Fear the Obama

Eventually, the mouth breathers on the right will coalesce around some coherent talking point in order to slam Obama, but for now, just watching them cast about for anything is good fun. He's black, of course, that's a problem, and clearly he's mixed race and inexperienced, a lefty, even a communist, and his wife is a Nazi. Glen Beck had a segment on "Obamanomics" last night, with Stephen Moore of the WSJ, in which they lamented the fact that because of his proposed policies for tax reapportionment, we are inexorably bound for the dark days of the 70s, and stagflation. Neither pundit thought it material to point out that Obama has not yet been elected, nor have his collectivist tax policies been imposed upon the Republic quite yet.

Leave it to Lisa Schiffrin of the National Review to mix the whole noxious stew together, however. Until we decide just what calamity Obama represents, this will have to do:

Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)

I don't know how Barak Obama's parents met. But the Kincaid article referenced above makes a very convincing case that Obama's family, later, (mid 1970s) in Hawaii, had close relations with a known black Communist intellectual. And, according to what Obama wrote in his first autobiography, the man in question — Frank Marshall Davis — appears to have been Barack's own mentor, and even a father figure. Of course, since the Soviet Union itself no longer exists, it's an open question what it means practically to have been politically mentored by an official Communist. Ideologically, the implications are clearer.

Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama's mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of racism — let's recall that the very question of interracial marriage only became a big issue later in the 1960s. The notion of a large group of mixed race Americans became an issue during and after the Vietnam War. Even the civil-rights movement kept this culturally explosive matter at arm's distance.

It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn't buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.

Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family's background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.

Indeed... (scratching my chin).

And the spectacularly unfunny comic Chris Muir, who clearly has significant sexual repression issues attempts to bring his sad idea of levity to the wingnut attack:



I know it doesn't make any sense.