Barack Obama desperately needs to distance himself from his spiritual mentor and pastor of two decades, Jeremiah Wright, Jr. But the man who wants America to believe his promise of unspecified change adopts the carefully-parsed language of a Harvard-trained lawyer. There is a fundamental discordance in spirit between a canny, evasive lawyer inserting loopholes, and the smiling vision of unity and change you can believe in.

Here is the key paragraph of Obama’s statement, bizarrely first published on the Huffington Post, a website that once featured Senator Joseph Lieberman in minstrel blackface. There are multiple evasions buried in each line, analyzed below: