Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey notes an oddity in the Washington Post’s water-carrying editorial that lauded Barack Obama’s most demonstrative denunciation of Jeremiah Wright to date:
To which I can only respond, “What career?” Coming out of Harvard Law School in 1991, one would have expected young Barack Obama to set the world on fire. He was editor-in-chief of the Law Review, graduated magna cum laude, even penned a well-received memoir soon after his graduation. And yet for a dozen years after law school, Obama toiled away in obscurity as a community organizer, a lawyer at a small firm that had the infamous Rezko as a client, and as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. This career path famously forced him and his wife to have to stretch to pay back their student loans. Much of this was of course laudable on Obama’s part, passing up the big bucks to better serve humanity. But he didn’t have a career that engaged in policy issues. He was an obscure figure whose efforts to forward his obvious political ambitions were uniformly thwarted until his successful run for senator in 2004. Besides, as Morrissey notes, if Obama’s “entire career” really has been “antithetical to the divisiveness of Rev. Wright’s comments,” it would have been swell if the Post had provided an example or two to support such a sweeping assertion. Against the Post’s unsupported hyperbole, there stands the formulation “20 years and $40,000.” For 20 years, Obama worshipped at Jeremiah Wright’s church. And yet Obama’s campaign would have us believe that he only became aware that Wright is a moral cretin on Monday. Perhaps even more bothersome is the $40,000 + in donations the Obamas gave to Wright’s church in 2005 and 2006. Given Michelle Obama’s repeated whining about the precarious state of the Obamas’ finances, we can assume they didn’t demonstrate such largesse without first giving the matter serious consideration. It’s a measure of how problematic the Reverend Wright situation will remain for Obama that his champions in the media have resorted to ludicrous exaggeration in a vain attempt to make it go away. They’d be better off standing by their tried and true (though still ineffective) method of shrieking “Distraction!!”
