One rule for the blacks and another for the whites, right guys?

Certainly looks that way.

There is a small difference.
I don’t believe that McCain has sat at the feet of any of these guys for 20 years.

But you’re right – he should disown them.
And if he supports torture then I would not support him.
(Which then leaves me no-one to supoort…)

I’m struggling here – I don’t want to defend McCain (cos god knows i don’t want to see republicans succeed) but…

There is surely a difference between basically saying “thanks for the support” to an influential loon (McCain) and giving an influential loon a position on your campaign team (Obama).

I appreciate Obama’s loon has since stopped serving on the African American Religious Leadership Committee – but Obama was happy to appoint him after worshiping under him for years and years.

McCain meanwhile has just been a bit vaguely polite about a man that he has in the past openly criticised.

are they really equivelent?

M4E is right on this point. If we think that John McCain has the wrong policies then we already have plenty of things to criticise him for without trying to make something out of this non-story.

McCain has been around for years, his views are well-known and on record. He has criticised Hagee in the past and was, in all likelihood, being little more than polite in accepting Hagee’s endorsement. Should he have refused it? Well, in a perfect world I suppose he should have done (though we might consider that candidates should merely want to do the right thing themselves, with little concern about the intentions of their followers. That’s why they’re political leaders, because their views are the ones that get made into policy).

Obama is different. He’s newer, his views are less well-known, and he has a long-standing relationship with Jeremiah Wright. It is a relationship that does bear some legitimate scrutiny, and Obama has acquitted himself well in the manner of his response to this scrutiny. Case closed, everyone can make their own mind up about it.

Trying to make an equivalent fuss about McCain/Hagee is the same kind of lazy tribalism that makes many American blogs unreadably awful whenever there’s an election on. Almost all of my favourite American political blogs have been possessed by the same kind of “yeah, my side sucks but if I squint at the issue this way, your side looks even worse!” argument and it would be a shame to see it catch on here.

I was going to leave a longer comment but one could hardly do better than the one above from Rob Knight. Nothing disfigures American politics in quite the same way that partisanship does. It’s the narcissism of small differences. The so-called “Jeremiah Wright / Obama controversy” is a nasty attempt at guilt by association. So why are you doing the same thing?

I think my point is somewhat misunderstood. I certainly don’t cheer for parties or candidates blindly and have never known to be.

My point here is about the hypocrisy of the right here and in the US over their support for McCain while simulatenously talking up the Obama controversy as if Obama himself is echoing Wright’s views.

and giving an influential loon a position on your campaign team (Obama).

I’d only say that once we have evidence that those lunatic positions actually fed into Obama policy.

Another point, made in this article by Kristoff in the NY Times:

Occasionally, we’ve had glimpses of this gulf between white and black America. Right after the O.J. Simpson murder trial, a CBS News poll found that 6 out of 10 whites thought that the jury had reached the wrong verdict, while 9 out of 10 blacks believed it had decided correctly. Many African-Americans even believe that the crack cocaine epidemic was a deliberate conspiracy by the United States government to destroy black neighborhoods.

Much of the time, blacks have a pretty good sense of what whites think, but whites are oblivious to common black perspectives.

What’s happening, I think, is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation — and they are thunderstruck.

All of this demonstrates that a national dialogue on race is painful, awkward and essential.

So my point is simply calling him a loon and hoping Obama would junk him is too easy and possibly not the answer. What encourages people to develop conspiracy theories, within ethnic/racial groups? I think thats an important question.

Sunny,

It was never a possibility that Barak Obama was going to lie down to the media over this. I have no idea how it works out in Peroria, but my admiration for him has gone up immensely. That was a political gamble that neither McCain nor Clinton would have made.

He said what any honest human being should say, that the Reverend Wright was wrong, but he was still his friend.

Which, I think, is right.

(I’d have thought most reasonable folk would agree)

Rabid wee conservatives might make a meal out of this but they are what they are.

Idiots.