I don’t even know where to begin with this. My mind is reeling from the sheer level of vitriol, Evan, that you spew in this post. I apologize for this long-winded post, but this addresses not only your post but alot of crap I hear from others in my life.
First, I find your post to be intellectually insincere because you begin with the premise that everything Barack Obama has done from practically childhood to the present was formulated in a cynical, manipulative, egocentric fashion. This post’s glaring flaw (although I believe that many on here don’t see it that way because they desperately want to see it through the same cynical prism that you do, Mr. Sayet) is that you presuppose Obama to be utterly disingenuous in his rhetoric. You simply have no proof of this. For what it’s worth (and I’m sure it’s not worth much on such a frightening, close-minded website) I do believe that Obama wants to heal a racial divide in this country. I do believe that he wants to effect a change in Washington D.C.’s current slimy culture. And from my vantage point, while I’m not fully convinced he’ll be able to pull all of this off, he’s our best shot at the moment.
With that out of the way, let me begin on several factual inaccuracies in this post. First, you assert that Ayers and his misguided ilk murdered Americans. This is simply not true. While their bombing of American symbols of empire and status quo were horrendous, not once did those bombings kill anyone. The only deaths that resulted were from a bomb that accidentally went off in NYC–by some careless Weathermen making said bombs. In other words, while the Weathermen were indeed terrorists, they never intentionally set out to kill Americans. And as an equally important aside, you completely twist his words post-Sept. 11th: he did not say that the terrorists didn’t kill enough Americans. He said that the Weathermen had not bombed enough targets. While I certainly don’t agree with that statement either, it is obviously a HUGE difference, and you should be ashamed for that libelous comment.
Secondly, I would like to see the evidence that Constitutional scholar Barack Obama benefited from affirmative action. Your prejudice slips through when you assert that because he’s African American that he automatically benefited from affirmative action. That colors you in latently-racist overtones Evan and I don’t think you want that on your resume. Or maybe you do, as it might get you more invites to the Heritage Foundation and photo ops with Ann Coulter. I don’t know.
And the last of the inaccuracies, but certainly not the least, was that the Wright controversy was costing him primaries. That is simply not true. In fact, polls indicate that a majority of Americans simply didn’t feel that this was a major issue. And why? Perhaps because a majority of Americans hear things from their religious leaders they don’t always agree with–far fewer Americans would get up and storm out, never to return, and that’s because there are things that their religious leaders say that they DO agree with, which is probably the case with Obama. Now of course, in places like West Virginia and Western PA this probably was an issue, but then again so was his middle name–Hussein, as you continually slip into your posts–so then the senseless meme that he’s both an American hating Christian as well as a covert Muslim terrorist comes into play, which just shows how immature and pointless that argument really is. I’d also like to add that BECAUSE five minutes of that hateful sermon was leaked, which then became representative of a decades-long career at the pulpit, Obama I feel had a RESPONSIBILITY to address race, if for no other reason to address the outcry that the controversy created in the first place. In that Philadelphia speech, he spoke about the disenfranchisement of working class white males, a very real issue. But again, that is seen only as cynical political posturing by you Evan; if he had not addressed the issue, you would have accused him of avoiding the issue for political expediency.
So it’s fairly clear to me that you just enjoy using Barack Obama, the next President of the United States, as a metaphorical pinata on which you project your small-minded, fearful world-view onto. And I think that’s sad because, while some I know would smack me for saying this, you do have articulate moments, and how beautiful it would be if you used those moments for not fostering more cynicism in the world and instead spoke of hope and the potential for change, two things that Obama stands for, and that millions of Americans await as I write this. Or at the very least, use that brain of yours to figure out how you’re going to get your horribly disfigured, sidetracked Republican party back on the rails, as three stunning Congressional losses shows that your once proud party of fiscal responsibility and personal privacy has become a party of obscene spending on massive beauracracy and invasive violation of personal liberties.
