This won't work, Barack

Obama's anti-American minister "resigns" from the campaign:

Obama’s campaign announced that the minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., had left its spiritual advisory committee after videotapes of his sermons again ignited fierce debate in news accounts and political blogs.
Obama did not clarify whether Wright volunteered to leave his African American Religious Leadership Committee, a loose group of supporters associated with the campaign, or whether the campaign asked him to leave.

(Via Memeorandum.) I believe the correct term is "thrown under the bus" and, given the timing, this could also be termed a "Friday night massacre." However, it doesn't solve the essential problem that Wright represented to the Obama campaign.

Wright was not a hired staffer on the Obama campaign. Nor was he merely a dignitary appointed to a titular position in order to lend prestige to the campaign (as was true with Geraldine Ferraro's position with Hillary Clinton's campaign).

As Obama himself has written, Jeremiah Wright has been his pastor for 20 years. Obama tries rather ineptly to distance himself from Wright's inflammatory anti-American rhetoric:

The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.

Whoa! Look at the defense of Wright's "black theology" offered by Trinity Church, which was cited by former Trinity congregant Kesha Boyce Williams in Wright's defense. According to Wright's defenders, this "black theology" -- which was what the minister was supposedly expressing in his America-bashing rants -- is part and parcel of the Trinity experience, and Obama was just fine with that, until it became a political embarrassment.

So Obama spends 20 years in this church, proudly claims the minister as a spiritual mentor, and then when Wright's anti-American rants make the network news, suddenly Obama is shocked, shocked to discover that his minister harbors such unpatriotic sentiments?

No. Uh-uh. This won't work.

UPDATE: Doing a little roundup of reaction to this affair, I note Ragnar's post highlighting Wright's anti-Israel rhetoric:

[America] supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic.

This is just historical ignorance talking. America certainly has not ignored the Palestinians. The problem is that the Palestinian leadership has been fanatically dedicated to the liquidation of Israel, which tends to make negotiation difficult, if not altogether moot.

As to Wright's accusation that America "supported Zionism," this charge dates back to the Cold War era. Back then, U.S. support for Israel was largely a response to the fact that the Soviet Union was arming and training the Arab armies that sought to destroy Israel in successive wars. And the Soviet didn't just back Israel's enemies in conventional warfare. What most Americans today don't know is that the Soviet Union for many years trained and sponsored international terrorist organizations (a fact documented in a once-famous 1981 Heritage Foundation treatise), and thus today's terrorist threat can be said to have roots in the old "Evil Empire."

UPDATE II: Andrew Sullivan is more charitable toward Obama, calling the dismissal of Wright "a classy move." Well, if you accept that there's a "classy" way to throw someone under the bus . . .

The Hot Air crew has an extensive roundup. Nobody over there seems to think Obama's move was particularly "classy," either.

You know what I haven't seen yet? Any accusation that the Hillary campaign was behind the ABC News report that turned Wright's rants into a major story. You'd never be able to prove such a thing, of course -- Hillary's people aren't stupid -- but you'd think that at least one pro-Obama blogger would think to ask, "Cui bono?" So far, I haven't seen any such suspicion expressed. C'mon, Obama people: Do you really think ABC News just stumbled onto these videos and decided to do a story without any prompting from anyone?