In an interview today on The View, Barack Obama said he would’ve left his church had Rev. Jeremiah Wright not retired from the pulpit last year:

“Had the reverend not retired and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable staying there at the church.”

The problem with this defense is that Obama had twenty years to leave the church. Was all Wright’s offensive rhetoric from the pulpit limited to just the last year or two? Obama has been a public official, as a state senator or U.S. senator, for nearly 12 years. Sure, he only started running for president last year. But shouldn’t he have been concerned about Wright’s inflammatory public statements as a state or federal officeholder?

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