So I take it you were watching Fox news all morning. And I hear his grammar wasn't too good either. Did it ever occur to you that the blogosphere is at this point full of competing trolls and surrogates who are doing everything they can to make it seem they have a legitimate argument?

Try taking a look at the larger point he was trying to make--we need to acknowledge and talk about race differences in this country--rather than focusing on one small part of it which might not have been delivered in a perfect way. This is so small and petty, and an actual inclusive and expansive message gets lost when focusing on this.

...doesn't bother me; his association with Rev. Wright doesn't bother me. What bothers me is the incoherent way he's been dealing with the flap about Wright, and the fact that he didn't see it coming. His speech was fine, but it was one he had originally planned, as I understand it, to deliver as a policy speech later in the campaign, not in order to try to repair the damage caused by the Wright mess; and it lost considerable dignity and force in the process of being repurposed.

What made me really angry was his suggestion that racial issues in the campaign had only become divisive in the previous couple of weeks, when his campaign and supporters had been making terribly hurtful (and entirely false, IMHO) accusations that the Clintons were "playing the race card" for months.

Barack Obama's speech was an attempt to acknowledge the resentment between whites and minorities in the hope of creating an honest dialogue that could lead to some understanding and reconciliation. Moreover, it was a challenge to members of the media to focus on real issues.

But instead of members of the media taking up Barack Obama's challenge and discussing the issues that divide whites and minorities in this country and what can be done about them, they declare that Barack Obama "threw his grandmother under the bus" and they parse his radio comment and blow it out of proportion.

In other words, this could have been a real opportunity to change people's perceptions and understandings of the country we live in. But instead, all we get is Barack Obama hates whitey.

You all have done an excellent job of turning Barack Obama into the second coming of Malcolm X. Well done.

If Obama is responsible for his pastor's remarks, then how do you not make this an issue worth addressing:

http://www.alternet.org/story/80248/

Excerpt:

There's a reason why Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the "Fellowship," aka the Family. But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May.

Sean Hannity has called Obama's church a "cult," but that term applies far more aptly to Clinton's "Family," which is organized into "cells" -- their term -- and operates sex-segregated group homes for young people in northern Virginia. In 2002, writer Jeff Sharlet joined the Family's home for young men, foreswearing sex, drugs and alcohol, and participating in endless discussions of Jesus and power. He wasn't undercover; he used his own name and admitted to being a writer. But he wasn't completely out of danger either. When he went outdoors one night to make a cell phone call, he was followed. He still gets calls from Family associates asking him to meet them in diners -- alone.

The Family's most visible activity is its blandly innocuous National Prayer Breakfast, held every February in Washington. But almost all its real work goes on behind the scenes -- knitting together international networks of right-wing leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, the Family reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that exemplary leader, Adolph Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole bestiary of murderous thugs. As Sharlet reported in Harper's in 2003:

During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration, the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.

At the heart of the Family's American branch is a collection of powerful right-wing politicos, who include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed Meese, John Ashcroft, James Inhofe, and Rick Santorum. They get to use the Family's spacious estate on the Potomac, the Cedars, which is maintained by young men in Family group homes and where meals are served by the Family's young women's group. And, at the Family's frequent prayer gatherings, they get powerful jolts of spiritual refreshment, tailored to the already-powerful.

Clinton fell in with the Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker. When she ascended to the Senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's "most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Sen. George Allen. This has not been a casual connection for Clinton. She has written of Doug Coe, the Family's publicity-averse leader, that he is "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."