I had a much higher opinion of Mr. Obama prior to his bid to win the Democratic nomination for president. While philosophically opposed to the content of his words, I had little reason to doubt that they were well considered.

Unfortunately, more and more of what I hear from him on the campaign trail is demagoguery. I doubt he intended to be an apologist for rioting, but his speech can easily be used by those who would engage in this destructive behavior. There were others means he could have employed to make his case. Other means that would have been responsible and presidential.

It turns out the AP was using loaded language to make Obama's speech more ominous than it actually was. Greg Sargent has a full text of the part of Obama's speech where he talks about "quiet riots"--he was talking about despair of blacks living in poor neighborhoods, a despair was only "discovered" after the Rodney King verdict or Hurricane Katrina. He didn't warn of another riot occurring.