That's what Bill Maher said last week on Real Time with Bill Maher regarding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. His argument was that Barack Obama could have done the politically expedient thing and distanced himself from Rev. Wright last month. Instead, when video on YouTube emerged of Rev. Wright apparently denouncing the United States (which he didn't do -- more on that later), Obama delivered a cogent and nuanced speech about race that treated Americans as intelligent people instead of as empty vessels into which simple, polarized opinions are poured. Obama's race speech was, sadly, revered throughout the media. I say "sadly" because it's the kind of speech that would be the old hat in academia: a speech in which a subject is carefully analyzed, and the apparent discrepancies are explained, but no solid conclusion is reached. Race is a very complex subject, Obama said, and should not be dealt with using platitudes. Wright, said Obama, is his spiritual mentor; he could no more disown him than he could disown his white grandmother, who also made occasionally racist statements. This kind of speech is not politically expedient, because it does not distill the issue down to talking points and sound bites. For Obama to be lauded for delivering a real speech with actual ideas is a disturbing commentary on how far our country's discourse has fallen.

But I digress. Obama took a bullet for Rev. Wright and was congratulated for it. And we thought it was the end. But the ABC debate that preceded the Pennsylvania primary brought Rev. Wright back into the spotlight, and Wright felt it necessary to go on a press blitz over the weekend. He appeared on Bill Moyers' PBS show as a soft-spoken, intelligent man -- but Moyers never addressed Wright's more inflammatory statements, like his assertion that the U.S. government spread HIV to kill black people. In one of his other appearances over the weekend, he said that Obama's defense of him was due to the fact that he's "a politician."

It's this statement that Bill Maher found most offensive: here is Barack Obama, trying his hardest not to appear like just another politician. Here's Barack Obama, faced with an association with a man who could injure his chance at the presidency. And Barack Obama takes the high road -- risking his candidacy -- to defend Rev. Wright. And how does Rev. Wright repay him? By going on TV and saying that Obama is just another politician, spitting in the face of everything Obama has been doing for the past year. And it is for this reason, I think, that Obama made a clean break with Rev. Wright.

Now, there are some points that Rev. Wright has made that are very good points: his "God damn America" statement is not a unilateral statement of hatred for the United States. God is damning America, according to Rev. Wright, because America fails to care for its impoverished and marginalized people, and because America involves itself in unjust wars that cost billions of dollars while people in this country live in poverty and without health care, among other things. Many commentators have passed judgment on the form of the opinion, but no one has talked about the opinion itself: is it valid or not? And the answer is yes, Rev. Wright's opinion is valid. His comment about HIV comes from his statement that, after the Tuskeegee experiments, he will believe anything. This, however, does not excuse statements that are factually incorrect as well as inflammatory. Like any human being, Rev. Wright makes good statements, but he also makes bad ones.

His statements about U.S. foreign policy are actually not the most offensive statements he has made. What's offensive is that Obama took a bullet for him, and Wright repaid him by throwing him under a bus.