So bamboozled that fertilizer is caviar?

I have been sitting here reading stories about Obama's "great speech" on race and racial relations. The speech I saw wasn't great by any stretch of the imagination.

One of the talking heads on the Sunday talk shows said it was so meaningful for the voters to hear Obama's message. In that instance, the speech was meaningful, although, not in the way the candidate or the talking head had in mind.

It was meaningful for the voters to hear that while the candidate could not condone and he "unequivocally" condemned Reverend Wright's, dare I say, racist remarks, he is still a member of Rev. Wright's congregation at Trinity United.

He still seems proud that this black bigot introduced him to Christianity. What kind of skewed separatist view of Christianity does this say the candidate has? He said in his speech that all of us have heard our ministers, priests or rabbis speak remarks with which we strongly disagreed. I have never heard of any priest, minister or rabbi anywhere who said HIV/AIDS is a plot of the government of the U.S. to reduce the numbers of blacks in Africa.

For this statement alone, the candidate should be totally disabused of this "reverend's" view of Christianity. Or we voters should be ashamed to pander any further to this hypocritical sophist or to a press (all media included) that thinks this is the stuff of greatness.

It is a sad day for America that the leading voices in journalism can be so bamboozled because we are afraid to appear racially insensitive, when a black minister, the black minister of one of three people in the United States that might be the president says, "God damn America."

Have we drifted so far from reality in this country that when the emperor has no clothes (no moral base for his position), we take this fertilizer and call it caviar.

Sad indeed.

Michael Schindel Sugar Grove