misused by those suspect to inflame ("[it] spoke to some of the racial divisions we have") he loses.

Wright's clips indeed did speak to "racial divisions," but by slurring whites, Jews, Italians, the WWII generation, and the United States. Other than radical African-Americans, Central American Marxists, Libyans and the Palestinians, almost every one else was fair game. He was not just "stupid" but cruel and uncouth. He did not misspeak "five or six" times, as did a Ferraro, a McCain, an Obama himself, or a Clinton on various topics, but systematically offered a written and spoken ideology of separatism and venom. And those who believe that are not themselves trying to do what Wright did. Would that Obama spend as much time criticizing Wright as he does the critics of Wright.

The controversy is no longer Wright (whose 20 years of slander and hatred lie like foul verbal IEDs buried deeply amid thousands of words in transcripts and texts, and go off the more the media navigates over them). Nor is the rub just Obama's past comments on Wright or his own landmark speech on race.