While we can't be sure that Barak Obama will run for President in 2008, the Swift Boat crew is already standing by to cast off. David Wallis wrote an amusing article about middle names of candidates for Slate yesterday. From FDR's classy Delano to Harry S Truman whose middle name actually was S, the cadence and sound of a candidates name can have an effect on the way we perceive them that translates into votes. I'm sure that Barak Obama takes these things seriously, since his middle name is Hussein - after his Kenyan father and grandfather.
You can hear Republican strategist Ed Rogers carefully stressing that appellation on Hardball with an audible sneer "Count me down as somebody who underestimates Barack Hussein Obama." One can almost hear the bilge blowers whirring and the big diesels turning over.
"You can't solve Iraq with a campaign about people's middle names," said Obama's communications director, Robert Gibbs to Maureen Dowd and he's right, but you can give the nitwits and the Xenophobes and bigots and pathological Republicans something to cackle about and you can't solve Iraq if you lose elections.
Debbie Schlussel, the right wing nutjob, says Obama
"… is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father's heritage, a man we want as president when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?"
One of my predictions for the coming year is that we will hear a lot more bigoted, racial insanity in 2007.
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5 comments:
The fact that this kind of discourse has become mainstream lets you know just how far down the sewer this country has fallen.
Yes, but I'm thinking that perhaps we've always been a cesspool and have hidden it from ourselves with a lot of patriotic blather, "we're number one" cheerleading, phony history and politics.
How long will it be before the patriots start asking for internment camps?
The crazies have already started asking for it. When that goes mainstream, I'll be on my way to Mexico. :-) I'm not going to be the last dumb Jew in Germany who swore up and down his countrymen would never do that to him.
Ah,the whole thing makes me sad.
I've always liked Mexico. . .
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