After months of withstanding the Clintons’ sotto voce racist mudslinging, the stuff that’s sticking to presidential candidate Barack Obama comes from his own rearguard. Apparently, the pastor of Obama’s church of twenty years had a penchant for inflammatory comments from the pulpit. In recent days, Obama has sought to distance himself from the comments of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago:

“Obama appeared on both Fox News and CNN the day his statement was released, saying that with the exception of one or two of the comments, it was the first time he had heard them. If he "had heard them repeated," he told Fox News, he would have quit the church.”

Later in the article:

“Obama told Fox News that he contributed to the church and was a "regular" attendee "in spurts." He said when he attended the services, Wright was preaching about "Jesus, God, faith, values, caring for the poor, family."

“CNN's Anderson Cooper challenged Obama, saying, "you must have heard that he had said these things." But Obama said he had not.

"I confess that I did not hear about this ... until I started running for president," Obama said.”

The article goes on to quote Mort Kondracke, one of the Beltway Boys on Fox News, who expressed doubt about Obama’s unawareness of Pastor Wright’s comments:

"These are things that a parishioner isn't oblivious to," Kondracke said on Fox News. "If your pastor, after 9/11, says that the United States is responsible for it, for 9/11, and that this is chickens coming home to roost, this is not something you can miss."

I agree. When a pastor in a church which one has attended for twenty years gives an inflammatory sermon, how can that escape one’s attention? It smells a little like the “I didn’t inhale” excuse. At the same time, how can one attend church “regularly, in spurts” and go on to wear one’s faith on one’s sleeve as Obama has been doing throughout his campaign? It doesn’t make sense to me that someone who portrays himself as this faithful Christian – a twenty year member of a black church no less - can now all of a sudden say he attended only sporadically and wasn’t all that up on what the preacher said on Sunday. If you’re not a regular member, please, please don’t try to come off as some kind of biblical scholar and preach to us on what Jesus feels about some leftist cause célèbre.

I don’t mind it so much when politicians bring their faith into politics, but if they’re going to do so, it can’t just be for cheap gains in the polls. It has to be because it’s truly where they stand in life. Otherwise it’s just empty religious pandering – the kind that Republicans have been accused of for decades now. But nobody’s taking Obama, or Hillary Clinton for that matter, to task on this – yet.

And so long as they keep pumping their old, tired, retread leftist agenda, it’s not likely that anyone in the “mainstream” media ever will.