There's a man who has been in the news lately due to the influence he had on a pastor who, in turn, influenced the spiritual life of yet another man. In America these days, it's all about degrees of separation and we are no longer talking about Kevin Bacon. Here are their names, in order: James Cone, Charles Augustus Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, former U.S. Marine and former Pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and Senator Barack Obama.

James Cone has spoken eloquently about the many forms of lynching: "With black people being 12 percent of the US population and nearly 50 percent of the prison population, that's lynching. It's a legal lynching. So, there are a lot of ways to lynch a people than just hanging 'em on the tree. A lynching is trying to control the population. It is striking terror in the population so as to control it…It crams people into living spaces where they will self destruct, kill each other, fight each other, shoot each other because they have no place to breathe, no place for recreation, no place for an articulation and expression of their humanity. So, it becomes a way, a metaphor for lynching, if lynching is understood as one group forcing a kind of inhumanity upon another group."

Tonight I watched as Senator Obama was categorically lynched by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. I watched as these two people, one of whom, Stephanopoulos, if you recall, spear headed Bill Clinton's rise to fame in 1992, dove into America's gutters and bowels to parade its basest prejudices in flagrant disregard for the ethics of such debates, with the sole intention of tearing down a candidate they did not support and indeed, fear. Together and with select questions carefully orchestrated from the mouths of "the masses," they did their best to do exactly what James Cone alluded to: to fill up the minds of people with old biases, and old fears so they would be unable to breathe or to express their humanity or, for that matter, think at all. Yes, one group (corporate America/politics as usual) forcing inhumanity on another (the American people/change).

Despite his best efforts to focus the attention of the people of this country on the issues that face them: the loss of basic necessities, i.e. food, shelter, medical care and education, and the rise of prejudice and divisiveness, not to mention the pursuit of an unethical and untenable war, Gibson and Stephanopoulos assaulted Senator Obama for the first half hour of a ninety minute debate by dredging up issues long laid to rest such as his association with Rev. Wright – a thirty seven minute and thirty seven second speech on race hailed across the country and, indeed, the world, as heralding a brighter day for America was clearly not enough for them – as well as obscure and, it turns out, false references to other individuals he had come to know during his long career as a public servant. We heard, once more, about Obama’s explanation of his argument that people in Pennsylvania and elsewhere draw closer to the things that define them as people, hobbies, religion, race, and exaggerate the things that make of their neighbors, the dreaded Other. We heard, once again, a discussion about whether or not Obama is elite. (I, for one, agree with Jon Stewart that I desire, I crave! someone smarter and better than I am to lead me. I don't need the good-old guy who chugs a beer with the guys at the ale-house even if he happens to be a she. We've been there and done that and more than 100,000 people are dead as a result.)

And throughout that crucial opening third of the debate, liberally sprinkled as events of national interest only can be in America with multiple ads of people sprouting flowers on their heads and buying soon-to-be-deemed-dangerous drugs, Gibson and Stephanopoulos repeatedly attacked Senator Obama, cutting into his responses, qualifying them after he had spoken, and making snide remarks (Gibson, in particular) about whether he had got a "straight answer." Throughout the ninety minutes, Senator Clinton looked like a cat after cream. Perhaps it was because none of these sorts of questions were directed at her. Perhaps it was because she was allowed to speak without interruptions, save for one, at the end of the debate. Perhaps it was because the right-wing paranoia that was spewing forth from the two individuals assigned to "moderate" the debate just happened to be in sync with her POV. Perhaps it was because they did not question her about her dealings in China, her connections to Colombia, or her income of $102.9 million which does not even account for any income made between April 15th 2006 and today. Perhaps because the only tough question posed to her was whether she took issue with people feeling she was "dishonest." Well, duh. Like, yes, Charlie. And perhaps it was because at the end of the debate, when in a display of Disney theatrics, the camera began to hone in on Senator Obama for a "last word," suddenly switched to her, apparently on the whim of a coin-toss, and finally lingered over the tearful face of Chelsea Clinton, she knew that the man who is destined to be the next President of the United States had been slain on national TV and served to her on a platter like that old strange fruit most of us have come to abhor.

During the lows of this campaign, and this was an all-time low, I have often considered the fact that this country does not deserve a leader of Barack Obama's calibre. But time and again I am reminded that the majority who support him are, themselves, Americans. In their support I see the face of a better, more noble future. A true kinder, gentler nation. A nation of human beings who will choose a leader not as though it were a contest for a TV show but as though it were a matter of life and death. For it is that.

So, despite the spectacle you witnessed tonight and despite what the pundits paid by corporate America will say to you tomorrow, I will leave you again with a word from James Cone. At the conclusion of an interview he gave to Bill Moyers, Cone had this to say: "There is always hope. Anybody who loses hope and gives up in despair, they die."

After all, this travesty occurred under the words written six feet high, We The People…Let us decide.