I was concerned when I saw an online advertisement for Barack Obama Exposed! while surfing the ’Net recently. After all, if a scurrilous, anonymous email that couldn’t even distinguish between the Illinois senator and a lawmaker from Minnesota could cause problems for the campaign, how much damage could be inflicted by a recognizable repository of conservative thought?
Not to worry. This compilation of 16 essays penned by contributors to Human Events contains no revelations about sexual predilections or a double life. In fact, some of the articles mention Obama only in passing. Barack Obama Exposed! has all the earmarks of having been patched together after a hasty Google search, the result relying upon Human Events’ 64-year history to lend it some gravitas. (Imagine: Human Events, a profoundly conservative publication, was founded in 1944, in the middle of wartime, during the term of a popular liberal president. Despite this, none of Human Events’ founders were branded as unpatriotic or treasonous. The mind boggles.)
But there’s not much intellectual heft to Barack Obama Exposed! By the time I finished reading the essays, I was convinced that the authors could claim only that marvel of evolutionary engineering called the opposable thumb as a link to humanity.
Take Ann Coulter. Please. Her mean-spirited take on Obama’s campaign announcement reads as follows:
Obama made his announcement surrounded by hundreds of adoring Democratic voters. And those were just the reporters. There were about 400 more reporters at Obama’s announcement than Mitt Romney’s, who, by the way, is more likely to be sworn in as our next president than B. Hussein Obama.
Now, this is why Ms. Coulter is held in such high esteem among conservatives. After peering into a murky crystal ball and deciding that former Massachusetts governor Romney is an obvious front-runner, she takes a gratuitous swipe at the media. Then she pokes fun at Obama, not because of his race, but because of his name.
A few words of explanation here, Barack (an alternative spelling to Barak or Baraq, meaning thunder) and Hussein (the diminutive form of Hassan, meaning handsome), are perceived as being Arabic names, but they are, in fact, Hebrew as well. Both languages share a common Semitic root, just as French, Spanish and Italian share a common Latin root. Ms. Coulter’s comments would meet a strict definition of being anti-Semitic.
Author Steve Chapman takes a shot at Obama’s name thusly: "That a Hawaiian-born son of a Kenyan father and a white mother, who grew up in Indonesia and has a name on loan from al Qaeda, could generate such broad excitement proves something Powell already demonstrated: Americans can surprise you."
Well, then. And I suppose Rudy Giuliani has a name that’s on loan from the Mafia?
Elsewhere, Amanda B. Carpenter takes exception to Obama’s pro-choice position regarding abortion. She argues that his views run counter to his Christian faith, while attempting condemn him for his father’s background in Islam and subsequent atheism; and his mother’s skepticism.
Robert Spencer, who insinuates that the Democratic candidate might face an Islamic death penalty for leaving that faith, also considers Obama’s faith. The unspoken suggestion: Can’t have someone like that in the White House, can we?
Of course, no discussion of faith can be complete without some examination of how the other side is praying, and Barack Obama Exposed! contributor Ben Shapiro does not disappoint:
And yet it is Barack Obama—a man who sees aloe vera as an actual foreign relations strategy, who routinely derides military sacrifice—whom the Democrats put forth as their hot new candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination.
Will America join Europe, sticking its head in the sand, enabling Islamism by ignoring it? Iran certainly hopes so. Like Al Qaeda, Iran’s leaders must be praying every day that Americans turn to a candidate like Barack Obama.
Even those people who merely support Obama come in for their share of pummeling. Mac Johnson offers this jaundiced view of the Obama phenomenon:
"Yet listening to the leftstream media, one would have to conclude that the man is a multifaceted miracle. He’s a moderate. He’s a third way. He’s demographic fusion cuisine. He’s a floor wax. He’s a desert topping (sic). He’s everything you’d hoped for and whatever you need," Johnson writes in one essay. A second essay finds him going after Obama backer Oprah Winfrey:
"Oprah is the friend every woman thinks she should have. She pays attention totally to their needs and hopes for an hour every day. Oprah is smart and funny and confident and wouldn’t at all want to hang out with you in real life. But several million mediocre folks all combined make an acceptable object for her attention."
These two quotes are evidence that progressives aren’t the elitist snobs that right-wingers claim.
And it took the mental exertions of two—count ’em two –Human Events contributors to tell everyone how wrong Obama was to say that the sacrifices of U.S. service men and women in Iraq had been "wasted." Considering that both Monica Crowley and Michelle Malkin have been hauling water for the master of mangled language who currently occupies the Oval Office, it takes a great deal of nerve to do that.
L. Brent Bozell wastes a few hundred words telling how unfair it was for the media to pursue a story on George W. Bush’s drug use while ignoring Obama’s history of substance abuse. Of course, it was Bush’s refusal to talk about the accusations surrounding him that made the story a challenge to reporters. Obama defused the issue by writing about it.
There’s more in this collection, but you get the idea, gentle reader.
Two things occurred to me after I finished this collection of essays. First, I believed I knew more about the character of Obama’s critics than I did about the man himself.
Second, having succeeded in that, I needed a shower.