It’s better for everybody that we assume Obama is a fraud, and it’s almost certainly the correct explanation. As Bob Herbert wrote today, “Barack Obama went to Rev. Wright’s church as a young man and was blessed with the Christian bona fides that would be absolutely essential for a high-profile political career.” It was the cost of doing business. But Obama must think us all bitter morons to try and pass off this embarrassment as the product of some kind of ideological evolution on Wright’s part. Is it that he didn’t leave the church but the church left him? How many other members of the church do we expect will distance themselves at the sudden revelation that their (former) pastor is a vile racist. The real question though, how is it that Andrew Sullivan was so easily duped by Rev. Wright (and Ron Paul)? What is it about Sullivan that makes him uniquely vulnerable to racists and bigots–the kind of people that are so far outside the mainstream that they have no other serious advocates? Sullivan is convinced that the entire Bush administration should be convicted of war crimes, and yet time and again he has demonstrated his own inability to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil. Obama may have sat in that church for 20 years without a peep, but he has an excuse–like Wright says, he’s just a politician. What’s Sullivan’s excuse?
