13 August 2008 @ 8:02AM >>
Last week, Rick Husong, who runs a company called “The Loyalty,” announced that a good way to show your loyalty to the modern messiah would be to hold an “O” sign over your head while walking down the street, kind of like a do-it-yourself perpendicular halo.
“We thought, ‘Let’s try and start a movement where even while walking down the street, people would hold up the O and you would know that they were for Obama,’” Husong said.
Despite plenty of snickering and negative feedback since his announcement, Husong is pressing on, explaining to U.S. News & World Report, “Our symbol ‘O’ is about much more than Barack Obama. It’s a symbol of unity, hope, solidarity, and an end to the divisiveness that has plagued this country for too long. It is the peace sign of our generation; a sign for those who are tired of the fear, the hatred, the greed, and the ignorance. There will be resistance, democracy requires it, but we believe that the good in the American people will persevere.”
Apparently, Husong is serious and this is not some sort of parody or Republican political jujitsu demonstrating the mindless conformity of Obama’s flock.
“People came out against the peace emblem in the sixties, making accusations that it was an anti-Christian symbol, an inverted crucifix, a satanic symbol, and a Communist sign. But like our ‘O,’ the goodness inherent in the peace symbol persevered, and today it is the international symbol for peace. The hand sign for peace was first a British form of giving someone the bird, then it became a war cry for victory. Today it is a symbol of peace & love. Once again goodness persevered. We too will persevere. Bring your hands together over your head to make a large ‘O’ and join us in our fight to take America back. Vote for Barack Obama.”
31 July 2008 @ 6:06PM >>
...at least that what Senator Barack Obama is implying.
Once again, the post-racial messiah, the guy who refers to his own grandmother as a “typical white person,” is playing the race card, effectively accusing the McCain team of using Obama’s race to try to scare voters. Of course, Saint Obama can’t point to any instances of this actually happening, and because he can’t, he is at least clever enough to use the future tense:
“Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama said. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name, you know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”
This isn’t the first time Obama has pre-emptively accused his opponents of future bigotry. It’s becoming a pattern.
I’m beginning to dread an Obama presidency where every policy disagreement is a sign of racism and every press conference ends in standing ovations from the media. It’s already getting old.
8 July 2008 >>The Economist noticed something interesting about Senator Barack Obama’s website. Most of the pages on the site—like this one—display a navigation bar showing the main sections of the site:
The “people” section on [Obama’s] website divides Americans into 17 categories: Latinos, women, First Americans, environmentalists, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, Americans with disabilities, Asian-Americans and Pacific islanders and so on. There is no mention of whites, or men.
According to the Obama campaign, this is the exhaustive list of people that matter:
In the inclusive world of the post-racial messiah, heterosexual white males have been ethnically cyber-cleansed, and I’m probably a bigot for mentioning it.
23 June 2008 @ 9:09AM >>
Saint Barack Obama, the post-racial candidate sent from on high to redeem the racist American nation, is now engaging in the healing politics of Hope and Change by preemptively accusing his opponents of racism:
Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama said on Friday he expects Republicans to highlight the fact that he is black as part of an effort to make voters afraid of him.
[...]
“They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”
I admired Barack Obama back when he was the first black presidential candidate not to play the race card. But after learning about Reverend Wright and witnessing Obama’s feeble efforts to explain why he spent 20 years eagerly lapping up sermons from Chicago’s version of Al Sharpton, it became clear that Obama wasn’t some new kind of post-racial healer. He’s just better at hiding who he really is.
And now that he’s saying Republicans will attack his race before it has even happened, Obama shows that he’s not above playing the race card whenever it suits him.
20 May 2008 @ 8:52AM >>
In yesterday’s, “The Coming Nanny State Fat Camp,” I mentioned two excuses Nanny Statists will use to get government to restrict people’s food intake and force them to exercise.
If this comment is any clue, those Nanny Statists have a friend in Barack Obama:
“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.
“That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen,” he added.
Millions around the globe have starved to death in recent years thanks to petty dictators and corrupt governments. But to Senator Obama, “leadership” means letting the rest of the world know that he blames the United States first.
America exports more food that any other nation on Earth, yet accounts for less than 5% of the world’s population.
When it comes to our net contribution to the world’s food supply, we are not the planet’s biggest problem.
But rather than implore, say, North Korea to abandon the bankrupt ideology that’s led to numerous mass starvations, a President Obama would prefer to subject the food intake of our private citizens to the approval of other countries.
Now that the senator seems to be preening for the job of Counselor-in-Chief of the Nanny State Fat Camp, his wife’s odd comments from earlier in the year suddenly make more sense:
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
10 May 2008 @ 11:44AM >>
Politicians sometimes misspeak. George W. Bush is well-known for it. And if it had been the current president who claimed to have visited 57 states—with one more to go—you’d probably have heard a few dozen jokes about it by now.
Perhaps Obama is planning an imperialist presidency, and he accidentally let it slip that we’ll soon have a few more states. If so, then maybe he wouldn’t be the pushover president I worry he’d be.
I’m sure Barack Obama knows how many states there actually are. The coverage of this quote (or the lack thereof) is more telling about the media than anything else.
Update: Dale S. of Lewisville, Texas writes in to contest my math. Because Senator Obama cited Alaska and Hawaii separately in addition to the “one [state] left to go,” Dale contends his statement could be interpreted to mean we have 60 states. Fair enough. On the other hand, he could be saying that Alaska and Hawaii are not states at all. So confusing! Can’t we just go back to having 50 states?
27 April 2008 @ 11:49AM >>
Senator Barack Obama’s “spiritual advisor” and pastor of 20 years is the gift that keeps on giving... to the Senator’s opponents:
We cannot see how what we are doing is the same thing al-Qaeda is doing under a different color flag, calling on the name a different God to sanction and approve our murder and our mayhem.-Reverend Jeremiah Wright
23 April 2008 @ 8:44AM >>
Barack Obama’s hometown of Chicago is famous for its political history in which the dead rise from the grave to show up on election day and cast votes for Democrats.
But, perhaps thanks to the messianic effect Senator Obama seems to have on some voters, his dead supporters go a step further. They actually open their checkbooks:
The [Los Angeles] Times’ campaign finance expert Dan Morain has found Obama campaign records reporting a $50 donation by Roy Scheider, who lists his occupation as actor and his home as Sag Harbor, N.Y. Remember him from many great movies including “The French Connection” and “Jaws” and the immortal line: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat”?
According to the campaign records, Scheider made the donation on March 10 last month.
Trouble is, Scheider died exactly one month before that, on Feb. 10 at the age of 75.
As the reporter notes, “Scheider was unavailable for comment.”
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.
[...]
You have to stay at the seat at the table of democracy with a man like Barack Obama not just on Tuesday but in a year from now, in four years from now, in eights years from now, you will have to be engaged.Michelle Obama,wife of Senator Barack Obama
6 February 2008 >>
If Senator Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination and goes on to lose the general election, there will undoubtedly be those who argue that his loss is a sign of racism among American voters.
So, after a primary fight in which Senator Hillary Clinton’s husband repeatedly and clumsily steered attention to Obama’s race, if Democrats subsequently reject Obama, is that a sign of racism among Democrats?
The race among Democrats is still very close, and Obama racked up some important wins last night. But it seems that Obama tends to do better in polls than he has in actual elections. He could have pulled into a commanding lead yesterday, but instead he finds himself nearly tied with Hillary in the delegate count.
Late polls had him winning last month’s New Hampshire primary and yesterday’s California contest by what, 8-13 points? Then he loses, and not by razor-thin margins. Are some Democrats lying to pollsters about their choice? And if so, why would that be?
Throughout the night, reporters on both CNN and Fox News cited exit polling data showing that Obama does much better among white male voters than he does among women, Asians or Hispanics, who support Hillary overwhelmingly.
If Hillary is nominated, it may be that identity politics prevented a black man from moving into the White House.
Who would have guessed that the one group that couldn’t be blamed for such a scenario would be white male Republicans?
Some argue that blacks should vote for Clinton because her husband was good to us. That’s not true. He did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky.Rev. Jeremiah Wright Trinity United Church of Christ
Now, in the interest of fairness, I should balance that critique of America’s First Black President with a few words in support of his wife:
2 July 2007 >>
A student at Georgia Tech reports that the school has officially endorsed Barack Obama for president. At least that’s how an e-mail from the Dean’s office makes it sound:
In the email message sent through the Buzzport announcement system, usually reserved for official Institute business, all 17,000 Georgia Tech students were informed about Obama’s visit and solicited to volunteer for his campaign. The message stated:
Senator Obama is also in need of a lot of volunteers to help him publicize while he is in Atlanta. If you are interested in volunteering you can check the box that says volunteers on the RSVP page.
Volunteers will be needed for Wednesday (street publicity team),
Thursday (sign making party) and Saturday (helping with the actual event) you can also reply to this message if you’d like to volunteer.
The taxpayers of Georgia may want to ask themselves why they are paying for officials of a public university to recruit volunteers for a political campaign.
On affirmative action, Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate, said he thinks that someday when his two young daughters apply to college, they “should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged” and there is nothing wrong with that.
“I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and been brought up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed,” he added. “There are a lot of African-American kids who are still struggling.”
Obama said that “if we have done what needs to be done to ensure that kids who are qualified to go to college can afford it, that affirmative action becomes a diminishing tool for us to achieve racial equality in this society.”
If Obama actually opposes race-based affirmative action outright, I’d consider it an act of political courage. Supporting racial preferences is a default Democratic position, and given the current state of American racial politics, it is a position that black Democratic candidates in particular are expected to take. To demonstrate that you don’t always take the default party position can be refreshing to people, especially when doing so runs the risk of getting you labeled as a traitor to your race.
But does Obama really oppose racial preferences? When he was running for Senate four years ago, Obama wrote a letter to Black Commentator addressing a number of topics, including affirmative action:
I favor affirmative action, but I’m still going after the votes of white union members who oppose affirmative action, because I think I can convince them that it’s Bush’s economic agenda, and not affirmative action, that is eroding their job security and stagnating their wages.
So, there you have it. Obama recently hinted that he opposed affirmative action, but four years ago, he he opposed it quite explicitly. Unless he just-as-explicitly says he has since changed his mind, I take the more definitively worded position (”I favor affirmative action”) to represent his actual beliefs.
Maybe Obama’s recent statement is just an example of his “going after white union members who oppose affirmative action.”
If he now speaks out against race-based affirmative action, he would be applauded by many people, including me. A viable black presidential candidate opposing affirmative action would be a milestone in American racial politics. Will it be Obama?
21 January 2007 >>
When President Bush talks about the very real threat that radical Jihadists pose around the world, Democrats accuse him of “fear mongering.” But when a much-hyped rival poses a threat to Democratic presidential hopefuls, suddenly fear mongering is in fashion:
Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?
This is the question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp is asking about Sen. Barack Obama.
An investigation of Mr. Obama by political opponents within the Democratic Party has discovered that Mr. Obama was raised as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia. Sources close to the background check, which has not yet been released, said Mr. Obama, 45, spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia.
“He was a Muslim, but he concealed it,” the source said. “His opponents within the Democrats hope this will become a major issue in the campaign.”
Update: Barack Obama denies that he was educated in a madrassa, and the Clinton camp denies that they were the source for the story. The story was reportedly based on a single unnamed source and has not been substantiated by a second source. (Hat tip: Ed Morrissey.)
