by Mark Rhoads
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright problem is getting worse for Sen. Barack Obama as new radical and immature statements by Wright are revealed. Starting with the Bill Moyers interview on Friday night and continuing with almost three hours on CNN Sunday night, a serious effort has been launched to rehabilitate Rev. Wright in the eyes of the public because Sen. Obama has been unable and unwilling to distance himself enough from wild statements by Wright. Is any of this fair to Obama? It depends on how close his association has been with Wright in the past 20 years. We know that the relaionship is close enough that Obama was not willing to repudiate Wright at the time he was making his charges against the U.S. Government, including the slander that America started the HIV epidemic. While Obama did repudiate that idea very recently, he was very late in doing so.
Obama has since made general statements of condemnation of the tenor of Wright's remarks without being terribly specific about which of Wright's charges are pure lies as to matters of fact as opposed to merely crazy opinions. Wright whines that he has been quoted "out of context" by You Tube clips and other sources. What should trouble the Obama campaign is that Wright has been caught red-handed and in context. Why kind of context can justify a Christian minister asking almighty God to damn his own country? What kind of state lawmaker, who has taken an oath to uphold both the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Illinois, sits silent in a pew and fails to speak out against such unjust and stupid statements. The radicalism of Rev. Wright does not make a complete case for voting against Obama for many people. But the context along with other very bad choices in personal associations Obama has made are enough to put Obama's charcter in play to a degree that it was not in play several months ago.
