"If you don't have anything nice to say...

...come sit next to me." - Dorothy Parker

Unlike a newspaper columnist, I don't have a deadline. I can post anytime I feel like doing so. I would like to be able to post something on a daily basis, but the details of my personal life aren't interesting enough to warrant that, and I don't like to post something involving my opinion or viewpoint without a serious self-editing process, which can often take days. And then comes the arduous task of editing while I'm writing, often accompanied by more editing after I've posted what remains of the original topic. I've actually missed out on posting about a number of topics because they were stale by the time I had mentally constructed an outline and was ready to apply my fingers to the keyboard.

I've never done the math, but I probably have more friends who are liberal than conservative; I have some friends with whom I've never discussed politics and honestly don't know what their leanings are. For a while I was even in a serious relationship with a young lady who came from a family of "Yellow Dog" Democrats, a clan who would have disowned the lady in question if we had married and I had not changed my voter registration (for any reader not aware, a "Yellow Dog" Democrat is one who would vote for a yellow dog if it ran on the Democrat ticket). To this day I'm astounded that we dated without catching more grief over our "mixed relationship" than we did.

I've received relatively little flack from my friends on the liberal end of the spectrum about my political posts, or "rantings," as my friend Dallas put it in a recent email (an ironic aside - Dallas lives in Texas' capital city of Austin; I always found that amusing). I don't know if this is because they're used to my conservative leanings, they're not reading this blog, or they figure it would be a waste of time to try to get their viewpoint through my thick skull. In any case, I've recently been mentally outlining a positive post about Barack Obama. Not to appease anyone, but because I genuinely have something nice to say.

Obama has, without fail, taken the high road in his campaign for the Democrat Presidential nomination. As the first serious (note the use of the word serious - this immediately DQs shakedown artist Jesse Jackson and poverty pimp Al Sharpton) black, African-American, whatever you want to call him, Democrat candidate for nomination, he could have made race an issue a long time ago, especially in light of comments and various stunts by Hillary Clinton's campaign. But rather than get into the mudslinging and dirty tricks one expects from the Clinton camp, Obama has kept the focus on the campaign and his message, not resorting to in kind attacks on his opponent. He has been, above all, a class act. And as a former boss often told me, there are two types of class - "first" and "no."

Now, however, race and patriotism have been put front and center in the Obama campaign due to caustic sermons delivered by his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. By now you've probably heard at least part of Rev. Wright's inflammatory rhetoric, or seen the now infamous "God damn America" sermon on YouTube.

On Tuesday, Obama attempted to quell the firestorm about his pastor's remarks with a speech centering on the need to bridge our country's racial divide. No one can deny that even in this day and age that racism still exists, and that there is a need for greater understanding, to look beyond one's DNA and see peoples' performance, not appearance. As I've mentioned before, the gentleman is a gifted orator and, as someone who has spoken in public many times myself, I can assure those who have not that delivering a speech is no easy task. I've often heard that short of death, the most common fear people have is speaking in public. It's a well-deserved phobia.

The jury is still out on two issues concerning Obama's association with Reverend Wright, and whether or not this will hurt his chances of securing the Democrat Presidential nomination. First, and most obvious, what does his association with someone who makes such inflammatory remarks about America say about the candidate? Second, what does this say about his credibility? Obama claims that in twenty-something years of attending Trinity United Church of Christ that he has heard Reverend Wright make what may be considered controversial statements, but has never heard anything like the "God damn America" sermon.

Now, as much as I would like to, I don't attend church regularly, but in the past have done so whenever possible (or when my parents made me, but that's another issue altogether). And I'm not black, so I don't have the vantage point that Obama and his fellow parishioners share, but I feel certain that the average minister of any skin hue doesn't just start preaching "God damn America," or similar sermons, out of the blue, and that if he or she did, that minister would have to deal with at least some backlash. And for someone who aspires to hold the highest office in our country to not only listen to such rhetoric, but to do so on what is supposedly a regular basis, and call the person spewing this invective a mentor and inspiration, make this candidate a questionable choice, at least in my mind.

God bless America.