Abu Wabu

Barack Hussein Obama has tossed his close friend, confidant and mentor reverend Wright, then the crazed Father Pfleger and now the entire Trinity United Church of Christ under The Bus Of Hope And Change. That's an awful lot of Obama's formative past that has proven too radioactive to sustain a campaign with their presence, so it's time to scrutinize the relationships between these players.

No-one is doing a better job of exposing Obama's past than Stanley Kurtz, whose NRO article "Left In Church" chronicles the ties that bind Obama to Wright, Pfleger and TUCC:

As Trumpet notes, Pfleger does in fact work closely with Farrakhan, Wright, and Obama. Pfleger and Wright are key partners in the Chicago crusade against Wal-Mart. Wright’s first public appearance after the “God damn America” scandal was in Pfleger’s church. Pfleger has repeatedly rejected criticism and hosted Louis Farrakhan at St. Sabina. Recently, Pfleger sharply defended the deeply controversial appointment of Farrakhan follower Sister Claudette Marie Muhammad to the Illinois Governor’s Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes. (Muhammad’s appointment led to a series of resignations from the commission.)

During the same period, Trumpet ran a highly positive feature article on Sister Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan. In fact, over and above the famous Empowerment Award” Wright bestowed on Farrakhan, Trumpet regularly features positive mentions of Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam. There is a kind of informal nexus between Wright, Farrakhan, and Pfleger, each of whom are bound by an allegiance to black-liberation theology, or to the black Muslim nationalism that inspired James Cone to create black-liberation theology to begin with.

Obama was a part of this nexus. Despite current attempts to rewrite history, Obama was close to Wright for years, and fully entangled with him, both theologically and politically. Pfleger’s influence over Obama, whose work as a “community organizer” had him in frequent contact with South Chicago’s churches, is second only to that of Wright. Obama has worked on a great many political causes with Pfleger, and Pfleger was a key early backer of Obama’s failed 2000 bid for a seat in Congress.