Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has taken to defending his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, by claiming that a hostile media has taken a few of Wright’s more outrageous (but rare) statements (out of context, naturally) and has played them on a continuous loop for weeks on end, in effect “distorting the truth” and smearing the otherwise distinguished career of an honorable man (and ex-Marine).

Well, we’ve all heard quite a bit about the Jeremiah Wright affair, but we’ve heard very little of this insidious “loop” of which Mr. Obama is so fond of speaking.

What, indeed, is “the loop”?  Well, it just so happens that I am very familiar with this arcane contraption because I served 20 years in military intelligence.  So, without further ado:

A Tape Loop Primer: How To Make And Use One

First, you need some magnetic tape:

Then you need to record some nasty, hateful, bigoted rhetoric from Jeremiah Wright on the magnetic tape.  You can use any reel-to-reel recorder for this step.

Cut out the strip of magnetic tape that contains the recording of Pastor Wright’s outrageous rant.

Splice the strip of tape into a loop as shown in the diagram below:

Feed the loop of tape into the transport and playback head mechanism of any standard reel-to-reel tape recorder.

You will have to rig some sort of adjustable, free-turning capstan device external to the tape deck in order to make this work.  This could be tricky if you’re not mechanically inclined:

Press the “play” button on the tape deck.  If you’ve followed the directions above carefully, the recording of Wright’s racist hate speech will play over and over and over until the tape splice breaks or until you vomit.  Whichever comes first.

Hmmm.  It just occurred to me that you’d have to be an incredible geek to know that stuff….

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