Barack Obama isn't what!?

This- by Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times- is one of the most disingenuous pieces I've read for some time.

Rutten's sneering implication that the bizarre slanders the Far Right make against President Obama must of necessity be made because he is an African-American is worth a cynical chuckle or two. Whence, then, the equally bizarre lies about George W. Bush, his National Guard service, his alleged complicity in 9/11, his prior knowledge of the absence of Saddam Hussein's WMD's, and the alleged stealing of elections in which the evidence of chicanery is far greater against the Democrats that were, and remain, just as prominent on the Left- so much so that John Kerry repeated the National Guard lie on the campaign train in 2004, four years after it was first made and then immediately discredited? Come off it, Tim. There are malicious nuts in both parties and at both ends of the political spectrum. Not every piece of right-wing lunacy is automatically due to racism!

But probably the silliest thing about the whole article is the suggestion that a man who was a member of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's congregation for a quarter of a century, who was married by Rev. Wright and had his children baptized by him, is not influenced by Liberation Theology. Well, no. There is one thing sillier: the suggestion that, since Glenn Beck was wrong about Jeremiah Wright's hero, James Cone, being one of the founders of Liberation Theology (as opposed to merely one of its practitioners), Beck's essential point is in any way compromised.

Liberation theology- which sees Christ's mission as the liberation of the poor and the oppressed rather than the saving of the world from "sin" in the Christian sense ("sin," in Liberationese, being captialism and unjust social structures), and reads the world and events through the filter of a Marxist hermaneutic- is part of the warp and woof of the theology of the Religious Left, whether its practitioners are brown, black, or white. And make no mistake: James Cone and Jeremiah Wright are very much liberation theologians, so much so that it is bizarre that this should even have to be pointed out.

No, I am not saying that the President is a Marxist. But I am saying that it's beyond denial that his personal religiosity- at least as indicated by his choice of churches and ministers- is heavily influenced by a theology which, whather he realizes it or not, is Marxist to the core. Further, it would be a sad commentary on Mr. Obama if he were to have remained a member of a church for more than twenty years and yet remained wholly uninfluenced by what is preached there!

If Barack Obama were free from the influence of Liberation Theology, he wouldn't have remained Wright's parishioner for a quarter century. Instead, he would have sought out a minister who proclaimed the gospel of Christ rather than that of Karl Marx.

HT: Real Clear Politics