The audacity of hype

As Paul notes below, Barack Obama denies having personally heard the now notorious statements of Jeremiah Wright:

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.

Obama reiterated this assertion in an interview on FOX News with Major Garret yesterday:

None of these statements were ones that I had heard myself personally in the pews. One of them I had heard about after I had started running for president and I put out a statement at that time condemning them.
The other statements were ones that I just heard about while we were… when they started being run on FOX and some of the other stations. And so they weren’t things that I was familiar with.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki figure prominently in Wright’s condemnation of the United States in his disgusting post 9/11 sermon:

We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and the black South Africans, and now we are indignant. Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yard. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

At NRO’s Corner, Rich Lowry discovers an admiring allusion to this vein of Wright’s rhetoric in Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father about the first sermon Obama heard Wright give:

The title of Reverend Wright

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