Obama Omnibus: Bad News Edition

Never let it be said that I can't quickly twist the knife in a candidate's back once a worse one is gone. Plenty of other people have gone over Obama's change of heart on public financing and on the new FISA bill, so I'm not going to get into that. Instead I'll turn my rage on other facets of the Man from Hawaii.

Like, for instance, his earnest but weird supporters. Doing nothing to dispel the idea that the Obama campaign is really an Islamoathiest cult and taking full advantage of the dumbest sectors of the internet, America now has a whole slew of people with "Hussein" for a middle name.

Emily Nordling has never met a Muslim, at least not to her knowledge. But this spring, Ms. Nordling, a 19-year-old student from Fort Thomas, Ky., gave herself a new middle name on Facebook.com mimicking her boyfriend and shocking her father.

“Emily Hussein Nordling,” her entry now reads.

With her decision, she joined a growing band of supporters of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who are expressing solidarity with him by informally adopting his middle name.

...

Ms. Nordling’s uncle liked the idea so much that he joined the same Facebook group that she had. But when her father saw her new online moniker, he was incredulous.

“He actually thought I was going to convert to Islam,” Ms. Nordling said.

My first thought when I read this was to wonder if we had the society we have today in the 1960, would Kennedy supporters wear Pope hats in solidarity? Because that would be awesome.

But what is the candidate himself doing? If you answered, "falling into the same stupid traps John Kerry kept falling into in 2004," you'd be depressingly correct. How else to explain the pure hokiness of doing a speech on patriotism in Independence, Missouri?

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. – As the nation prepares to celebrate the Fourth of July, Senator Barack Obama opened a weeklong patriotism tour here today, hoping to explain and define his American ideals to ward off skepticism and answer questions from his critics.

“I will never question the patriotism of others in this campaign,” Mr. Obama said, speaking over the applause of several hundred supporters gathered here. “And I will not stand idly by when I hear others question mine.”

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“It is worth considering the meaning of patriotism because the question of who is – or is not – a patriot all too often poisons our political debates, in ways that divide us rather than bring us together.

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“Surely we can agree,” Mr. Obama said, “that no party or political philosophy has a monopoly on patriotism.”

No no no no no. Why do Democrats always get caught in this game? Isn't it just as easy to find twistable things John McCain said and prove that he hates America just as much as Barack Obama? Or at the very least, Americans? I'm convinced that anyone who runs for President truly, deeply hates us and is just waiting for the opportunity to play with the American people like a fly caught in a glass. How else to explain the open sore of dumbness that is the campaign? What does one even do on a patriotism tour anyway other than dress in denim and purposely confuse what "Born in the U.S.A." was all about?

Finally, in real news, The Boston Globe comes up with an awesome hit piece (found, unfortunately, via Mickey Kaus) that would be damaging if America gave a shit about black people or public housing. It does however, highlight Barack's tendency to push mushy centrist positions and then avoid any controversy around them.

As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama's former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.

...

Nonetheless, the buildings deteriorated badly. The problems came to public attention in a dramatic way in 2004, after a sport utility vehicle driven by a suburban woman trying to buy drugs struck one of the buildings, causing it to collapse. City inspectors arrived in the ensuing glare, finding a long list of code violations, leading city officials to urge the federal government to seize the complex.

In the midst of the uproar, a small group of Lawndale residents gathered to rally against the Democratic candidate for the US Senate, Barack Obama.

Obama's Republican opponent, Alan Keyes, trailed badly in the polls and was not seen as a serious challenger. But the organizers had a simple message: Cecil Butler had donated $3,000 to Obama's campaign. Habitat had close ties to Obama. And Obama had remained silent about Lawndale's plight.

Hey, everyone who's ever contributed to this blog has been warning people about SUVs for years. Barack Obama may or may not have looked the other way while the projects crumbled, but at least we now know an SUV can destroy a (shoddily constructed) building.