TOBY PETZOLD

Barack Hussein Obama says that people like me don’t like him because he has a “funny name” and because he is, as he identifies himself, a black man. But the actual reason I don’t like Obama is because of insufferable ploys like that one: “If you oppose or criticize me, you’re a racist.”

With about three months to go to the moment of truth, such a preposterous rationale is intended to paralyze and suspend normal political criticism. It’s grossly unfair and racist in itself. Let’s see how much more mileage this goddamned charlatan gets out of what John McCain today finally and bluntly called “playing the race card.” I think it’s bound to backfire on Obama in a big way —and with crucial Democratic voting blocs, viz., Northeastern Catholics, Rust Belt blue-collars, older folks (especially Floridian Jews), and large segments of the Latino vote.

The legend that is growing up around this unqualified liar is that he represents a post-racial America. Yet the support he receives from Black America exceeds even the usual 90-10 split the Democratic Party can count on every cycle. How is that suggestive of a post-racial appeal? The very idea is a joke, as was repeatedly demonstrated in the last several Democratic primaries.

It just so happens that it’s Barack Obama who comes into an electoral dynamic where his identity and character are not even known to the majority of Americans. All that can be known about him is what he asserts himself and his beliefs to be. So why is that acceptable? It is not. It is not enough for a man to claim to be something; he must demonstrate himself to be worthy of the most powerful office on Earth.

On that point, McCain is unquestionably the better choice. He is known to the society he is asking to lead. He is known to us as a man of real character and as a man with a demonstrated record of service. On what basis is Obama asking to lead us? On the strength of his good looks and his alleged mastery of the oratorical arts? Well, that’s the audacity of horseshit. If guilt-ridden white liberals want a black man to play at being President, they might as well choose Morgan Freeman (who happens to be a good and interesting man, which I would know from years of reading about him, seeing him in interviews, and sharing in his artistic choices).

I wish I could suppress my contempt for people who support this nonsense, but I am having a hard time of it. I am sorry to even have to say that, but it is true. Ever since about Super Tuesday, I have looked on the Democratic Party in much the same way that I looked on the Republicans in the wake of the Schiavo Unpleasantness. To me, the Democrats have absolutely gone mad. Does their self-loathing as Americans run so deep that they would inflict this crap on our culture without any thought of its recklessness?

The answer is obvious.

John Hinderaker is saying that Barack Obama told a reporter in Sderot, Israel today (emphasis mine):

Now, in terms of knowing my commitments, you don’t have to just look at my words, you can look at my deeds. Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.

To which Hinderaker adds:

But Obama is not a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Obama just made that up so he could count the committee’s action as one of “my deeds.”

If committed by a Republican, this would be a gaffe of historic proportions. Even a Senator as inattentive to his duties as Obama certainly knows what committees he serves on. For him to fabricate the claim, out of whole cloth, that the Senate Banking Committee is “[his] committee,” strikes me as another sign of Obama’s megalomania. That, plus more evidence that he is totally at sea without a teleprompter.

Surely, there’s just some sort of misunderstanding, right?

Ralph Nader is not mincing his words on Barack Obama in an interview he gave to the Rocky Mountain News:

“There’s only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He’s half African-American,” Nader said. “Whether that will make any difference, I don’t know. I haven’t heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What’s keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn’t want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We’ll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.”

The Obama campaign had only a brief response, calling the remarks disappointing.

Asked to clarify whether he thought Obama does try to “talk white,” Nader said: “Of course.

“I mean, first of all, the number one thing that a black American politician aspiring to the presidency should be is to candidly describe the plight of the poor, especially in the inner cities and the rural areas, and have a very detailed platform about how the poor is going to be defended by the law, is going to be protected by the law, and is going to be liberated by the law,” Nader said. “Haven’t heard a thing.”

“We are obviously disappointed with these very backward-looking remarks,” Obama campaign spokeswoman Shannon Gilson said.

I doubt Nader can do much to harm McCain electorally, but he may serve to point out what a flimsy nominee Obama is. The more Nader tries to draw him out on issues that disproportionately impact black Americans, the less able Obama will be to keep moving to the center without looking like what Bob Shrum once called John Edwards: a hyperambitious phony.

Now that the point of Hillary’s candidacy is moot, let a hundred post mortems bloom on how she lost and to what extent the Obama campaign used its manipulation of Big Media to make their man into some sort of demigod at her expense. What a disaster for the Republic! Hillary ran a poor campaign in many ways that her superior intelligence, command of the facts, and strength of purpose could not overcome. But the passes Big Media continues giving to Obama on the hollowness of his rhetoric and his many Quayle-worthy gaffes were rarely extended to Hillary. Her remarks on “hard-working white Americans” and June of 1968 were picked apart as though they were the final proof of her racism and the murderous intent of her soul. Who helped beat that horse for the past five months? Why, it was the very same liberals in Big Media who condemned Bill Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro as racists! Racists?! It doesn’t get much more perverse than that, but what are mere reputations worth when we must all make the mad, headlong dash into post-racial/post-American harmony with Obama Soter?

I don’t like Leftist demagogues. I don’t like the new ethos that says I must accept the nonsense of this candidacy lest I be branded a racist. Barack Hussein Obama is a mile wide and an inch thick. Why is that not more widely recognized? Because Big Media is in love. And we know what love is.

Hillary Rodham Clinton would have been the better choice for her party by far. Once McCain wins this November, I hope she makes it a point to remind the hippies of their stupidity.

Jonah Goldberg has some very interesting thoughts on Black Liberation Theology and the meaning(s) of Progressivism. About Obama, he writes:

He may use the phrase Social Gospel the same way he (and so many others) uses the word “progressive,” i.e. in near total ignorance or indifference to its actual historical connotations. For example, when Obama held a rally at the University of Wisconsin, Madison he proclaimed “where better to affirm our ideals than here in Wisconsin, where a century ago the Progressive movement was born?” Obama seemed not to know or to care that the University of Wisconsin Progressives were almost all racists and eugenicists who might have thought — at minimum — that his parents should have been barred from having children.

I often remark to the so-called “progressives” I come across that they are abusing the term. The Progressives of the Twentieth (and, now, the Twenty-first) Century may both be Big Government socialists at heart —but you can’t marry these people today to what the former group believed in: White Protestant Civilization and American exceptionalism. Progressives today are secular humanists who despise the “Christianists” and are repulsed by patriotism or excessive caucasoidalism. So why are they recycling progressive? Is it really so bad to be thought of as a liberal?

They say that eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, but I disagree. That distinction belongs to any hour, say, that Barack Obama is giving one of his speeches. At least that’s the impression one gets from the TV. Although there’s a wide variety of people who are drawn to these transcendent moments in the History of the Universe, the smaller groups of people arranged to stand behind him during his rallies are almost always white. Why is that? Why isn’t there more often a more diverse and proportionately represented group of people in camera shot with him?

I think it’s got something to do with manipulating the country through people-scenery for the news. Everything’s a prop if the stakes are high enough.

Lynn Sweet’s got the goods in this transcript of reporters asking Obama about his resignation from Trinity United Church of Christ yesterday (emphasis mine):

Q: Do you think it will be possible for you to join a black church, or a historically black church, or do you think as matter of, do you think that political correctness is going to be an issue in this election and that will be a factor in the racial mix of the church that you join?

BO: It’s an interesting question. I do think that — I said this earlier, that there is a different religious tradition or a worshipping style in some of the historically African American churches and other churches. But I am confident that we are going to be able to find a church we feel comfortable with and that will reflect our concerns and values. But I do think there is a cultural and a stylistic gap that has come into play in this issue.

What a tin ear this man has for religion in America! Barack Obama may think of himself as a Christian, but most American Christians do not —and will not— recognize the kind of race-based conspiracism and outright segregationism of the Black liberation theology he’s been wallowing in for most of his adult life. Is there any clearer evidence of his insularity from normal American life than his clumsy defense —and then abandonment— of his pastor and his church? What sort of man of faith allows politics to dictate where his worship turns?

It is almost fascinating to me that this supposedly brilliant man should have so little sense of how offensive his church is in the eyes and ears of most Americans —and, moreover, how stupid he must think people are to expect them to ignore his serial capitulations on the question of faith.

And is there any promise he’s kept from his “legendary” race speech? He has disowned Wright and now he has disowned his church. What’s next? It doesn’t really matter because these choices of church and spirituality are a question of “style.” Never mind that the substance of what is preached in these places is anti-American, anti-white, and classist; in Obama’s mind, it’s really more a question of how it’s seen by others than it is of genuine religious fidelity.

Barack Obama is a user of religion and a hypocrite. As an atheist with a clear conscience and a sound moral structure, I reject him utterly.

Word on the street is that Obama has resigned his membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ. I suppose this is a demonstration of his superior judgement? After consorting with vile Black Nationalist and neo-Marxist garbagemen for almost half his life, this guy thinks he can just walk away from it without a question? Pretty audacious. I wonder if there’s any so-called reporter worth his salt who has the balls to ask Obama why he is leaving such a pit of racist nonsense now.

The Big Media propagandists are already thinking of ways to suppress this.

Lynn Sweet has a report in the Chicago Sun-Times about David Axelrod’s further interest in demagoguery —this time in the person of a self-loathing radical Catholic priest (emphasis mine):

WASHINGTON — The Rev. Michael Pfleger’s “I’m white! I’m entitled … black man stealing my show” outburst about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton from the pulpit of the Obama family church, Trinity United Church of Christ, created a political problem for likely Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama that won’t disappear.

Pfleger’s crusades against guns, prostitution, porn and tobacco have made good copy for years for a fairly admiring local press corps hooked on cheering for the underdog, the poor and the powerless.

Pfleger is the subject of a documentary being made by Chicago-based David Axelrod, Obama’s top strategist. On Friday, Axelrod told me in an e-mail that the film project has “been dormant for much of the last two years due to other commitments.”

Are you shitting me? Do you know how much more effort this association will require to be suppressed by Big Media? When your campaign’s chief strategist is interested in validating the psychotic rants of a disgusting hater like Pfleger, it says something about what you and him and your whole crew think of America: it says you hate this country and wish to make it over into something else.

For-profit news dissemination is a kind of abomination.

One of the jobs Obama claims as part of his curriculum vitae is “community organizer.” What the hell does that even mean? It sounds like a euphemistic way of saying “shit-stirrer.”

I don’t like what’s happening inside the Democratic Party. I think they’ve gone plum loco. Why couldn’t they have gone with a nominee whom America actually knows?