Please note: harder language than Crab Media's average in this post. Please be advised if such language is offensive to your sensibilities.

Jesse Taylor of Pandagon, June 30, 2008:

As a fellow Middle American, let me step up and say this: if you believe that Obama is a Muslim, unpatriotic, a terrorist, not born in America, any of the various rumors floating around about him, you are an ignorant, bigoted asshole giving in to the worst temptations of society - no matter how coddled you are by people unwilling to offend you lest they seem like the sort of elitist who doesn’t obsess over whether or not Negroes with funny names are going to kill you in your sleep. Facts don’t seem to work, so I’m more than willing to try abject shame for their unrepentant dumbassery.

I would in general agree with this assessment. I could forgive it more if it were an isolated phenomenon not stoked by Republican operatives, and if the media were less obsessively fawning over its own fetishization of "Middle America" (cue the Aaron Copland soundtrack.)

There are plenty of good reasons to reject Barack Obama. One excellent reason, for example, to oppose Obama is if you think that it's a good idea for America to maintain an indefinite military commitment and expenditure in Mesopotamia, if you think that a 50 year continuation of Beetle Bailey marching between the Tigris and Euphrates constitutes a great American realpolitik choice. I think that's a horrible policy choice.

I have grown weary of these reporters, seemingly helicoptering in to small-town America and expecting to see stupidity, such that when they actually encounter it, they don't call it by its name. It would be better not to expect these small-town people to be dumbasses, but to call them on dumbassery.

No one has any factual basis for believing that Obama is a Muslim. They just "suspect" it because they are, you know, so well versed on Islamic law and custom in rural Ohio and West Virginia. The wingnuts have been putting out the idea that Hawai'ian-born Obama (born two years after statehood, not that that matters) is not a natural-born American citizen. This sort of thing will continue, though not much for McCain, who was born outside the U.S. in the then U.S. Canal Zone (though a natural-born citizen also by parentage.)

They will call him a faggot because, I guess, he knuckle-bumped his wife instead of putting one of those hot-loving Al Gore-mounting-Tipper-in-front-of-millions-of-friends kisses on his wife. I recall that mouthy, obnoxious make-out session; I think I temporarily shifted from heterosexual to "DEAR G-D NONE OF THE ABOVE **PLEASE**" for about two days. But because Obama has not apparently cheated on his wife, looks lean and young (to Caucasian accustomed to melanin-starved, sun-battered wrinkled crone and geezer faces from 47-year-olds), he will be a "faggot" Muslim for some. A uppity "faggot" Muslim with two daughters whose Christian preacher of 20 years talks way too much. These sorts of bullshit lies are designed to poke West Virginia hicks' cultural sore spots, like for example hating "colored" like their late-on-the-Obama-bus-ex-Klansman senator, hating "faggots" and by all means hating "sandn***ers." (Of course, many more Muslims live in temperate, tropical and subtropical climates than in deserts, but I digress.)

Obama has more experience at the federal level than Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Abraham Lincoln had combined at their inaugurations (zero, zero, zero and two years versus four for Obama.) I can understand that some people will value McCain's decades of gross policy reversals, violent temper outbursts and cloying ass-kissing of theocratic mullahs in "Christian America" more than they will the fresh start that Obama will bring. Obama's not perfect; his supine failure to back General Clark's comments shows a lack of character. It IS true that getting shot out of a plane and surviving torture and confinement do not qualify you to run General Motors, your neighborhood Starbucks or the Executive Branch of the federal government; it probably does qualify you to teach military how to survive such an ordeal. Surviving such an ordeal may be a test of character, but even so: what have we seen from McCain's now maverick, now slavish theocrat wannabe pivoting that leads one to do anything but compare him to the nebbishy Woody Allen character in Zelig, who took on the persona of whomever he met or dealt with in chameleon-like fashion, but with an ill-tempered streak that burns friend and foe alike?

I want Obama in because only Obama will get a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or its functional equivalent by a less pretentious name, to get to the truth about how the Bush White House lied its way into a bullshit war for oil leverage, how it has monumentally stacked the federal government with wingnut operatives and lackeys at so many turns. Obama's team will turn on the light and flush out the roaches in a way that neither Team Bush nor Congress nor the courts can or will. A President McCain will never do so. Since the press won't fall over for Obama like it did for Bush, we can expect the media to do their damn job, to hold Team Obama's feet to the fire, not to "embed" themselves in Executive Branch projects as pals, as they seem to want to do on the campaign bus with Saint McCain, ready like any insecure girl to give it up on the first date to "my guy John." President Obama will get his ass kicked by the press, and that's healthy politics.