So Sen. Barack Obama has finally come around to my view that his long-time pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a race-baiting blowhard.

He didn’t put it in exactly those words, but that was the sum and substance of his reaction to the reverend’s lastest foray into public discourse – a foray in which the reverend confirmed his earlier declarations that caused such a furor on YouTube and cable television.

The declarations included the statement that the United States government might have invented the AIDS virus as an act of genocide against people of color, that 9/11 was well-deserved retribution for American terrorism around the world, and that Louis Farrakhan is a major spokesman of our time.

No, dear readers, those statements, which appeared in video snippets, were not “taken out of context,” as Obama’s liberal apologists claimed and no doubt hoped. They were accurate reflections of his paranoid beliefs.

Now Obama has repudiated both the statements and the reverend, if I understand him correctly, but that still leaves hanging the question of how he kept his peace in the reverend’s church for 20 long years, coming to regard him, as recently as a month and half ago, as “like family.”

He says he never heard statements like those from the pulpit, and you can believe that if you want. A lot of statements must emanate from any sacred pulpit that would tax the credulity of the most gullible, and maybe Sen. Obama just got in the habit of nodding along and not taking them very seriously, which is a habit that I suspect a lot of churchgoers get into.

But now, late in the primary season, he could no longer gloss over them – not when the Rev. Wright was out in public making a spectacle of himself. So we have taken another little step in this curious affair.

If you want to know if I stand by my earlier assessment that Obama revealed a disconnect in himself as unexpected as that revealed by Eliot Spitzer, you can turn to my column on page B1 of the Thursday Gazette, but the short answer is, yes, I do.