The line uttered by the late, great Alec Guiness in the first "Star Wars" movie is what I've been continually reminded of every time it Sen. Barack Obama feels the need to throw someone else under the bus. Guiness, playing Jedi Obi-wan Kenobi used the force to befuddle the weak-minded. Obama seems to have a similar effect on his adoring followers as he repeatedly argues that "So-and-so isn't the person I knew."

First it was his long-time spiritual mentor Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Then it was his good friend Father Michael Pfleger.

Then it was the entire congregation of Trinity United Church of Christ.

Yesterday, it was his good friend Tony Rezko, who was convicted on 16 of 24 corruption-related charges.

There's been repeated rumors that there's a tape out there of Michelle Obama railing on "whitey" (I'll believe it when I see it -- I don't think it exists.) -- what would Barack Obama say then? "This is not the woman I've known for two decades"?

His acolytes would gobble that one up too.

For the rest of us whose brains have miraculously stayed in our brains even as Obama has spoken, these false claims are amusing -- because John McCain is going to use them to hammer Obama into stuttering apoplexy.

Obama has been discounting experience at every turn in this campaign. For good reason; he has the thinnest resume of any major party candidate since perhaps the beginning of time. (Seriously, someone should be comparing Obama's resume to every candidate in our nation's history, I can't imagine anyone's being thinner.)

Instead of experience, Obama touts judgment. In the abstract, Obama has a point. It certainly is better to have good judgment and no experience than bad judgment and tons of experience. Unfortunately, the former doesn't describe Barack Obama and the latter doesn't describe John McCain.

McCain was railing for years against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the way the war in Iraq was being run. He called for more troops and supported the surge when it was a very unpopular thing to do. And he was right. It was good judgment born of experience.

Obama has no experience, and if we're to trust his judgment, the best light he can put on his decades-long association with the likes of Wright, Pfleger, and Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn is that "these aren't the people I knew"? President George W. Bush gets regularly razzed about his infamous statement about what he found when he looked in to Russian President Vladimir Putin's eyes. Yet those same people take Obama's parallel explanations about people he's known more intimately and for much longer and nod in agreement linke mindless automatons.

Commentator Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News writes in Friday's Wall Street Journal that it's time for Obama to come clean.

To deal with this controversy effectively, Mr. Obama needs to give another speech. This time he has to admit to sins of using race for political expediency – by knowingly buying into divisive, mean messages being delivered from the pulpit. He has to say that, as a biracial young man with no community roots, attaching himself to Rev. Wright and the Trinity congregation was a shortcut to move up the ladder in the Chicago political scene. He has to call race-baiting what it is, whether it comes from a pulpit or calls itself progressive politics. And he has to challenge his supporters, especially his black base, to be honest about real problems at the heart of today's racial divide – including out-of-wedlock births, crime, drugs and a culture that devalues education while glorifying the gangster life.

Good luck with that.