Matthews gets the worst of it, as well he might, but let’s spare a thought for the blogosphere’s most shameless hypocrite, who demagogued the McCain/Hagee thing so exquisitely for so long and yet somehow finds the objections to Obama’s 20-year marriage of political convenience with a conspiracy theorizing hate merchant completely overblown. Collins dispatches with him here.

MM thinks the Wright thing is a net loss for Obama going forward, but how far forward? Newsday and Politico report that the GOP is feeling frisky over it, but given the depths to which the left has already sunk to present McCain as a bigot (Greenwald and his Hagee obsession being but one example), I’m not sure how you go about attacking Wright in the general without playing into that. Sure, Obama’s an opportunistic fraud on race who’s being excused from a habit of tolerating intolerance that no white politician from either party would be indulged — but what else would you expect conservatives to say? Maybe the election comes down to whether independents believe it’s inherently and irretrievably racist to fault a guy for shrugging off “America invented AIDS” theories for 20 years because he wanted to seem “authentic.” We’ll see.

Exit question per Gibson’s sign off in the clip: Hot Air “indispensable”? Gibby, you sweet-talker, you.