Sen. Obama Rejects and Denounces

As the quote I posted before shows, Fox News has been messing themselves with glee at having turned the Rev. Wright story into a full-blown media scandal, because lord knows things are going so great in America these days, that there's simply nothing else for the media to obsess over. I mean, the ABC News debate taught us that since the economy is going so great for all Americans that we can have a nice little debate about the capital gains tax and all those 'middle class' folk who make over $200,000 a year. Seriously, there's just nothing else happening in the world but this.

Well now the media has gotten their pound of flesh from Barack Obama.

This was, of course, inevitable. Rev. Wright's decision to go to the media and attempt to get past the caricatures of him was understandable and justified, but when he started ranting about how Obama was acting like just another politician-- when Obama had done the politically incorrect move of refusing to throw his old pastor under the bus-- he showed that he was not willing to treat Obama as decently as he himself had been treated. Even trying to portray the Senator as some sort of Uncle Tom I think might have gone ignored by the campaign, until Wright decided to go the full bombastic on us. I think that's when I picture Obama sitting in an Indiana hotel room with his wife, shaking his head, and deciding no more Mr. Nice Barack.

And so today we got this press conference-



Said Obama, "I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday... The person that I saw yesterday was not the person that I had come to know over 20 years... His comments gave comfort to those who prey on hate... I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia, explaining that he has done enormous good in the church. But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS; when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century; when he equates the U.S. wartime efforts with terrorism – then there are no exuses. They offend me. They rightly offend all Americans. And they should be denounced, and that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally here today."

(Sen. Obama also held a Q&A session with reporters in which he elaborated on all of this.)

And that's the end of that story. Ha! Just kidding! We'll be discussing this bullshit all year.

[UPDATE: What Jane Smiley said here, on the ridiculous role of religion in politics.]