Obama's America

The sheer wonderfulness that is the fine young senator from Cook County seems to be diminishing somewhat lately and it is entirely his own fault. He and his campaign started it all when they leaped on a verbal gaffe by John McCain to suggest that Big Mac is too old to be President, that his mind is fogged by age, that he is confused and befuddled.

The problem with this line of attack is that not only is Sen. McCain is obviously intelligent and very much in touch with the great issues of our day, but that Obama with nearly every public utterance is revealing himself to be intellectually inept and astoundingly ignorant regarding the nation he presumes to lead and the world he will confront should he become President.

The problem has become so blatant that even left-wingers have noticed it. Jake Tapper, writing for ABC news, has branded Obama a "one-man gaffe machine." [read the article here]. He notes that Obama's errors are not just simple slips of the tongue -- they reveal vast wells of ignorance regarding important matters on which a President must make crucial decisions.

But there is a far more disturbing aspect to Obama's utterances that his obvious intellecual incapacity -- it is manifested in his stated perceptions regarding the American nation and its people.

Already we have noted Obama's strange associations with radical figures such as Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayres, and the weird opinions regarding America voiced by his wife, Michelle. The Obama campaign has been able to dismiss these as not reflecting the candidate's own views and attacked his critics as bigots seeking to declare him guilty by association. But, if we look at Obama's own words we can discern a disturbing pattern of references.

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

When Barack Obama talks about avoiding the "money culture" and the lifestyle of suits and big houses, there is nothing per se wrong with such a call to public service.

By the same token, he makes many fine points in his frequent recitals of U.S. history in which the Underground Railroad, the freedom riders, women suffragists, and icons of the civil-rights movement figure prominently....

[I]n almost every allusion to our collective past there is mention of reform and protest, all of it needed of course. But after a while, whether inadvertently or not, our only heroes become those who found the system wanting and took it on. Yet there were many other elements of the system that are responsible for our current freedom and prosperity, and plenty of wonderful Americans outside of social activism.

At some point as he continues to offer us primers on our past, Obama should also include men and women of genius who were not social activists..., otherwise..., the aggregate effect is Carteresque — more lectures about the old gloom and doom, and more reminders that the unique Americans of the past were only those who followed paths of activism — not surprisingly like those claimed as well by Obama himself.

Read the whole thing here.

This is the man who calls for more "oppression studies" in our schools, whose wife sees America as a "mean" place, whose pastor damns America, and who seems to find worthy of note only those who reject the mainstream of American culture. The question looming for most Americans is increasingly going to be whether or not we want to elevate such an alienated individual to the presidency.

UPDATE:

Another day, another gaffe. Obama seems to think that his uncle, or maybe it was his grandfather, liberated Auschwitz. The guys at Hot Air are all over it here.