Four days to go. Do you find yourself watching your candidate on TV and saying. “I wish he had said that in the debates!” or “Why couldn’t he have displayed that intensity three months ago”? Candidates and their supporters are finally saying some things “better late than never.”

And some are saying things about saying things that maybe they shouldn’t be saying. Or maybe it’s good they ARE saying certain things; that is, maybe we’re hearing things just in time.

On Halloween – appropriately – Barack Obama figuratively jumped out from behind a bush (no pun intended) and yelled Boo to voters. In Columbia, Missouri, he warned that the last four days of the campaign would be filled with hate, fear, and threats… from the Republicans. Just like they’ve been doing all along, he said. There would be attempts to keep voters from the polls… by the Republicans. (Big jokes from little ACORNS grow.) So forth and so on… but, understand, Obama will be there to protect us.

But saying these things do not make them true; or, to the real extent that all politics has become dirty, to tip O’Neill on his head, Obama’s portrayal of his campaign, the dirtiest in history, as the most innocent and cleanest will not make it so.

But with herd-instinct voters in the Media Age, you CAN put a Halloween mask on a pig and scare people.

One of the despicable tactics of the Obama campaign has been to play the race card. Actually, the campaign has dealt the race DECK. Did you notice that the outrageous racism of “Reverend” Wright, aired so early in the campaign, effectively erased a depiction of Obama himself as a Black Radical?

Then Obama said in many speeches that “they” (Republicans and conservatives) will tell “you” (susceptible voters) that “he” (Obama), “he’s different, he has a funny name, he… looks different.” Which is the same thing as accusing his opponents of stopping just short of the N-word and organizing lynching bees.

Notice that in this long campaign, Hillary and McCain were accused of being bigots, but the only SAYING of racist words were by people like Obama and Wright; the only bigoted words SAID were by Obama and his surrogates.

In the third presidential debate, a similar Big Lie was attempted. Obama claimed that at Sarah Palin appearances angry crowds were yelling, “Kill him!” at the mention of Obama’s name. But the Secret Service, a constant presence with the campaigns, denied they ever witnessed such a thing. The FBI investigated; the same thing – no evidence. No crowd members or reporters, even that reliably hostile press entourage, could attest to a single such imprecation.

But – having raised his libel from McCain as an individual to voters in general – Obama’s “saying” such trashy fabrications had the usual, slick success.

The latest bit of scabrous-saying from Obama surrogates and supporters comes from a doyen of American letters, the feminist icon Erica Jong. In Rome at the moment, she was interviewed by the newspaper Coriere della Serra on October 29.

Stick with my translation (the entire interview is here: << http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2008/ottobre/29/Follett_Jane_Fonda_liberal_americani_co_9_081029030.shtml >> ) but here is what a Pulitzer Prize winning author, an oft-displayed supporter of Obama, said:

“… liberal Americans have anxiety about Obama.” The article quotes her feeling that there will civil war in the US if Obama were to lose. “There are voting booths that cast your vote for McCain when you pull the Obama lever.… the Republicans have already perpetrated swindles.”

She continued: “…my generation has seen, first-person, the murders of JFK, his brother Robert, Martin Luther King. Squads, armed with Kalashnikovs [machine guns] will also kill the Obama Dream.”

She asserts she is not alone in such assurances: writer “Naomi Wolf calls me every day in order to see if my mood is any blacker. Yesterday Jane Fonda sent me an e-mail” about her stress and back pains caused by anxiety of what will happen in the wake of an Obama loss. “My back also spasms a lot,” Jong said, “making me take Valium. This is what they [the Republicans] have caused….”

She claims “if Obama loses, the second American civil war will erupt. There will be the blood in the streets, believe me. … Bush has recalled from Iraq a contingent of soldiers who under the command of Dick Cheney will be employed in the streets against American citizens.”

The Italian reporter calls Jong’s analysis “apocalyptic.” But the American authoress continued: “Jewish intellectuals like me are not astonished, after eight years of Bush, as Naomi Wolf wrote in ‘The End of America,’ because the United States has been transformed into a police state -- from the torture of… journalists to the Patriot Act.”

So say Obama surrogates among the intelligentsia and overseas (is it any wonder that polls say Obama would carry European electorates?) Does Obama ever distance himself from such lunacy? Of course not. In his semantic paradigm, rather an existential exercise, you see, saying such things makes them perforce true. His absurd claims to ignorance of Jeremiah Wright’s racism and treasonous charges neutralized their significance. What Americans should be asking is” “Even if you never knew this guy whom you quoted for your autobiography’s title, why weren’t you outraged when you DID learn about it?”

Finally, let’s consider the threats made by Obama supporters like the celebrated writer Erica Jong. If her candidate loses, there will be civil war, blood in the streets. Indeed we have heard about big-city police departments, and inner-city officials, already scheduling extra security on the streets for election night.

What Erica Jong said, oh my. I have to disagree. I don’t think there will be rioting in the streets if Obama loses. You see, she says it as a threat (besides, if she incites to riot she will be safe in Rome or Israel or Beverly Hills).

What I foresee – and I pray and I keep hope alive that I am wrong – is that if Obama loses, the inner cities will riot. If Obama wins, the inner cities will riot. This happens when basketball teams lose and win; why not this presidential candidate?

This is what democracy in America has come to: lies, threats, and dangerous nonsense. Say it ain’t so.

– 30 – 

Rick Marschall has been called by Bostonia Magazine "perhaps America's foremost authority on popular culture.” He is the Managing Editor of Rare Jewel Magazine, the Christian journal of politics and culture; and founding and Contributing Editor of Hogan's Alley, Journal of the Cartoon Arts. The author/editor of 62 books, he has been a political cartoonist, columnist, syndicate editor, publisher, and lecturer. His wide experience includes Editor at Marvel Comics, writer for Disney Comics, consultant to the US Postal Service, and lecturer for the US Information Service of the State Department. He has been on the faculties of the School of Visual Arts, Rutgers University, Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts), and the Summer Institute for the Gifted at Bryn Mawr University. 

Every election, there’s an inevitable refrain that monumental implications are at stake. This time, however, it actually might be the case. Occasionally the sky DOES fall; sometimes, when the boy cries “wolf!” there really is an exceptional threat.

Generally, Democrats argue that Americans should take the pulse of the current situation and reject the past four years. On some matters, like government-run health care, their critique is older and their solutions more philosophical. Such is the general outlook of the average Democrat.

Generally, Republicans after Reagan trusted the individual and distrusted government. In the Bush era they have found their party transformed into a party of big spending, empire-building, and social engineering – foot-dragging liberalism. Many Republicans are sensing, and many conservatives and Christian patriots have known, that there is more at stake in the 2008 election than current events.

Suddenly the important issue is not, say, whether to raise inheritance taxes or eliminate capital gains taxes. It is not even a menu of choices about when to leave Iraq or how to deal with pollution or energy sources.

With a week left in the election, Christian patriots are realizing that the task at hand is not to elect John McCain. It is not even to defeat Barack Obama. It can be put clearer: it might be a matter of America’s survival to PREVENT Barack Obama. That is, to prevent forces and movements that have festered like ulcerated sores on the body politic of America at least since the 1930s, but now are poised to take control.

This election is exceptional. I invite readers, especially Democrats and liberals – and even more especially, Christians who are tempted to vote Democrat – to bear with me for a few paragraphs.

Only fools think that everything from the past was better. But it is even more foolish to think that everything that is new is better. Christian patriots do not merely engage in nostalgia when they reject the left’s “new reality” and “change.”

A lot of this “change” proposes to turn the world on its head, and there would be profound implications for generations to come. Many voters have not realized this.

“Change” is being proposed, not only about a wartime strategy, or taxes, but what for thousands of years in countless civilizations around the globe have been commonly accepted matters of conscience, manners, and morals. How arrogant, and ultimately how self-destructive, to think that, in defiance of God and history, we have all of a sudden discovered the real truths about things like homosexuality and infanticide.

Let us put aside arguments about bailouts, illegal immigration, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, a possible war with Iran; or whether it’s government’s job to restrict some salaries or play Santa Claus with others. No matter how “hot” these buttons are, I propose that we see the importance of this election in a different light.

If Barack Obama or John McCain were to move into the house next to yours, would you object to either as a neighbor? By what we see on TV, few of us would. Genial, polite, well mannered, both. What sort of neighbors would they be?

I suggest that Barack Obama would start inviting his friends over, as would be his right. Although he virtually is unknown to the American public, we know enough about his friends.

There would be his pastor. The man who performed the Obama nuptials and preached to the Obamas for 20 years would sneer at you – certainly if you are white – for being part of a system that “invented AIDs to destroy the population of Africa.” If you flew an American flag, he’d be heard yelling, “God damn America” at you. And if you objected to this afterwards, Mr Obama would likely say he was in the kitchen at the time and wasn’t aware of things his close friend was saying.

There would be his longtime mentor/partner/associate William Ayres, or in Obama’s terminology, “a stranger.” Asked about Ayres’ oft-stated (and recently affirmed) pride in bombing the Capitol, the Pentagon, and police stations, Obama famously replied that they were despicable acts, but he (Obama) was only eight years old when Ayres and his girlfriend earned spots on the FBI’s Most-Wanted list; therefore, to Obama, subsequent associations are blameless.

You might, at that point in the conversation, see what Good Neighbor Obama’s reaction would be if, theoretically, you planned to invite a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan to your own barbeque. What if you said: “Of course, he committed those despicable acts when I was young, and even if he hasn’t renounced his past, I see no problem with being his pal.” Or try this one: “I think I’ll launch a political career in the living room of another neighbor, that unrepentant Nazi down the street. Wasn’t all that Nazi stuff ‘way back in the past’?”

When people quantify the inviolability of Communists, blacks, and Jews, but excuse attacks – sometimes deadly violent – on the United States of America, we start to see the nature of the “change” that is afoot.

Wright and Ayres would be just a couple of the guests in Obama’s house, your neighborhood. Others would include Tony Rezko, the wealthy Syrian, now in federal penitentiary, who assisted Obama through underhanded means to buy his Chicago mansion. There would be Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist poet identified as a “father figure” in Obama’s autobiography (and suspected by some as being his biological father). There would be rowdy hordes of ACORN “street organizers,” supported by Obama and now supporting him financially and “other” ways. There would be another screaming racist cleric, Father Pfleger, who was removed from his pulpit by his Chicago cardinal for scabrous activities. There would be Louis Farrakhan, who has endorsed Obama. So has the Communist Party USA, by formal announcement. So have Hamas and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in rare gestures of foreign meddling.

Listen to the small talk wafting over the fence at neighbor Obama’s rowdy party next door. Nancy Pelosi plans to impose restrictions on AM talk radio because conservatives dominate. Then it sounds like Barney Frank, laughing about the man he called his “spouse,” Herb Moses, having served as an executive with Fannie Mae – which, in turn, made contributions to Frank’s campaign; and which agency Barney Frank later defended against calls for congressional investigations. The lawn-party guests laugh at such things. But now Frank’s voice rises above the din – he announces that he will use his influence in Congress to cut the military by 25 per cent. More laughs. On and on it goes, into the night.

Obama can be heard mocking us within earshot: we’re the idiots who cling to our guns and our religion. More laughter from his friends.

What a group. What a party they’d have next door. What a potential neighbor, this guy Obama.

However, we are electing a president, not a neighbor. While it is worthwhile to gauge a person by the company he keeps – especially someone as spectacularly unknown as Obama – this all should be a warning, not a curiosity. The bigger danger he poses is his lying, double-talk, and excuses about his associations and his past.

Christian patriots have got to stop making their OWN excuses, wiggling out of their OWN responsibility. We have, for instance, compromised on the issue of abortion too long. It should be called for what it is, infanticide: killing babies. Unplanned pregnancies have touched many families; but compounding a sin is tragic when redemption is possible and when innocent life is in the balance. Obama “regrets” abortions yet praises Planned Parenthood and accepts their money; and he answered a hypothetical question about his daughter’s unplanned pregnancy, saying he “wouldn’t punish her with a baby.”

Because major personalities or judges without conscience dismiss opposition to abortion, many people think it is an acceptable “change” in society. But “respectable” people once sanctioned slavery too. Abraham Lincoln “regretted” slavery, albeit by stages in those different times, however early in his life he declared, “If slavery isn’t wrong, nothing is wrong”… and he acted on it, eventually giving his life for its abolition. Obama should be honest on the subject – he favors killing babies. And so should Christians be honest: we are acquiescing in a system that grinds out a Holocaust-load of dead babies year after year.

There is a fair prospect that Christian patriots will look back after four years or eight years of an Obama presidency and sigh, “We could have done better in the 2008 campaign.” Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.”

Barack Obama is not astride a Trojan horse. His past and current friends, his past and current views, have come to light. Not all… but enough of them. For an unknown figure with a slim resume, his character references ARE rather revealing. One of the mysteries of this campaign is why opponents have been mum about Obama’s “most liberal senator” rating, tallied by friendly groups, hostile groups, and proudly acknowledged by Obama. He registers as more liberal than Independent Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed Socialist from Vermont. Such extremes used to unsettle most Americans.

The electorate’s longtime foundation-stone is cracking in 2008. Are people buffeted by economic chaos or confused into cultural insecurity? Is this a deeper sign of civilization’s decay? Where are the traditionalists? Where is the sense of the American heritage? Why are Christians and patriots so lackluster? Where is the outrage? What has happened to pride in the past, our sense of today, a program for the future?

Where is our self-respect? Can we sit by and let pickpockets, liars, and those who hate us, waltz in to the halls of power, controlling the military and the courts once and for all? Some people think this is the evolution of democracy, or even God’s will that exempts us from involvement. But such fatalism is not of the Bible: we are commanded to work while it is yet day, as we see the right.

The Good-Neighbor illustration is not a metaphor; this is reality. If the thought of such a neighbor disturbs you, the thought of such a president should scare you. These are extreme words, but one can avoid being an alarmist while still sounding the necessary alarm. If your home were on fire, would you want your neighbors to whisper their pleas?

I wonder how many I speak for: John McCain doesn’t exactly steal my heart away. But I’m not going to let that fact hold me back from fighting the crowd that’s trying to steal my country away, either.

– 30 – 

Rick Marschall is the author or editor of more than 60 books. A former political cartoonist and columnist, he was Managing Editor of Rare Jewel Magazine, a Christian journal of politics and culture.

Rick Marschall

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