Taylor Marsh – TaylorMarsh.com – News, Opinion and Weblog on Progressive Politics

Who can forget the middle name slur, compliments of Fox \”News\” morning
show. When I pushed back at one of the main wingnut blogger attackers, I was
even threatened with a lawsuit.

We also had the whole madrassa thing. Even had it connected to Clinton\’s camp,
which was an outright falsehood. Of course, this was also pushed forward by
Fox \”News,\” especially through the never ending baloney spread by
Dick Morris, who never misses an opportunity to hit Hillary.

But now we\’ve got someone else chiming in, Mike Allen, a reporter who it seems
is miffed at not getting access to Obama.
Stoller targets one section with pinpoint accuracy:

Whoever gave Allen the smear sought him out because they are building a political narrative around Obama divorced from important political issues. And Allen repeated the smear without checking because it seemed to fit into the story he wanted to tell. In this same article, Allen said that party strategists argued that Obama is vulnerable because of \”his frank liberalism in a time when the party needs centrist voters.\” Where does this come from? According to recent polling data I dug up in one minute, Obama is stronger among independents relative to Clinton than he is among any other block of voters. Yet there Allen is, writing a conventional wisdom that \’party strategists\’ are telling him, even though it\’s patently false.

Now, there\’s a lot in the Allen piece to go after, but I found this little
offering especially interesting.

Officials at the top of both parties calculate that Obama has risen too fast to sustain his popularity in the cauldron of a presidential campaign. Democrats talk of “vapid platitudes” that could produce a “soufflé effect” – an implosion as journalists and activists begin probing for substance behind Obama’s appealing promise of “a different kind of politics” and “a new kind of politics.” “With a couple of pinpricks here and there, the whole thing could fall apart,” said a Democratic strategist familiar with the plans of Obama’s rival campaigns. Says another top Democrat: \”Once the shooting war starts, he\’s not going to be able to get away with these grand pronouncements.” … Undoing Obama: Inside the Coming Effort to Dismantle A Candidate

Now, if I weren\’t a white chick out here in the west, I\’d give you the shorter
version flat out. But since I am, let me just say this smacks of the DC insiders
calling Obama an uppity newcomer. You use whatever word you want to
replace newcomer, because I\’m sure you catch my drift.

Here\’s more evidence of Allen\’s thinly veiled attack on Obama, which is nothing
less than what we\’re getting from the wingnut racists and bigots.

Now, Obama’s about to endure a going-over that would make a proctologist blush. Why has he sometimes said his first name is Arabic, and other times Swahili?

Brad Delong
does the work Allen was to lazy to do. Poorman
has more.

Two minutes of Googling would have told Mike Allen that \”barack\” is both a Swahili word meaning \”blessed by God\” and an Arabic word meaning \”blessed.\” There\’s been lots of trade between Swahili-speaking East Africa and the Arabic-speaking Middle East for millennia. That \”barack\” is a word in both languages is part of the same process by which the largest Swahili-speaking port in the world has a pure Arabic name–Dar es Salaam, meaning \”House of Peace.\”

As a chaser, Allen brings the big donkey in the room, which may have helped get the DLCers on their high horse.

3. Liberalism The senator is unabashedly more liberal than the centrist path charted by President Bill Clinton. Back in 1996, a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter wrote that Obama – then the Democratic nominee from his state Senate district – sighed when asked about the fall election. “Bill Clinton?” Obama was quoted as asking. “Well, his campaign\’s fascinating to a student of politics. It\’s disturbing to someone who cares about certain issues. But politically, it seems to be working.\” (emphasis added)

Sound like someone else we all know?

All this is very interesting, plus it keeps the whole Barack Hussein
Obama – madrassa conversation afloat, obviously, but at the very end of Allen\’s
piece comes the real red meat for the wingnut radio rabble and the
Fox \”News\” crowd.

It is immensely valuable as a Rosetta stone to a man who wants to lead the free world and who wrote rawly about his shame when he had referred to a Beaver Cleaver-like, argyle-sweater-wearing black friend as an Uncle Tom in order to try to ingratiate himself to more radical friends. But Obama, who would start his career in politics as a community organizer in Chicago, wrote that he also found solace in the autobiography of Malcolm X, with his “unadorned insistence on respect.”

Malcolm X.

That\’s Allen\’s real contribution to forwarding the Obama swiftboating trend the media
began on Fox \”News\” with the madrassa slur. Because nothing scares
Republicans and pasty white media pimps more than the thought of the militant
civil rights leader Malcolm X. Nothing. That is unless it\’s a black man out
of Harvard running for president and talking about civility, instead
of anger and arms, after having learned the importance of respect from
Malcolm X. Especially when that black man was against a war most DC Democrats
and current presidential candidates pimped out to the public and still don\’t
have the spine to end, because none of them had the courage to stand up and
push back against Mr. Bush and his neocon cabal from the start.

But just in case that wasn\’t enough, Allen, the latest media hack pack pimp,
throws in sex and drugs, minus the rock \’n roll, at the end. Malcolm X more
than makes up for it.