Have we all gone mad? (Bob Kerrey Talks About Sen. Obama)

Cross-posted at MyDD. I hope that's okay.

I should be buying Christmas presents online after a long day at work, but I get home, do my usual perusal of my favorite liberal blogs, and what do I see? Kos, Atrios, Carpetbagger, and possibly others, are implying that Sen. Bob Kerrey is trying to stir up racist and religious smears against Sen. Obama, in a despicable attempt to boost Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Wow! Serious stuff. So what did he say?

Apparently, this:

   "The fact that he's African American is a big deal. I do expect and hope that Hillary is the nominee of the party. But I hope he's used in some way. If he happens to be the nominee of the party and ends up being president, I think his capacity to influence in a positive way without spending a penny the behavior of a lot of underperforming black youth today is very important, and he's the only one who can reach them."

   Kerrey continued, "It's probably not something that appeals to him, but I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim. There's a billion people on the planet that are Muslims and I think that experience is a big deal." He added, "He's got a whale of a lot more intellectual talent than I've got as well."

Apparently he then went on CNN and said this:

   "I've told Barack Obama when I've met with him. It's something that I've spoken about before. So, this is not something that just sort of came out in the (inaudible) out there in Iowa. I've thought about it a great deal. I've watched the blogs try to say that you can't trust him because he spent a little bit of time in a secular madrassa. I feel quite opposite. I think it's a tremendous strength, whether he's in the United States Senate or whether he's in the White House. I think it's a tremendous asset."

And now the lefty blogosphere is aswarm with messages from outraged folks claiming this is the vilest attack yet--an obvious attempt to bring up the generally unknown facts that (1) Obama is apparently partly black, (2) that his father was Muslim and he has a Muslim middle name, and (3) he apparently went to a secular school (madrassa simply means "school" in Arabic, and shouldn't mean "place where they teach people to blow things up" anymore than "liberal" means "someone who will force you to have an abortion even if you're a guy.") somewhere where he had Muslim classmates, things you might not know had you not, for example, ever seen a picture of him, read Obama's book, listened to him talk about his childhood, or generally been sentient at any point in the last year or so.

That we even have to spend time arguing about this makes my brain hurt. Here we have someone who is unequivocally and obviously praising someone (I mean, my detractors never say that I have a "whale of a lot more intellectual talent than [they've] got", or call me a "tremendous asset", or say that something in my upbringing is a "tremendous strength."), and people are convinced it's a smear. Because he's suggesting Obama's Muslim ties will help us with our diplomacy in the world's most dangerous region. How dare he! Who would ever suggest something like that?

Or something like this:

   Consider this hypothetical. It's November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man--Barack Hussein Obama--is the new face of America. In one simple image, America's soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama's face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

Who wrote that? Andrew Sullivan, who cleverly hid this piece of religion-baiting in a cover story for The Atlantic in which he endorses Obama. (With enemies like these, who needs friends?) How much does Sullivan despise Hillary Clinton? The Israelis and the Palestinians will mediate the meeting where Sullivan finally agrees to stop hating Clinton.

Come on, folks. That's not a dog whistle--because we're not dogs. We're Democrats. There is nothing wrong with noticing that Obama's unique background would make him an extremely strong ambassador of American values in the Middle East, and that he makes an excellent role model for black youth. It's Republicans who are supposed to go nuts when John Kerry mentions the extremely well-known fact that Mary Cheney is gay, wondering how anyone would dare mention such a shameful fact. We're Democrats. We know better. And we know that while Obama is Christian and proud of it, that he does have Muslim family, and that in our vision of America, that's a good thing.