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So it is okay if Rev. Wright hates rich white people? OMG, can you hear what you are saying? And no, Rev. Wright would not thank me. I went to law school in Chicago, and worked with abused children in the south side. I know about Trinity Church-- been there done that. This man does not care for my type, nor do I care for him. The BIG difference is that I do not care for him because he is a BIG FAT RACIST ASSHOLE. He does not care for me because I am a white Jew.

And for those of you defending him as a preacher, may God take pity on you because I want to whoop your ass. GOD WOULD NOT DEFEND this man, so neither should you. LYING to his people, telling them that white america invented AIDS to kill black people this is not God's work, and to say so is truly blasphemy. Alligning with Louis Farrakhan, stating the God was angry so he caused terrorists to attack the world trade towers--this is not preaching THIS IS BULLSHIT. Making people hate one another, pitting one race against the other, this is WHAT HITLER DID.

Obama lied to you good people, and you need to wake up. You are the victim here, and in my opinion you should all demand your money and your hearts back from this man. He has abused your good faith, and this is what I feared. It is better to face this now than later....

Gerry, I heard the entire NAACP speech. He was talking about AFRICAN vs. EUROPEAN CULTURE, not biology, not race. Wright is not one of those who use the term African-American exclusively for black. He says "black" and "white" frequently, and when he means race, he says "black" and "white" and he very pointedly used the term African and European, not black and white. There is nothing in that speech that says a damn thing about biological differences between the races. The entire discourse was about culture, from music to preaching styles to religious perspectives being different when you're in the hold of the ship and when you're on deck. And I don't care how many ignorant blowhards in the media or on comment boards continue to spout it (and I don't mean you; I've seen this crap repeated over and over with the same vehement righteousness that they have it correct that I hear from people who say Bill Clinton closed a runway down at LAX, that Al Gore said he invented the Internet, that Obama is a Muslim and that Hillary killed Vince Foster). That doesn't make it any more correct.

Wright quoted a children's education scholar, Janice Hale -- one of whose books, Unbank the Fire: Visions for the Education of African=American Children, by the way, was a Pulitzer nominee -- and her theories. Here's the blurb on the Pulitzer-nominated book talking about her earlier work, the one cited by Wright, from its publisher, that bastion of underground radical racist literature, Johns Hopkins University Press:

From the Publisher

In her highly acclaimed work Black Children, Janice Hale argued that the difficulties many African American children have in school result from differences in learning style that are deeply rooted in African American culture.

Culture, not race, not brains wired differently, not biology. Good lord, is this stuff that difficult to track down??? Did even ONE of these idiot pundits bother to look up, let alone actually read the books by any of the people Wright cited before they shot off their mouths on the subject??

At least some people did weigh in on the books he cited for his AIDS created by the government theory (and concluded there wasn't much to it) -- which is the only truly wacko thing he said. Geez, Louise, we're all entitled to hold one or two ridiculous ideas in our lifetimes. It shouldn't negate an entire lifetime of thought and action. Do Reagan worshippers denounce and reject St. Ronnie because he and Nancy believed in astrology? (Personally, I find supply-side economics quite a bit more ridiculous and fairy-tale divorced from reality nonsense than astrology, but that's just me.)

This country has a really serious problem of dealing with anything in a grown-up, nuanced manner. We don't do complex. We can't discuss any topic more complicated than who won the ball game and who is Britney sleeping with now. The French, God love 'em because nobody else will, will have running debates for months in a general circulation newspaper or magazine about some obscure philosophical theory. But we can't even discuss practical, concrete issues of life and death with any more depth than a kids' wading pool.

Now, whether any of Hale's work is definitive, I don't know, I'm not a scholar in the field. But the author of the theories Wright cites is certainly a respectable scholar, not some crackpot with a degree from a mail-order catalog.

You know, in some ways, I wouldn't mind if the Rev. Wright issue was a key focus of attention in the media, IF -- and it's a big IF and would only exist in some alternate universe where political discourse is sane and intelligent -- he was quoted accurately, the issues he touched on were actually discussed, the context in which they were said was accurately explored, people who knew what the hell they were talking about were asked their opinion instead of just any old Joe Pundit off the pundit turnip truck, if a full picture of the man and not just the YouTube version was presented, a fuller discussion was held about the intersection of politics and religion (and some of the wacko stuff the Christian right believes -- that have actually become domestic POLICY or could, heaven forbid, become foreign policy under a Republican administration) -- if anything like that type of conversation was being pursued, it might be worth the bothering. If 24-hour news actually meant we had 23 more hours to explore issues in depth and explore issues beyond the simple subset we address in the evening news. If pigs could fly.

And, you know, Obama is not really a huge question mark. He has a history of public service that goes back a couple of decades, as an organizer, as a lawyer, as a state lawmaker and in the U.S. Senate. Is there ANYTHING in his history that indicates he hates white people, embraces divisive rhetoric, believes that AIDS was government genocide? NO. Then why is this an issue even if one accepts the simplistic caricature of Wright's most outrageous youtube moments? And he'd have been under more pressure in his hometown to be an activist in that mold than he is in a more diverse national arena. Glenn's point under the snark is right. This issue -- as it has played out in the media, in any event -- is a waste of our time.