Shtick Talk Express™ final takes

Well, after Barack Obama’s Tuesday masterpiece, I’m almost ready to say we will have the Shtick Talk Express™ vs. the Schmuck Talk Express™ in the general election.

Per Huffington Post, with numerous other links, I think Obama probably told a few lies almost in McCain territory.

The biggest? To claim that, after 20 years at Trinity United Church of Christ, all under the pastorship of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he had no idea Wright said some of the crap he did.

Anderson Cooper noted Obama listened to tapes of Wright while he was at Harvard Law. Makes you wonder more about how much deliberation went into his decision to move to Chicago.

because he “would have quit the church” if he heard them “if I had heard them repeated.”

And if I had thought that that was the tenor or tone on an ongoing basis of his sermons, then, yes, I don’t think that it would have been reflective of my values or my faith experience.

Please. Tell it to the Marines.

Or, here’s another take, one that lets Obama somewhat off the hook. Maybe he hasn’t been “praising Jesus” at Trinity all that often these past 20 years. (Of course, most Republicans that pander to the Religious Right from Ronald Reagan on haven’t gone to church that much themselves.)

As Rolling Stone’s Ben Wallace-Wells puts it bluntly, “He picked Jeremiah Wright.” (Emphasis in original.)

Wallace-Wells observes that Obama’s life is about a splicing of two roles.

Obama is at once an insider and an outsider, a bomb thrower and the class president. “I’m somebody who believes in this country and its institutions,” he tells me. “But I often think they’re broken.”

That’s an excellent insight. What’s now happened is that one of the stools has gone rotten under him in public view. And, to continue the analogy, Obama knew for some time the stool was rotting out, at least “rotting out” in terms of him being a mainstream political candidate.

What could Obama had done differently?

Well, his election to the U.S. Senate would have given him a dodge to not go to Trinity so often. However, all the old stuff, from Anderson Cooper’s finding out Obama “targeted” Wright at Harvard Law, eventually would have come up anyway.

But, he certainly could have been more prepared for this moment. From Obama’s biographer David Mendell, a long-term Chicago Tribune political reporter, we have comments on Obama’s thinking he could control the press, and hasn’t liked that when it’s turned out not to be true in the past. Mendell also points out some of the same dichotomies as Wallace-Wells.