Via Mickey Kaus comes this from Hugh Hewitt’s radio show yesterday. Hugh played a selection from Obama’s best selling book Dreams of My Father, including the Messiah’s mentioning the first sermon he heard at Rev. Wright’s church.

[T]he pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting title Hope.

“The painting depicts a harpist,” Revernd Wright explained, “a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountaintop. Untill you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.

It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, aprtheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere … That’s the world! on which hope sits.”

In his very first sermon at the church, Obama heard his soon-to-be spiritual guidance counselor blaming white people for the world’s problems. Kaus notes that Obama isn’t criticizing the statement either:

Keep in mind: a) Obama isn’t disapproving of this sermon. In the book he weeps at the end of it; b) Demonstrating that at least some blaming of “white greed” for the world’s sins–which Obama now criticizes– isn’t an exceptional topic for Rev. Wright in a few wacky sermons Obama may or may not have missed. It’s at the quotidian core of the Afrocentric philosophy that Obama says drew him to the church; c) Indeed, in his big Feb. 18th race speech Obama reads the passage from his book that describes his emotional reaction to this very sermon (his “first service at Trinity”)–how it made “the story of a people” seem “black and more than black.” d) This is also the sermon that gave Obama the title of his next book, The Audacity of Hope. e) The “profound mistake” of this sermon is not that Wright “spoke as if our society was static”–Obama’s analysis on Feb. 18th. The problem is that “white folks’ greed” is not the main cause of a “world in need.”

Indeed. It seems Mr. Unity knew his own church helped widen racial divides from the very first sermon. Yet, Obama would continue to listen to Wright’s sermons for 20 years, bring the Reverend on to the campaign as an adviser, have Wright marry him and his wife, and baptize his children.

What does Obama claim is his advantage? Judgment?

Meanwhile, Obama is more interested in defending Wright than condemning his hate mongering.

I think he’s saddened by what’s happened, and I told him I feel badly that he has been characterized just in this one way, and people haven’t seen this broader aspect of him.

We haven’t seen the broader aspect of him? He believes we deserved 9/11, claims America invented AIDS to inflict on African Americans, blames white people for just about every problem the world has, and believes we’re all white supremacists. And Obama feels bad that Wright has been characterized in a negative way? Seriously?