The candidate of fear

Olavo de Carvalho

Diário do Comércio (São Paulo, Brazil), October 24th, 2008

Called “the Messiah” by radical Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan and “My Jesus” by the college associate editor of a student newspaper, Barack Hussein Obama informs us, “Contrary to the rumors you have heard, I was not born in a manger.” What if he did not let us know?

Whatever the case, he has already performed at least one confirmed miracle: he is the first presidential candidate who has won the applause of all the enemies of the United States without it having ever aroused the least suspicion of the American establishment against him. Counted among his enthusiasts are Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Iranian president Ahmadinejad, Muammar Khadafi, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and the television station Al-Jazeera. I wonder what would have happened to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s candidacy in 1932 if he had received ostensible support from Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini.

It is true that Obama pledges to dismantle the space defense system of the United States, to slow down unilaterally the American program of nuclear research, to turn victory in Iraq into defeat, to ban new oil drilling, and to grant driver’s license and health care to illegal aliens, that patriotic mob which wants to turn Texas and California into Mexican states. But if you insinuate that any of those things is a good reason for Communists and radical Muslims to like him, the media en masse will say that you have “crossed the line” and that you are virtually guilty of a “hate crime.” Ahmadinejad has declared that the victory of the Democratic candidate in the election will give the green light to the Islamization of the world, Khadafi has proclaimed that Obama is a faithful Muslim financed by Islamite millionaires, and Louis Farrakhan, availing himself of the wave of pro-Obama enthusiasm, has announced that the Nation of Islam, the secret society of radical Muslims he presides over, which has been making slow progress for decades, is having a “new beginning,” and will be fully operational soon. The meaning of those facts is clear, but noticing it is immoral: every decent citizen has to swear that the support coming from the enemies of America is only a mistake on their part, since Obama has never given-oh, no!-the least pretext for them to sympathize with him. To insinuate any convergence of interests is to impute to Obama “guilt by association”- an act of perfidy, obviously, loaded with racial “overtones.”

Besides, any stronger word used against the black candidate is pointed out as proof of racism, and the least suggestion that there is racial blackmail in this is double proof. John McCain himself makes a point of confining the debate to the sphere of “ideas,” emphasizing that his opponent is “a decent person and a person you do not have to be scared of.”

This statement is unintentionally ironic. The thing that every American fears most, nowadays, is being suspected of thinking bad things about Barack Hussein Obama. Following the example of their leader, Republican militants are doing their best to show respect and veneration for the person of the adversary. A staffer at the John McCain campaign office in Pompano Beach, California, who posted behind his desk a sign associating Obama with Marx and Hitler was immediately fired. An Ohio citizen, who asked some tougher questions to the Democratic candidate about his tax plan, paid dearly for his boldness. He had his life rummaged through by reporters and was severely criticized for the heinous crimes of working as a plumber without a license and of not having paid a traffic fine he had incurred in Arizona eight years ago. That gives an idea of the exasperated zeal with which the mainstream media protects Barack Obama’s image. Samuel Wurzelbacher, or Joe The Plumber-the nickname by which he has become known nationwide-draws from his experience an unavoidable conclusion, “When you can’t ask a question to your leaders anymore, that gets scary.”

This fear is not just psychological. Several Republican activists have already reportedly been beaten up by Obama supporters, McCain campaign offices in various states have been broken into and destroyed, and only police action managed to prevent, just in time, hundreds of well-trained Obama agitators, armed with Molotov cocktails, from setting fire to the buses heading to the Republican Convention in St. Paul (even so, the remainder managed to wreak quite some havoc). When a candidate employs terrorist methods, and at the same time the establishment decrees that calling him a terrorist is insanity to the utmost, it is clear that this candidate has unlimited rights. He is allowed to receive 63 million dollars in illegal contributions from abroad, and nothing bad will happen to him. An NGO that patronizes him can flood thirteen states with fraudulent voter registrations, and woe to them who suggest that he bears some guilt in the case. In contrast, McCain was charged with criminal verbal violence for the simple fact of mentioning the widely attested link between Obama and William Ayers. A pro-McCain-Palin march, in New York, was received with every sort of insult and threat. As, on the other hand, no violence could be observed against Obama militants, it was necessary to invent a story that, in a Sarah Palin rally, somebody shouted “Kill him” after hearing Obama’s name mentioned. The police looked carefully into the tapes of the rally and concluded that nobody shouted any such thing at all.

Another intimidating factor is economic superiority. Obama’s campaign collected nothing less than $605 million in contributions. For every McCain ad, four Obama ads come out. Even more overwhelming is the free advertisement provided by the big media for the Democratic candidate.

To this day, the only newspaper of some importance that has reported the lawsuit filed by Democratic attorney Philip Berg against Obama was the Washington Times-nominally Republican-which, nonetheless, categorizes doubts about Obama’s nationality as mere “internet rumors” and, alluding to the lawsuit only in the last lines, as if it were nothing but one more rumor, omit informing that Obama, instead of presenting his birth certificate as requested by the plaintiff, preferred making use of a complex legal argumentation in order to dodge doing so. The second lawsuit on the same issue, filed in the state of Washington, is not even mentioned.

The major newspapers and television companies protect the Democratic candidate not only against his adversaries but against himself. Acts or statements that may show him in an unfavorable light are carefully omitted. In all the American mainstream media one will not find a single word about Obama’s long career as an abortion militant, let alone about the only important activity he undertook on the international level: the campaign set up, with public money, to bring into power in Kenya the anti-American and pro-terrorist agitator Raila Odinga, guilty of ordering the murder of more than a thousand of his political opponents and of conspiring with Muslim leaders to impose the Islamic religion on a Christian-majority nation. Not only did Obama help Odinga with American tax-payers’ money, and introduce him to contacts in the Senate, but spoke in his favor at rallies in Kenya. If there is something that shows the true nature of the international commitments of the Democratic candidate, it is this episode-but even Fox News omits touching upon the subject.

Here in the United States everybody says that Obama’s victory is certain. It seems to me that, even if Obama loses the election, he will be a winner. The party of his adversaries was already on its knees at the moment that, instead of an authentic conservative, it chose a typical liberal Republican for a candidate, a sure promise, if he is elected, of a weak administration subservient to critics, exactly like George Bush’s. After this first fit of frenzy, there followed a worse one: from the moment when Republicans, instead of filing a thousand lawsuits like that of Philip Berg, accepted as a legitimate and decent electoral adversary a candidate with no ascertained nationality, with a misty biography full of flagrant lies, aided and subsidized by the most heinous enemies of the country, it became clear that they had abdicated all sense of honor and consented to legitimate a farce. If they lose the elections, they will deserve as many tears as those who preferred to allow Lula to win the presidency of Brazil rather than tell what they knew about the São Paulo Forum.

As for Obama’s campaign, its profile is clear. The amalgam of utopian promises, overwhelming advertisement, psychotic beatification of the leader, racial appeal, media control, and systematic intimidations of voters, is identical in the least details with Hitler’s electoral strategy in 1933, but in order to say this in public-or even to become aware of it in a low voice-it takes more courage than one can expect from the average voter nowadays.

Olavo de Carvalho, 61, taught Political Philosophy at the Catholic University of Parana (Brazil) from 2001 to 2005 and is the author of twelve books. He now lives in the United States as a correspondent for Brazilian newspapers. Website: www.olavodecarvalho.org.

Source: Laigle’s Forum

Divulgation: http://www.lastdayswatchman.blogspot.com