Dave’s logic on Rev. Wright goes like this: people were attacking Obama with clips from this pastor. Because Obama is “good”, Wright must also be good. Because he’s good, those clips must be “taken out of context” and the reports about them misleading. Because Wright was kind and human during a TV interview (that he did specifically to try to help Obama), that proves he’s good.

Surprising to nobody, but in the interest of disclosure: I don’t plan to vote for Obama in November. That said, I don’t particularly care about the Wright clips. I find them disturbing and the product of a patently silly line of reasoning, but I don’t attribute any of those qualities to Obama simply because he sat through some of Wright’s sermons. That’s a pretty ridiculous logical gap to be leaping.

That said, the media didn’t get the Wright story “wrong”. Wright said all of the things that they claim he said and, whatever Dave might insist, “context” did nothing to make them sound any better. So he goes on TV, puts on his “I love everybody” face, and makes nice with a soft interviewer. That doesn’t mean he’s actually good/smart/nice/kind/loving. It means he can appear that way on TV. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have some crazy, backwards beliefs. And it most certainly doesn’t mean that he never said (or didn’t mean) the things he preached in the video clips.

But, in Dave’s world, once you go on TV and make nice with the camera, your sins just melt away — which is what makes the Tucker example so perfect. Tucker committed an act of unspeakable depravity. She took the lives of two innocent people, and did it in such a vicious and violent way that the State of Texas (and a jury of her peers) felt the only acceptable punishment was death.

The fact that she went on TV and claimed to have found Jesus and changed her ways didn’t change anything. She had still killed two people. Even if we assume that she wasn’t lying to try to save her own life (something some people will never be convinced of), so what? What’s done was done, and there were consequences. (Also, for full disclosure, I don’t support the death penalty for a number of reasons that are beyond the scope of this post)

That’s precisely the case here. Rev. Wright said some things that made people uncomfortable. Him making nice on TV doesn’t change that.