The question of whether Barack Obama will get the Democratic presidential nod is not going to be decided by the laying on of hands by the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Sharpton, according to this piece in the New York Post (to which I ordinarily don't like to link, what with it being the print equivalent of Fox News), is jealous as hell at the excitement Obama's candidacy has generated. Accordingly, the good reverend is bad-mouthing the junior senator from Illinois all over the place.
But why should anybody care? Is the African-American community going to withhold most of its vote from Obama just because Sharpton is in a snit? Don't bet on it.
Sharpton has done a lot of good things for the downtrodden over the years, but his virtues are offset to some extent by his tendency to shoot his mouth off before the facts are known.
For example, take this case, as it's described in Wikipedia:
"In the Tawana Brawley case, a 15-year-old black girl was found smeared with feces, lying in a garbage bag, her clothing torn and burned and with various slurs and epithets written on her body in charcoal. Brawley claimed that she had been assaulted and raped by six white men, some of them police officers, in the town of Wappingers Falls, New York.
"The incident made headlines nationwide. Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason joined Sharpton in taking up her cause. A grand jury was convened; after seven months of examining police and medical records, the jury determined that Brawley lied about being assaulted by the police.
"Sharpton, Maddox and Mason were later successfully sued for statements made in connection with the case, and ordered to pay $345,000 in damages. All three falsely accused the case prosecutor, Steven Pagones, as being among those who abducted and raped Brawley.[11]The jury found Sharpton liable for making seven defamatory statements about Pagones."
If I was Obama, I wouldn't want Sharpton's endorsement, and I would brag about not getting it.
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