Given that Obama is deemed by the Right as having been/will soon be associated with every type of miscreant, radical, and "troublemaker" (that is Conservative speak for "intellectual") it seemed appropriate to detail some of these relationships. As this (less than comprehensive) chart makes clear, Bro'Bama is in big trouble...
The Barack Obama Six Degrees of Separation Life Chart
1. Barack Obama-->Michelle Obama--> Princeton University
(where she wrote her "unpatriotic" senior thesis)--> Cornel West
(a dangerous Democratic Socialist who makes lots of money on the lecture circuit and from his hip hop cd's)-->either Karl Marx (Cornel has probably read Marx)--> or even worst to Black Jesus (the Black church is going to be the end of Obama isn't it?):
2. Michelle Obama-->Black people (yes, "real" black people)...
3. Obama-->1960s radical and (now) Professor Bill Ayers-->Father Pfleger-->Reverend Wright (via Trinity Church) and to Louis Farrakhan ('nuff said)-->Libyan President Muamar Quaddafi (remember Farrakhan was getting bankrolled by the now cross-dressing and somewhat insane Libyan leader-->the terrorist organization Hamas-->Yasser Arafat-->Osama Bin Laden. This one could be the end for Barack because Osama is far worse and far more dangerous than Black Jesus...
4. Obama-->his white, hippy, race mixing mother (she had a thing for the brown folks)-->Marx (she is an anthropologist by training)-->Dirty Hippies. We all hate dirty hippies:
5. Obama--> his African, lapsed-Muslim, apostate, father-->Hamas-->Arafat-->Al Queda. This is an easy one because many Americans already believe Obama is a Muslim, that Muslims are all terrorists, and that Obama could be a closet supporter of Islamic terrorism (or alternatively that Obama's father and by extension Obama could somehow be targets of suicide bombers because of dad's status as an "apostate"). The Right has been on this one since jump street so they will only increase their emphasis of this point in the coming months:
6. Obama-->his African father-->his African extended family-->Shaka Zulu. I love Shaka Zulu and in fact believe that any link to Shaka should give a candidate instant credibility. While all folks may not agree with the power of Shaka, I couldn't resist sharing it:
This chart is less than comprehensive. For example, I left out the noted scholar Rashid Khalidi and how from Obama to Khalidi one can go instantly to Osama and Al Queda (because of course, anyone that is critical of either the Israeli occupation or of political zionism is anti-Semitic:
One could also instantly go from Marx to just about anything that the Right would find threatening, problematic, scary, or unsettling (full employment, yikes!!!), but that link was too obvious.
Respectable Negroes and our friends, who else should we include in version 2.0 of our Obama Six Degrees of separation chart? And, what relationships should we include in our John McCain Six Degrees of Separation chart?
In short, if this handy chart is at all telling, I think Barack Obama, presidential candidate to be, is in some perilous waters. Your thoughts? Is there a way to fix this "problem"? Who else should he disassociate himself from? Should he just withdraw now? Should Obama change his name to "Berry," disappear, and then come back in a decade or so with a new persona? An "Obama-lite" without baggage, attachments, or "troubling" relationships?
Get ready for the "radical" comments towards Obama to be hurled from the right. Black politicians, particularly Democrats, consistently fight that label.
ReplyDeleteAnd by Sen. Obama being popular with yuppies, I expect this label to stick around for a while.
Since Shaka Zulu was one of the most effective military leaders in history I don't think the GOP will play up that connection, they will want to paint Obama as a namby-pamby liberal appeaser.
ReplyDeleteOn that point, I'm sure Bill Ayers can lead somehow to Jane Fonda, whose very name gets vets frothing at the mouth.
As far as McCain goes, he will have to run away from Dubya and John Hagee. Catholics don't like their church being called the "Great Whore."
This is funny. Khalidi is hardly that radical, and unlike his colleagues, Massad and Dabashi, he doesn't simply polemicize in melodramatic prose for the already converted. Instead he provides a lucid voice as a public intellectual voice for both Palestine and postcolonial causes more generally, just as Said had once done.
ReplyDeleteI guess this officially marks the death warrant on my political ambitions, since I am officially listed under the evil discipline of Near Eastern Studies, though strangely I don't consider myself a Middle Easternist.