Rev. Jeremiah Wright

In 1995, Barack Obama gave a TV interview to discuss the memoir he wrote, "Dreams From My Father." Philip Klein at The American Spectator picked up on this back in August, but the video is making rounds again now. Obama spoke very highly of his then pastor Rev.Jeremiah Wright(my empahasis added:)

 OBAMA: In times of economic scarcity, ahm, generally, ahh, the politicians in this country, right now, ahh, want to look for scapegoats, want to organize around race, as opposed to around principle, and around values, ahh, and I think that's a mistake, and I think that can be countered, but it's gonna require the kinds of grassroots mobilization, ahh, and, and the kinds of work at a local level that I think, ahh, I talk about a lot in, in those chapters on Chicago.

INTERVIEWER: Wonderful man there, Reverend Wright?

OBAMA: Right! [ED: WRIGHT ?!?] And...

INTERVIEWER: Yeah...

OBAMA: ...ahh, who is, who is, ahh, my pastor, and, ahh, he is a wonderful man, and I think it, ahh, that's an example of, ahh, he's a pastor of a, of a large congregation in Chicago, and one of the interesting things that I discovered in my journey to discover...

INTERVIEWER: Mmm-hmm...

OBAMA: ...what my identity is, and who my father is, is also discovering sort of, ahh, my own faith, which, which is not, ahh, necessarily a traditional faith - I don't come out of an institutionalized religious setting, but, ahh, ahh, what becomes important to me is I work with, ahh, churches in...

INTERVIEWER: Mmm-hmm...

Former New York Times reporter Timothy Egan doesn't hide his hostility for conservatives on his nytimes.com blog "Outposts," and last week he accused the GOP of being "troglodytes," "know-nothings" and, in the case of a special Congressional election in Mississippi, "scare-mongering" racists. All that and more in Egan's Wednesday posting, "New Math for November."

McCain surely knows this, even if his party has yet to get the message. The speech that he gave here on climate change marked a big break with President Bush and the troglodyte wing of his party. Look for similar divorce announcements in coming months, even on race. In that speech, McCain envisioned a nightmare of runaway forest fires, heat waves stifling the cities, storms swamping the coasts, unless something is done. "The United States will lead," he said, "and will lead with a different approach." In every way, the speech was a slap at know-nothings like Rush Limbaugh, who tells his 20 million listeners almost every day that global warming is a massive hoax.