Drink This In With Your Coffee!
By SusanUnPC on August 5, 2008 at 8:33 AM in Barack Obama, Electability, John McCain, Race Card
TAKE A BIG SWIG:
ATV/Zogby Poll Toss-Up! McCain 42%, Obama 41% as Undecided Voters Increase… … “Obama loses support among his strongest demographic groups. …”
DON’T CHOKE NOW:
Bob Herbert: Why is everyone missing the phallic symbols in McCain’s Britney ad?
(As I wrote to some friends, perhaps the problem is that Bob Herbert is the only person in America who sees ANY phallic symbols in those ads.)
Herbert read a book’s worth of meaning into this single phrase by John McCain last spring: “Mr. McCain had himself touted as the ‘American president Americans have been waiting for’.”
There was nothing subtle about that attempt to position Senator Obama as the Other, a candidate who might technically be American but who remained in some sense foreign, not sufficiently patriotic and certainly not one of us — the “us” being the genuine red-white-and-blue Americans who the ad was aimed at.
That is heavy. Quite frankly, Herbert is near hysteria: “The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control.”
And could it be that there is a RELATIONSHIP between Mr. Obama’s falling poll numbers and his playing of the race card? The American people — even white people — are decent, good people who overwhelmingly abhore REAL cases of racism. But they also detest the race card being flapped about, especially when a candidate is cornered because of his inability to handle the job of being a presidential candidate, let alone being a president.
Then I read this self-pitying drivel by Mr. Herbert — despite the fact that it is Obama’s OWN campaign that has promoted him as a hip pop icon!
Mr. Obama has to endure these grotesque insults with a smile and heroic levels of equanimity. The reason he has to do this — the sole reason — is that he is black.
Mr. Herbert, you’re an able (albeit not great) essayist, but your hypersensitivity is getting the best of you.
By your standards, there is nothing we can say against Mr. Obama that cannot be construed by you as racist.
Why can’t YOU see what most of America sees? That it is Mr. Obama and his campaign who have turned him into a “pop icon.”
That it is HE who has replaced the American flag with his giant O on the tail of his campaign plane? (While we’re speaking of symbols, just what is that giant O a symbol of, Mr. Herbert?)
That it is HE who put the word “President” on his plush seat on his incredibly expensive campaign plane.
That it is HE who okayed the use of a faux presidential seal on his lecturn.
Yet you twist Mr. McCain’s correct satire of Mr. Obama’s own iconic campaign strategy into somehow being highly sexualized, featuring two white blonde women. No. That’s not it at all.
Speaking of icons, why don’t you take to task the vile, misogynistic “lyrics” of Ludacris and Snoop Dog, both of whom Obama admires and listens to?
But, then, those are only insulting to women, and they had better get used to it, right?
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by Ronald Scott
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