Obamamessiah

Obamamessiah

A number of people have pointed out the absurdity of how people are responding to Obama--an idol worship that would be silly if he were an entertainer, but is downright scary because he is a politician. This piece of satire in the July 25, 2008 Times of London really captures the insanity:

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.
The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.
When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”
In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.
...
And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth - for the first time - to bring the light unto all the world.
He travelled fleet of foot and light of camel, with a small retinue that consisted only of his loyal disciples from the tribe of the Media. He ventured first to the land of the Hindu Kush, where the
Taleban had harboured the viper of al-Qaeda in their bosom, raining terror on all the world.
And the Child spake and the tribes of Nato immediately loosed the Caveats that had previously bound them. And in the great battle that ensued the forces of the light were triumphant. For as long as the Child stood with his arms raised aloft, the enemy suffered great blows and the threat of terror was no more.
From there he went forth to Mesopotamia where he was received by the great ruler al-Maliki, and al-Maliki spake unto him and blessed his Sixteen Month Troop Withdrawal Plan even as the imperial warrior Petraeus tried to destroy it.
And lo, in Mesopotamia, a miracle occurred. Even though the Great Surge of Armour that the evil Bush had ordered had been a terrible mistake, a waste of vital military resources and doomed to end in disaster, the Child's very presence suddenly brought forth a great victory for the forces of the light.

Let me emphasize: this isn't an attack on Obama. It's an attack on the bizarre idol worship that is going on about this guy.

This piece in the July 25, 2008 Telegraph isn't so clever--it just points out that Obama is, once again, out of his depth:

he words sounded wonderful. "Not only have walls come down in Berlin, but they have come down in Belfast, where Protestant and Catholic found a way to live together," Barack Obama told 200,000 gathered for his speech at the Victory Column. Only trouble is, that's not the case - since Good Friday peace agreement in 1998, the walls dividing Belfast's sectarian enclaves (known as the "peace line") have been going up, not coming down.

Obama has no excuse for getting this wrong because his own Northern Ireland adviser Trina Vargo wrote an oped piece in the "Irish Times" in February that began with the words "Belfast's so-called peace walls remain". It quoted former Senator George Mitchell - who chaired the Good Fiday talks - as saying: "I hope and pray that I live to see the day when the peace line goes the way of the Berlin Wall: its destruction will be the symbolic end of an age of conflict."
In September 2007 Vargo even drew a direct contrast between the wall coming down in Berlin and walls staying up in Belfast in another "Irish Times" piece in which she asked: "With things settling down in Northern Ireland, isn't it time to consider taking down the so-called 'peace' walls separating communities instead of erecting more""
A quick Google search would have clued in Obama's speechwriters. Shawn Pogatchnik, the long-time Belfast correspondent for the AP, wrote a piece in May that was headlined "Despite peace, Belfast walls are growing in size and number" in "USA Today". He reported: "Ten years after peace was declared in Northern Ireland, one might have expected that Belfast's barriers would be torn down by now. But reality, as usual, is far messier. Not one has been dismantled. Instead they've grown in both size and number."
I checked in with a couple friends in Belfast last night. They confirmed that the trend I witnessed while reporting from Northern Ireland up to late 1999 has continued. While there has been dramatic political progress in Northern Ireland, if anything there has been an increase in sectarianism. The consensus is that it will take at least another generation before Protestants and Catholics can "find a way to live together" in a fashion that the rest of the civilised world would consider normal.

Look, I don't expect Obama to be an expert on everything. I don't expect any president to be an expert on even a few things. I do expect that before making a factual statement in a speech about something important, that the president, or his advisers, would see if the factual statement had any actual facts backing it up.