Shaun Casey

Michelle Boorstein, writing in the Washington Post's The Trail, sounded more like she was presenting a glowing Barack Obama campaign press release than a political story when she announced the hiring of Obama's new religious affairs adviser:

Shaun Casey, who teaches religion and politics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., has been hired by the Obama campaign to focus on outreach to evangelical voters.

Casey, who has been informally advising the Obama campaign on faith issues for a year, next month will become a formal part of the faith outreach staff, Casey said today. His title will be senior adviser for religious affairs.

At the end of a Good Morning America segment today about Barack Obama's pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., an Obama campaign representative complained that John McCain's pastor had not been similarly "vetted." If that's true, then ABC or some other media outlet surely should and will do so.

Let's imagine that upon vetting, McCain's pastor is found to have made statements that were the mirror-image of those that Rev. Wright has made. How long would McCain remain a viable candidate? Judge for yourself, based on Rev. Wright's statements as exposed in the GMA segment that was the result of work by ABC's chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross. GMA aired a number of clips from sermons Rev. Wright gave at his Trinity United Church of Christ.

JEREMIAH WRIGHT: "The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God Bless America? No, no, no! Not God bless America. God damn America! It's in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating its citizens as less than human!"

View video here.