Dear Senator Obama: Oprah and the ex-husband of Rev. Wright’s Wife saw the damage Wright could do. Why didn’t you? [Updates throughout]

“Obama’s campaign has been built upon his supposed transcendent qualities and intuitive judgment,” writes former ambassador Joseph Wilson today.

The American people need a president they feel they can trust: They need a president who has shown sound — even calculating — judgment in the most basic, everyday matters. Like choosing a pastor, or leaving a pastor who preaches divisive and racist beliefs. If it had come out that Obama had left Trinity 18 years ago because he disagreed with that pastor’s “incendiary” rhetoric, people would have been impressed with his judgment, even if it was self-protective.

“Something Wasn’t Wright”: According to a story in the new issue of Newsweek, Oprah left Wright’s Chicago Trinity church because of “Wright’s more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America’s favorite daytime talk-show host.”

So why didn’t Barack Obama leave the church for the same reason? Why not leave to protect his all-consuming political aspirations? And might this be part of the reason we haven’t seen much of Oprah in support of Barack? That she was able to make the cold but rational decision to leave the church because it would harm her career. Oprah used what my mother used to call “good old-fashioned common sense.” Obama did not.

And how could Obama attend the church of a pastor who “stole the wife of a parishioner – after the man sought Wright’s help in saving his troubled marriage,” according to today’s front-page story in the New York Post, “BARACK’S REV. ‘STOLE A WIFE’: EX-HUBBY: HE COUNSELED US, THEN WED HER.”

And why didn’t Obama object to Rev. Wright’s attack — from the pulpit against another minister who criticized Wright’s questionable marital counseling methods? The incident happened in 2003, before Obama was in the Senate, and still living in Chicago, a strong indicator that, even if he wasn’t in church that day, he heard about Wright’s attack. The minister Derrick Mosley reports that “[Wright] ranted and raved from the pulpit. He got up and announced, ‘If Derrick Mosley is in the building, I want you all to arrest him.’ ” Why was Wright angry? Derrick Mosley dared to state the “‘unwritten rule’ that pastors don’t counsel married couples separately” — as Wright did with his future wife and her then-husband.

Why didn’t these stories — which Obama surely had to hear about while attending the church for 20 years, either in person or from fellow parishioners — sufficiently bother Barack Obama that he’d leave the church? And why would Barack and Michelle Obama seek counseling for their marriage from Rev. Wright? Or seek him out to baptize their children?

Delmer Reed, 59, confided to pals that he believed the minister moved in on his wife while Wright was counseling the couple at his Chicago church in the early 1980s, The Post has learned.

"That's exactly how he said it," Reed's divorce lawyer, Roosevelt Thomas, told The Post.

"It looks like Delmer might have been right," he said, because after Delmer and Ramah Reed were divorced, she got remarried – to Wright. "Either that or this was the biggest coincidence in the world."

Asked about the relationship between Wright and his ex-wife, Reed told The Post, "Oh, the things I could tell you."

Initially, he didn't believe the rumors.

"People were telling me that my extremely attractive wife was seen with the pastor," Reed said. "But I didn't believe it. I thought, 'So what?' "

Was he wrong in the end?

"Well, yeah," he said.

Asked if Wright broke up his marriage, Reed laughed, then said, "I told my kids I wouldn't say anything to hurt their stepfather, so I'm not saying anything."

But he said he's been hounded by the press and "offered money" to tell his story. …

Here’s more damning information from the second page of the article:

[Y]ears ago, Reed did express anger about the situation, said Harold Davis, who said he learned about the matter through mutual friends.

“Jeremiah knew all the weaknesses of the couple, and he started focusing on the wife, her vulnerabilities, and started doing things she wanted Delmer to do – spending time with her, taking her to the movies, that sort of thing,” said Davis, who heads the Chicago branch of football great Jim Brown’s Amer-I-can youth program.

“Everybody knew Jeremiah took the man’s wife,” said Davis. “It was common knowledge.” …

This may be the most disturbing passage of the article:

Activist Derrick Mosley, a self-styled minister who has clashed with Wright, said there’s an “unwritten rule” that pastors don’t counsel married couples separately – as Wright did with Ramah Reed, he said.

In 2003, Mosley said, “I called him on the carpet about the indecorous manner in which he’d obtained his wife.”

In response, said Mosley, “he ranted and raved from the pulpit. He got up and announced, ‘If Derrick Mosley is in the building, I want you all to arrest him.’ “

Read all of the NY Post’s “BARACK’S REV. ‘STOLE A WIFE’
EX-HUBBY: HE COUNSELED US, THEN WED HER.”