Seeing how thrilled so many of my fellow Americans are that a black man -- even a half-black man -- is going to be on the presidential ballot in November I can’t help wishing I were one of them. It’s as if there’s a great big party taking place and I’m stuck outside with my nose pressed against a window. But, frankly, I don’t know what the hoop-de-do is all about.
I mean, it’s always nice to be reminded that America is the place where anyone is free to achieve his dreams, although perhaps not quite yet her dreams. But when it comes to being president of the United States, the commander-in-chief of the best and the most powerful nation on earth, I don’t think we should be getting quite this excited. To me, Barack Obama seems like nothing more than the end result of affirmative action run amok.
His fans insist that it’s unfair to question his qualifications or judge him by his associations. That makes sense because if I were a fan of his, I sure wouldn’t want anyone scratching beneath the surface of a pleasant smile and a soothing voice. And, believe me, if he were auditioning for a job as a TV announcer, I’d hire him.
The Obamans insist that mentioning any of the man’s disreputable friends and religious mentors is a no-no that smacks of McCarthyism. This is an odd complaint because, one, McCarthy was right when he pointed out that the folks who associated with other people at Communist cell meetings were in fact Communists, and, two, every child is told that he’s going to be judged by the company he keeps. So, let’s face facts -- John Dillinger ran with a nicer crowd than this guy.
The first screwball we found out about was Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the gutter mouth whose swinish sermons Obama lapped up for a thousand Sundays. Then there was Bill Ayers, the mad bomber who should have wound up sharing a cell with Ted Kaczynski, but instead was apparently offered the option of becoming a professor. And let us not forget Tony Rezko, who was recently found guilty by a Chicago jury of just about everything except kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. It’s still up in the air whether he’ll be offered the same deal as Bill Ayers, but there’s no getting around the fact that “Professor Rezko” has a nice ring to it.
It probably isn’t cricket to include Michelle Obama in this dirty laundry list of Barack’s associates, and yet it’s hard to simply overlook the fact that he chose to marry this nasty, bitter, openly racist ingrate.
Finally, when it appeared that we couldn’t sink any lower in the barrel, out popped Obama’s longtime friend and religious mentor, Father Michael Pfleger. The first time I became aware of this fellow was when I heard segments on the radio of the speech he delivered at Trinity United. When, later that day, I saw him on TV, I was shocked to see that he was white. Although he seems to have forgotten much of his religious training while serving at Faith Community of St. Sabina, on the South Side of Chicago, he has certainly mastered the black patois. He actually sounded blacker than either Rev. Wright or Louis Farrakhan, but he obviously thinks along the same unsavory lines.
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