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The answer, my fellow Americans, is yes. Hillary Clinton, just for instance, has spent years cozying up to Nixon's old friend the Rev. Billy Graham. And yet what are the chances that she seconds Graham's feeling, caught on Nixon's tapes, that Jews are pornographers with a "stranglehold" on the American media? Just a ballpark guesstimate: zero. Or that John McCain is right there with his buddy televangelist John Hagee's belief that Catholics are the spawn of Satan? (I paraphrase, but what he actually said was worse.) Or that McCain agrees with his other "spiritual adviser'' Rod Parsley (his real name), who thinks we ought to declare war on "the false religion" of Islam? What, you didn't even know John McCain had a spiritual advisor? I doubt that he did, either.
Barack Obama, of course, has had a far more substantial relationship with his longtime preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who in turn is sweet on Louis Farrakhan. And as everyone with cable now knows, Wright has given a bunch of fiery sermons in which he blasted America's foreign policy and racism, and said Hillary Clinton has never been called the n-word. (Only, except for the part about the "chickens coming home to roost'' on 9/11, isn't much of what he was railing about sad but true? Former Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro suggests that Obama is an affirmative-action slacker with skills inferior to those of the average white guy, her candidate responds with a tepid tut-tut, and there's somebody out there who thinks racism is not still a problem?)
But spend two minutes listening to Obama, and you know he is no more in the same zip code with Wright on the anti-American or us-vs.-them stuff than Clinton is anti-Semitic or McCain is anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim. The real question about Obama in all of this is why, knowing that this guy Wright was a big political liability, he didn't quit that church years ago. But isn't the only possible answer that he didn't do that because he still has other-than-political motivations in his life, ties to a community that mean more to him than they maybe even ought to, and stubborn gratitude to the man who, as he put it, brought him to Jesus and to the "Gospel on which I base my life''?
Kind of puts to rest those rumors about him being a secret Muslim, doesn't it?
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Wouldn't you love to know the back story on Paul Krugman's column today? Because without knowing that his real beef is that his wife can't stop singing "Yes, we can," or maybe that his idiot nephew won't shut up about how all the cool people are on the O Train, it's all very mysterious: What is he referring to when he says "most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody''? That Obama's supporters are not chill like Hillary Clinton's?
That is a fresh take, definitely, but where did he get the impression that "many Obama supporters seem happy with the application of 'Clinton rules'—the term a number of observers use for the way pundits and some news organizations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent.'' Then he draws a straight line from there to ... Whitewater? Suggesting what? That if not Obama then those who mindlessly follow him approved of the vast right-wing thing? I'd hate to put this non-sequitur on a par with Krugman's buddy Bush mentioning 9/11 in the same breath with Saddam—but we're all in some danger, aren't we, of mirroring what we loathe?
His least original point, about how "the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality,'' is one I hear all the time from Hillary supporters who claim it is a sign of immaturity to support Obama and that to believe there is any other way of doing business is really to believe in a fairy tale. But thinking that any one group or campaign or party has cornered the market on "most of the venom'' is what seems like kid stuff to me.
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