I must confess that I was only marginally awake when Sen. Barack Obama held his press conference Monday afternoon (EDT) to announce that he had finally seen the light and discovered that his pastor was kinda wacky.

Obama said he was "shocked'' by [the Rev. Jeremiah] Wright's statements during a speech at the National Press Club yesterday in Washington.

"The person I saw yesterday was not the person I had come to know over 20 years,'' said Obama, an Illinois senator.

I'm going to call bolshevik storytelling on this. The standard pundit line appears to be that they don't believe that Obama shares his pastor's outrageous views, but his toleration of them for more than two decades is equally inexplicable.

That's as may be, but what today's press conference really told us is that while Obama may not hold those views, he doesn't see them as beyond the bounds of reasonable political discourse. While the outrageous charge that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to wipe out blacks wasn't enough to move Obama to act, I get the feeling that he would've left Trinity United Church of Christ if Wright had questioned global warming.

Is Obama so out of touch with mainstream America that he doesn't realize that Wright is on the furthest extremist fringe of American political thought? Frankly, all the right-wing nuts that are worried about the North American Union and the superhighway through Texas are more mainstream (and far less odious) than Wright.

Obama claims that the Wright on display Monday morning at the National Press Club was a stranger to him. Obama is not stupid. That leaves two options: Obama is lying or he is an incredible naif and fool. Neither explanation is a positive for someone who seeks to become president of the United States.