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Bravo, Roger.

Those who ask “what will it take to forgive Obama?” miss the point on so many levels it almost leaves me speechless.

Almost.

You talk about this as a form of ‘redemption,’ as if there is some rhetorical or behavioral hurdle that must be leapt to regain my (or Roger’s, or America’s) trust and confidence.

But this is not about redemption. It’s not about “redeeming” your candidate, because this is not a ‘gaffe’ or a ‘miscalculation’ that can be repaired.

The instant I heard Wright say “God Damn America,” I was repulsed. Viscerally. There is no set of circumstances I can imagine that would make me speak in those terms, because I love this country to the core and I can divorce her faults from her essence, which I take to be good and decent and just. To think that in those stunned days after 9/11 that his first thoughts would be that we deserved this — thoughts broadcast to cheering throngs while the smoke was till rising in Manhattan — fills me not with disappointment, but with rage.

I personally don’t give a shit about Wright or what he believes. All I can say is that my instant, immediate and vioulent reaction was that if I was in the presence of such rhetoric I would rise from my seat, take my wife and children by the hand, and leave, never to return. That is the correct response to this vile hatred.

A few months ago, I thought that Obama might do more symbolic good than the policy harm he will surely do. Since then, there have been a series of ever-increasing red flags, and these red flags all point in the same direction: that a man with such a deeply conflicted past, whose mother and wife and father figure are or were committed America haters, has no business being President of the United States.

Barack Obama, despite his oratorial skill, has revealed himself with every step to be a man steeped in racism and hatred for the country he wishes to lead.

There is no way around it. Derek Moyer’s puerile defense is absurd on its face: Racism is racism. End of story. I am not the first person to point out that if we discovered that George Bush had spent the last half of his life attending backwoods Klan meetings — that he met his wife in the Klan, that he had his daughters baptized by a Imperial Grand Dragon, that he went back again and again and again to hear that Black people were monkeys and pigs — would Derek Moyer be willing to accept George Bush say VERY CLEARLY (now that he has been discovered) that he finds many of the messages reprehensible? Shall we disavow a lifetime of the deepest and most personal association with such hatred simply because of a bland assurance that the Klan contains “the best and the worst, the most ignorant and the most inspired?”

Or shall we perhaps accept the evidence of our lyin’ eyes and say what is immediately obvious to a small child: that these messages are not only pervasive in that church, they are in fact the selling point of such a Klan meeting or “congregation.” That hatred and prejudice is the product that they are selling and that their members are lining up to buy.

He is an Illinois representative, and if the people of Illinois choose this rhetoric of ruin, that is there business. But below policy, below position, below character even and most certainly below rhetorical skill — deep down, in his or her core — I want the leader of my country to love my country: the country that is, the country that was, and not just the country that might soothe Wright’s white-hot fury at phantoms that do no exist.

And I do NOT trust this man to be President of the United States.