'Some people', Varian-HitchTwin?

No. The polls have shown consistently that the people are tired of this made up scandal, have no use for it, and want the debate to get back to real issues. In a Presidential campaign nothing takes place in a vacuum, and when the media decide to focus on one made up scandal to the exclusion of everything else, that is nothing less than a deliberate attempt to skew the race in a certain direction.

The "twenty year" relationship that supposedly existed between Obama and Wright is an empty cliché. No, Obama was not in the pews every week, No, he didn't faithfully attend Wright's every word for 20 years, and No, to call someone a "mentor" doesn't mean you agree with their every position. Obama has explained his fealty to Wright's church: that body has done a lot of good for the community; he feels respect for the angry elders of his community who experienced the humiliations of Jim Crow; he's devoted to the spirit of fellowship the church embodies and to channeling the energy and spirit of his fellow believers in a positive direction, away from the divisions of the past. His relationship with Wright has been well known for quite some time, he has completely separated himself from the Rev's more radical positions and No, no one, not even you, Varian, believes that Obama somehow secretly shares them.

So why make an issue of this? Because guilt by association is the only hope you and Hillary and the GOP have for derailing Obama's campaign. It's disingenuous and dumb. Every politician has acquaintances who espouse out of the mainstream ideas. But for reasons that have more to do with reactionary media prejudice than with intellectual honesty, many of those freak associates of powerful statesmen get a free pass - just who, I'd like to know, just who decided to appoint a clearly racist right-wing freak like Pat Buchanan, for instance, to be the spokesperson on racial matters in our society? If all the Republican candidates and their media pals can get by associating themselves with a man who ran his own White House campaign on the basis of an open appeal to white supremacist bigotry --oh, that's just gruff but lovable ole Pat -- then I don't think Wright should be much of a problem for anyone.

And it really isn't. You can keep cramming images of Wright down the people's throat, but I don't think they're buying this time. They have other things on their minds -- jobs, prices, war, to name a few.