'Cause He's the One

Though the election is now behind us, the Cute Obama Pictures juggernaut grinds on.  It won't end until all resistance has been crushed, and every knee is bowed and every tongue has confessed that he is Lord.

I mean, c'mon, would a war criminal allow a picture like this to be released?

Sure he would, and he did.  But it's so cute!  You have to be a total hater not to love him.

Then there was this one, which came my way from my liberal law-professor friend:

This is a really vile distortion of the history of the Civil Rights Movement, and of race in America.  Rosa Parks "sat" -- that is, she refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama -- as a first step to break through Jim Crow segregation, and the ensuing bus boycott was for all African-Americans, not just to give Martin Luther King a leg up.  The Civil Rights Movement itself didn't just consist of a few charismatic individuals: there were thousands of courageous people who put their lives on the line in that cause.  This is important to stress because of the American tendency to ignore or vilify organization and solidarity in favor of the Hero who smashes injustice single-handed, and then passes the torch to his or her successor.

Likewise, Martin Luther King was a spokesman for a movement much greater than he, and without which he'd have been nothing.  Sometimes he had to run just to keep up with it himself.  No doubt he was interested in African-Americans' being elected to political office, and he wouldn't have objected to an African-American president, though it's fair to wonder what he'd have thought about the African-American president we in fact got, who used the occasion of winning a wholly unmerited Nobel Peace Prize to jeer at everything King stood for.  (Very neatly, and savagely, dissected here.)

As for Barack Obama, well, he doesn't really give a damn about anyone else's children, leaving aside his penchant for killing them.  (And cheering on other leaders who kill them.)  I've always been critical of the tendency to turn him into a Civil Rights hero, because although he stands on that movement's shoulders he clearly views it as his footstool, to be used for his own advancement and then tossed aside.  As Shirley Sherrod, whom he fired in a vain attempt to appease the racist Republican right, tells it (via):

[Ta-Nehisi Coates] asked [Shirley] Sherrod if she thought the president had a grasp of the specific history of the region and of the fights waged and the sacrifices made in order to make his political journey possible. “I don’t think he does,” Sherrod said. “When he called me [shortly after the incident], he kept saying he understood our struggle and all we’d fought for. He said, ‘Read my book and you’ll see.’ But I had read his book.” ...

In her new memoir, The Courage to Hope, she writes about a different kind of tears: when she discussed her firing with her family, her mother, who’d spent her life facing down racism at its most lethal, simply wept. “What will my babies say?,” Sherrod cried to her husband, referring to their four small granddaughters. “How can I explain to my children that I got fired by the first black president?”

And fired not because she'd done anything wrong, mind you.  The basis for her ejection was a falsified videotape, edited by the unlamented Andrew Breitbart to make her look bad.  She was barely out the door when the hoax was exposed.  Her boss had the resources to see if she deserved to be dismissed, but he couldn't be bothered.

Meanwhile he's working to extend the War on Terror indefinitely, so that "our children can fly" predator drones, forever.  What's appalling about stuff like this is that Obama cultists aren't content merely to insist that Obama is preferable to, say, Mitt Romney: they feel that they must exalt him as a hero and very nearly a saint -- which he isn't.