Well this is interesting. And not at all surprising.

Enterprising conservative blogger Matt Margolis dredged up an almost completely ignored report in the New York Post during Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 that revealed Obama’s efforts in 2008 to “hush” big-mouth anti-white, anti-America (“God bless America? I say God damn America!”) racist minister Jeremiah Wright. Wright, you will recall, was Obama’s supposed “spiritual advisor” whose Sunday sermons qua rants the future President said he attended religiously (snort) for many years. We now know that although Obama solved his Wright problem by denouncing him publicly, Obama’s true views were much closer to those of his mentor than most voters would have been comfortable with in 2012.

But O couldn’t allow that cat out of the bag (yet) so, according to Wright himself, (who was furious over Obama’s betrayal) he offered the good reverend $150,000 to stop saying bad things about whites and the United States until Obama was safely in the White House. The story begins with reporter Ed Klein hearing Wright say, as they met for an interview, “Man, the media ate me alive….After the media went ballistic on me, I received an e-mail offering me money not to preach at all until the November presidential election”:

“Who sent the e-mail?” I asked Wright.

“It was from one of Barack’s closest friends.”

“He offered you money?”

“Not directly,” Wright said. “He sent the offer to one of the members of the church, who sent it to me.”

“How much money did he offer you?”

“One hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Wright said.

“Did Obama himself ever make an effort to see you?”

“Yes,” Wright said. “Barack said he wanted to meet me in secret, in a secure place. And I said, ‘You’re used to coming to my home, you’ve been here countless times, so what’s wrong with coming to my home?’ So we met in the living room of the parsonage of Trinity United Church of Christ, at South Pleasant Avenue right off 95th Street, just Barack and me. I don’t know if he had a wire on him. His security was outside somewhere.

“And one of the first things Barack said was, ‘I really wish you wouldn’t do any more public speaking until after the November election.’ He knew I had some speaking engagements lined up, and he said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t speak. It’s gonna hurt the campaign if you do that.’

“And what did you say?” I asked. “I said, ‘I don’t see it that way. And anyway, how am I supposed to support my family?’ And he said, ‘Well, I wish you wouldn’t speak in public. The press is gonna eat you alive.’

“Barack said, ‘I’m sorry you don’t see it the way I do. Do you know what your problem is?’ And I said, ‘No, what’s my problem?’ And he said, ‘You have to tell the truth.’ I said, ‘That’s a good problem to have. That’s a good problem for all preachers to have. That’s why I could never be a politician.’

“And he said, ‘It’s going to get worse if you go out there and speak. It’s really going to get worse.’

As I said at the outset, this is hardly a shock.

It also provokes these musings…

• Did Republican “pounce”? Nah. Mitt Romney didn’t even use it while Obama’s minions and surrogates (like Harry Reid) were slandering him. “Romney lost, didn’t he?”
• When Barack Obama tried to pay someone to shut up during a Presidential campaign explicitly to aid his election prospects, nobody saw that as trying to influence an election, or even particularly newsworthy.
• When Donald Trump paid “hush money” under far more ambiguous circumstances, it’s became a hook for a politically motivated criminal prosecution.
• A minister would have been a much more credible witness than a porn star, I would think.
• A Presidential candidate holding racist views and anti-America views would be a lot more damaging to his election chances than an adulterous sexual encounter in the post-Bill Clinton era, wouldn’t you think?
• Donald Trump’s friends, employees and associates are a lot less loyal, trustworthy and reliable than Barack Obama’s.
• There are different standards of acceptable conduct applied to Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives, and Barack Obama and Donald Trump particularly.

But we already knew that.