Barack Obama's Speech Tries to Get Past the Jeremiah Wright Controversy

Barack Obama made a speech Tuesday in Philadelphia, where the founders made the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and sought to assuage concerns about his relationship with a fiery, hate mongering pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Despite flowery verbiage about racial reconciliation, Barack Obama failed.

Here is the crucial passage of the speech in which Obama seeks to tap dance around the fact that he attended the church of a hate mongering pastor for decades, whose ravings he claims to disagree with:

"I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely - just as I'm sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed."

The last sentence in the paragraph is the one that should jump out. How many people who attend church of synagogue, unless the church is something like the Westboro Baptist Church, have heard from the pulpit the damnation of the United States of America and weird conspiracy theories about AIDS and 9/11? One would suspect that the answer is very few, if any. Yet Barack Obama wants to draw some kind of moral equivalence between a preacher who sermonizes hate and any other cleric, suggesting that hate and lunacy is a common ingredient in religious sermons.

Obama tries to explain why he persisted in attended Reverend Wright's church.