I refrained from posting about Barack Obama’s maybe kind of just-a-little-bit racist preacher – whose church Obama attended for two decades, who baptized Obama’s children, and who Obama has supported with 5-figure donations as recently as 2006 – following Obama’s speech yesterday. I was annoyed that the usual suspects would so happily take 20 years of bad judgment from a presidential candidate and gloss right over it now that Obama has given an airy speech that hardly addressed why he’s so close to such a crazy racist. Why try and break it down any further myself when they’re doing a better job of saying what I’m thinking at The Corner? First, from Victor Davis Hanson:

The message? Wright’s motives for espousing hatred are complex and misunderstood; your motives for worrying about Obama and his Pastor are simple and suspect.

VDH’s post is, true to form, a wordy but interesting one. And for the shorter, grumpier John Derbyshire reaction:

Yesterday’s speech, read through in the clear light of dawn, is worse than I thought: an ugly mish-mash of ancient socialist clichés and Gen-X spoiled-brat self-congratulation, all enveloped in clouds of flatulent Oprahnian rhetoric. Ugh!

Ugh, indeed.