I noticed this blame the messenger tidbit from Kevin Drum in the Washington Monthly,
Go scan The Corner and you'll find Mark Steyn and Victor Davis Hanson and the rest of the gang still in an absolute lather over Wright. Ditto for other conservative sites. They have no intention of allowing this to die, and I have no doubt that it will resurface with a vengeance in every last swing state this fall. When Obama continues to fail to denounce Wright thoroughly enough — and believe me, no denunciation will ever be enough with this crowd — then eventually the crossover Republicans who were singing Obama's praises after Super Tuesday will, sadly but inevitably, use this as an excuse to switch their support to McCain.Actually, I think Mark, myself and others "in the gang" would like nothing better than for the Wright mess to die, so that Obama could drop the 'hope and change' generalities, and instead get serious, present his agenda to the public, and thus make the case to the electorate why and how the Senate's most liberal member should be the first Northern Democratic candidate to win the Presidency in almost a half-century.
But the problem is that Obama either can't or won't disconnect from the flamboyant Wright by simply explaining, without contradictions, why he stayed in the church amid such sermons, and why Wright's hate speech and those who tolerate it must be subject to the same withering criticism accorded to any others who indulge in, or subsidize by their person and purse, such vitriol.
The traditional enabler, not the true liberal, always contextualizes hate speech by, "but he also did good things,", "but those were just snippets", "but we all have friends or pastors that do this," "but you don't understand the atmosphere in which he spoke," "but his enemies are just exaggerating this," and ad nauseam. Although it was not his intent, Obama has lowered the bar, and established a dangerous precendent in which the next public racist will seek refuge in the contexts he has established.
The problem was not created by conservatives, but by Democrats, who are now scorched by the dragon of multicultural identity politics they helped to create. If you didn't have a Wright who felt his crudity was exempt from criticism under the protocols of victimization, then you would have to invent him.
Democrats should now ask themselves how a party of supposed racial transcendence inevitably ended up with primaries predicated along hardening racial lines, and a unity, trans-racial candidate who for twenty years was intimate with a pastor and spiritual advisor who seems to have derided almost everyone and everything, from America, to Italians, to Jews and Israel, to whites and moderate blacks, with serial slurs worthy of a Don Imus or Michael Richards.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDAzZTZjOWNjM2MyMDAyMjQyM2ZlMWFhMWM5MTc4ZDI=
