A Thorny Question of Religion for Obama.

DID HE BECOME A MUSLIM WHILE ATTENDING A RELIGIOUS SCHOOL AS A KID? IF SO, HE’S GOT A PROBLEM-- NO MATTER HIS CHRISTIAN FAITH NOW.

If He Became One Even Temporarily as a Child, it Could Immensely Complicate His Presidential Candidacy. Father’s Likely Affiliation Basis the “Hussein” Middle Name, Mother’s Remarriage to Indonesian in Heavily Muslim Country Points to Strong Possibility.

Two Pronged Political Headache: Americans May Not Want a former Muslim President…and, As if You Didn’t know, Muslims Vow Vengeance on all who leave the Faith. Is This a Hillary-Fomented Backlash? Just Asking.


Media Not Going Out of Their Way to Confront Senator with Religious Question

Unlike the Tack They Used in 1960 Against Catholic John F. Kennedy.

Senator’s Office Insists Question is “Bigoted Attack!”

By Thomas F. Roeser

[Updated Story from The Wanderer, the oldest national Catholic weekly.]

CHICAGO—A Barack Obama Democratic intra-party backlash has started, with a blog item from the “Sun-Times’” astute political writer Lynn Sweet, significant in this birth-state of Hillary Clinton where the regnant Democratic party would have endorsed her for president except for its favorite son, born in Hawaii, who has become a national phenomenon of sorts: Barack Hussein Obama. Sweet is an Obama enthusiast but beyond this is an excellent reporter. The backlash smacks of Hillary Clinton, showing that the little lady won’t take this Obama phenomenon stuff lying down.

Most of the malicious attacks, leaked to the media, don’t come from Republicans but from Hillary Clinton allies. Obama craze not withstanding, the New York Senator commands significant elements of support in her home state. Before we get to the mischievous leaks, take a look at who’s for whom in this prairie state which owns most of the significant action for the Democratic nomination.

The most powerful Democrat, Mayor Richard M. Daley, who has announced his own candidacy for reelection in Spring of 2007, has announced that he supports Obama. This is mandatory because of the clout blacks have in the Democratic party. Also, there is little doubt that Illinois’ reelected Democratic governor, Rod Blagojevich, who will head the delegation to the national convention, will do the same. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) is in a particularly tight spot: owing his soul to Daley who supports Obama but whose rise after Daley first hired him came from patronage by the Clintons—although Hillary Clinton caused him to be demoted in White House hierarchy but Bill, who rescued him and plopped him back front-and-center, is heavily involved for Hillary. Look for Rahm to remember that he doesn’t need the Clinton’s animosity. He will most certainly finesse it and come down on the side of a Hillary-Obama ticket.

Intriguingly, Daley has caused to be leaked—in order to placate Hillary supporters—his own private misgiving that Obama is too liberal, scoring 100% on the ADA scale thus far in his Senatorial voting record, six points more than even Sen. Ted Kennedy. Daley, father of a serviceman, worries that Obama’s dovishness on national security could make him vulnerable to Republican charges in 2008 and thereby hurt the Democratic ticket. Nor is the mayor alone in his misgiving. Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan, chairman of the Democratic party here, is one of the very few Democrats who has tiffed seriously with Obama, calling him derogatorily “the Messiah,” after Obama’s state treasurer with mob ties, Alexi Gianoullias, candidate defeated Madigan’s. So for now while the Obama rock-star fad is hitting a national high, only Madigan has had the guts to low-ball the incipient presidential candidate. But behind the scenes, all Illinois media know the Hillary leak-brigade is hard at work.

Thus far only one Obama backlash news story has done some scuffing of the Obama image: but not much. And it was not a Hillary leak but from a Republican source: the one from the “Chicago Tribune” that details how Obama profited personally thanks to the solicitude of an indicted fixer’s wife. Tony Rezko was indicted by the feds for siphoning kickbacks from firms doing business with the state of Illinois. When Obama bought a Chicago mansion in 2005 for $300,000 less than the asking price a stunning coincidence occurred when, the same day, Rezko’s wife bought an adjoining lot for the full $625,000 asking price, which caused the “Tribune” to speculate that Mrs. Rezko subsidized Obama’s $1 million plus house in addition to providing a park-like preserve with no access to a public street. That was serious enough to draw a public admission of fault from Bambi. Other news leaks bear a shadowy imprint of the Hillary forces. Most are inconsequential. Obama’s path to glory is not going to be blocked by a Tony Rezko indiscretion.

Ah, but one has the potential to do serious damage.

That’s the rumor, reported by Sweet that began with blogster Debbie Schlussel, a conservative talking-head on MSNBC, now carried widely by word of mouth by some political cognoscenti in Chicago bars. Right now the tale is in a decidedly phase 3 cyclonic stage as a key rumor in the bars. The rumor goes: While Barack Hussein Obama is affiliated with the Unitarian-like United Church of Christ in Chicago, he may have, at one time, been a Muslim—or at the very least was accepted as one in his early years: which, if verified, could truly be explosive and possibly disqualifying politically for the presidential nomination of a major political party in a nation at war with extreme elements of the religion. There has been no formal answer to that charge by the Obama people but the rumor gains currency.

First, his Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., killed in an automobile accident, was apparently a Muslim. No big stuff so far as it goes although it’s interesting to note that Hussein, given to both father and son, is a distinctively Muslim name—derived from that of Husayn ibn Ali [626-680], grandson of the prophet Muhammad. He was killed in the battle of Karbala in A. D. 680 and is a day of mourning and religious observance for Shi’a Muslims. Let’s say if you got a kid running around named Hussein, it means something.

Second, according to best-selling lawyer-novelist, Chicago native and fervent liberal Democrat, Scott Turow in the Internet publication “Salon,” young Obama went to a Muslim school for two years in Indonesia. Third, his mother, Anna, re-married an Indonesian man (most likely a Muslim as Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world).

Fourth, while Junior’s affinity is for Kenya which is largely Christian, it has a fast-growing Muslim population which has engaged in a good deal of religious violence and riots against Christians. Kenyan courts apply Sharia (or Muslim) law when the participants are Muslim. Fifth, in Junior’s book Dreams from My Father, after his father died in Nairobi in 1982, Obama was working in Chicago. He met his Kenyan sister, Auma, a linguist educated in Germany who was visiting in the United States. When she returned to Kenya in 11986 to teach for a year at the University of Nairobi, Obama finally made a trip to his father’s homeland. There he fully embraced the heritage and family he’d never known and came to terms with his father whom he had mistakenly believed was a foreign prince but who now realized was a human being burdened by his own illusions and vulnerabilities: this from his best-seller autobiography.

Schlussel puts it out this way: “Even if he identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on “Oprah”), Obama is a man whom Muslims think is a Muslim and who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage.” She asks: Is this “a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where would his loyalties be?” She goes further: “Is [he] even the man we’d want to be a heartbeat away from the presidency if Hillary Clinton offers him the vice presidential candidacy on her ticket (which he certainly wouldn’t turn down)?

Or, put another way: A president thought to have been a Muslim as a child and who left the faith for Christianity is the last person to “heal”—which is Obama’s favorite word applied to foreign affairs. Even a third way: a president trying to disabuse a suspicious world that he’s soft on the Muslim religion may want to use replete examples to get tough. Finally a fourth: how would a president once viewed as a Muslim who became a backslider do in the concert of world politics?

Now there has been no substantiation or denial by the Obama people of the rumor that Ms. Schussel has put forward other than for Obama people to claim it is (a) racist, (b) vindictive and (c) full of suppositions. Very well, then let them answer it. Racist? It has nothing to do with Obama’s half caste black-white heritage. Vindictive? Not any more so than the theory put forward against John F. Kennedy, when he was the Democratic nominee in 1960. Full of suppositions? Sure: so the best way to clear the air is for Obama or his staff to give out all the facts.

Kennedy was called an inappropriate candidate for the presidency by none other than Norman Vincent Peale who cited Catholic theology on the absolute nature of the Pope in spiritual governance. Peale said that if the Catholic Kennedy were elected president he would not be beholden to the electorate but to the Pope. This writer remembers well the controversy spawned by Peale and others who asked: does separation of church and state mean what it says or does it mean subordination of state to the church or the other way around? Then they linked many interesting questions: the dominant role of the Pope as head of the church and infallible, or immunity from all error, when promulgating a doctrine on faith or morals. Protestant critics confused the doctrine of infallibility with that of impeccability.

It got to the point in 1960 that Peale found some quotations from St. Paul which he used to assume that Kennedy would be subservient to the papacy in a number of secular actions. Peale’s affirmations went on to specify numberless questions until none other than Adlai Stevenson, a wordsmith, was asked on a Chicago street by a television reporter to comment while the TV camera rolled. Here was an example of brilliant political answering almost unrivaled. The reporter asked Stevenson: “Dr. Norman Vincent Peale has questioned John Kennedy’s loyalty to the country by citing an epistle from St. Paul. Would you comment, sir?”

Stevenson said: “Yes. You can say that I find Paul appealing but Peale appalling!”

That quip got the country chuckling and gained Kennedy time until he could make a definitive statement to the Greater Houston, Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960. Kennedy specified that if elected president he would follow an independent course and if there ever came a time when he could not in conscience he would resign the presidency. The key sentence was: “If the time should ever come—and I do not concede any conflict to be remotely possible—when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office, and I hope any other conscientious public servant would do likewise.”

That answer satisfied. Interestingly enough, the man who wrote the speech for Kennedy was John Cogley, a radicalized Catholic, a writer for Commonweal who later became religion editor of The New York Times whose difficulties with the Church later led to his leaving it over the issue of Humane Vitae and dying as an Episcopalian.

“Schlussel’s article is the latest example of the bigoted conservative attacks against Senator Obama,” said Karl Frisch, a spokesman for the Senator. But, come on: that’s won’t satisfy. On the December 5 edition of Fox News’ “Special Report with Brit Hume,” senior political correspondent Carl Cameron told viewers: “Though he’s written two books about himself already, most people know very little about Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.’s uncommonly privileged life.” They know nothing about whether Obama was ever a practicing Muslim or if the school he attended required adherence to that belief.

If he had professed as a Muslim even as a kid and backslid, Obama would likely have more to worry about than merely losing a presidential election. His life could be in danger from Muslim sources. As an expert in Islam, Robert Spencer, has written in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), “…[I]n traditional Islamic law, when a Muslim converts to another faith, it can bring a death sentence. This is not, mind you, `extremist’ Islam. It is the Islamic mainstream, based on a statement of Muhammad: `Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.’ It is also based on a statement of the Qur’an: `But whoever of you recants and dies an unbeliever, his works shall come to nothing in this world and the next and they are companions of the fire forever” [Qur’an 2:217]. Spencer writes, “This has been widely interpreted by traditional Muslim commentators as giving sanction to the death penalty for apostates—which they derive from the verse’s assertion that the apostate’s work will come to nothing in this world’ as well as the next.”

Questions concerning whether or not he ever embraced the Muslim religion will be front and center before Barack Obama gets very far along in the presidential campaign. They aren’t questions Hillary Clinton is asking but assuredly are ones some of her supporters are spreading in rumor form before the mainstream media—enthusiastic Obama sycophants—will be pressed to ultimately ask. As eager as Lynn Sweet is to see Obama win, her better nature—that of an outstanding reporter—won out. Good for her.

Precarious Audacity: The Democratic Love Affair with Obama is Bound to Blow Over Soon with Disillusionment and a Fresh Realism.

While He Looks, Sounds Great at First Blush, He is Far Too Naïve for the Job. That’s Why it’s Best for Him to Run Now so Dems Can Scratch

That Itch and then Pick Someone Mature.

By Thomas F. Roeser

A column for The Wanderer, the oldest national Catholic weekly (with some updating).


CHICAGO—The official press announcement from the office of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) was bristling with importance. It followed immediately a huge reception of screaming, weeping exultant partisans in New Hampshire on Sunday, December 10, where he addressed the largest pre-presidential primary crowd in modern state history. There were 1,500 cheering people as enthusiastic as if they were witnessing John Lennon. At exactly that moment, the junior Illinois senator’s Washington office filed a low-key, terse heads-up to the national media.

It said that Obama would make an important announcement the following evening, on Monday, December 11, about “an upcoming contest of great importance to the American people.” Media savants nodded to themselves and did high-fives: here it is! The news ricocheted around the nation and was a bombshell here as with every pundit in the country. Political correspondents were called to the office of major newspapers and ordered to be prepared to write crisp commentaries on the entrance of the charismatic African American senator into the presidential race of 2008. Television networks stood by; Washington, D. C. staffs hustled to their offices. The office of Sen. Hilary Clinton (D-N.Y), the Illinois native who until the Obama fad was regarded as a sure-thing for the Democratic presidential nomination, tensed up. Her publicists got ready to issue good sport welcoming statements to Obama. All the while gritting their teeth in recognition of what could be the most dramatic contest for the Democratic nomination since 1960.

All Democratic presidential candidates and current and former presidents were standing by. President George W. Bush lifted his eyes from Baghdad. Former president Bill Clinton, intensely interested in his wife’s presidential future hired a writer to contrive some ad-libs.

Add to them former Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), now considered a hopeless basket case after having maimed himself with a badly delivered joke misinterpreted as slurring military service; former U. S. Senator John Edwards, once regarded as the most potent alternative to Hillary Clinton; former vice president Al Gore, considered to be the major challenger to Hillary Clinton, worrying that he would lose his berth to Obama.

And on the Republican side Sen. John McCain, the front-runner for the GOP nomination who had had his own earlier run-in with Obama and had allowed his old Navy blow-torch temper embarrass him; Rudy Giuliani, running second to McCain for the nod felt suddenly depressed; Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, regarded by some as the conservative challenger to the nomination wondered if the charges against his Morman religion’s old strictures against blacks would be revived. Also, Rev. Jesse Jackson rehearsed a statement that said Obama would lead all blacks from Galilee to Jubilee. Rev. Al Sharpton had a plane reservation for Chicago to get some face-time on TV. All waited tensely.

Then on Monday night came news that seemed incredible—at first. Obama would appear on—of all things—the sports TV network ESPN which ordinarily has a huge viewership. Political wise men and marketers nodded their heads. This was a new era and the fact that Obama would choose the hugely-watched sports network would be in deference to the enormous ratings sports has over regular news breaks. It was to be a new era dawning.

Then, with everybody fastened on ESPN, Obama appeared and in a serious mode. He began by saying in presidential tones that he recognized “this is a contest about the future.”

Journalists began to scribble and tape recorders whirred. “This is a contest about the future. A contest between two very different philosophies. A contest that will ultimately be decided in America’s heartland,” said Obama. “In Chicago, they’re asking: Does the new guy have enough experience to lead us to victory? In St. Louis they’re wondering: are we facing a record that’s really so formidable? Or is it all just a bunch of hype?”

Journalists across the nation leaned forward, ready to link this announcement with the most dramatic ever made on television: John Kennedy at Fannueil Hall, Boston, announcing as the first Catholic to seek the presidency since Al Smith; the Lyndon Johnson decision not to run for president in 1968; Franklin Roosevelt’s announcement that he would seek an unprecedented third term in 1940.

Obama’s voice was calm, measured.

“So tonight I’d like to put all doubts to rest. And tonight, after a lot of thought and a good deal of soul-searching, I would like to announce to my hometown of Chicago and all of America that I’m ready…”

Pause. Then an undignified, un-presidential shout:

“…for the Bears to go all the way! Go Bears!” And as he clapped a Bears cap on his head, he intoned in a resonant hum the V-signal that animated the three-dots-and-a-dash of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as used in World War II: da-da-da-DAH!

The most brilliant bit of promotion and hustle for any modern incipient presidential candidate. One which far exceeded the 12.7 million viewers of the previous week’s Monday Night Football—for the Chicago Bears-St. Louis Rams tussle. Only hopeless old fogies dating to the early 20th century didn’t like it. Kids, middle-agers, elders, blacks, whites, Hispanics, men, women, business-types, conservatives, liberals, radicals, reactionaries, feminists, racists, straights, gays, labor union beer drinkers, limousine liberal champagne sippers—people of all ages--loved it. As did I. It was not triviality triumphant; it was political merchandising at its most brilliant apex.

And a wondrous joke deservedly pulled on the too-solemn political writers who take everything a candidate says as equivalent to the Ten Commandments. As a journalist who goes back a very long way (too long, in fact) I can say it ranks with the prime stunt in the pre-television era when super-dark horse candidate Wendell L. Willkie became the odds-on favorite for the Republican presidential nomination of 1940 by appearing on and stumping experts like Clifton Fadiman and Oscar Levant on the country’s top-rated radio entertainment program “Information Please.” Robert Taft and Tom Dewey were eclipsed after that. Roosevelt’s jest about “my little dog Fala whose scotch blood was furious after Republican attacks” in 1944. Harry Truman’s radio imitation of commentator H. V. Kaltenborn pronouncing him defeated on election night 1948. The botched polling of the three-member Puerto Rican delegation at the Republican convention of 1952. The screamingly funny screwed up valedictory of Herbert Hoover at the GOP convention four years later.

Or John Kennedy’s appearance on live TV as the mystery guest on “What’s My Line” in 1960 and his dignified yet comic one-liners which caused viewers to regard him as a youthful composite of America.

Congratulations should go to the Illinois man who, assuredly, thought up and wrote the stunt: David Axelrod, a Democratic consultant who never had a presidential winner yet after twenty-plus years in the business.

Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, Franklin Roosevelt and the litany of presidential candidates going back to the birth of modern communications must have saluted this gimmick from their Valhalla.

Was the da-da-da-DAH! sung by the candidate—from Beethoven—overkill? Not on your life. But other missteps by Obama…including his own incredible naivete… come close to being fatal. And when he fails to get the presidential nomination as he surely will despite this brilliant hype and falls back to being just another Senator among the 100, he might well console himself by cherishing his Chicago Bears announcement which stirred the team’s juices to win 42 to 27 as it marched to a hoped-for Super Bowl victory. Race discrimination won’t beat him. Youth won’t beat him. Other factors will.

Great visuals are in place for him to be remembered enduringly as a losing primary candidate before the convention, however. Like Adlai Stevenson’s shoe with the hole in it; Al Gore having invented the Internet. Obama will be remembered appearing in the relaxed style of business casual appropriate for Gentleman’s Quarterly: a jacket, collared shirt but no tie which given his thin, boyish face looks just right: dressy enough to show serious intention but without the old-man formality of a tie and business suit. His fans say it reflects the quality of being comfortable with himself. From now on, it will be in fashion to go open-throated shirt and tieless. Not said very often is the fact that the only other world figure to appear thus is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who may also have thumbed through GQ to capture the jacket-and-no-tie look.

While Obama’s sartorial style has the refreshing quality of unconventional youth, his latest book, The Audacity of Hope called by detractors The Audacity of Hype or The Hope of Audacity is a disaster. The book which I read cursorily at Barnes & Noble in less than an hour, is not only the most ignorant book by a presidential candidate since Illinois’ Paul Simon’s which recommended slashing U. S. defense during the pre-primary jockeying of 1979-80 in the Cold War, it is the heady kid thoughts of a youth exultant that under campaign laws a Senator can fly in luxurious private jets donated by corporations for the parsimonious cost of just one regular first-class ticket. Until he discovered the down-side.

Whee! The book has all the depth of Action Comics—vapid, shallow, inexpert, embarrassingly naïve—totally shockingly unexpected from just a run-of-the-mill Harvard law grad and University of Chicago professor of law not to mention a Senator and incipient presidential candidate. In Audacity, Obama pinches himself for being able to ride in CEO luxury on private jets at such cheap cost. True, it is difficult to put up with the big business, big-labor escorts, lobbyists, who seek to ply him with requests for special interest favors. But, sigh, that is the burden of being a statesman. Then, he discovered that as the Democrats’ point-man on ethics, he was required to disdain such favors. This brings forth great sorrow; but he resolves to buck up.

The furor over Obama is because he is a living reincarnation of the seemingly innocent Bambi…wide-eyed, very youthful at 45, not immediately discerning on the motivations of those who want to take him to the cleaners (but with an inward notion of how to cash in on his celebrity). What will kill him politically is that he is congenitally tempted to violate his Bambi image and cash in. It happened to better men.

Running with special interests almost did-in John McCain which led him to the overkill corrective of collaborating on the “McCain-Feingold” act that put the 1st amendment in a straitjacket. That was to purge himself of corruptive stain of being a “Keating Five” wheeler-dealer who bummed free corporate jet rides and got favors in return for trying to save a near-bankrupt savings and loan. Even so, McCain is a vastly more prepared candidate for the presidency since he learned the lesson. Obama says he’s learned his lesson—but no: he hasn’t. He still often goes private jet paying one first class ticket. He still gets caught taking personal favors that he should avoid. He knows better but he can’t help it.

Is he either dumbly naïve or--as some journalists are beginning to ask-- is he the reverse of the Bambi he pretends to be? Everybody knows the story of the Disney tear-jerker. A baby deer is born and as we watch he experiences everything for the first time: butterflies and flowers, his first sight of snow and the forest fire. But as Chicago journalists now ask: this is a different kind of Bambi. This Bambi Obama looks innocent with beguiling soft brown eyes and a gentleness of a fawn but he has adjusted all too well to Chicago’s steamy political jungle. There’s no simple life for him. He’s susceptible to grandiose living quarters and privileges, made possible by his two big book sales, yes—but also because of the great good fortune that came to his lawyer wife and the freebie gestures of new-found rascal friends.

Then there’s Mrs. Obama. A statuesquely beautiful black woman, she loves the social limelight, standing next to her angular, beaming husband in evening clothes as the TV lights almost blind them as they walk into social gatherings of mega-multi-millionaires. He loves it too. But we begin with her.

Michelle Obama had had a modest income as a lawyer before her husband was elected to the Senate and became a national figure. She worked as a community organizer and a junior attorney through the sufferance of Newton Minow, an old liberal warhorse blue-chip lawyer of the old Democratic establishment. Then she worked as an assistant planner for Mayor Richard Daley. But as her husband’s career flourished, she got a good paying job at the University of Chicago hospitals, in the Hyde Park area of Chicago where they live. Her beginning salary there when he was just another state senator was about $50,000. But better things were to come along with his political success.

When her husband got elected to the U. S. Senate, her income rose to $121,910 with the hospitals in 2004 and she was put in charge of the institution’s community relations. And the next year, 2005, she was made vice president for external affairs—basically the same job with a fancier title—and received a massive salary hike to $316,962, tripling her income. The hospitals depend to a great extent on state and federal grants. Its president explained to the media that the value it placed in Mrs. Obama came naturally and was not related to her husband’s election. Sure. Okay, her stunning salary hike, while suspicious, does not register a scandal on the Chicago political Richter scale where many aldermen and city hall patrons can’t lie straight in bed. The next piece of coincidence does.


As the Obamas’ income expanded, the Senator and his wife determined to buy a luxurious mansion in the Hyde Park area. And I mean a luxurious mansion. Where Paul Douglas, the last Hyde Parker to go to the Senate, lived in a modest house he did on a professor’s salary and a bare apartment in Washington, where, to give him his due, Dick Durbin lives in a bachelor apartment in Washington which he shares with two other lawmakers, that doesn’t go with the Obamas.

Fair enough. With income in the millions from the book sales and their two hefty incomes, one might suppose that they need not have to take advantage of old-style politics such as have enlivened the biographies of other Chicago political types—especially when Barack Obama is touted as the new wave of reformer, eager to break with the corruption of our present day. A more disciplined man would be careful to keep his nose clean. Not so with the Obamas. It turns out that the Obamas’ property in the pricey South Side neighborhood adjoins that of one Antoin (“Tony”) Rezko, a close fixer friend of Governor Blagojevich. Rezko was indicted for siphoning kickbacks from firms wishing to do business with the state of Illinois. Earlier, Rezko and his companies contributed a total of $19,500 to Obama’s prior state campaigns (in Illinois corporate contributions to state campaigns are legal). In addition, Rezko held a fund-raiser in 2003 for Obama’s U. S. Senate campaign. Let us say the Rezkos and Obamas are well acquainted.

Rezko pleaded not-guilty on the kickbacks and must be regarded as innocent until incorrigible federal attorney Patrick Fitzgerald calls him to trial. But here the heavy taint of scandal could…not will but could…reach Obama because Obama bought his house in 2005 for about $300,000 less than the asking price. On that same day, Rezko’s wife purchased the adjoining lot, paying the full $625,000 asking price. The same day. Which prompted the Chicago Tribune to wonder if Mrs. Rezko didn’t subsidize Obama’s purchase of his $1million-plus home while at the same time providing a park-like preserve which has no access from a public street. The U. S. attorney has said nothing but--.

When first asked about the deal, Obama said he “dotted every i and crossed all the t’s.” Then a few days later he admitted the deal may look improper. “It was a mistake to have been engaged with him at all in this or any other personal business dealing that would allow him, or anyone else, to believe that he had done me a favor. For that reason, I consider this a mistake on my part and I now regret it.” There is a noticeable lag between Obama’s scathing criticism of corruption in other countries (such as in Africa where he charmed international media on his klieg-lighted tour there) and his benign toleration of Rezko in Chicago and his failure to comment on corruption in Chicago and Illinois where federales are sifting through files in Mayor Daley’s and Governor Blagojevich’s offices. From our champion of ethics: not a peep.

To his supposed rescue has come none other than that rogue donkey of Democratic politics, Fr.Andrew Greeley. Greeley has a weekly column in the Chicago “Sun-Times” and to switch the focus away from Rezko the waspish priest wrote an attempt to help Obama. Far from helping him, it got Obama in danger and Greeley into trouble. Greeley wrote that there are so many racists in this nation—and in the Republican party—that…get this…crazy “white supremacists will fall over one another in their attempts to derail the campaign…” Greeley then went—as he often does when inflamed—beyond the pale.



He wrote: “If he decides to run, the senator is a very brave man. He should invest in flak jackets and helmets—emotional and physical.”



That was the first hint of mention of a possible assassination attempt. The story was not only intemperate; it was an unintentional message of harm that any sober commentator and newspaper wants to avoid. It only underscored the truism in Chicago that when you have Andy Greeley on your side, watch out, as Joseph Cardinal Bernardin discovered too late.



Be that as it may, for now, Obama captivates primary state crowds where he exhorts Democrats to pick someone not from the baby boomer generation, one who is a break from the Vietnam-era politician, who reflects the shifting ethnic and racial makeup of the country—someone who has vision and magic. But his Bambi style—whether it’s naivete and accident-prone involvements with Chicago hoods and fixers--can be easily capitalized on in a primary campaign. In the last state campaign, he endorsed a Greek banker who has funded mob figures. When this came out, Obama didn’t drop the guy like a hot potato. He stuck with him.

Some journalists assure me that with this great hype will come a fall. I think so, too—but to save the party from itself, Obama has to run so that it can learn a lesson from this foolishness. But no one should expect cunning old Vietnam-era pol Hilary Clinton to go after Obama personally if they run against each other in the primaries. She will be a pleasant, harmless little lady candidate. No one can afford to assail a black Bambi in a Democratic party where African Americans are its largest, most temperamental and most loyal bloc. But insinuations in politics have been known to float up from nowhere. The biggest one McCain has to face is one that began in 2000: a cruel one…that as result of five years of solitary in the Hanoi Hilton, he’s half nuts.

With the disclosure of stories putting his judgment and maturity in doubt, Barack Obama will face his first big test in the primary debates. There he can’t get away with saying some states are blue, some states and red but all states are American: Rotary Club pap. So far he has not had the sophistication to handle a real first-class forensic debate on the issues—especially when his gaffes on U. S. defense and the domestic budget and his implacable animosity against tax cuts is leaked. When he debated Alan Keyes, he lost spectacularly but no one cared since Keyes’ emotional balance was doubted, too, at the time. But intellectual maturity is only one thing.

Like all other Democratic national candidates, he’s appalling on traditional moral issues…but he’s got one to get over—not bothersome to Democratic red-hots but independents and those Republicans who with misty eyes may be tempted to vote for him to allay fancied guilt for the fact that some whites owned slaves. He has tried to woo a kind of evangelical liberal constituency who care more for pollution and peace than unborn life. It hasn’t gone all that well. There he faces a big test. Already pro-life church groups and traditionalist organizations have been filled in—on an issue all but unanswerable: on Obama’s steadfast opposition to the Illinois “Born Alive” bill where he refused to admit any help be given in form of nutrition or pain-relievers to babies writhing in pain from botched abortions. No, Hillary Clinton won’t raise those concerns. She will be discreetly silent. But the issue will be raised by other, non-candidatorial types.

When that occurs…whether it comes from a journalist’s question ala Bernie Shaw who asked Dukakis if he would favor capital punishment if his wife were raped…Obama, facing the question on his opposition to saving children born alive from botched abortions…standing next to Hillary on the platform while she looks demurely at him… will have to answer the questions alone, on a platform somewhere, perhaps in pro-life Iowa, before the TV cameras and without David Axelrod by his side. There’s no good way for him to reconcile himself to the center.



By trying to reconcile his stridently leftist views…far exceeding those of even Hillary or John Edwards—anyone that is unless Al Gore himself…Barack Obama he risks alienating his fan club which loves him for the Lefty he is.

As he tries to respond at that future time, while Hilary Clinton waits for his answer with her plastic sweet smile, the nation will once again hear the opening strain Beethoven’s Fifth which he made so famous in extolling the Chicago Bears. By all odds it will signal the rolling down of the curtain on what up to now has been an exciting preliminary. But it will be the deadly drum roll for Bambi, meaning “back to the Senate for more preparation before you try again for the major leagues.”

Da-da-da-DAH!

[An intercepted interoffice memo from executive office of David Axelrod & Associates to the company’s public relations division]

Memo from the Barack Obama for President Campaign.
To: The Publicity…Op Ed…Photography and Creative Concepts Divisions. Cc. Advertising.

From: Executive Office—D. A.

Re: Congratulations and Some Suggestions.

Dear All: Congratulations on a really first-class job from concept…the idea of Barack returning to Africa to visit the land from which his natural father left the family to go to Harvard…through the visit to the South African prison that housed Nelson Mandela…to the follow-up events that I know will be carried-on in your true professional style. There is absolutely none better than you guys at doing this. The genius of it is that if anyone criticizes they will be held in contempt by white liberals who will insist that they are (a) racist and (b) abnormally insensitive to the humanity that absolutely streams off of our guy which fosters white guilt. Just a few things that could be improved which are offered in the spirit of constructive criticism which I know you will understand as none of us are above improvement which the sign in our reception room affirms.

First, the photo of Barack looking through the prison bars at the jail where Nelson Mandela was held was truly inspiring. Nothing captures the thoughtfulness and deep thoughts of our guy than shots of this type. Whoever put the newspaper photog on to the stunt deserves our praise. There’s nothing that helps our cause more than white guilt. Don’t tell me that whites here had nothing to do with Mandela’s being locked up for 28 years. So what? Who cares? Liberal guilt is guilt: a blessing to our guy. When I opened the Sun-Times this morning and saw that picture on the front page…well—it just blew me away. And then to read Lynn Sweet’s prose, both in the paper and on her blog—all I could say was “whhoooooeeee!” You will want to get that photo at once and put it in the file which we’ll use for the brochure. Is there any silent film footage of it? I should imagine that if a still photographer snapped it there were cameramen around…God knows there’s enough of them on the trip…to have gotten the shot. We want the film for the commercials.

Second, you expected some criticism from this office, didn’t you? The photo of Barack looking through the bars with the thoughtful look on his face, his eyes sad, his face drawn in inexpressible sadness, was great. But…it would have been even better if…if what? Think! It would have been even better if there had been just the faintest trace of a tear on his cheek…or, failing that, a suggestion of his eyes misting over. Now you think I am suggesting artificial tears, aren’t you? That would be tacky. Nothing this agency is associated with is artificial. There is no substitute for real tears or real mist produced by the real process. The way to accomplish this is, if somebody had just thought of it, to give just a whiff of a spray from an atomizer, nothing more than a kind of spray that asthmatics use to clear their lungs (which produce either tears or misty eyes) and women use for perfume. Anything causing the eyes to fog up a bit or mist is good and often welling tears in the eyes may include one trickling down the cheek. Cameras are good these days at catching misty eyes. Nobody did it better than Reagan where it was accompanied by a visible lump in the throat —but he was a professional actor. Not like our guy.

I personally prefer evident tears over misty eyes. Sure, there’s always the chance of over-kill, like if he were to bite his lip. That would be too much. Clinton did that—too much. But the faintest suggestion of tears would have transformed a 99 percent perfect shot into a 100 percent ten-strike. I don’t want to dwell on it but somebody could have done it before the photog came on the scene. I suppose in the rush to get the picture snapped and processed nobody thought of that. But it shows that no matter how good we get, we can always get better. But even without the misty eyes, the concept of white guilt was produced. Excellent.

Third, none of us in this agency can rest on our laurels. I don’t know if any of you have had the time to dwell on what happens after the African trip is over. It so happens I have. I would hold up on the television interviews with CBS until Couric takes over. She’s a real natural for this kind of thing. You can go ahead with Nightline and NBC but I’d like to be able to turn on my set the night Couric takes over the evening newscast and have her announce that Barack will be with her to reconnoiter the African thing. You may argue that it will be a dead issue by the time she comes on the scene. No way. You can always think of a reason to update it. By the way, whoever thought of Barack’s condemnation of Africa not doing enough to cure AIDS was thinking the way I think. It was so safe, so simple. So unanswerable. Of course, nobody’s done enough to cure AIDS! He can use a variant of that with Couric. You see where I’m going on this? Assignment: it doesn’t have to be necessarily Africa. Think of any injustice. The kids who die as result of no seat belts being fastened. No one’s better at this stuff than our guy. Suppose he goes on with Couric and has statistics showing how many children died without seat belts. Immediately her eyes well up and his. That’s the kind of stuff.

I know you have the idea because the speech-writing division scored big-time with his talk to the Katrina graduates telling them to study hard. How profound, how unutterably meaningful! So simple yet unanswerable. Of course! Katrina kid victims should study! Who but the most crass would say that message is political? Just like who would say his trip to Africa was political? If I say so myself the keynote I had something to do with that had him saying there are no African Americans, Irish Americans, Greek Americans but just Americans: it says everything and nothing. The assimilation of non-controversial truisms is what will nominate our guy.

Fourth, in this project we all re-learned how absolutely magnificent our guy is with photo ops which show his thoughtfulness. In the old days we’d pose a guy with his chin resting in his hand and a thoughtful, misty…there’s that magnificent embodiment again… look in his eye communicating the idea of deep thinker. We don’t have to do that with our guy. The New York Times magazine is always looking for something on him that’s new. What about (a) the Op Ed division doing an article for Barack to sign off on about Abraham Lincoln, subtly pointing out how backward he was in the long reach of history because he wanted to send blacks back to Africa: there’s that guilt thing again. Then again, we could use another Katrina. Send him to New Orleans, walking tall and majestic, through some kinds of rubble. That gets the idea that fits without saying so into Nagin’s point that white racism allowed New Orleans to worsen, that if it were Orange county things wouldn’t be so bad. Barack doesn’t have to echo it. Just walk in shirt-sleeves and look sad. Ergo: white liberal guilt.

But back to the Lincoln thing. Of course it’s somewhat unfair using views of the 19th century in contrast to the advanced ones of our own. But Op Ed can go relatively easy on Lincoln…point out at the same time also how advanced he was and presto! Our guy comes off as a moderate. Now stay with me for a minute: the cover of the Times Sunday magazine has…get this…Barack standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial looking thoughtful. I wouldn’t want to overdo the misty eyes thing but maybe he could look determined…as if to say: as a successor to Lincoln I will see that his promise is redeemed. Great stuff. We will want Lynn Sweet around at all times with her dispassionate descriptions that I love. I can see Eric Zorn going poetic, Mary Schmich turning thoughtful. Mary Mitchell turning somersaults. Carol Marin—but that’s too easy. Rather like the old days with Bob Greene.

By now I’m sure you get what I mean. One more. I would personally consider a trip to the slave quarters at Monticello…I think they still exist unless the DNC tried to get them to be removed given Jefferson is regarded as the founder of our party…but if they haven’t, the same kind of shot can never be overdone. There’s the white guilt thing again. How to atone for it? Easy: elect Barack.

The important thing is for you to continue what you’re doing…thinking and executing great, solemn, dramatic scenarios. Let me in summary tell you once more what I’ve learned in this business. We have a guy here who doesn’t have to say much—just sketch out huge themes and step back. The speech advocating that religion be brought into Democratic politics was a natural. He never explains how, just says it ought to happen. The African trip was another ten-strike. Other agencies worry about their guys…or woman, pardon me…building up issues. Not us. This guy transcends issues. Stands for big concepts: religion in politics…sadness thinking of Mandela. That kind of thing. All the while we’re doing these great things, Biden is trying to adapt the Wal-Mart minimum wage into a national story. I crack up when I think of it.

I’ve got to run but be assured that any of your ideas will receive prompt attention here in the front office…and thanks so much for the great work up to now. And when you see Lynn…which I know will be soon…give her my warmest regards along with my best to her good friends over there, the two Johns. You know who I mean.

Censuring Durbin: The Numbers Roll In: Part II.

Jim Leahy announced the campaign to censure Richard Durbin last night on my radio show. By the time he got home, his web-site www.censuredurbin.org showed 170 signatures. By the end of business Monday he had more than 500. He figures that he’s tote up ast least 5,000 signatures a week. He wants to get at least 250,000 to present to the Senate. Do you realize that there is no other sitting U. S. Senator who can draw that much of an early response than Durbin? Russ Feingold doesn’t have the drawing power despite all the effort he has made to corral the left for his future presidential drive…Getting signatures for Ted Kennedy, no matter how long he has been in power would be a dud since Kennedy is oracular but rarely goes over the edge…Can you imagine trying to get signatures for Joe Biden? Barbara Boxer? Chuck Schumer might get some but only because he’s obnoxious—and most people understand he stays within bounds. But Durbin? He’s a natural.

Why? Because he is so slippery that were he to lose his balance and stumble walking up to the Senate podium, he’d glide up there. No one in Senate history has been so patronizing—and that’s stiff competition. Take a look at his apologies for the Pol Pot, Nazi storm troopers and Soviet gulag statement. Wringing his hands, he apologized for being misunderstood that he had insulted veterans (“I never, ever intended disrespect”. Or to Jews: “I’m sorry if anything I said caused any offense or pain to those who have such bitter memories of the Holocaust, the greatest moral tragedy of our time”).

Durbin is an orator of a type. Not one who speaks with conviction, just an orator who orates with salubrious effect. After he finished apologizing not unconditionally but “if”—“if I have unintentionally” hurt anyone, he turned on his critics with this persecution-prone utterance: “My critics from the Republican side have carefully orchestrated this! They have used all the resources…Fox, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh. They clearly want to keep the spotlight on me and away from other issues!” One can’t be censured for no class—but Durbin’s lack of it makes it easy. Thus the numbers roll in to Jim Leahy. Cast your vote and add your signature today. You’ll find the link-up in the left-hand column. This Blog and Jim’s will be among the very few to carry it: it’s too unconventional for many others to do so. And don’t count on the media to refer to it. We’re blacked out: are you surprised? But the liberals know about it. Check the names we’re called on this Blog’s Reader’s Comments to get a flavor of some of the vitriol. Then gargle with Listerine.

Why the Censure of Richard Durbin is Imperative : Part I.

[As the founder of the Republican Assembly of Illinois, a grassroots organization not tied to Combine Republicans, I feel this project launched by Jim Leahy, its executive director, is very important. In this the first of several articles, let me tell you why. This Blog now installs www.censuredurbin as a permanent link. ]

As one who has studied the role of Congress as Congressional staffer, member of the executive branch, a foreign service officer and as a John F. Kennedy Fellow at Harvard, I have long been engrossed in the question of what limits of debate should be applied during time of war—especially when our nation has been attacked.

First, the United States was attacked wantonly and cruelly in major degree for the first time since the Civil War. The Congress responded immediately by giving the president the sanction of girding our defenses so that at no future time would such so many lives be taken as were on September 11. Senator Durbin supported this action. But from the outset, in his special role as Senate Democratic Whip, he has involved himself in strenuously opposing all major actions by the President as Commander-in-Chief while engaging in a masterly subterfuge. The bill of particulars will be detailed here at a future time. Suffice it to say for now the question is: Given our respect for dissent by elected members of Congress, is it possible for one to commit sedition and serve as an obstructive force to conduct of the war?

U. S.. historical tradition has been exceedingly lenient with those who criticize presidents on their war plans. Congressman Abraham Lincoln for one was a great critic of President James Polk’s wish to enter the Mexican War. He served one term, declined to seek reelection and was far from a leader of the then Whig party. His criticism was marked but he supported appropriations to continue the army in the field and in no way could be said to have given aid and comfort to the enemy. His opposition was well within the circumscribed boundaries of responsible debate.

In my own lifetime, Republicans have criticized both the intentions of presidents to go to war and/or the decisions of a president to go to war. Ohio Senator Robert Taft, regarded as a Republican leader from the first day he joined the Senate, whom I supported for president in 1952, was a critic of our joining Britain in World War II if there would be no overriding action to commit us to the conflict. Taft, along with almost all Republican Senators of the period—including Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan—followed the same policy which can be described as supporting a build-up of our defenses, aiding Britain in all steps short of war: the same position advocated by both President Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie in the presidential campaign of 1940.

Taft voted for all appropriations for the military services as well as the Lend-Lease Act, supporting an increase in the number of aircraft to 6,000, supported the National Defense bill, the bill to establish a reserve of strategic and critical materials, the bill to create a two ocean navy, legislation increasing the Army to 375,000 when FDR didn’t recommend an increase beyond 225,000. While he expressed hope that diplomacy would not draw us into war, Taft’s position was clear as a supporter of a strong national defense and an ally of Britain in all ways short of direct involvement. Likewise with the leading Republican foreign policy lawmaker in the pre-war period, Senator Vandenberg.

Assuredly there were Senators and Congressmen in both parties (Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, D-Montana, Sen. Gerald P. Nye, R-N.D. and Sen. C. Wayland Brooks, R-IL among them) who harshly criticized FDR on a personal basis charging that he was leading the nation to war. None were in the leadership of their parties and none hurled attacks on soldiers in wartime; none ever remotely spoke of comparing our troops to troops of harsh, repressive dictators. Sen. Durbin is the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate and, as is widely known, used an anonymous source in the FBI to compare our soldiers guarding prisoners at Guantanamo, Cuba with the vilest torturers in world history.

Obviously there have been Senators who have so exceeded the bounds of civility that they have been censured by their fellows. The most recent case was that of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.). While latter-day revisionists now say that McCarthy was right in his estimate that some persons high in the federal government were active, conscious and articulate instruments of Communist conspiracy (as the Venona Papers now attest) there is no doubt that in many specifics he was reckless and in certain cases in total disregard of civil liberties. Sen. McCarthy, a subcommittee chairman not an elected leader of his party, was censured and died of acute alcoholism: in all, his period of influence did not exceed five years.

There can be little doubt that Sen. Richard Durbin as the second ranking member of the Senate minority has been given one of the highest posts within the power of his party to confer. By listening to him and watching the visual on the Blog www.censuredurbin.org you can hardly equate his highly inflammatory charge…a charge which has caused him to apologize to the Senate not once but twice…a charge that earned him criticism from Mayor Richard M. Daley among others…a charge that so cruelly misrepresented the work of our soldier-guards as to give active aid and comfort to our enemies.

As this nation and all the world, sadly, knows, he likened American interrogators of the vilest terrorists, quarantined from society to protect this nation from assault, to “Nazis, Sovietsd in their gulags or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings.” His vicious language which stunned even liberals in his party dominated the news cycle for days. Then Durbin hastened to the floor to do the usual explanation without accepting blame, declaring that he regretted any misunderstanding over his remarks. That failed to quell the furor. He returned to the Senate floor and issues an emotional non-apology, complete with tears which said “if” he had offended any, he apologized.

For this alone—a totally unpatriotic tirade that the dispassionate Almanac of American Politics says was extreme—censure should be applied. But there is more. Earlier, in July 2003, he took to the Senate floor to declare that the Bush administration was trying to push him off the Intelligence committee—but it is open speculation and far more than rumor that Durbin leaked classified information to the detriment of the United States and its troops. To try to defend his unpatriotic misrepresentations as just par for the course in a nation which values dissent…ignoring that we are in a war for our survival where all of us should watch our language…would be the height of incredulity.

It is safe to say that no one in the modern history of the Senate—and perhaps none in the entire history of that body—has been so identified with actions that are deleterious to conduct of war in which our survival is at stake. His abject, slash and burn partisanship is the scourge of the Senate. He voted against the Gulf War authorization in January, 1991 and voted against t he Iraq War authorization in 2002—but he did vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq when Bill Clinton was president, in February, 1998. The late Steve Neal, the liberal Sun-Times political columnist dismissed him as “a hustler.” Always twisting and turning remarks with a masterly legerdemain, Durbin is probably the nation’s most obvious national security risk: completely at variance with the liberal tradition of Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, both of whom were patriots and neither of whom were security risks.

In my lifetime, it was a former American hero, Col. Charles Lindbergh, who came the closest to Sen. Durbin in his assaults on those who were empowered to defend this country. Lindbergh was a private citizen, was unelected but in a series of town hall meetings inflamed the country although we were not at war. As a rebuke to Lindbergh, FDR held a news conference in the Oval Office. The president reached over and picked up a Nazi Iron Cross which had been sent to him by one (not Lindbergh) who was returning the decoration out of disgust for the Nazi criminals running Germany. Noting that Lindbergh had received high decorations from Hermann Goering, Roosevelt said that for Lindbergh’s service to Nazi Germany, the flier deserved the Iron Cross. Even the press corps gasped.

The differences between Lindbergh and Sen. Durbin are several. As earlier stated, Lindbergh was a private citizen and did not represent the government of the United States—Durbin is a high member of the Democratic minority in the Senate. Lindbergh was up to that point one of the nation’s foremost heroes for being the first to fly the Atlantic: Durbin has not compiled any record aside from his lifelong careerist status of politics. Lindbergh never apologized (in a sense, Durbin has not either, having used the old dodge that “if” he offended anyone, he was sorry). Lindbergh offered to enlist in the Army Air Corps even at middle age. His offer was understandably turned down. Then Lindbergh went to the South Pacific as a private citizen and, as history records, in an aerial encounter with several Japanese Zero aircraft shot down several of them. Even this has not rehabilitated Lindbergh but did serve to make the point that, however benighted, he was a patriotic citizen. Unfortunately the book on Durbin’s support of this war effort ends with his insult to American troops, an insult that presents doubt that he is interested in anything higher than his own and his party’s left-wing factional partisan ends.

Thus the record shows clearly that Senator Durbin’s irascible and viciously partisan behavior threatens the lives of American troops is unparalleled for a Senate leader in American history. Should the Senate receive 250,000 signatures calling for censure, one would hope it would take the matter under advisement. The idea, expressed by some, that to consider censuring Durbin would be a waste of the Senate’s time, is fallacious. Just as Joseph Welch told an arrogant Senator McCarthy “at long last, sir, have you no decency?”—a statement that caused many Americans to insist on a limit to vituperation—the censure of Richard Durbin would show that the tolerance of the American people with unreasoning demagoguery that puts our troops and this nation in grave danger--a far worse offense than Joe McCarthy committed in his most excessive hour--is not unlimited.

And It Came to Pass that Saint Obama Told His Party There is a Vaguely Attractive Way to Make Use of Religion: And Mr. Cruickshank Agreed

[Fragments from the “Here and Now Newest Testament” to be discovered four hundred years hence in the rubble of the Apparel Mart wherein remnants of a long-forgotten tabloid called the Sun-Times were unearthed].

And in those days it came to pass that a tall, angular man by the name of Barack Obama, His eyes closed in prayer at strategic times, came to exhort multitudes who looked to Him as a possible liberal Democratic political savior. Before He had ascended to the senatorial mount, He had been among them and they knew Him slightly and disdained Him when He ran against Bobby Rush, saying, “He is not a man of the people like Bobby” and defeated Him. And when He ran for the U. S. Senate nomination, many scoffed but others stayed. Then it came to pass that the leader of the group, Blair Hull, was sorely embarrassed by disclosure of a divorce record wherein it said that he had struck his wife on the shin in order to get her to stop punching him but she made the shin-strike public which enabled Blair to donate to her some of the treasure of his work, twenty thousand drachms of gold and two thousand two hundred pounds of silver but this was not enough. So she continued to bewail and he lost the primary. And thus the Democratic party electorate said unto Barack Obama, Arise, bless the Lord your God and make a case for yourself as the future Senator.

And Barack Obama arose and many white liberals and all the blacks along with the media afflicted by guilt for past misdeeds of prior generations sought to gain absolution from this man and they elected him to the Senate. And from that day onward He needed to say little of significance, just mouth the usual platitudes but because of this and in particular because he was civil and un-angry, Democrats saw in Him a man to save them from the hands of their enemies. They noted there was a slight twist to his words that made him sound different from the multitude of other liberals. A black man, he would give ever-so-slight emphasis on patriotism and godly manners: with the result that he sounded somewhat conservative but acceptably so: thus they hailed him. His address to the Democratic convention in 2004 was no more unusual than had it been given by others at different times but it had a tad of conservatism that caused favorable reaction—as the thought that we are not divided by race but united as Americans.

Because it was not liberalism-filled but merely relativism with no obligations placed thereto on conduct or belief, it would sound cliché-filled if delivered by a white. But liberals seized on these words that were said by a black man, ceasing their mourning and sorrow and were turned to mirth and joy, believing that these should be days of feasting and gladness in which they should send one to another portions of the taxes of the bedeviled rich from which should be given gifts to the poor. Amen, they said, Obama has occupied and commands the center.

And in Chicago both newspapers saw in His words things that had never been perceived and promulgated them widely so that the people who had thought the words banal re-read them and said, “Behold since the newspapers think them significant, who are we to deny?” So His words became as seen anew and regarded as Deep. And had they come from a Bush they would have been dismissed as banal but since they came from one who should be expected to mouth extreme liberalism as his colleague Dick Durbin had uttered to everyone’s unutterable tedium, they said: “Listen to Him! He has expressed words that may have been said often but that He says them at this time when we are looking for a political Savior, He should be recognized.”

Then speaking from in Washington a convocation of the Trinity United Church of Christ in a gathering of the National City Christian Church, Barack Obama told the gathering of Democrats that they need to repair to God and the people cheered and said, “Behold, He is right. The enemy, those who go regularly to church as most of our people do not, are the stronger and the polls which say those who go often to church tend to vote for the enemy show those who have defended the right of innocent unborn are lording it over us who believe unborn life can be discarded at the whim of the mother, but who are they to be so high and mighty and get elected while we have not been? They who hail abortion as a sacrament should not be disparaged by those who don’t for those who don’t are hypocrites: they must sin as much as we. Therefore we need not change our ways but merely get a new leader who will get us in good with the Lord who in turn will lift up all that fall and sit up all that are cast down.” They cried: “let all hear His words!”

For to them His words conveyed a thrilling relativism but with a tad of mild conservatism to them. But it was the relativism that convinced them he was humble. Written down by a Ms. Falsani of the Sun-Times, herself a relativist, He said: “…I’m not somebody who is always comfortable with language that implies I’ve got a monopoly on the truth, or that my faith is automatically transferable to others” which caused great joy among the liberals who did not subscribe to absolutes since this made them feel comfortable in doing what they wanted without guilt. Further to Ms. Falsani He said, “I think that religion at its best comes with a big does of doubt. I’m suspicious, too, of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding.” This they took as enlightenment and they gathered unto Him.

He told them, “I think I have an ongoing conversation with God. Throughout the day I’m constantly asking myself questions about what I’m doing, why I am doing it.” And they who love one asking questions instead of one who prescribes answers were pleased with Him. For they dislike all who say they have religious answers. Thus they were enamored of Him who celebrated that He had doubts and questions, not answers.

Wisely, though, He gave conservatives small concessions that were seen a magnanimous such as his view that it is permissible to say the Pledge of Allegiance and still refer to God and that when a gang-banger kills someone “there is a hole in his heart that government programs along cannot fix.” The liberals cheered immediately and said this man is proof we are not a cursed seed which is fated to lose elections to time immemorial on social issues because of angry black militants crying out or by secularists decrying religiosity. They said among themselves, “truly this man can win by not conceding much to the religionists but merely seeming to do so. Let us therefore ride with him because we cannot gain victory frontally as all despise our views.”

Then there rose up one Lynn Sweet, chief political scribe of the Democratic newspaper of record in Chicago whose views were unashamed and never separated from the flow of the news—a laudable practice. And she wrote of her evident boredom with those who stress merely the Ten Commandments when they talk of religion and not “the morality of budget choices Congress makes every day” and she wrote of them who hailed Him as Savior of the Democratic party which to her was all-encompassing. Thereupon she promoted His forthcoming book called by an intriguingly vague title which means anything one wishes to all men but of particular value to intellectuals who pose with forefinger deep to cheek in furrowed-brow thought, the title of which is The Audacity of Hope, about which some asked among themselves “the Audacity of Hope? What does this mean?” To which they were told, shut up: it means this man will get elected. Whereupon they were satisfied and did shut up. And hoped very much.

Thereupon to prove the point that Barack Obama intended to run for president, His press secretary came forth and said that this was not the truth but “the speech reflects His desire to welcome more people of faith to into the Democratic party. Viewing this speech—and everything Barack does—through an `08 lens does a disservice to the message of the speech and His work in the Senate.” Those words caused those in the know to say yea, yea, He is running because His spokesman has so eloquently denied it.

And all the while others exulted saying, “His words are free of the hard strictures which involve the salvation of innocent lives from abortion or the repugnance of homosexuality which we say is a physical condition and they a sin. It is the style and pleasantness of the speaker that blurs all unpleasantness, hear ye Him!” And so He continued: “We first need to understand that Americans are a religious people, 90 percent of us believe in God…I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers’ lobby but I also believe that when a gang-banger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him we have a problem with morality…”

And they cried out as if no one had ever conceived that before, crying out “Huzza! He says what we have heard but now hear again with new ears because it is comforting to hear banal words often uttered by the non-thinking now uttered by a freshman Senator who may become the man to get middle American votes to become our president and install us in the thrones of power.” And they declared further: “That this man is black is significant because he is of a different, more moderate political hue than his more demonstrative fellows such as Charlie Rangel and others.” And Saint Obama continued: “No matter how religious they are or may not be, people are tired of seeing faith used as a tool to attack and belittle and divide, they’re tired to hearing folks deliver more screed than sermon!” By which he meant horrid traditional moral absolutes which had made the liberals feel downcast. But now his words gave them new hope.

So they hailed Him, thinking when someone black who sounds this good says it, it is different than when others including those who are white say it and perhaps this may trump those who have been using social issues against us and depriving us of our rightful inheritance of power. He will cause our enemies to be cowed and not use against us that we are the party of abortion, that we—and He—will fight against confirmation of judges that may spare unborn life. Verily, He will lay asunder all the divisions that have come upon us and He will change the subject to who will support the fatherless and the widow and the ways of sinners will soon be seen as that of those who dare to assume they are better than we! And when they attack him verbally it will be seen as an attack on his race no matter how they say it so our liberal cause will be advantaged.

And so in those days at the Sun-Times, the publisher John Cruickshank caused to be issued an editorial in the department headed by scribe Steve Huntley who in turn commissioned the publisher’s wife by the name of Jennifer Hunter, a feminist, to write an editorial that would proclaim that with the righteousness already expressed by Saint Obama and that through the newspaper’s support of same-sex marriage and abortion on demand, there is a higher morality which is malleable to accommodate exigencies at one particular time and not the next. And Cruickshank ordered, “Thus let not the conservatives defeat us because of what we support but let us espouse this man’s style because it supplies a tad—just a tad—of conservative-sounding rhetoric. But it is relativistic religion for good purpose.” And Huntley agreed, saying, “Righto! Let it an editorial be done.” And Ms. Hunter set immediately to work and completed it.

And so Jennifer Hunter wrote and it was published that religion should apply also to the Democratic party. And those who had cast about for a way to get out of the trick bag with strings drawn tight in a noose because of liberals’ own invention thought they may be saved by an earnest-appearing young black man. Thus they were filled with the hope that those who were deceived electorally in past years may be mis-led again by the same devices that beguiled their ancestors, with words like New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier and Great Society. And they believed He would be spared from criticism because to do so would invite retaliation that the enemy was racist. Racism was one remaining crime that liberals had not excused as choice, the one crime that shrank from hurled accusation of its name.

Therefore, with Him protesting He was not a candidate, Saint Barack Obama was led to the Here, unfortunately, the fragment breaks off but you can devise the end for yourself can you not? Try on Reader’s Response.

Peter Fitzgerald Could Head Up McCain for President Drive Here

Former U. S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald may very well head up the Illinois McCain for President drive for 2008. He is privately recruiting key staff help for the state campaign.

If so, bagging Fitzgerald is a big coup for McCain. Fitzgerald has achieved rock-star status with conservatives because he stood firm against what John Kass calls “the Combine” when he was in the Senate. He filibustered George Ryan’s attempt to pack the Illinois Lincoln museum with patronage hires…he was denied reelection endorsement by state chairman Judy Baar Topinka…he had to brush aside Speaker Dennis Hastert who wanted to intrude on the U.S. attorney naming process…he had to face some inner-party anger at naming the outsider Patrick Fitzgerald (no relation) to the post…he was ridiculed year-in and year-out in a thousand petty ways by the late Steve Neal of the Sun-Times in columns for refusing to play the old congressional back-scratching, bring-home-the-goodies game: columns which haven’t stood up well given for Neal in light of Fitzgerald’s prescient role vis-à-vis the GOP establishment.

All these things have endeared Fitzgerald to the conservative-movement side of the state GOP and even heightened his appeal to the establishment. But there are some downsides in Fitz’s attempted sale of McCain to Illinois conservatives which make the sale difficult. McCain is the author of the hugely controversial McCain-Feingold campaign “reform” bill which has been accused of snuffing out free speech…Fitzgerald voted for the bill which is now law which is regarded as a disaster by conservatives…In 2000 McCain, who has a blow-torch temper, assailed leaders of the Christian evangelical movement who backed George W. Bush…McCain has been all over the map on ideology, often serving as the ideological left’s poster boy on a variety of issues….He was offered the vice presidential nomination by John Kerry and toyed with the idea for weeks, regarded as akin to betrayal of the GOP…McCain’s pro-life credentials are almost invisible despite his votes because of his warm romance of the left…For those weary of Iraq there is little public evidence that McCain would change the direction: if anything he is tougher on preemption than Bush.

Nor has Fitzgerald’s political insights been as golden as his undefiled character of rock-firm integrity. He touted Steve Rauschenberger for governor, insisting he was an excellent candidate despite Rauschenberger’s steady low polls and failure to raise money.

But—with Peter Fitzgerald pushing McCain, there is no doubt that the McCain campaign would get a gigantic push here and be attractive to a legion of conservatives who like Fitzgerald better than McCain: their hope being that if elected—and McCain is high in the polls—Fitz could well become U. S. Attorney General and spark an even more energetic clean-up of politics than he has heretofore.

Aren’t There More Issues Obama Can Solve?

The gushing, white liberal-guilty Sun-Times obviously believes freshman Democratic Senator Barack Obama, elevated to guru status for being a Senator While Black, can solve all pesky national and international issues with the snap of a finger. Already its headlines proclaim that he has declared definitively, ex cathedra, on the matters of global warming, the NSA with Valerie Plame and Scooter Libby, nuke plant inspections, ports. Aren’t there any more questions he can resolve for the Sun-Times?

What about the firing of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard?

The decision of the Wall Street Journal to trim its page size by December 31? Intelligent Design? The dialectic between Paramenides and and Melissus in ancient Greece? The tiff between the White Sox’s Kenny Williams and the Big Hurt? Whether Cardinal George should resign over the Father Dan McCormack matter? Whether Daniel Barenboim has disrespected the Jewish tradition by conducting the anti-Semitic Wagner in Austria last year? How to deal with bird flu H5N1 found in Asia? Whether it a grand jury should have indicted gumshoe Anthony Pellicano for tapping the phone of Lisa Bonder Kerkorian, the former tennis pro who is demanding $320,000 a month in child support from Kirk Kerkorian, the octogenarian billionaire?

Perhaps you can think of other issues Obama can solve as he leans toward 2008. Write them in Readers’ Comments.

McCain and Obama Deserve Each Other

The temper tantrum letter written to Sen. Barack Obama by Sen. John McCain causes more people than Obama to wonder what prompted it. The Senate is filled with prima donnas and none are more sensitive to the need for adulation than the Illinois Democrat and the Arizona Republican. Ever since ethics raised its head as a juicy issue for presidential wannabe’s a few months ago, all of them have been playing in the sandbox. No big surprise that Obama, who’s being stage managed by David Axelrod, does not want to dilute his rock-star celebrity by working with another rock-star, McCain.

Is it a surprise is that McCain reacted in such a tempestuous way? Not really, and it is something that McCain idolaters should consider. Not long ago I talked with a national reporter who was visiting spouse in-laws. The reporter has long covered McCain in the Senate and was on the receiving end of an unaccountable blast from him. This is what the journalist said in paraphrase:

Few people realize what an erratic major presidential candidate McCain would be were he to get the Republican nomination in 2008. We had a taste of it when he ran against Bush in 2000 and blasted the entire evangelical Protestant leadership—all of it!. Frankly, there are some people who say he’s nuts. --What does that mean? It means that one’s emotional conditioning can be irreparably damaged by years of torture. The Bush people alluded to it indirectly in the campaign of 2000 which sent McCain off on a tantrum, claiming that for this draft-dodger to question my emotional stability was an insult and blah-blah-blah. But the fact is that unrelieved mental torture works a terrible price on one. I always thought Denton [Republican Sen. Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, held for many years at the Hanoi Hilton after being shot down in Vietnam] was goofy. Take a look at the Admiral [James Stockdale] who ran for president with Perot, the guy who began his debate by asking “who am I and why am I here?” The unspoken problem is not that McCain will be too old—72—in 2008, but something that nobody likes to even think about—the question of instability. For one thing, if anyone brings it up he’s a goner, given the kind of sensitivity people have to war heroes being criticized.

So likely it won’t be brought up.

Even bringing it up in this oblique way is going to get me a lot of vicious comments on this blog but fire away. Remember I’m only quoting somebody else.

So Once Again (I Forgot) Tell Me Why When Barack Obama Goes to the Middle East He’s Escorted by Media Bigs So It’s Chicago Front Page and Prime Time TV News?

Q. Is it because he’s an expert on foreign policy?

A. Nope. He’s not, having been in the Senate only a year.

Q. Because he’s tall and good looking?

A. No-no-no, couldn’t be. Indiana’s Evan Bayh is tall and good looking and a presidential possibility but nobody knows when he goes overseas or not.

Q. I know! It’s because Obama’s black, tall and good-looking.

A, No-no-no, couldn’t be. Massachusetts’ Edward Brooke was black, tall and good looking. In addition to which he served two terms, was mentioned for vice president. Also Carol Moseley Braun was black, not tall but pleasant looking with a 50,000-watt smile. No laudatory coverage of a first time trip to the Middle East like that for her.

Q. Let’s see. He’s black, tall, good-looking—also a power in the Senate?

A, No-no-no, wrong again. He’s black, tall, good-looking and is second to the bottom in seniority in a Republican Senate which means he’s not a power.

Q. It’s got to be obvious. Is it because the media have determined to single him out as the leading representative black person in politics and plays him an emblematic for an entire people?

A. You’re getting warmer.

Q. I know: it’s because media decides the people who should be singled out for future victory…

A. Keep on, you’re almost there.

Q. …about what party should be singled out for future victory and who their choice is to be destiny’s tot in order to be balanced with a white woman to become their pick for a ticket they are pulling to win!

A. Bingo.

Q. But, tell me, wasn’t Edward Brooke who was all these things eligible for fame as well? About the time when Jeane Kirkpatrick was mentioned for president?

A. Yep, now tell me what Brooke wasn’t.

Q. Let’s re-cap. He was black…

A. Right.

Q He was tall…

A. Right.

Q. He was good-looking…

A. Right.

Q. He was brilliant…

A. Right.

Q. He was--, he wasn’t--.

A. He was what?

Q. He wasn’t a Democrat! He was a Republican!.

A. Bingo again.

Q. That’s right. Of course, media can’t have a Republican tall good looking smart black Senator promoted as destiny’s tot. That’s not the right casting. Why didn’t I think of that before? Stupid me.

A. Stupid you.

The Meaning of Charisma

Today I saw Barack Obama’s face in the background at the funeral service for Rosa Parks—and I said there’s a guy with total charisma. Which started me thinking: what the devil is charisma anyhow? Is it good looks? No, Everett Dirksen had it and he looked like Bert Lahr playing the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz. Charisma is more than looks. It has to be described, not merely appear. Which reminds me of the time I first saw one to whom charisma was endemic.

In the early 1950s, with Eisenhower installed as president, Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey had determined to further add to his political base in that state. Humphrey had been born in South Dakota and was a combination Irishman and Norwegian, a druggist’s son who transplanted to the state and who in the ‘50s always felt like he needed political shoring up. He felt rather isolated from the Catholic community of Minnesota and Catholics held great sway in certain areas sorely needed by Humphrey to be added to his base. One was the city of St. Paul. Irish Catholic it was, and Democratic, too, but it was not very sure about Humphrey. He was too oracular, too emotional and too dramatic a speaker for the good burgers there. So early in 1953 Humphrey found what he thought was a solution. He would invite the newest U.S. Senator to come to St. Paul and make an address—not a political speech, but a civic one in which the key leaders of the Catholic community would be invited, starting with the archbishop of St. Paul-Minneapolis (who was rather cool to Humphrey). Kennedy’s family was a crown jewel (so viewed) of U.S. Catholicism: his father, the former ambassador to England who enchanted isolationist Catholics by railing against Great Britain, his brother, Joe, a lost war hero. But I needn’t tell you about all this, need I?

So he invited John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts to come in the night before and address a civic breakfast in St. Paul the next morning. It so happened I was to cover the speech for a wire service and I got to the St. Paul Hotel early in hopes of interviewing the new Senator. Instead I found Humphrey running the corridors trying to find Kennedy. “He was supposed to check in here last night,” he told me, “but he hasn’t shown up, didn’t take his room.” It was clear what he was thinking: Good God Almighty, here I have gathered everybody, the mayors of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the archbishop of St. Paul-Minneapolis, the presidents of 3M, Minneapolis Moline and all the other companies and no Kennedy.

The breakfast started on time with a prayer from the Archbishop and I thought I could see Humphrey’s lips moving in silent prayer that Kennedy—the many everyone was there to see and hear—would show up. No Kennedy. We drank our fruit juice. The waiters brought the eggs and bacon. Then, in the back door he came: a pencil-thin guy with a brush of reddish hair, a shy but diffident style, walking slowly to the speaker’s table. Humphrey with great relief led a standing ovation for the very late speaker. The Archbishop wiped his lips from the napkin and waited for Kennedy to explain what in the world took him so long, where he was, etc.

The place hushed. Kennedy stood up, thanked Humphrey for his lavish introduction and nodded to the Archbishop and assembled guests. Then, waiting until there was not a sound, he said something like this. “My staff made a mistake and booked me not at the St. Paul Hotel but at the Leamington in Minneapolis which is where I slept the night after arriving at midnight. But let me tell you, taking a cab from Minneapolis to St. Paul involves a great deal of money.”

Everyone laughed nervously, knowing that this slim young man was the heir to hundreds of millions. “As the cab neared the St. Paul Hotel,” said Kennedy, “I noticed the fare was very large. Very large. I could scrape up enough for a very good tip. I pondered giving him a big tip and telling him to vote Democratic.” They tittered. “But then I remembered,” said Kennedy, “what my father would have done.” There was an expectant hush. Joe Kennedy was the shrewdest, self-made multi-millionaire in the ‘30s.

“And so,” said John Kennedy, “I gave him no tip and told him to vote Republican.”

The story brought down the house and that morning Humphrey was seen sighing and and sighing and sighing: sighing with relief that Kennedy had showed but also sighing with satisfaction that he had turned what could have been a huge embarrassment into a triumph with a deprecating but gentle reminder of his father’s wily nature.

Which taught me then that this was the essence of charisma. Not just looks, although Kennedy assuredly had it. Not just the confidence that wealth brings and Kennedy certainly had that. It is the grace that comes with self-assurance: grace that Kennedy had, Reagan had and I would aver that George W. Bush has, if I may say so. It certainly is what Barack Obama has. Long before Obama came to the Senate, the first African American senator since Reconstruction served. He was a tall, good-looking lawyer, former attorney general of the state of Massachusetts, Edward Brooke. Everything that is needed for successful candidacy, Brooke had. He had superb gifts—but he didn’t have that indefinable self-confident something.

And I would abjure my Republican colleagues to get out of the way whenever Barack Obama decides to run for something else. I presume it would be the vice presidency at first—but it certainly will ultimately involve the presidency at some future date.