Week of March 17, 2008

I've been asked many times whether we will have another Great Depression. My standard answer is that we won't have that one again -- I'd be surprised to have one of that seriousness and duration. But that doesn't mean we wouldn't have a catastrophe we haven't seen before.

We were all wrong about Barack Obama's exotic past.

The same folks who once whispered that B. Hussein Obama was a mole for radical Islam are now decrying his links to an even more anti-American cult: the United Church of Christ.

And it wasn't Honolulu, or Jakarta, or Nairobi that put Obama in touch with folks supposedly bent on undermining heartland values. It was the heart of the heartland's biggest city: the South Side of Chicago, where Obama launched his political career. The South Side is responsible for the black nationalist preachers and violent radicals-turned-professors whose sound bites and rap sheets have now mired Obama in the worst patch of his presidential campaign. But without them Obama wouldn't have had a seat in the state Senate, much less a shot at the White House. And now the black street cred and lefty bona fides they provided, so crucial to Barack Obama's early local success, are proving corrosive to his national ambitions.

Obama suffered his biggest embarrassment of the campaign last week when his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was shown on ABC News changing the words of"God Bless America" to"Goddamn America."

Finally, a revised version of my"Jeremiah" appears in this morning's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, whose op-editor thought the word,"jeremiad," too difficult for the newspaper's readers (4 syllables, donchano).

I can no more disown him [Rev. Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.