The Rev. Dr. Wright does not have to invoke the damnation of the almighty on your country, by every account of the list above, and by the fact that most of the people effected by these facts at home apparently cannot even see or care about their implications or the relative importance, means that they and their country are already damned to face the consequences.

Is the Rev. Dr, Wright, or his suggested “influence” on Obama really the problem? Them chickens will sure be flocking home to roost! Karma for the people who want to poke out their own eyes rather than open them is what it is.

These discussions have helped me understand better why this issue has been moved to centre stage in this pathetic pre-election, mud slinging fest orchestrated by the MSM.

Is it not that like racism, or economic exploitation, or political corruption, or lying, torture and wars of aggression, we are faced with a host of evils that require moral responses that our capitalist, competitive, politicised, compromised, and de-humanized institutions have no means of providing, or even accommodating?

Yet in a market based society every need is mined, even the need for a moral anchor in a sea of lost souls. Obama has learned the power of this hunger for “change” and is mining it for political ends, but he learned it from Rev, Dr. Wright who has spent his life mining it for spiritual and religious ends.

Wouldn’t it be nice if America and Americans could just vote for someone new and get their immoral slate whipped clean by a savior and march righteously onward into the promised-land, of democracy, freedom, equal opportunity and the right to happiness…. Only in a brainwashed, delusional consumer based society could such a sham be even conceived and subleminally sold.

The changes needed are inside the individuals. The reality of the construction of the corporative, politicised institutions and all their minions that make them up is, that instead of moral based ideals and goodness, good governance, compassion, and caring coming to the top, it is the tricky, the greedy and sociopaths that float, blotting out the light, feeding the masses with lies and hate and dominating with injustice and tyranny.

Wright, Obama, you and I know, this elitist construction is of our own doing, we chose to accept it, to tolerate it, to benefit from it on an individual level and it is up to us individually to change it. Ah, but there’s the rub.

No, it was obvious what he was doing on Moyers and the NAACP: he was rehabilitating his reputation. And he was doing it quite well. The speech at the National Press Club was going in the same direction and with similar success. There was no reason for him to have plied such a course, that far, only to veer off message (“I’m not crazy. I’m an intelligent, learned, rather cool guy.”), become angry, stupid and in your face, and thereby blow the gains he’d made.

It’s taken me a while, but I think I’ve figured out how Wright and Obama are different. The difference is that Obama doesn’t get pissed off about the subject of race. Or rather, when he does get pissed off, as we all do on occasion, he doesn’t park himself there, as though it’s the right place to park, and then dare anyone who doesn’t appreciate why he’s parked himself there to make him move to another spot.

I think I understand why Wright falls into such a trap, a trap we all fall into on occasion, and it has nothing to do race. Race is merely what triggers it. To keep it simple, let’s call it a character flaw. We all have it. When we speak of someone having “character,” perhaps we’re referring, at least in part, to how someone minimises it or keeps it under control.

Hope here — for Wright or for any of us — lies not in looking for justifications to mitigate the fact of trapping oneself. Hope lies in the willingness to repair any damage and doing whatever one is capable of doing to do so.

It’s not as though Wright can’t do exactly this. And there’s every reason he should. Whether through future speeches and interviews, op-ed’s, a series of YouTube videos, a web site, whatever, he could effectively repair the damage he’s done to Obama and to himself. Done right, he could do even better than that.

But before he can be trusted to do anything particularly intelligent on the subject, he’ll have to figure out, or at least get a far better grip on, why he remains so fond of letting race bait him into blowing his cool.

The media likes to characterize the Moyers interview, NAACP and National Press Club speech as Wright’s “media blitz”, but there’s something seriously disingenuous in that characterization. The truth is that the media has an insatiable appetite for Wright and having avoided the press for several weeks, Wright finally made himself available. Granted, he could have been much more effective had he done the Moyers interview and then retreated, but this whole affair is intrinsically media driven.

It might sound a stretch, but I even think it’s possible that Wright, knowing he would be toxic to a general election, wanted to give Obama another chance to completely disown him.

“Whether Wright’s suspicions are baseless, in the light of Tuskegee, the fact that he has them should be neither shocking nor terribly surprising.”

Having come to hold him in high regard after seeing his interview with Moyers and his speech at the NAACP, I was in fact both shocked and terribly surprised. I was also terribly disappointed because such a lapse of rationality and of spiritual and mental equilibrium runs directly contrary to what had nurtured my esteem in the first place.

Absence any facts or compelling evidence whatsoever, the AIDS issue is not only nothing more than a conspiracy theory: it is a particularly unhealthy and toxic one. All the more so for someone with his religious beliefs and in his position. He should never have gone beyond being curious about it and keeping an eye out for any actual evidence. He had no rational reason to do more. That he did do more gives rise to legitimate suspicion as to what may have motivated him.

However his considerations about this theory may have evolved over the years, that he continues to do anything other, publicly, than admit to having made a serious mistake is not good. I doubt he doesn’t realise this on occasion himself. I imagine he simply can’t confront owning up to it. And this isn’t good either.

Wright: “… based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”

Wright doesn’t believe your government is capable of doing “anything” any more than you or I do. However he intended the statement to be taken (factually, metaphorically, as a mere insult, or whatever), it succeeds only in confirming his flaw and in giving offence to any who would choose to take offence at such a statement.

I find it despicable and unjustifiable when anyone, let alone someone like Wright, is attacked for his flaws in the manner that so many have done. But Wright, insisting that his error was anything but evidence of a flaw, certainly didn’t leave them without an excuse — even if such actions are inexcusable — to do so.

I’ve been following the electoral politics in the U.S. for several months with considerable interest, hopes and excitement. The Wright “scandal” has been a reminder — and I needed it — of the absurd, base level to which such “politics” have fallen in your country. Not God bless America. Not God damn America. God help America.