A thoughtful post, but some counter points:

 "What I don't see is…how Obama…can compare whatever racist mumblings of his white grandmother to the prepared sermons of a preacher before his flock."

 The point here, as you can probably tell, is how these relationships parallel one another.  The stock counterpoint I've encountered most frequently has been "Obama can't choose his grandmother, but he can choose his pastor."  I suppose that's true to an extent, but it ignores what he was saying about personal nature of those connections by grilling him (rather obtusely, I’d say) on the literal bearing of these relationships.  I mean, yes, technically, he can "choose" another pastor.  But he can also "choose" to spurn his grandmother.  I've written before that my father, for all his wisdom in many areas, carries some unquestionably blue-collar baggage when it comes to homosexuals, hispanics, etc.  If that was all he was, or even what most of him was, just because begot me doesn't mean I'm contractually obliged to love and honor him.  God knows some people really hate their parents.  The point Obama was attempting to make, I thought, was that his relationship with Rev. Wright extends to a level far deeper and meaningful level than heated, three-minute youtube clip. He said as much.  Besides putting Rev. Wright's anger in a historical and cultural context, which he asks us to try and understand--not condone, but understand--he also asked us to cease our self-righteous chatter of gavels that in effect relegate a well-respected religious scholar and noted community activist to the cartoonish embodiment of "black hate."

Personally, I don’t see the difference between “racist mumblings” and “prepared sermons.”  Both are releasing pent up prejudices.  How is giving greater articulation to the same fundamental anger any worse or different?  It’s all catharsis for the same emotional undercurrent.  Does the fact "mumblings" could be better checked on second thought make the emotion less prevalent? How it’s expressed has less bearing than why it’s being expressed in the first place—at least in terms of this example.

 “He excuses Rev. Wright's anger because of when he grew up, but Wright was quite a bit younger than Martin Luther King, who had many more fights to wage against worse conditions, and who managed to keep his message of love and hope even while standing up to racism. Malcolm X split from the intolerance of his church and made his way into a more accepting if not humbled view of humanity.”

I think it’s pretty dense to suggest that just because Jeremiah Wright was younger than Martin Luther King, Jr., he has somehow been spared the worst parts of discrimination.  His age has absolutely no bearing on the nature, frustration, and pain of his experiences of being a black man living in America, and it’d be terribly thick to assume otherwise.  Furthermore, throwing up Martin Luther King, Jr. as an appropriate model for constructive protest holds Wright up to a very naïve standard of conduct.  How many Gandhis do you know, personally or historically?  Anger is a far more natural and inevitable human response than is becoming a historical paragon of peace.  I’m not saying it’s preferred, but I mean, let’s get real here.  To cynically dismiss Obama’s message as you have done on TPM numerous times, I’m guessing that your worldview is littered with half-empty glasses.  Expecting Wright to take some notional highroad shows a pretty credulous idealism, no? 

As for Malcolm X, he left the Nation of Islam not because of its anti-white rhetoric, but because he was spiritually repulsed by the adultery of its leader, Elijah Mohammad.  What’s more, the event that directly precipitated Malcolm’s departure had nothing to do with the NOI’s spiritual hypocrisy at all, but came when Mohammad silenced Malcolm for, interestingly enough, describing the assassination of JFK as “America’s chickens coming home to roost.”  Malcolm X did eventually recant his earlier anti-white rhetoric after leaving Elijah Mohammad, but it wasn’t a matter of him simply growing disgusted or shocked with the racist views of the Nation of Islam.  He had vocally espoused those ideas for over a decade, in terms far more racist and hostile than anything Jeremiah Wright has ever said.  He completely mocked MLK’s belief of nonviolent protest several times, which goes to show how not all angry black activists are endeared to non-threatening protest. But the point is, Malcolm’s spiritual reawakening came at the end of his Hajj—a profoundly meditative and soul-searching experience taken by a man who had lost an enormous portion of his spiritual identity—it was not a simple matter of splitting “from the intolerance of his church.”  To say the driving issue for him was being suddenly fed up with the racism he had believed in for over a decade blurs his motives for leaving and the nature of his religious meditation entirely.  What's more, you're using it to discount the reality and historical legitimacy of racially tinged black anger.  I do not agree with it, nor do I like it, but it's a visceral reaction to the perpetual treading on a collective sense of worth by a group who historically oppressed them with violence.  It is a different kind of anger than the hate of the KKK, emerging out of an wholly different collective experience and is, yes, therefore not stigmatized to the same levels that white society treats its own legacy of oppressive, exploitative race hate.  No, it's not okay, but saying 9/11 was the result of The Great White West's arrogant lording over ethnically colored nations is worlds away from African Americans genetically inferior, stupid, lazy, savage, criminally-inclined, n*ggers.  What sounds more hateful to you, and what sounds more generically angry?Yes, Malcolm X may have been an angry black man who eventually saw the folly in being angry, but it’s a far cry from even remotely paralleling the circumstances surrounding Jeremiah Wright.

Personally, regardless of Jeremiah Wright’s comments on Louis Farrakhan (he did not, by the way, ever say Farrakhan “epitomized greatness.”), Trinity Church is not the Nation of Islam.  Not only is Trinity’s father-denomination, The United Church of Christ, overwhelmingly white, but also the Trinity congregation is not exclusively black.  An op-ed in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune by a woman who attends Trinity (and who is, incidentally, married to a white man) admits that while some of the sermonizing might make some whites uncomfortable, there are always whites sitting in the pews at Trinity.   It is not a “hate whitey” church, wherein a dashiki-swathed Wright furiously expounds upon the evils of the white character while the enraptured throng echoes his sentiments with resounding Amens.  All of the controversial comments made by Reverend Wright I’ve heard just denounce white America, which, when you look two words down within the context of that statement, is rhetorically linked to the government (and who heads it up?  Why, the Grand Old White Party, of course!) Anti-American it might be, anti-white "hate speech" it most certainly is not.  And if it isn't anti-white, then how can it be called "hate speech"?  Hate speech, when I last checked, is defined essentially by race.  Wright has never called anyone a “white devil” in these speeches, nor has he ever demanded his “flock” eschew associations with whites or cooperation with white organizations.  Big deal, you might say.  It doesn't change the fact he said “white.”  Yeah, but he does not expound upon the perceived tyrannies or eternal flaws of white character.  He attacked the government, sometimes with honest points, sometimes with horribly looney ones, but the government--not the coveted Reagan Democrats, not the white people in attendance that day, not you, and not I.  The closest thing to a culturally racist remark was when he claimed Zionism had an element of “white racism” to it—a comment which, by the way, is regarded anti-Semitism-free by the Anti-Defamation League.  Trinity is not a racist church, despite its edgy sermons, as its members—black and white—have and will continue to attest.  Yet, to stubbornly persist with allegations of hate speech despite these accounts is truly bad, arrogant form.  In continuing to harp on the "hateful" content of these snippets with wholly undue self-assurance in your convictions, you are not only casting suspicions about the potentially “hateful” effects of Wright’s sermons on Obama, but you are also effectively extending the same baseless and ugly mistrust to the entire congregation of Trinity.