Wanker of the Day

Tom Roeser could probably be the wanker of the decade as well, but today he is very special:

Ah, but one has the potential to do serious damage.

That’s the rumor, reported by Sweet that began with blogster Debbie Schlussel, a conservative talking-head on MSNBC, now carried widely by word of mouth by some political cognoscenti in Chicago bars. Right now the tale is in a decidedly phase 3 cyclonic stage as a key rumor in the bars. The rumor goes: While Barack Hussein Obama is affiliated with the Unitarian-like United Church of Christ in Chicago, he may have, at one time, been a Muslim-or at the very least was accepted as one in his early years: which, if verified, could truly be explosive and possibly disqualifying politically for the presidential nomination of a major political party in a nation at war with extreme elements of the religion. There has been no formal answer to that charge by the Obama people but the rumor gains currency.

First, his Kenyan father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., killed in an automobile accident, was apparently a Muslim. No big stuff so far as it goes although it’s interesting to note that Hussein, given to both father and son, is a distinctively Muslim name-derived from that of Husayn ibn Ali [626-680], grandson of the prophet Muhammad. He was killed in the battle of Karbala in A. D. 680 and is a day of mourning and religious observance for Shi’a Muslims. Let’s say if you got a kid running around named Hussein, it means something.

Second, according to best-selling lawyer-novelist, Chicago native and fervent liberal Democrat, Scott Turow in the Internet publication “Salon,” young Obama went to a Muslim school for two years in Indonesia. Third, his mother, Anna, re-married an Indonesian man (most likely a Muslim as Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world).

Fourth, while Junior’s affinity is for Kenya which is largely Christian, it has a fast-growing Muslim population which has engaged in a good deal of religious violence and riots against Christians. Kenyan courts apply Sharia (or Muslim) law when the participants are Muslim. Fifth, in Junior’s book Dreams from My Father, after his father died in Nairobi in 1982, Obama was working in Chicago. He met his Kenyan sister, Auma, a linguist educated in Germany who was visiting in the United States. When she returned to Kenya in 11986 to teach for a year at the University of Nairobi, Obama finally made a trip to his father’s homeland. There he fully embraced the heritage and family he’d never known and came to terms with his father whom he had mistakenly believed was a foreign prince but who now realized was a human being burdened by his own illusions and vulnerabilities: this from his best-seller autobiography.

Schlussel puts it out this way: “Even if he identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on “Oprah”), Obama is a man whom Muslims think is a Muslim and who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage.” She asks: Is this “a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where would his loyalties be?” She goes further: “Is [he] even the man we’d want to be a heartbeat away from the presidency if Hillary Clinton offers him the vice presidential candidacy on her ticket (which he certainly wouldn’t turn down)?

Or, put another way: A president thought to have been a Muslim as a child and who left the faith for Christianity is the last person to “heal”-which is Obama’s favorite word applied to foreign affairs. Even a third way: a president trying to disabuse a suspicious world that he’s soft on the Muslim religion may want to use replete examples to get tough. Finally a fourth: how would a president once viewed as a Muslim who became a backslider do in the concert of world politics?

Now there has been no substantiation or denial by the Obama people of the rumor that Ms. Schussel has put forward other than for Obama people to claim it is (a) racist, (b) vindictive and (c) full of suppositions. Very well, then let them answer it. Racist? It has nothing to do with Obama’s half caste black-white heritage. Vindictive? Not any more so than the theory put forward against John F. Kennedy, when he was the Democratic nominee in 1960. Full of suppositions? Sure: so the best way to clear the air is for Obama or his staff to give out all the facts.

Besides the level of bullshit that someone said it so it must be a big deal even though there is no evidence and it’s directly contradicted by Obama’s own account of his life, Roeser is too stupid to even get the attribution of the quote right.

Karl Frisch works for Media Matters of America, not the Senator.

IOW, despite claiming the Senator’s staff ducks the question, no one has asked the Senator’s staff because everyone in their right mind knows Debbie Schlussel and Tom Roeser are fucking batty.