Barack Obama for Kids

Bruce Handy , a self-professed Obama fan, reviewed three children’s biographies of Barack Obama for tomorrow’s New York Times Book Review.

As an Upper West Sider and member of the media elite, one who’s scared of John McCain’s rickety temperament and doesn’t find Sarah Palin credible on any subject or even as hot as Republican bumper stickers and obliging foreign leaders would have us believe…I’m all for Obama.

But thankfully, his gag reflex has survived, despite his heavy intake of Koolaid. He actually dares to ask the question, what if Obama is not only “the first black president” but also a “the first lousy black president?” Look out Bruce. You’re going to be on the receiving end of a lot of angry O-bot e-mail now.

Arms and the Man

Just Say No Deal is a coalition, whose members may oppose the candidacy of Barack Obama for many reasons.

My deepest reasons are contained in this poem, based on Virgil’s famous line Of Arms and the Man I Sing…

The account of dead children is true. Even http://www.factcheck.org has reported that Obama’s claims about this issue are not true.

This poem reflects my views, and makes no claim to represent
the views of this blog or any of its writers, except of course for myself.

— johninca

Arms And the Man

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun…”
–Barack Obama

“Of arms and the man I sing…”
–Virgil, Aeneid I, 1

Of arms and the man now, like Virgil I sing,
Who a gun to a fight once boasted he’d bring,
If that’s how it’s done on Chicago’s south side,
With him may my country never collide.

If they bring a knife, he said, “…we bring a gun,”
Let not his language shock you, or stun,
If to a rumble a campaign he compared,
Or to employ such metaphors dared.

Of arms and the man with alacrity sing,
And every device of poetry bring,
Lest any part of the cause of his fame
Fail to be met with the highest acclaim.

Your unemployment problem may be resolved,
For Barack will not let you stay uninvolved,
Barack “will require you to work,” we were told,
To declare which, his spouse herself has made bold.

You need not have heeded the party line hack
Who made you indenture yourself to Barack,
What’s yours now be his; and what’s his be his too,
If for him you voted, this be your due.

The ancient poet, if now he were alive
Some means or other would surely contrive
To ask the Muses what fortune or curse
In such a disaster this land could immerse,

Like Communist countries we had once mocked,
And by whose propaganda were shocked,
Whose masses once looked less living than dead,
Proclaiming in song that the East is now Red.

And now, O Great Leader, I’m talking to you:
That there are neither red states nor blue
But only the United States, you declaimed,
For which assertions I did not have you blamed,

Some admirers of yours can speak only of race,
Themselves with calumnious words they disgrace,
The color I see isn’t black– only red,
The color of blood of a baby who’s dead.

Its death had been planned for its own mother’s womb,
But when it escaped from the preordained tomb,
It was to be left in a closet to die,
The poet knows not where this victim may lie,

Such were the children you would not protect,
Lest you lose the slightest of NARAL’s respect,
Of blood I now sing, and the pallor of death,
And children who now have drawn their last breath.

Of arms and the man, and the crack of a gun
Of violence, by which the land’s overrun
Of a country now by evil beguiled,
Of a deadly weapon applied to a child,

Of terror connections swept under rugs,
Of death threats and goons and internet thugs,
Of lies and of slander and friendships destroyed,
And everywhere treacherous agents deployed,

Of aberrant policies skewed to the left,
Of fraud and coercion and caucusing theft,
Of all must I sing before my song can end,
And of a dark night about to descend.

By your own actions I show what you’ve earned,
That you be loved, or that you be spurned,
For your office now deign to show some respect,
Each human life to the weakest protect.

Of arms and the man, and the blood on your hands,
I sing– the damnation your conduct demands,
Change your heart now; change your policies too,
A nation’s healing at last let ensue.

Editorial Note: The theme that is referenced in this poem regarding Senator Obama’s opposition to a bill which would have directed abortion providers in Illinois to resusitate fetuses born alive after an abortion is a sensitive subject for many people. We at The Confluence do not dictate how people should feel about abortion. We respect the views of our readers from both sides of this issue. However, in general, the sentiment of the readers at The Confluence is that we believe that abortion should be safe, legal and rare and that all of us, no matter where our starting point, can work towards the goal of prevention of unwanted pregnancies as the best way to insure that abortions are unnecessary in the future.

Saturday: When Hillary met Sally

We have never understood the irrational hatred of the press towards Hillary Clinton.  We know why the Republicans couldn’t stand her husband, Bill.  It was because he was actually the one in charge during the nineties and they never accepted him as legitimate.  Besides they were on a roll with Movement Conservatism.  Yeah, all that hard work was paying off, once they made up their minds to fight their exile into the wilderness after Barry Goldwater’s defeat. That never explained viciousness of the media towards Hillary though.

As far as we have been able to trace, the nastiness started in earnest just after the Clintons arrived in Washington and Sally Quinn attempted to pull Hillary into her social circle.  But it seems like Sally was playing quite a different career game than Hillary.  I imagine it was a little like what happened on Mad Men between Peggy, the newly promoted junior copywriter from the steno pool, and Joan, the office manager who saw her job as a route to domestic bliss in the suburbs with a man she snagged from one of the corner offices:

And then Hillary proceeded to dismiss the White House travel office staff who was collaborating with the media for sweet travel deals and gossip.  We think that was approximately the time the $%@# hit the fan.  Oh, sure, the Republicans gave both Clintons a colonoscopy with 8 years of investigations.  It was relentless and brutal- and categorized in minute and embarrasing detail on the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.  Seven years of the worst president in history, a president the media helped to put in power, was not enough to curb the media’s enthusiasm for trashing Hillary.  When the primary season started, they picked up right where they left off.  Hillary was the media’s favorite punching bag.  She almost won too.  It drove them NUTS.

We’ve known for more than a year now that the media has a sycophantic hard-on for Obama.  So, it came as a shock yesterday when Paul Krugman, who is generally well liked in PUMA circles, wrote the following in his blog, The Conscience of a Liberal:

The crisis isn’t the only scary thing going on. Something very ugly is taking shape on the political scene: as McCain’s chances fade, the crowds at his rallies are, by all accounts, increasingly gripped by insane rage. It’s not just a mob phenomenon — it’s visible in the right-wing media, and to some extent in the speeches of McCain and Palin.

We’ve seen this before. One thing that has been sort of written out of the mainstream history of politics is the sheer insanity of the attacks on the Clintons — they were drug smugglers, they murdered Vince Foster (and lots of other people), they were in league with foreign powers. And this stuff didn’t just show up in fringe publications — it was discussed in Congress, given props by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and so on.

What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. Ronald Reagan was supposed to have settled that once and for all.

The good thing is that Krugman acknowledges the irrationality of the attacks on the Clintons.  What he *doesn’t* acknowledge is that much of it comes from his neighbors at the NY Times, not the Wall Street Journal.  Did Krugman read any of the stuff from Frank Rich during the primaries?  And does anyone know what bug Maureen Dowd has up her ass about Hillary? (BTW, Maureen, we still aren’t voting for him and we don’t really care what you think.)

We’ve often heard it said that Hillary’s campaign was nasty towards reporters. But I used to sit in on those conference calls between the media and Howard Wolfson.  I often came away impressed with Wolfson’s comparative composure.  The venom that flowed from the likes of Andrea Mitchell was astonishing in its sarcasm and sheer unmistakable contempt for anything Hillary said or did or planned.  After 15 years of this stuff, I wouldn’t have liked the media much either.

Paul has been hanging out with his buds at the NYTimes too long.  He has started to believe what ever new fantasy they are promoting these days.  This new meme about voters longing for Ronald Reagan is pretty stupid.  I don’t doubt that some of McCain’s fans are waxing nostalgic for the Great Communicator but I suspect the real source of their discontent is similar to ours on the left who can’t stand Obama.  It’s like we didn’t have any choice in the matter.  The media did the picking of our nominee this year.  The voters were superfluous.  We on the Democratic side were steamrolled if we wanted Hillary Clinton.  We’ve been told that neither our opposition or our votes are legitimate.  Both the DNC and the media had a hand in stripping us of our ability to affect the election.  But our resistance to Obama is not about Hillary anymore.  It’s about preserving our right to self determination.

Now, Republican voters are getting a taste of that same media fueled Obama juggernaut.  Those of us on the left who experienced the “Hillary can’t win, it’s mathematically impossible” haka that began in February recognize the “It’s over.  Obama won!” haka of October.  But Republican voters have yet to connect this meme with the intense psychological warfare that David Axelrod is throwing at them with the media’s help.  And Krugman is completely wrong when he connects the agitiation of the anti-Obama voters with Reagan.  I survived the Reagan years as a college student.  There is nothing about Reagan that I liked, admired or wish to have again.  I loathed the guy.  In fact, I really wish both McCain and Palin would drop the lavish praise of Reagan.  Whenever he is mentioned, I lose whatever tepid warmth I have for the Republican ticket.

Today we see a new media frenzy over Sarah Palin’s Troopergate problem.  I guess I’ve been watching the Hillary vs Sally problem long enough to know that it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans and no one but the media and the cognitively dissonant in the Obamasphere will care.  So, she tried to get her brother in law fired after he did some things that would get most people fired.  So she went about it the wrong way.  The way the media is behaving, you’d think the only reason she ran for governor was so she could use the full force of her office to torment and harrass this one man.  It reminds me of the massive amount of ink that was wasted on Hillary’s missing billing records and the federal case that was made out of that.  Or the unintentional exaggeration she made of one of her Bosnia trips.  Or her firing of the White House travel office.  Who frickin’ cares?

They all pale in comparison to Obama’s campaign staff intimidating and threatening delegates at the convention and invalidating the primary election results in 57 states.  It can’t hold a candle to the manipulation of the primary results by the DNC on Obama’s behalf that he accepted without protest.  It doesn’t come close to the fraud, verbal and physical bullying that happened during the caucuses.  It’s not nearly as enraging to voters as the Obama surrogates who accuse us of racism while they undermine us with sexism. The media barely covered any of this so we’ve had to document the atrocities on our own.  Obama may be their darling, but he isn’t ours

What I can’t understand is how it is that Krugman, the Princeton economics professor with the massive brain that crunches data without effort, can’t understand what’s really going on with voters at McCain rallies who resent the media’s interference with their ability to make a decision and have it count.

Go figure.

Deprogramming and Kool-aid Detox

I’ve been asked repeatedly of late if I have any tips for people who have loved ones trapped in the cult of Obama.  After consulting with my good friend Captain Spaulding who has lots of experience with cults and trapping people, I offer this handy guide.

Obamamania is no joke.  The first step is believing the media hype.  Then comes the experimentation with Kool-aid, and before you know it, BAM! – you’re a brain-eating zombie.

It makes me ill when I smell the fetid stench of sugary swamp bilge oozing from some Kool-aid slurper’s pores.  I think it’s the rotting odor of decaying brain cells wafting out with every hot exhalation.

You can spot an Obot by looking for some or all of the following signs:

1.  The inability to use logic and think rationally.

2.  Paranoid delusions that everyone (except fellow cult-members) is a racist

3. Uncontrollable outbursts of sexism and misogyny (similar to Tourette’s)

4.  Bright discoloration around the nostrils (caused by snorting the Kool-aid in powder form)

If your friend or beloved family member isn’t already, um . . . “receptive and ready” to begin deprogramming, you will have go catch them convince them to come with you for treatment.  The Captain recommends duct tape and a large windowless van for transportation.

Before your patient arrives, you need to make preparations.  We recommend a large house, preferably with a basement and neighbors who mind their own business.  Select a well-lit and cozy room and furnish it with a comfortable bed and chairs.  On every wall should hang several pictures of Hillary and Bill Clinton.  Pleasant music and aroma-therapy scents should be brought in.  This will be your room.

Take the least desirable room of the house, and remove any amenities like carpeting or lighting.  Board up the windows but be sure to leave openings for cold drafts.  Plumbing is optional, depending on your sense of smell and how hard you plan to work.  A plastic bucket works for the Captain, but you may want to include lots of air freshener.

“Brain-eating” is a metaphor, your patient will eat other things.  Gruel is a common and easy to prepare meal, with some occasional “mystery meat” from your refrigerator for variety.  DO NOT feed them Cheetos, no matter how much they beg or plead.  Those little orange puffs of imitation food are a gateway drug.

The length and intensity of the treatment will depend on how much you really care about your patient and what happens on November 4th.  For the first step in the treatment process you will need to obtain a fish about 18 inches to 2 feet in length.  Fresh fish are available for a reasonable price in most large supermarkets, but for those on a budget you can obtain not-so-fresh fish for free from the supermarket dumpster. 

Secure your patient to a chair with generous amounts of duct tape, leaving their head and shoulders exposed.  Blindfolds optional.  In a loud firm voice say “Nobama”  while striking your patient across the face with the fish.  (Don’t hold back, really smack them)  Continue saying “Nobama” while striking them back and forth in the face with the fish.  Go ahead and yell it if the neighbors can’t hear.  Keep doing this until your arms are too tired to continue.

This won’t help your patient but by now you should feel much better.  Repeat Step 1 as often as you feel like it, but eventually you may need another fish.

With luck, sometime around mid-November you can release your patient while laughing at them mockingly.  It is possible,  however, that you may have to keep them somewhat longer, until they either exclaim “My God, what did I do?” or you lose patience and brick up the entrance to their room.  (I will remind you that Captain Spaulding does need organ donors and is willing to pay finder’s fees, no questions asked.)

I hope this guide has been helpful.  Good luck and happy hunting.