I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but the Democratic primary contest features a woman running against an African-American, which doesn't happen very often. A situation like this raises the possibility, just a little bit, that attitudes born of sexism or racism might come into play. And they have! Although, by any fair accounting, Hillary Clinton has gotten by far the worse of it thus far -- it's a bit easier to be blatantly misogynist in a mainstream kind of way than it is to be racist. MSNBC's Chris Matthews, all by himself, is responsible for enough sexism to warrant several Congressional investigations. But don't be disappointed, those of you who were looking forward to an even uglier fight. We still have the general election coming up! In which the right-wing punditocracy, having accommodated themselves to the horror of a McCain candidacy on their own side, will be able to turn their venom on the Democratic candidate full-time. And it's increasingly likely that the candidate will be Barack Obama. (Notwithstanding the Clinton campaign's attempts to change the rules mid-stream.) And it will be ugly. Ugly ugly ugly. As a warm-up salvo, consider Lisa Schiffren of the National Review Online. That would be the web presence of the National Review, leading journal of the conservative movement. Ms. Schiffren has deployed her powers of logic to deduce something that the country surely deserves to know -- Barack Obama is a Communist! And here would be the evidence:
Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics.
Arguments don't get much more air-tight than that. Obama, born in Hawaii of a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, is presumptively Communist because Lisa Schiffren's mixed-race acquaintances from New York City in the 1960's were inevitably the spawn of shifty black Communists who seduced nice Jewish girls. Logic! Admittedly, the focus wanders somewhat, as Ms. Schiffren is not quite sure which horror to dwell on, as Belle Waring notes:
The truly beautiful thing about this is that it incoherently wavers between two poles of repulsive slander: is it Communist Negroes having sex with our white women? Or are Communist Jewesses subverting black Americans who, patriotic though modestly ill-treated, would have been able to resist had the party not offered them the tempting fruits of miscegenation?
You might, if you were a generous person who wanted to think the best of the National Review, hope that Ms. Schiffren doesn't take her chain of deduction too too far. You might be disappointed.
Of course, since the Soviet Union itself no longer exists, it's an open question what it means practically to have been politically mentored by an official Communist. Ideologically, the implications are clearer. ... It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn't buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow. Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family's background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.
And it's not just the fever dream of a single maverick columnist. "Accuracy in Media" (sic) has dropped the bombshell that -- one of Obama's father's friends was a Communist! And from this we are empowered to hint darkly that there must be some nefarious forces behind his popularity.
Obama's communist connection adds to mounting public concern about a candidate who has come out of virtually nowhere, with a brief U.S. Senate legislative record, to become the Democratic Party frontrunner for the U.S. presidency. In the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, Obama beats Republican John McCain by almost four percentage points.
(One wonders why, if public concern is so obviously mounting, he's beating McCain so badly?) But we're not just dealing with some musty old history here. Evidence that Obama's dark skin tone has a pinkish tinge to it is also to be found in the legislative record, AIM goes on to discover!
AIM recently disclosed that Obama has well-documented socialist connections, which help explain why he sponsored a "Global Poverty Act" designed to send hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. foreign aid to the rest of the world, in order to meet U.N. demands. The bill has passed the House and a Senate committee, and awaits full Senate action.
Can you believe your eyes? The man wants to fight poverty, even in non-American parts of the world! I suspect we'll be singing L'Internationale at his inauguration, where his left hand will be resting on a copy of Das Kapital. His right hand will, of course, be on the Koran, and in his back pocket he'll be carrying Mein Kampf, because he's also a fascist. Mixed races, mixed ideologies. Barack Obama, leading edge of the Communist/Muslim/Nazi revolution. Time for some investigative journalism! It's going to be a long campaign.
