Here's an interesting little cartoon I saw from Slate.com, today:


All right, I admit I know next to nothing about the preacher they are talking about being connected to Senator McCain. However, given the article about this in the Columbia Journalism Review, it would appear that McCain, while seeking the endorsement of this particular televangelist, was never a member of the man's church, or, even, very aware of what he regularly taught. He was just looking for a Fundamentalist preacher with a big audience for an endorsement. It's not even clear if the two had ever met before their first public appearance together.

Hillary had nothing to do with the defense of Black Panther, Bobby Seale. I'm willing to give Hillary the benefit of the doubt about the law firm she worked for when I was in kindergarten. Let's chalk it up to being young, dumb, and from the 60's. No real connection with those guys in decades. As for the Marc Rich pardon, hey, the documents released from the National Archives about the Clinton administration clearly show that after Hillary bombed on her health care, she was persona non grata in the West Wing of the White House.

Even for Obama, his connection with 60's counterculture terrorist, Bill Ayers, I have not seen anything really credible on him having a serious connection with Obama. Nothing more than some loose association.

Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr., on the other hand ... that's a little harder to dismiss as nonexistent, or, at best, some casual relationship.

Reverend Wright took the helm of Trinity United Church of Christ in 1972. Obama placed membership in 1992, or in the 1980's, depending on which source you choose. By the time that Obama placed membership, Reverend Wright had been in that pulpit for 20 years.

Reverend Wright's entry in Wikipedia states this about his relationship with Obama:

"Barack Obama, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President, first met Wright and joined his church in the 1980s, while he was working as a community organizer in Chicago before attending Harvard Law School. Wright officiated at the wedding ceremony of Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as their children's baptism. The title of Obama's memoir, The Audacity of Hope, was inspired by one of Wright's sermons.

Wright was scheduled to give the public invocation before Obama's presidential announcement, but Obama withdrew the invitation the night before the event. Wright wrote a rebuttal letter to the editor disputing the characterization of the account as reported in an article in The New York Times.

In 2007 Wright was appointed to Barack Obama's African American Religious Leadership Committee, a group of over 170 national black religious leaders who supported Obama's bid for the Democratic nomination; however, it was announced in March 2008 that Wright was no longer serving as a member of this group."

Uh-huh. Okay.

On February 22, 2007, Rolling Stone (not exactly part of the "vast Right Wing conspiracy") posted an article entitled "The Radical Roots of Barack Obama". Here is the pertinent part about Reverend Wright:

Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama's life, or his politics. The senator "affirmed" his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a "sounding board" to "make sure I'm not losing myself in the hype and hoopla." Both the title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright's sermons. "If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from," says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, "just look at Jeremiah Wright."

Obama wasn't born into Wright's world. His parents were atheists, an African bureaucrat and a white grad student, Jerry Falwell's nightmare vision of secular liberals come to life. Obama could have picked any church — the spare, spiritual places in Hyde Park, the awesome pomp and procession of the cathedrals downtown. He could have picked a mosque, for that matter, or even a synagogue. Obama chose Trinity United. He picked Jeremiah Wright. Obama writes in his autobiography that on the day he chose this church, he felt the spirit of black memory and history moving through Wright, and "felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams."

Then, there is the old dictate: "Follow the money".

So, where did Barack and Michelle's money go?

Well, according to a March 25, 2008 article on the Bloomberg site, between 2000 and 2004, the Obama's donated less than $11,000 TOTAL to the various charities that they supported. In 2005, Reverend Wright's church received $5,000.

Did you catch that? In one year, the Obama's donated half as much to ONE charity that they support as all of their charitable donations for the previous FOUR years, COMBINED.

It gets better.

In 2006, they gave $22,500 to Reverend Wright's church, or more than twice all of their 2000-2004 charitable contributions combined!

I could go on a rant comparing my salary to those figures, but that would be crass.

Let's look at the ratios of those numbers that I mentioned above.

Over a five year period, the Obama's claimed $10,772 total in charitable donations, total. If you divide that figure evenly, for that period, that would mean that the total donations made to charities that were big enough to claim on income tax forms came to $2,154.40 ... total.

The year after that period, they donated $5,000 to Reverend Wright's church, alone. More than twice the previous year's assumed donations to ALL charities, combined.

The following year, 2006, they donated $22,500 to Reverend Wright's church. In other words, in 2006, the Obama's donated, to one charitable organization, more than TWICE the total of ALL of their charitable donations from 2000 to 2004 COMBINED.

Now, think about yourself for a minute.

Would you make those kind of changes to your charitable donations without being real confident about the receiving organization? Is it reasonable to assume that you would make those kind of changes without knowing the mission and message of such an organization? OR, is it more reasonable to assume that you were VERY familiar with the mission and message of the organization, and, in fact, endorsed it?

HHHHHMMMmmmmm.

Newsmax says that the latter is what happened.

Of course, I could be the anal retentive, or touchy one, here. My sense of propriety too severe. Maybe, I'm too sensitive about some things, like: God, church, America, to name a few.

I think I should let the Right Reverend speak for himself: (WARNING!!! While these videos are of a preacher in his pulpit delivering a sermon, this guy is NOT Billy Graham, ...or, even, Billy Swaggart, or Jim Baker.)





I don't mean to offend. I just watched that last video. I'm a bit nauseous.

Mark Steyn is a Canadian-born, British-raised author.

I think he wraps this up best.