Comment by Guido Continelli

I find it most amazing that in America it is considered perfectly normal to lynch a presidential candidate for words he has not uttered or believed, but those of a friend or someone to whom he is close enough to consider family. Since when was the qualification to be president dependent on what a priest or pastor says. Should Rome fall or every catholic politician disqualified because there is irrefutable evidence that some catholic priests have a proclivity for altar boys? Should we disqualify everyone who attended a church or had a rabbi, minister, pastor, priest, etc. with issues? The media is sometimes very juvenile and irresponsible in the way it trivializes the political process. There are some decision-makers in the media who are not serving America's long term interests. They behave with the intellectual maturity below that of a high school drop-out. In the last election they were accomplices in the destruction of Howard Dean's candidacy by replaying over and over again a sound re-engineered scream - reducing the presidential candidate to a single scream in the minds of people... and you are surprised by the quality of people you end up with in office. In the Clinton years the media was obsessed with little blue dresses and other distractions you ended up being blind-sided by a mini-recession and 911. These days it is the ranting of a priest while the financial system is facing a much more serious collapse. I can assure you that the people who are running the sovereign funds that are buying up America at fire-sale prices or those who are attracting American factories and jobs to their shores or dreaming up strategies of how to best America in future are not wasting their time in their countries over such tertiary trivia. California is proposing cutting education budgets and laying-off teachers while these countries are graduating ten times the engineers and scientists America is producing. HB1 visa anyone? Furthermore, the thousands facing foreclosure and lay-offs, or the millions having to contend with higher gas and food prices, ordinary men and women, do not give an ant's fart about what some pastor in Chicago thinks. They want to hear what these candidates are going to do about the serious problems confronting the country. If Obama is smart, which I am convinced he is, he will move on and not let himself be sucker-punched and hoodwinked into this non-productive exercise that ultimately leads nowhere. He has said enough on the matter and should steadfastly refuse to waste resources on that divisive agenda. He should devote the rest of the time and lots of resources to assiduously sticking to his positive message. Nothing frustrates and drives negative people to madness more than sustained positive energy and spirit. He should fight his way out of this trap and counter this strategy of distraction by ferociously sticking to his agenda - uniting this country to deal with the difficult challenges it faces. If the press bringsn up Jeremiah Wright, he should ask people how that will stop foreclosures, how it will reduce the price of gas, how it will increase consumer and market confidence, keep jobs in the country, enable parents and students to pay school fees, or end the war in Iraq... and then he should change the subject to one of those things that are relevant to American lives and running the administration in 2009. We have had enough of this nonsense and fools' game.