Two things only do men require of their government: bread and circuses.
-Juvenal, Satire X
The circus has started. The problem is, however, that it threatens us with less bread. The circus this election cycle starts with Obama in the central ring where he is being taunted for being born into the wrong family. And by virtue of his poor choice of parents, Obama himself is being turned into one of those "t" persons.
The following passage was quoted at
Digby without attribution. Truth is, I don't care whether any of its assertions might be true or false. I don't care whether it comes to us from the right or is fabricated by the left to embarrass the right. What I care about is that it is designed to keep us from listening to what Obama says and replace arguments about policy with
ad hominem arguments. This transforms the election process from being about policy to being about personality. In a word, it becomes less about bread and more about circuses.
Be careful, be very careful
Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (black muslim) of Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas(white atheist).
When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced and his father returned to Kenya. His mother married Lolo Soetoro -- a Muslim -- moving to Jakarta with Obama when he was six years old. Within six months he had learned to speak the Indonesian language Obama spent "two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school" in Jakarta. Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim while admitting that he was once a Muslim, mitigating that damning information by saying that, for two years, he also attended a Catholic school. Obama's father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was a radical Muslim who migrated from Kenya to Jakarta, Indonesia. He met Obama's mother, Ann Dunham--a white atheist from Wichita, Kansas--at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Obama, Sr. and Dunham divorced when Barack, Jr. was two.
Obama's spinmeisters are now attempting to make it appear that Obama's introduction to Islam came from his father and that influence was temporary at best. In reality, the senior Obama returned to Kenya immediately following the divorce and never again had any direct influence over his son's education. Dunham married another Muslim, Lolo Soetoro who educated his stepson as a good Muslim by enrolling him in one of Jakarta's Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad on the industrialized world. Since it is politically expedient to be a Christian when you are seeking political office in the United States, Obama joined the United Church of Christ to help purge any notion that he is still a Muslim.
According to this line of argument, Obama is a Muslim pretending to be a Christian. And his sin against Christianity was to be born into the wrong family.
The difference between the people who are writing this sort of crap and the people who ran the Inquisition is that the people who ran the Inquisition stopped when a person declared for Christianity. At least until they did something that offended the Church. The people responsible for this crap might be better compared to the enforcement arm of the Inquisition, without so much as the nominal balance of defensive advocacy. Once they target a person, there is no defense. There is no escape. This makes them witch hunters of the worst sort. They simply find people who displease them. Then they associate them with the "t" word; give them a good dowsing of it. Then they throw the match. And the witch burns: the "t" person's public persona is compromised. At least that is the way it is supposed to work.
So far, anyway, that burning has been purely metaphorical. Destroying reputations and political ambitions has been enough. The process can also be compared to the Roman process of throwing Christians to the lions. In that culture the Christians were the outsiders with the odd ideas. And people laughed and cheered when an outsider was torn limb from limb. In our culture, it is people who are "not like us" who get thrown to the lions. And if we cheer when they get torn limb from limb, we are as barbaric as the Romans.
The problem is that all this public theater is keeping us from talking about serious issues. Things like whether democracy is theoretically possible in a place where the top one tenth of one percent own twenty percent of the wealth. Things like the fact that we have imported fifty percent of our oil since the early ninteen seventies, and despite a great deal of work on efficiency, we use ever more. But it is beginning to run out. What should we do? Things like the fact that Americans no longer get first-world scores in mathematics or in traditional measures of health care. Then there is the problem of balance of power, and how the executive has overbalanced and overshadowed other branches. These are just a few of the big problems that we stopped talking about sometime between 2000 and 2007. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of smaller ones that have been purposefully neglected by a government of distraction, by distraction, for distraction.
The public trial of Obama is just a distraction. Nothing serves the purpose of the rabid right more than to have a whipping boy like Obama. It keeps us from talking about issues. So here is a "modest proposal." Let's speed up the process. Let's throw Obama into a deep pool of water. If he drowns we will know he was a good Christian, and all this stuff was made up or irrellevant. If he floats, then we can burn him as a "t" person. We will have had our little circus. Then we can get to arguing over bread.