Many months ago, readers began asking me whether Barack Obama is Muslim. Since he identifies as a Christian, I said, "no," and responded that he was not raised by his Kenyan father.
But, then, I decided to look further into Obama's background. His full name--as by now you have probably heard--is Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. Hussein is a Muslim name, which comes from the name of Ali's son--Hussein Ibn Ali. And Obama is named after his late Kenyan father, the late Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., apparently a Muslim.
Oh. Or not.
There has been a giant to-do over Senator Obama for the last several months. Most serious political observers feel that he is the one candidate who can actually challenge Hillary Clinton's almost unbreakable grip on the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
As you may have guessed, I'm not a serious political observer.
Firstly, I don't think that Hillary is going to win the nomination. If the Democrats are truly serious about winning in 23 months, they'll nominate anyone but Clinton. Even a school janitor awaiting trial on sex charges would do better in the Electoral College than Hillary. Her negatives are as high as they possibly can be in politics without being a convicted war criminal or George W. Bush.
So she can beat Saddam Hussein or a Republican president for the Democratic nomination, but that's about it. Yes, she has the money to destroy perennial losers like Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, but so do I. A goal like that can accomplished with the refund on the empty beer bottles on the floorboard of your car. If Dodd or Biden proved really hard to put down, you could get a paper route or something.
I not only think that Al Gore or John Edwards could beat her, I think they could beat her badly. Unless of course the states decide to hold all of their primaries on the same day, in which case you'd end up with a brokered convention and the real professionals take charge in those storied smokey rooms, which hasn't happened in several decades. If that happened, Hillary would end up as Ralph Nader's vice-presidential candidate.
Secondly, Obama would be out of his mind to run for president right now. He's never held executive office anywhere and has only been in the United States Senate for two years. No one that thinly credentialed has ever been elected president before. I think voters are incredibly dumb, but even I don't think they're
that dumb. And I think the senator knows that, too.
However, Obama is whip-smart, charismatic and has all the media juice a politician can hope for right now. He has to know that lightning doesn't strike twice. I think he'll play coy for another few weeks and announce that he isn't running, but isn't endorsing anyone, either.
If I'm right, that'll you that he's running for vice-president - a nomination that is his for the asking. At only forty-four, Obama still has twenty years to reach for prize. And sitting or former vice-presidents are almost never denied the nomination.
I think Obama would be easier to beat than most professional analysts do, but he does scare the bejesus out of most Republicans. And Republicans are chock full of bejesus. Young, charismatic Democrats are exceptionally tough to beat, as Richard Nixon learned in 1960 and George H.W Bush learned in 1992. But my reading of history suggests that that only applies in an issue-free campaign.
While Obama wouldn't be my first choice of an opponent (Hillary would,) I wouldn't be all that shy about running against him.
If the campaign were a "who's the fairest of them all" media horseshit festival, Obama would win without breaking a sweat. But if you get him to talk issues, you put him on the defensive. And Barack Obama has never had to campaign on the defensive before. Bill Clinton did it, but he was defensive on his personal life. He had the issues on his side. I'm not convinced Obama would.
For all of the hype surrounding him, Obama is shockingly short on policy. "Let's end urban poverty forever" sounds great in a convention speech, but if you get him on a debate stage and ask how he intends to do it, I suspect that he'll end up sounding like Walter Mondale. And at that point, the campaign is over. Even a semi-competent Republican should be able to pull that off. And both John McCain and Rudy Guiliani are at least Obama's equal rhetorically. And both have records of substance. I'm sure that everyone has heard of Vietnam and 9/11, so I won't belabor the point.
Obama's "energy independence" plan is a wealth of riches for the Republicans. And better still, the ultra-lefty magazine Harper's has done all of their research for them.
A couple of months ago,
Harper's ran a profile called "
Barack Obama, Inc," which painted him as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Archer Daniels Midland company. Yes, his plan for energy independence ideas focus on ethanol, but he voted in the senate against lowering tariffs against Brazilian ethanol - the cheapest and most plentiful source of that fuel in the world today. He voted against it because it would undercut subsidies to southern Illinois farmers and more importantly, ADM.
Harper's had this to say about ethanol, Archer's Daniel Midland and the United States Congress;
Although this is not the place to review the full history of ethanol, it’s beyond dispute that it survives only because members of Congress from farm states, whether liberal or conservative, have for decades managed to win billions of dollars in federal subsidies to underwrite its production. It is not, of course, family farmers who primarily benefit from the program but rather the agribusiness giants such as Illinois-based Aventine Renewable Energy and Archer Daniels Midland (for which ethanol accounts for just 5 percent of its sales but an estimated 23 percent of its profits). Ethanol production, as Tad Patzek of UC Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering wrote in a report this year, is based on “the massive transfer of money from the collective pocket of the U.S. taxpayers to the transnational agricultural cartel.”
Unsurprisingly, the largest contributions to Obama's political action committee (PAC) come from agribusiness giants generally and ADM in particular. The net effect of that vote is that America will continue to escalate its imports of Saudi crude until The United States can efficiently produce its own ethanol, something that is widely expeted to take at least a decade.
The article, taken as a whole, makes Obama look a lot less like a political reformer and environmental crusader and a lot more like a old-time hack, labouring for corporate paymasters. And something like that coming from Obama's left makes it all the more effective than it would from the right, who are automatically presumed to have corporate paymasters. If the Republicans are smart (which remains to be seen,) they'll sit on that article until Obama gets the nomination and then put it out everywhere - on television, on the web, they'll pull it out during the debates - you get the idea. Harper's may have just become the GOP's best friend.
And Debbie Schlussel, being Debbie Schlussel, is determined to be the Democratic Party's best friend. Any fair reading of her article can only lead one to believe that she wants to tie the Republicans to her anti-Muslim, McCarthyite witch-hunt. And if anyone of any stature in the GOP has that manner of BDSM kink, they'll be hounded for years for their trouble.
Her entire article is based around the idea that Muslims can't be loyal Americans and are unfit for executive office. Not only does that reinforce the image of conservative bigotry, it's a message that won't play very well in states like Michigan, which the Republicans would very much like to win.
It also leads to other interesting questions. For example, Schlussel ends her article this way;
So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on Oprah); 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?
Other than noting that this might be the longest sentence in the History of the English Speaking Peoples, I found myself asking one question about that particular observation. That question was "Really?" I don't remember Debbie asking questions like that of Senator Joseph Lieberman when he was the 2000 vice-presidential nominee. If one's religion conflicts with national loyalty, it logically follows that an observant Jew like Lieberman - or Schlussel herself - is disqualified because he or she would act in Israel's interest rather than America's. Of course, such a charge would rightly be seen as silly and wildly anti-Semitic. But if you don't mind being labelled an anti-Semite, you can offer up the
Jonathan Pollard case as evidence of divided loyalties among observant Jews. That's the kind of slippery-slope that Schlussel's demented thinking starts in motion.
It's also politically counter-productive. As a matter of fact, the campaign of Senator Hubert Humphrey tried it against Senator John Kennedy in the 1960 West Virginia primary, saying that a Catholic would be more beholden to the Vatican than to the United States Constitution. At the time, Catholics were less than 2% of the West Virginia population and anti-papism was very real there. But Kennedy won that primary in a landslide and Humphrey's dreams of ever being president were buried in a coal mine. It turns out that people will go to weird and unpredictable lengths to prove that they aren't bigots.
If Debbie Schlussel thinks that branding Barack Obama as a fundamentalist Muslim is effective politics, she's woefully ignorant of both politics and history.
On the other hand, that shouldn't surprise anyone. Despite being obsessed with Islam, she doesn't seem to know very much about it, either, as evidenced by this paragraph;
And while Obama may not identify as a Muslim, that's not how the Arab and Muslim Streets see it. In Arab culture and under Islamic law, if your father is a Muslim, so are you. And once a Muslim, always a Muslim. You cannot go back. In Islamic eyes, Obama is certainly a Muslim. He may think he's a Christian, but they do not.
Actually, Debbie, in Islamic eyes, Obama "is certainly"
an apostate, which is not a popular thing to be in the Muslim world, particularly in fundamentalist circles. There is some controversy about this among scholars of the Koran, but it is generally accepted that
the penalty for apostasy is death. Even if not directly called for in the Holy Koran (and my reading indicates that it is,) it has been the practice in the Middle East and South and Central Asia for centuries. And those are the Muslims that Schlussel seems most concerned with, not the ones in, say, Oklahoma. Although I'm sure they're next.
Anyone with the inclination to study the history that Debbie won't should quickly come to the conclusion that Obama might be the West's best friend in the war against radical Islam. After all, who would want their defeat more than someone they want to kill above all others? One should always remember that Americans are only fifth or sixth on the fundamentalist hit list. Apostates are second only to the Shi'ia. And depending on who you ask, the Shi'ia
are apostates. Secular Arab regimes, the state of Israel, Jews generally, and India all beat the United States on the list of folks al-Qaeda wants to kill most.
The interesting part is that Schlussel doesn't even
attempt to imply that there's any radicalism in Obama's lineage. If she did, she could at least make a simplistic "sins of the father" argument against Obama. After all, no one ever nominated
Daniel Rosenberg for president, either. Instead, she relies on guilt by association. An association, I should note, that she makes no effort whatsover to prove. She merely notes that Obama's father was from Kenya, a country with
some Muslims and that the senator went to an Islamic school in Indonesia for four years. She doesn't even know if the senior Obama actually
was a Mulslim. A careful reading of her article shows that she says "And Obama is named after his late Kenyan father, the late Barack Hussein Obama, Sr.,
apparently a Muslim."
Please note the use of the word "apparently." God forbid that Debbie do anything crazy like look up the death certificate of Barack Hussein Obama, Sr in Kenya and actually check if a religion is indicated. Jesus, what the fuck do you actually expect from "journalists," anyway?
Debbie doesn't even attempt a silly "fifth column" argument. Instead, she comes right out and says that Muslims are to be suspect in the public arena simply because they are Muslim. The logic appears to be this, "If al-Qeada are Muslim terrorists then all Muslims are terrorists." Unfortunately, to accept that, you also have to accept that all Catholics are terrorists because the
Irish Republican Army is Catholic and all Jews are terrorists because
the Stern Gang blew up
the King David Hotel. And I'm pretty sure that Schlussel wouldn't make either assertion. At least not out loud.
It also isn't a great leap to another disturbing conclusion. If Muslims are a clear and present danger to the United States, then violence - or, at a minimum, state-sanctioned persecution - against them must be acceptable. It doesn't logically follow that you can paint someone as a mortal threat to your existence and then expect others to do absolutely nothing about it. Ask the
Japanese of California how that works if you have any questions. Better still, ask
Canada's Japanese. Our fabled reputation for politness was lost entirely on them.
I'm a pretty media-savvy guy. And I have no choice but to assume that a big chunk of Debbie Schlussel's fan base is at
least stupid as she is. It isn't exactly a secret that dumb, crazy
Americans have a long and storied history of shooting presidents and
charismatic presidential candidates. Screaming ill-informed, lunatic nonsense like this to a wildly ignorant mob in a post-9/11 world could get Barack Obama
killed.
I'll likely never support Obama's political ambitions, but I happen to think that he's a smart and well-intentioned guy. The United States Senate can - and routinely does - do a lot a lot worse than Barack Obama. Despite my political differences with him, I think he's a very good man. I wish to see no harm come to him. For that reason, people of goodwill everywhere should speak out against parasitic idiots like Debbie Schlussel.
The case against Ann Coulter (and few have made it more
forcefully than I have) is that she's prone to psychotic over-statement. This she does in part to be funny and in part because she actually is insane. But she isn't an idiot. In her wild hyperbole, people forget that Coulter is a highly educated constitutional lawyer, and despite a decade of people trying, very few people have found serious factual errors in her arguments. Sure, her
conclusions are delusional, but she generally has her facts straight.
Debbie Schlussel on the other hand doesn't even have a rudimentary understanding of the facts. Look, I'm pretty well known for hysterical rants that seemingly never end, but I try pretty hard to have a basic understanding of what I'm talking about before I put it out there in public. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that if I spent five years dedicated to one subject, I'd know that subject inside and out. I know I'm not a wildly smart guy, but I don't go out of my way to look stupid, either.
And that might be the biggest mistake I've made since starting this blog. I try to know what I'm talking about, and I'm doing cartwheels if 500 people a day read me. Schlussel doesn't even understand the basics of her subject matter and she presumably has an audience in the millions.
I never thought that I could make a living at this, but I wasn't sure why. Now I am. I'm just not ignorant enough. Yes, brilliant minds like George Will make a living writing opinion pieces, but he was established before stupid became chic. It turns out that I was born 20 years too late.
I seriously never would have thought of Christmas as the ideal time to attack people's religions. I thought Easter was the best time for that. And that's why I'm a sad, frustrated loser.
Special hat-tips to Captain's Quarters and Baldilocks, both of whom you should be reading instead of my nonsense. Baldilocks in particular was far more eloquent than I could ever hope to be. But that's why she's Baldilocks, teenagers. That's why she's Baldilocks.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Crazy He Calls Me By: Billie Holiday From: Billie Holiday's Greatest Hits
