But Wright isn’t really the issue. It’s Obama who’s the issue. He was a member of the church, sat through the sermons, endorsed Wright without qualification in his first autobiography and named his second book after one of Wright’s sermons.

If McCain, Palin and the GOP are to shoulder the blame for the “Obama is a Muslim” crowd, why shouldn’t Obama get more scrutiny for his much, much closer association to this crackpot?

At the risk of being inflammatory, who really takes the black clergy seriously, either theologically or morally? In my experience, the most corrupt element in urban environments are these black religious leaders. They are openly political, personally avaricious and most lack a deep understanding of Christian orthodox theology. The case of “Dr.” King’s bogus dissertation is just the best known example of this phenomenon. Consider the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton, just how fraudulent does one have to be in order to be expelled from their confraternity? Were it not for white guilt, most of these mountebanks would be preaching from prison.

OTOH, Obama is clearly not Muslim. I do suspect that he is somewhat agnostic about God and religion in general. But I am not going to declare he is not a Christian until he himself renounces the Christian tradition.

So, what’s more disturbing, that there’s a fringe still holding onto a long discredited theory (of which there are oh so many fringes), or that our president had no problem sitting in church for two decades listening to equally bizarre conjectures from a man whose very sermon inspired the title of one of his books?