larvatus prodeo

Thus spake Barack Hussein Obama in his second debate with John McCain on 15 October 2008:

I think that the Constitution has a right to privacy in it that shouldn’t be subject to state referendum, any more than our First Amendment rights are subject to state referendum, any more than many of the other rights that we have should be subject to popular vote.

Regrettably, his uncompromising defense of the Constitutional right to privacy is belied by the approach to the Second Amendment. While campaigning in Iowa on 5 December 2007, even as he acknowledged that gun ownership “is an individual right and not just the right of a militia”, Obama stressed that “all rights […] are constrained by the needs and the rights of the community”.

As Obama knows, Justice William O. Douglas conjured the right to privacy on 7 June 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut, U.S. Supreme Court 381 U.S. 479, from the theory that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” By contrast, on 26 June 2008, Justice Antonin Scalia recognized the right of individuals to bear arms as an “enumerated constitutional right” in District of Columbia v. Heller, U.S. Supreme Court 554 U.S.     . On the same day, Obama expatiated:

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Writing for the majority in Griswold, Justice Douglas ruled that the “zones of privacy” emanate from the First Amendment’s right of association, the Third Amendment’s prohibition against the quartering of soldiers in any house without consent in peacetime, the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self-incrimination. His colleagues were unpersuaded. Justice Potter Stewart, famous for knowing it when he saw it, found no constitutional infringements in the contraception ban at issue. Justice Hugo Black averred: “I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision.” Favoring penumbral emanations over specific, enumerated constitutional rights is unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny. Thus the stage is set for probing Obama’s position on local jurisdictions instituting their own abortion laws.

Stop hating on Trig Palin, future U.S. President!

Hegel bemerkt irgendwo, daß alle großen weltgeschichtlichen Tatsachen und Personen sich sozusagen zweimal ereignen. Er hat vergessen hinzuzufügen: das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce.


Let’s discuss another pointy head:

For somebody who kvetches about his muslim faith, Obama is ill advised to disparage Republican pigs for wearing lipstick. ( Read more... )Fortunately, the surface disunity of Obama’s campaign can be justified by his larger purpose. As his opponent has pointed out, Barack Hussein Obama would lose a war to win an election. All that remains is to shore up popular support for revisiting positions taken by his Weathermen confederates when Obama was just eight years old.

The principal sources for the New Yorker cartoon of the Obamas on the cover of its 21 July 2008 issue are Christopher Hitchens’ dissection of Michelle Obama’s endorsement of Black Power and Daniel Pipes’ analysis of Barack Hussein Obama as an apostate Muslim. Hitchens twits the would-be First Lady for acknowledging, in her Princeton undergraduate thesis, her guidance by the definition of black “separationism” offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 opus, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. In his turn, Pipes reprimands her putative lord and master for dissembling about having been born a Muslim and having had a Muslim upbringing.

    Mixed messages are the most effective vehicle for political defamation. According to its editor David Remnick, the New Yorker’s cover image is “not a satire about Obama — it’s a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama”:

Obviously I wouldn’t have run a cover just to get attention — I ran the cover because I thought it had something to say. What I think it does is hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama’s — both Obamas’ — past, and their politics. I can’t speak for anyone else’s interpretations, all I can say is that it combines a number of images that have been propagated, not by everyone on the right but by some, about Obama’s supposed “lack of patriotism” or his being “soft on terrorism” or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the second coming of the Weathermen or most violent Black Panthers. That somehow all this is going to come to the Oval Office.
    The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are… We’ve run many many satirical political covers. Ask the Bush administration how many.

To be sure, the slide show of past political covers by New Yorker illustrator Barry Blitt accords the pride of place to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney amid luminaries ranging from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Martin Luther King, Jr. But it is preposterous to propose that the limitations of the speaker’s vocabulary should constrain the public implications of his speech. We have no control over the “aboutness” of words blowing in the wind. And the Obamas’ fusion of multicultural roots and separationist ambitions is due to receive more than its share of scrutiny in an election year as marked by suspicions of race and religion as it is inflected by imperatives of culture and politics, when their presumptive adversary already has been exposed as a deranged victim of three slant-eyed screws — a simian, a shrew, and a spook:

    How to combat these noisome slurs? Jesse Jackson was not far off the mark in wishing an orchiectomy upon Barack Obama. The wellspring of his difficulties is but a few inches away. It’s all about the Jews. David Remnick is one. Daniel Pipes is another. Even Christopher Hitchens, despite his name bearing our Lord on the inside, despite his hand officiating an inward baptism with a tumbler of whisky, aligns himself with the Chosen People. As a bonus, Jann Wenner, the skalawag responsible for racialist scapegoating of Senator McCain, is a Jewish homosexual.
    Only one escape is left to Obama. It is spelled out by another woman of color, Zadie Smith, in an even smugger organ of Hymietown booboisie, reassuring the kosher compatriots of Gregor Samsa: “We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer, now.” Clearly, his attempt to brand himself as a life-long Christian has backfired. He couldn’t do any worse rebranding himself as the second coming of the Jewish Negro, namely Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior. The writing is on the wall: in March 2008, 1% of registered voters believed that Barack Obama was Jewish. The least Barack would get out of repudiating Michelle’s separationism for the sake of embracing Zadie’s incorporationism to realign himself with subhuman vermin, is a better class of punani:

“But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
— Barack Hussein Obama, 6 April 2008

No elitism here, quite the contrary.

“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.”
— Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1880, translated from the French by Edward Aveling