Oprah Winfrey was once a member of the Rev Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ. But she left some while back, ostensibly because of Wright’s fiery racist rhetoric.  
                Oprah was also one of the first celebrities to come out for Barack Obama, and was/is certainly his most powerful African-American voice in America.

               Like it or not, Obama has painted Oprah into a corner. Question is: How does she get out? Or can she?
               Moses Sands often said that all things come in twos, sometimes threes. When one finds oneself confronted with a mistake in judgment or fact, he/she has one of three options; 1) Out of humility, stand on the public box and announce to the world “I was wrong” (the rarest of people, few can or have done this), 2) Out of narcissism, expand the lie, build on it, even be willing to risk death for it. (Such self-delusional narcissism is equally rare, but Kim Philby and John Kerry come to mind.) And finally the most common option, 3) drift off into ever-lasting silence and hope no one notices. 
               The Soviets found out many years ago, when they recruited English public school boys into their espionage ring, that while a few would follow their immature decisions to the bitter end, i.e., Philby, most, once they’d grown up and seen the errors of their decisions as young men, would fall off into silence, thus muting a large number of the best and brightest of a generation. A win-win for the Communist. Recruit a few, silence the rest. 
               Thus it was again in the 1960s in America. The brightest (though clearly not the best) of a generation silenced by their singular inability to go to their closets and strip themselves of that over-powering vanity to never be wrong…in public.

               Our guess is that Oprah will choose Door #3.

Vassar Bushmills