Barack. Hussein. Obama. Hussein, Hussein, Hussein.
15 October, 2009
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. John Wayne Gacy.
George Washington Carver. Lee Harvey Oswald.
Hillary Rodham Clinton. Boutros Boutros Ghalli.
Mao Tse Tung. John Wilkes Booth. Johann
Sebastian Bach. Mark David Chapman. Andrew Lloyd
Webber. James Earl Ray. The list could go on
longer, but you get the idea: All of these people are famous,
and they are known by all three of their names: first, middle, and
last. While some of these individuals are the stuff of comedy
routines (most famous assassins, for example, seem to be known by all
three names — and I would guess, cynically, that this is because
people with the same first and last names would rather not be
associated by mistake with celebrity murderers), others are historical
figures, and a couple are famous politically. What they all
have in common, I have to believe, is that none of them get offended —
or, in the case of those who are deceased, got offended — when you call them by their names.
During the presidential campaign and the subsequent election
to high office of Barack Hussein Obama, a new taboo, a new tenet of
political correctness, raised its sneering, wide-eyed head in
American politics. This is the firm conviction, among some
leftists (crackpots and more mainstream liberals alike) that to use
Barack Obama’s middle name even in conversation — indeed, to state the
man’s full name in any way — is to attempt to smear and malign our noble
President by associating him with dark and sinister forces that are
vaguely Muslim, uncomfortably alien, and inconveniently less than
Western. To utter the name Barack Hussein Obamawhile
failing to omit the egregiously offensive fact of Obama’s middle
name is to spit in the face of Mr. Obama and all who hold dear his rise
to power, proclaiming your avowed affiliation with the Vast Right Wing
Conspiracy while kicking puppies and pushing little orphaned girls into
mud puddles. At least, this is so in the wide eyes and through
the crocodile tears of those who have tried so hard to hector us until
we believe the assertion is reality.
Huffington Post
drone Taylor Marsh, who is apparently too stupid to understand that an
image found at random through a Google search may indeed be subject to
copyright restrictions even if it is not so labeled, makes just this assertion in this column. In her opinion, to utter Barack
Obama’s middle name is “the most heinous attack I’ve seen against a
Democratic candidate since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was attacked for
his alleged sexual prowess with women not his wife. …The
line being forwarded by the linkes of Ed Rogers and other Republicans,
if only by cowardly inference, is that Senator Obama may call himself a
Christian, but he’s actually a Muslim out to do the USA harm through
his masquerade of faith.”
The phrase “cowardly inference”
is what is significant here. This is leftist doublespeak for
something like, “Even if people who insist on using Barack Obama’s
middle name don’t actually SAY in any way that they’re trying to smear
him with his Muslim-sounding middle name, why, we righteous and noble
keepers of the progressive flame possess the psychic powers necessary
to know that this is exactly what they mean.”
In this way, leftists have been excoriating and even
destroying their political opponents for decades, condemning and
crucifying conservative and Republican political figures, operatives,
and office-holders not for their words, but for the thoughtcrimes
leftists claim their enemies are committing — crimes that, these
left-wingers claim, are indicated by the completely benign and entirely
inoffensive things those same individuals actually utter.
These are the same people who seem to believe that George W.
Bush, in an insidious and diabolically clever act of psychological
manipulation and propaganda, managed to convince a presumably
profoundly stupid American public that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had
something to do with the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade
Center. This nefarious act of political sleight of hand was
apparently accomplished by mentioning Iraq and 9/11 in rapid
succession, repeatedly, because Bush was just that fiendishly
clever. Why, it could not have been that this mediocre
president truly believed that fighting a war in Iraq and eliminating
terror-sponsoring regimes in the Middle East was part of an overall
campaign, a doctrine of anti-terror belief, that would accomplish his
long-term goal of making the United States more safe; no, it had to have been,
according to various and oh-so-very-objective 501(c)(4) organizations,
that Bush was cackling with glee behind his hand as he duped the public
into believing that gosh-darn Sad-damn Hussein feller was part of the
9/11 conspiracy.
Now, the absurdity of this cannot be overstated.
It’s true that a disturbing number of people seemed to
believe, at least at the time, that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved
with or linked to the September 11 atrocities. This USA
Today article quotes the Associated Press
reporting on a Washington
Post poll proclaiming that a whopping 69 percent of
Americans thought so. If we can’t trust the objectivity of a Washington Post
push-poll created to generate agendized politically slanted news, well,
whom can we? Still, even if we stipulate that the 69 percent
figure was factual, critics on the left side of the political aisle
cannot have it both ways. Either George W. Bush and his
cronies were the most eeeee-vil
geniuses ever to orchestrate events and public opinion on the world
stage, or George W. Bush was a moron with an IQ equal to or lesser than
that of a potted plant, who pranced through his eight years in office
with little clue as to what he was actually doing. Both
pictures have been painted, gleefully, by Democrats, liberals, and
leftists; they are mutually exclusive.
But I digress. Let us return to the Hussein in
question: Barack Obama. Nathan Thornburgh, writing in Time, dared to ask the question,
“Why is Obama’s middle name taboo?” He points out that RINO John McCain
practically deep-throated the microphone in his rush to apologize for
conservative talk radio host’s Bill Cunningham’s use of the name
“Barack Hussein Obama” at a rally in Cincinnati during the presidential
campaign. Thornburgh, apparently torn between the fact that
he writes for Time
and the fact that McCain is a Republican (at least in name), referred
to this as “McCain’s fatwa against the use of Hussein.”
The pundits were quick to applaud McCain’s fatwa against the
use of Hussein, and broadcasters began trying to report on the
controversy without actually saying the name too much, dancing around
the offending word……So who gets to say Hussein? At the Oscars, host Jon
Stewart
took innuendo about as far as it can go, saying that Barack Hussein
Obama running today is like a 1940’s candidate named Gaydolph Titler.
But that reference, served up to a crowd that presumably swoons for
Obama, got laughs. So maybe the H-word is more like the N-word: you can
say it, but only if you are an initiate. Blacks can use the N-word;
Obama supporters can use the H-word.
David Wallis, meanwhile, wrote a piece in Slate in 2006 in
which he attempted to chronicle the history of “bad
middle names” in politics. In so doing he betrays
his feelings on the evils of using “Hussein,” which he sees as only too
obviously an attempt to malign Barack Obama with his own name:
Just days after Barack Obama mused about running for
president, Republican strategist Ed Rogers winged the senator on Hardball.
“Count me down as somebody who underestimates Barack Hussein
Obama,” sneered Rogers, carefully enunciating Obama’s middle
name—a family moniker passed down from his Kenyan father and
grandfather.…Obama’s “Hussein” highlights the surprising, if very
occasional, utility of middle names in politics, particularly in attack
politics. Middle names can be particularly helpful in undermining a
candidate’s manufactured image. Consider Jim Webb’s effective
middle-assault on incumbent George Allen in the Virginia Senate race.
To fend off charges that Webb applauded flag burning, a Webb aide
repeatedly derided “George Felix Allen Jr.”
for choosing to “cut and run” rather than serve in the military during
Vietnam, as Webb did. (Allen shares a first name and last name with his
father but technically is not a junior.)This was a brilliant swipe, since “Felix” conjures up not the
image of a football-tossing, Confederate-flag-waving good ol’ boy, as
Allen portrayed himself, but of Felix Unger, the kvetching,
overfastidious bachelor of TV’s The Odd Couple.
About a year later, fellow traveler Jake Tapper, at least at the time a senior White House correspondent, breathlessly demanded to know why Bob Kerrey dared even to mention
Barack Obama’s forbidden middle name. It was, in Tapper’s
too-clever-by-half thinking, a “clear attempt to raise an issue while
pretending not to raise it.” At least, that is the implication of
Tapper’s column, even as he offers, with little comment, Kerrey’s
follow-up rebuttal claiming that the moniker “Hussein” should be embraced as a strength rather than reviled as a weakness.
There’s one reason to use Barack Hussein Obama’s middle name, to my thinking, that eclipses all others, and that is simply because it drives the left absolutely nuts.
This is defiance in the face of a subtle tyranny; this is
resistance to the increasingly institutionalized fascism of the Left,
with their speech codes and their overwrought sensitivities and their
political correctness. This is forcing the Left to confront
something that makes them uncomfortable simply because it happens to be
true. The man’s name is his name. Using it cannot and
should not be forbidden. Using it couldn’t be a weapon if it did not make denizens of the Obama Nation squirm so magnificently.
The Obama administration has broken new ground in its brittle,
defensive denunciation of anyone and anything that dares to question
Obama’s words or deeds in any way, culminating in the White House’s
recent and very embarassing declaration that Fox News
was run by a bunch of heretics who dare not to prostrate themselves in
worship to The One. Obama becomes both strident and petulant when
coping with criticism; he has frequently lowered himself and therefore
the office of the President by addressing directly and plaintively the
disappointing failure of many Americans to be persuaded by his
brilliance. Two memorable examples of this behavior included
taking the airwaves yet again to inflict his image on our televisions,
Big Brother style, in defending his attempt to socialize medicine in
the United States, on the heels of creating a White House tip line to which citizens could report fellow Americans who questioned this same plan.
I can think of no better way to stick a thumb in the eye of such an
administration, therefore, than by insisting on doing something that
bothers both that administration and its most ardent minions so
intensely. Using Barack Hussein Obama’s name is not an offense.
It is not a weapon. It is not an insult. It is simply
a fact — an accurate recitation of the man’s identity.
If Obama or Obama’s supporters are uncomfortable with the
associations one may freely draw from that identity, if they think it
somehow unfair that the truth should prompt Americans to contemplate
the background, the history, the outlook, the attitudes, and the
cultural loyalties of the President of the United States, well, that’s
just too damned bad. Objective reality requires us to stare into
its face with unflinching determination. Political reality
demands the same — though we, as a society, have proven far more
reluctant to make eye contact.
Even as we stare into the soul of Barack Hussein Obama, we must
remember that Barack Hussein Obama stares into us as well. I am prepared to accept what he will see, even if he and his worshipful followers cannot say the same.
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