The Stone version

Some measure of how uninformed is Mark Brown’s assessment (below) of Rev. Wright may be gotten from today’s Beachwood Reporter, which cites and links:

* Rolling Stone magazine of 14 months ago (through The Daily Howler), describing Obama’s church in radical terms and Obama as its preacher’s grateful disciple:

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. . . .  The senator ‘affirmed’ his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a ‘sounding board’ to ‘make sure I’m not losing myself in the hype and hoopla.’ Both the title of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright’s sermons. ‘If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from,’ says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, ‘just look at Jeremiah Wright.’  [Italics added]

On this The Beachwood Reporter commented that it “strains credulity . . . when Obama says Wright is not the same man he has known for 20 years.”

As the Rolling Stone article shows, this is indeed the same Wright – and that’s what concerned Obama so much when he announced his campaign for president that he stuck Wright in a basement.

and

* NY Times of a year ago, which reports the invocation cancellation:

“[Obama] had sampled various faiths but adopted none until he met Mr. Wright, [whose] assertions of widespread white racism and . . . scorching remarks about American government . . . prompted the senator to cancel his delivery of the invocation when he formally announced his candidacy in February.

Wright comes off as a longtime irresponsible extremist, rather than the “generally well-intentioned guy who sometimes says some crazy stuff by white people’s standards” of Brown’s dream world.