Jumping off the Obama Express

It's only been six weeks, but I think I'm going to leave this train at the next station.

Inviting Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration isn't Change I Can Believe In (C).

I assume that Obama is trying to appear magnanimous and statesmanlike by inviting this extremely visible, famous conservative preacher to bless him and his presidency. All of that might be reasonable if Warren wasn't a self-serving jerk.

Does our new president really think he can make change in this country, real change, with this kind of act? How is cozying up to the right going to fix all the harm that the right has done to this coutnry in the last eight years?

Does Obama really believe that the toxic far right will hate those of us the reality-based community, any less?

If he does, he's wrong.

Obama has made a calculation that I find reprehensible--that it's okay to stick a middle finger out at the people who believed in him, financed him, and elected him in order to suck up to one of the spokesmen for the fanatical part of the right wing that hates gay people and doesn't believe in evolution.

Does Obama really think that inviting Rick Warren to pray over him at the inaugural is going to erase the hateful things that Warren has said and done in the past? Why does he feel that it's important to reach out the olive branch to people who do not and will not ever play fair?

I've heard all sorts of people saying that this is "politically smart" for Obama to do. If it's politically smart for Obama to sell out gay people and believers in science--two constituencies who were among his strongest supporters--to cozy up to the religious right, then maybe Obama is as shallow and devious as some people have said.

The hell with it.

Thoughts?