Throw grandma under the bus ( Barack Obama )

When seeking to extricate himself from the tight spot in which he has been placed by his long association with the spiritual leadership of Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama hauled in his (living) maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham. Obama has previously characterized Mrs. Dunham as a "trailblazer of sorts, the first woman vice-president of a local bank." She had a direct hand in his upbringing when Obama chose to live with his maternal grandparents rather than his mother, who was then in Indonesia.

Today Obama brought Mrs. Dunham into his speech for a cameo appearance as a white counterpart to the fulsome Reverend Wright:

" I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. "

Even amid the false equivalencies and obvious evasions of his speech today, Obama's misuse of his grandmother seems to me a striking sign of poor character.

What he can't get by lying, he'll get by threats of violence: Obama Warns Of 'Quiet Riot' Among Blacks Democratic Presidential Hopeful Says Hurricane Katrina Pulled Back Curtain On Poverty Of Gulf Coast HAMPTON, Va. (AP) ― Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Tuesday that the Bush administration has done nothing to defuse a "quiet riot" among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago. The first-term Illinois senator said that with black people from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still displaced 20 months after Hurricane Katrina, frustration and resentments are building explosively as they did before the 1992 riots. "This administration was colorblind in its incompetence," Obama said at a conference of black clergy, "but the poverty and the hopelessness was there long before the hurricane. "All the hurricane did was to pull the curtain back for all the world to see," he said. Obama's criticism of Bush prompted ovation after ovation from the nearly 8,000 people gathered in Hampton University's Convocation Center, particularly when he denounced the Iraq war and noted that he had opposed it from the outset. Repeatedly, he referred to the riots that erupted in Los Angeles after a jury acquitted four police officers of assault charges in the 1991 beating of Rodney King, a black motorist, after a high speed chase. Fifty-five people died and 2,000 were injured in several days of riots in the city's black neighborhoods. "Those 'quiet riots' that take place every day are born from the same place as the fires and the destruction and the police decked out in riot gear and the deaths," Obama said. "They happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates. Despair takes hold and young people all across this country look at the way the world is and believe that things are never going to get any better." He argued that once a hurricane hits or a jury renders a not guilty verdict, "the frustration is there for all to see." Obama, who is bidding to become the first black president, took the stage after a succession of ministers repeatedly brought the crowd to its feet, singing, praying and swaying to music.

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