ABC's Brian Ross found these words and then noted Obama has professed, "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." He said Rev. Wright "is like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with," telling a Jewish group that everyone has someone like that in their family.

How in the world can the same media that roundly condemned George W. Bush in 2000 because he "stood uncritically" at Bob Jones University now accept this crazy-uncle defense? ABC's George Stephanopoulos suggested Bush's standard stump speech there made him a "Kamikaze conservative." That was a single moment on Bush's campaign schedule. Barack Obama's been attending his crazy uncle's church for 20 years; that crazy uncle married him and baptized his children, too.

Once these statements hit the airwaves, Obama repudiated them but then suggested that those mean-spirited conservatives were at it again. "I noticed over the last several weeks that the forces of division have started to raise their ugly heads again," Obama declared. But the "forces of division" were right there within his campaign -- until Obama expelled his minister from his African American religious leadership team.

Barack Obama looks phony either way. Either he missed all of these sermons, meaning his "devout Christian" talk on CBS doesn't match his church attendance record, or he sincerely thinks that hateful, race-baiting, America-bashing sermons are part of a pleasant Sunday worship experience. The press has an obligation to pursue this.

If Obama really meant any of this rhetoric about healing racial divisions -- in any of his speeches over many months of campaigning -- he would have quit his hate-spewing minister and his Church of Slurs a long time ago. If the media ever meant to be fair and balanced instead of a real-life comedy sketch full of slavish Obama myth-builders, they would have found this story a long time ago.