With Dems Like These, Obama Doesn’t Need Enemies

The late, great humorist and Arizona Congressman Morris K. Udall once said Democrats keep forming their firing squads in a circle. Such humor proves true as supporters of Democratic nominee Barack Obama provide help that does more harm than good.

Democrats are in a state of high anxiety with the unexpected spinach eaten by John “Popeye the Sailor” McCain out of a can shaped like Alaska.

How does South Carolina Democratic chair Carol Fowler lend a hand? By saying Sarah Palin’s only qualification for vice president was not having an abortion. Thanks Carol. That was a big help. Then again, maybe she was trying to outdo her husband, former Democratic National Committee chair Don Fowler, who joked Hurricane Gustav’s timing hurting the Republican convention was proof God is a Democrat. Thanks Don. That won a ton of New Orleans votes and wooed Evangelicals. Maybe some Catholics.

During the MTV awards, an offensive comic named Russell Brand — I guess he’s well known but I never heard of him — was barely kept from a remark in horrible taste about Sarah Palin’s Down syndrome baby. He called President Bush a “retard,” which rightfully upset advocates for the disabled and said much more about Brand. He went on to tell Americans the world needed us to vote for Barack Obama. Better to hear that coming from Bono, a music artist actually doing something to feed the hungry in Africa, than from this clown. And Bono is working non-politically with Bush on behalf of his humanitarian causes. Guess he’s intellectually challenged too.

Actor Matt Damon says the selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican nominee for vice president of the United States could end up “like a really bad Disney movie” if John McCain wins the November presidential election. I thought Dave was a better comparison, but what do I know?

New York Congressman Charles Rangel was given an opportunity to correct his statement saying of Sarah Palin “you’ve got to be kind to the disabled.” He didn’t take it.

These attacks remind me of the earnest, but clumsy, neighbor begging to help you paint your house, while tripping over buckets, smashing lamps, breaking windows, knocking down grandma’s portrait, and generally creating havoc. Would have been better if the neighbor had just stayed home.

Then came a pair of outrageously dumb remarks, crossing any reasonable boundaries of good taste. Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee, a man I’d never heard of and with luck will soon forget, said this on the floor of the House of Representatives: “If you want change, Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus, who our minister just prayed about. Pontius Pilate was a governor.”

So many people attempting to apply the New Testament to American politics remind me of the saying from Confucius that it is “better to be silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

Obama doesn’t need yet another Messiah comparison.

Obama doesn’t need a weak and silly comparison between Pontius Pilate and Governor Sarah Palin.

We missed Herod. He could be the small-town Jerusalem mayor. What about Caesar as president … for life?

One could say a real New Testament community organizer with only life on earth on his mind was Barrabas the Zealot. His “organizers” got the crowd to free him and crucify Jesus. One could also say stop trying to compare anyone in the Bible to an American community organizer. It doesn’t work.

How do these comparisons help the campaign of Barack Obama? How about none?

Then, there’s Sandra Bernhard, an actress whose rantings are so racist and vile they won’t be printed without censorship. Let’s just say she’d like her black male friends to meet Palin on a dark street in Manhattan and show her a bad time.

And there’s a range of voices saying whites not voting for Obama must be racist. Ridiculous. That demeans and degrades the nature of his candidacy.

With Dems like this, who needs enemies? They must make the liberals of the past, Hubert H. Humphrey, Henry Jackson, and Robert F. Kennedy, among others, spin in their graves.

Barack Obama must cringe and wish some of his “friends” would crawl back into their shells and go away.

One longs for the return of the civil, “too funny to be president” demeanor of Morris Udall. Who else would have said, “Lord, give us the wisdom to utter words that are gentle and tender, for tomorrow we may have to eat them”? Or fought back criticisms of flip-flopping with: “The ability to change one’s views without losing one’s seat is the mark of a great politician”? We’re missing the capacity to compare and criticize with wit and grace. The “Attack of the Killer Dems” on Sarah Palin, the bottom of the ticket they seem to forget, seems more out of a need to vent their ruptured spleen than to win an election.

The would-be friends of the campaign don’t seem to understand their words blend with the real campaign, giving the public the impression all are one. They don’t help themselves one bit with rhetorical whipsaws from the hateful to the nutty.

Obama needs to tell his “friends” to straighten up and fly right. Those supporters who pass from sanity to derangement in their stridency will blame the candidate if he loses, saying he wasn’t tough enough. But in truth, more and more of them are the bumblers stepping in the paint bucket.

If they form a firing squad, get clear of the circle.