I want to say two things forthrightly: first, that I basically agree with David Domke's analysis of the manufactured crisis around Jeremiah Wright's sermons. I can understand that they make some people uncomfortable (that's point two), but we need to ask why they make people uncomfortable.

The fact is, America has postponed a necessary conversation on race for at least forty years. Jeremiah Wright makes white (and not a few black) people uncomfortable because he reminds them that America is not as morally pure as it would like to imagine itself as being. Nor is it as post-racial. Injustice, however ameliorated, is still daily a part of many lives. Until we are willing to face that truth, we can never truly leave the ghosts of our racial past behind. White Americans don't like to hear that, and I don't blame them.

It is also true that since Nixon's "Southern Strategy," Republicans have been running more or less explicitly on race. They depend on it to win their elections. Shame on Sean Hannity and Anderson Cooper and all the other media enablers for allowing the Republicans to run not against Barack Obama but against this guy:

Remember him? That's Malcolm X, the guy who suggested that white America's sowing of violence might have lead them to reap the whirlwind.

That created a firestorm of controversy that ultimately led Elijah Muhammed to cut Malcolm loose and in the end to his death. But here's the funny thing: nobody ever bothered to address his original point.

Why do you suppose that is?