Obama: What Did He Know, And When?

If you want it quick and neat, the answer to the title question is: a lot and a long time ago.

The many and terrible fulminations of Barack Obama's minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright have only now drawn national attention because the Reverend's church thought it would be a great idea to make Reverend Wright's "best" moments available to everyone for a fee, and because Fox News and ABC decided to pay that fee.

And the church is right, they are THE BEST!

Defenders of Obama will want to paint the intense scrutiny Wright and Obama are now receiving as a gotcha moment, you know, the sort of antic the liberal media does with incidental or irrelevant things they try to tie to their person of interest who happens to be a Republican and/or a conservative, and which they then exaggerate in both proportion and importance, and do they so as loudly and brazenly as possible.

So it's helpful then when you can point to something that was written before all this blew up in Obama's face, something that few were aware of at the time, and that was written without any hype and in a cool tone.

And as luck would have it - good for us, bad for the Obama-Wright tag team, such an article exists, and thanks to the American Thinker you are moments way from reading it. The story puts to rest any idea that Obama was unaware of Reverend Wright's "old uncle eccentricities,".and gives the reader an impression that Wright's fiery denunciations of America, specifically white America, and of Israel were everyday occurrences. Well, at least on any Sunday.

A reporter for NewsMax attended a Trinity Church service last year when Obama was also in attendance, and he heard "a sermon filled with profanity"

Then there's this from the subsequent NewsMax article of August 8, 2007: "Obama's campaign staff did not respond to a NewsMax request for the senator's response to Wright's statements."

NewsMax also references an April, 2007 story from a slightly liberal source and notes: "'It is hard to imagine, though, how Mr. Obama can truly distance himself from Mr. Wright,' writes Jodi Kantor of The New York Times."

And the concluding paragraph of the NewsMax piece is big enough to sink the Titanic:

"If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me," Wright told The New York Times with a shrug. "I said it to Barack personally, and he said 'yeah, that might have to happen.'

Well guys, thanks to efforts like yours, they're responding now. I wonder if Reverend Wright is privately preaching, "God damn NewsMax?"