Take the silly broughhaha on the Right, in the media, and in the Democratic primary campaign, over the statements of Obama's "spiritual mentor" the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Everyone is all worked up--and Obama has sacked Wright from his campaign's religious advisory committee--because of some statements Wright has made that crossed an invisible line of permissible discourse.

Wright's "crime"? He dared to point out that the US is a racist nation. He dared to suggest that the US is a terror state.

In fact, what Wright said is absolutely correct. If you look at the incarceration rate for African Americans, at the fact that half of the astonishing two million Americans who are in prison at this moment (one-percent of the adult population!) are black, at the fact that half the approximately 4000 people on death row are black, at the appalling education that is offered to most of the nation's black children (my daughter teaches math at a "magnet" high school in Brooklyn, NY that is billed as a college preparatory institution, where there are 35 kids per classroom and where there's no teacher offering calculus or even pre-calc even though some students are ready for it), if you look at who the main victims are of the sub-prime loan scandal, if you look at how the Republican Party has deliberately worked in state after state to keep blacks from voting, it's clear that this is a racist nation.

But you're not allowed to say that and be a candidate, or work for a candidate, for public office, much less for the office of president.

Rev. Wright said that 9-11 was a case of "the chickens coming home to roost." He cited America's use of nuclear bombs on civilian targets--the non-military cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He might as well have mentioned the equally catastrophic US bombing of the cultural city of Dresden. These were terror bombings pure and simple, on a scale never seen before in the history of war.

He might also have mentioned the sacking and leveling of Fallujah in 2004--an act of "collective punishment" by the US for the killing and subsequent mutilation of four mercenaries captured by militants in that city.

But in America you're not allowed to say that the US is a terrorist nation, even though objectively, it is at the top of the list