As I said previously, either he was aware of this kind of thing for the past two decades and had no real problem with it, or he was unaware of it, demonstrating an utter cluelessness. And I don’t buy the latter. I don’t believe that Wright suddenly changed, and I don’t believe that Obama believes that he did. Somehow, I have a feeling that the only thing that really outrages and saddens Barack Obama is the fact that his former pastor has switched from being a political asset in Chicago to being a political liability nationally.

In any event, either way, he’s not fit to to get my vote for president. I suspect that a lot (too many for him to win) of other people will have the same opinion.

As someone once said, sincerity is the key to success in life. If you can fake that, you have it made. I think that Obama’s mask is starting to slip.

[Update a few minutes later]

I agree with Roger Simon that this is a tragedy for race relations in this country (and that Obama has been to them what Bill and Hillary were for gender feminism).

The situation is close to tragic and this election year shows a real chance of running off the rails in a way few of us would have predicted. It has a potential for pushing race relations seriously backwards in a society that was already relatively open handed. People do not like being accused of racism when it is not there. The original attraction of the Obama campaign is that it was post-racial and now it is anything but.

This is not the fault of America or of the American people. It has been caused by the race baiters and the spinelessness and opportunism of Barack Obama. He made his compact with the race-baiting devil twenty years ago and now, in the immortal words of Reverend Wright, “it has come home to roost.”

Obama still has a chance to salvage his “post-racial candidacy,” if not his campaign, which (I suspect) is now a completely lost cause. What we need from him is a real speech on race in America, where he calls out the true haters and bigots, and poverty pimps and shakedown artists in his own party–the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons who keep their own people on the “liberal” plantation. That would be a service to the nation, and a speech worth praising. But I don’t think he has either the political acumen or courage to do that. Not to mention that it would estrange his own wife. I guess that, with this implosion of his candidacy, Michelle (whose pastor Wright no doubt really was) won’t have any more reason to be proud of America.

[Another update]

Obama has been telling us that his lack of experience doesn’t matter, because what is important is not experience, but “judgment.” But just what does this episode say about his vaunted judgment?

Back on March 18, Obama declared that we were being unfair in concluding Jeremiah Wright was “a crank or a demagogue” because we didn’t know him the way Obama did. We were reaching that conclusion based on “snippets” and “soundbites,” whereas he could take the full assessment based on a close relationship of 20 years or so.

He was, he assured us, in a better position to make a better judgment.

Today, Obama tells us, he doesn’t really know Jeremiah Wright at all.

And now, it seems, we’re in better position to make a judgment about Barack Obama.

UPDATE: Paraphrasing a reader’s suggestion, foreseeing an Oval Office address near the end of Obama’s first term: “The Prime Minister Ahmadinejad who ordered the nuclear strike on Tel Aviv yesterday… is not the same man I met in Tehran at our summit back in 2009.”

Heh.

Of course, this argument would carry a little more weight if George Bush hadn’t declared that he could see Putin’s soul in his eyes. On the other hand, as much as he’d no doubt like to be, Obama isn’t running against George Bush.