Jeremiah Wright has broken out of the cage his illustrious congregant, Barack Obama, artfully, gently, with sedulous concern constructed around him in his Philadelphia speech last month. The reverend could have picked the lock and stolen quietly away nursing his wounded pride at his former protegé's precisely worded attempt at quarantine, and offered up the humiliation in a spirit of Christian forebearance and for the greater (viz. Obama's) good.

He chose instead to go the well-worn Old Testament, eye-for-an-eye route and snapped the bars into smithereens like so many lengths of uncooked spaghetti.

Revenge is a dish best served cold they say, but the Chicago pastor obviously prefers his nourishment sizzling hot and spicy enough to set the most jaded palate atingle. Yes siree, jouncin' Jerry's morphed into King Kong and come next week he'll be swinging off the top of the Empire State Building with a screaming Michelle clutched in his hairy paw while the doughty Barack strafes him from a buzzing bi-plane.

Obama - He Who Would Talk To Tyrants - is floundering, grasping at straws, stuttering and stumbling, bumbling and blustering when confronted by a mere cleric with attitude who is but one Rorschach Test away from being declared clinically insane. Presidential timbre indeed. He now condemns Wright for expressing the same rabid off-the-walleries which we've all seen the reverend utter from his pulpit with considerable more panache and pespiration for the last two months.

At the NAACP on Sunday and also at Monday's Q & A the Pastor, though as much an anti-American Hard Left racist kookaroo as ever, was at least engaging as a personality. You could imagine him carving the Thanksgiving turkey without having to fight back the urge to cut the throats of the impatient diners just for the heck of it. Yet Obama calls this a "performance" and a "spectacle" which left him "shocked", "saddened" - "outraged" even. "The person I saw", he declared with a kind of strangled solemnity, "was not the person that I'd come to know over twenty years".

Of course not. The Jeremiah Wright of recent days is as urbane as Cary Grant compared to the raving, flailing, spittle-flecked hate-monger Obama saw every time his "spiritual mentor" mounted the church rostrum and re-enacted the Nuremburg rallies "Shee-caag-ooo style". Yet these are the very "performances" and "spectacles" at which the Senator nary batted a proverbial eye. And for the aforementioned twenty years to boot.

Not to mention the many tete a tetes the two of them avowedly had as the reverend "counseled" and "guided" his favorite wannabe in that meek emollient way of his. We are to believe that such a fluent pontificator and demented obsessive as Mr. Wright never, ever, ever launched into one of his trademark rants on one of his many idees fixes while the two of them whiled away a slack hour in one of Hyde Park's latte lounges? That's akin to believing it won't rain in Kerry on your vacation!

What profound metaphysical change has transformed the nature of the man whom Obama was so careful to clasp to his well-tailored bosom in The Speech a short month ago and for whom he chose to make his grandmother a national joke - literally - rather than "disown"? What devious alchemy has turned the views which Obama then airily characterized as merely old-fashioned or eccentrically avuncular into what he now calls "a bunch of rants that aren't grounded in truth"?

What indeed!

Wright has not changed. Rather he has simply revealed himself more deliberately of late for the benefit of the slow learners amongst us who apparently found the videotaped sermons too intricate and subtle to interpret in a meaningful way. The same folk, one presumes, who persist in stroking the tiger through the zoo bars until they get their arm chewed off at the shoulder and then declare plaintively in the recovery room that he reminded them of a stuffed toy they played with long ago in kindergarten.

So why is the Transcendant One so seriously p*ss*d? Political expediency cry those from whose misty peepers the scales have newly fallen. I wanted to have his babies, they wail, but he's just another cynical politician, boo hoo hoo. If only that were true. The choice then would be simply between Hillary with Bill and a smoother, slicker Hillary without Bill. No such luck, my friends.

The real reason for Obama's sudden rage is to be found in the mysterious 24 hour delay between Wright's NAACP "performance" and the Senator's expulsion of him into exterior darkness where there is heard only weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth from those excluded from the Lambent Presence of the Paramount Leader Of Us All.

What happened in those lost 24 hours? What new element arose to devastate Obama's carefully balanced equation? Why, Pastor Wright indulged in his Q & A "spectacle" on Monday and along with the usual son et lumiére he purposefully exposed the tumor that is eating away at the rotting heart of his former friend's political existence from the very moment he entered upon his White House bid.

The reverend stated quite bluntly that "politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever’s doing the polls". In other words he endorses the views of the Senator's fiercest critics and we've been quite a small band, even among the right, for most of this sorry saga.

Obama, the pastor is saying, is coming from essentially the same point of the ideological compass as Wright himself but he must posture and pander - lie and deceive - in order to attract enough votes from the gullible to achieve power.

From then on, unencumbered by the need to dissimulate, he will be free to pursue his real agenda and if he strays from the path of Hard Left righteousness Reverend Wright promises Obama that "[i]f you get elected...I'm coming after you, because you'll be representing a government whose policies grind under people".

This is what impelled Obama to hack away so furiously at the man who married him, baptized his children, inspired his book and, in a bizarre prelude to the main event, prayed with him and his family in the basement of the building from the steps of which moments later he launched his Presidential campaign with the Pastor's anointment fresh upon him.

Obama can co-exist quite comfortably with Wright while the preacher goddamns America, accuses a genocidal Federal Government of infecting blacks with AIDS, compares US troops to Christ’s' executioners, canonizes the unholy Louis Farrakhan, glories in 9/11 as justified retribution, mocks the way white people talk and think. None of this sorry litany, in part or taken as a whole, is a deal breaker for the man who exhorts us to joyously embrace him as the next President.

Remember Philly and The Speech which, we were breathlessly told, consummated what Lincoln had merely hinted at in that rain-drenched Gettysburg graveyard.

"I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown the black community." But, hey, here's my granny. Gnaw on her old bones if you're feeling peckish.

But now even the terminally well-meaning know the truth of it.

It is only when Obama is personally the target of Wright's viciousness that a thoroughgoing repudiation is called for.

"That's a show of disrespect to me," the Senator hisses tellingly. "It is also, I think, an insult to...this campaign.''

So, Jeremiah Wright's mortal sin, his one truly reprehensible act is dissing Barack Obama!

What a worm this man is. What a toad. And what a total fraud. If the Fed ever gets around to issuing a three dollar bill they should stick his smug mug on it.

President? This guy should be selling the Brooklyn Bridge to Japanese tourists.

The shills and the flacks of the MSM, whose reputations would be in tatters except they were journalists to start with, the party political spinners and weavers, all the pundits, both personable and grotesque, continue to talk of polls and perceptions, delegates and popular counts, of demographic imponderables from Indiana and North Carolina through to Puerto Rico, but all is wind, a tornado of just talk.

No matter how many decks are shuffled or how many dice are cast Barack is a busted flush who’ll come up snake eyes in the end.

He started off last January at the head of a great army of acolytes and he still marches at their head. Listen carefully and you can hear their purposeful tramp.

Left, Wright...Left, Wright...Left, Wright...Left, Wright...

...straight off the cliff!