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The answer, my fellow Americans, is yes. Hillary Clinton, just for instance, has spent years cozying up to Nixon's old friend the Rev. Billy Graham. And yet what are the chances that she seconds Graham's feeling, caught on Nixon's tapes, that Jews are pornographers with a "stranglehold" on the American media? Just a ballpark guesstimate: zero. Or that John McCain is right there with his buddy televangelist John Hagee's belief that Catholics are the spawn of Satan? (I paraphrase, but what he actually said was worse.) Or that McCain agrees with his other "spiritual adviser'' Rod Parsley (his real name), who thinks we ought to declare war on "the false religion" of Islam? What, you didn't even know John McCain had a spiritual advisor? I doubt that he did, either.
Barack Obama, of course, has had a far more substantial relationship with his longtime preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who in turn is sweet on Louis Farrakhan. And as everyone with cable now knows, Wright has given a bunch of fiery sermons in which he blasted America's foreign policy and racism, and said Hillary Clinton has never been called the n-word. (Only, except for the part about the "chickens coming home to roost'' on 9/11, isn't much of what he was railing about sad but true? Former Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro suggests that Obama is an affirmative-action slacker with skills inferior to those of the average white guy, her candidate responds with a tepid tut-tut, and there's somebody out there who thinks racism is not still a problem?)
But spend two minutes listening to Obama, and you know he is no more in the same zip code with Wright on the anti-American or us-vs.-them stuff than Clinton is anti-Semitic or McCain is anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim. The real question about Obama in all of this is why, knowing that this guy Wright was a big political liability, he didn't quit that church years ago. But isn't the only possible answer that he didn't do that because he still has other-than-political motivations in his life, ties to a community that mean more to him than they maybe even ought to, and stubborn gratitude to the man who, as he put it, brought him to Jesus and to the "Gospel on which I base my life''?
Kind of puts to rest those rumors about him being a secret Muslim, doesn't it?
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