There are, no doubt, some valid and fact-based reasons to oppose Barack Obama as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for President of the United States.
But the echo chamber of the far right does not care much for facts; among that crowd, vague smears and self-flattery have sadly become the chosen political currency.
Exodus youth activist Mike Ensley reminds of that today, as he parrots a fact-free tirade against Obama that was first penned by Thomas Sowell of the increasingly neocon and partisan Hoover Institute.
First, Ensley (through Sowell) projects onto others his own preoccupation with trivialities — denying gay Americans equality, promoting scientific ignorance among youths — at a time when America needs unity and true leadership to reverse the catastrophe in Iraq, conserve energy at home, live with religious and cultural diversity, and accept the sacrifices that will be necessary to reverse such crises as the federal debt and economically catastrophic climate change. Ensley points to the speck in his enemy’s eye while ignoring a plank in his own:
One of the painful aspects of studying great catastrophes of the past is discovering how many times people were preoccupied with trivialities when they were teetering on the edge of doom.
Then Ensley parrots Sowell’s cynical and hypocritical position on federal judges. The Liberty Counsel, which with Exodus is a member of the Arlington Group, believes that reactionary activist judges should rewrite American law and justice, and remake social policy, according to the Group’s reinterpretations of the Bible and according to un-Biblical social mores that seem to be derived from 1950s TV sitcoms. When judges do their duty and rule that there are constitutional limits to presidential power, or that gay Americans are entitled to their constitutional rights, then Ensley, Exodus, and the Liberty Counsel vent the Arlington Group’s collective outrage and resentment with about as much individuality and originality as a ventriloquist’s puppets.
Read carefully:
Barack Obama has already indicated that he wants judges who make social policy instead of just applying the law.
Notice that Ensley does not support judges’ mandate to interpret state and federal constitutions, nor their mandate to balance and counteract the other two branches of government. Instead, Ensley views judges as rubber stamps “applying” whatever unconstitutional laws might be passed — provided, of course, that such laws are written by Republican Party apparatchiks who are, in turn, controlled by the Arlington Group.
Ensley briefly parrots unsubstantiated gossip about Obama’s record on crime. Then Ensley, who has demonstrated no knowledge of mid-20th-century American history, accepts at face value — and without a single factual example — Sowell’s vague, sloppy, and sweeping accusations about Obama’s domestic and foreign policy:
Although Senator Obama ha s presented himself as the candidate of new things — using the mantra of “change” endlessly — the cold fact is that virtually everything he says about domestic policy is straight out of the 1960s and virtually everything he says about foreign policy is straight out of the 1930s.
Sowell offers no evidence, and Ensley apparently neither notices nor cares. Whether anything that has been said about Obama has any basis in fact is irrelevant to Ensley, who lives and works in a political environment of gossip and innuendo.
If this style of gossip and innuendo is what Exodus wants to bring to the nation’s schools and youths, then Exodus should be banned from schools and disenfranchised by the nation’s Christian youth groups.
The nation and its youth are in need of historical, social, scientific, political and religious facts — not more partisan warfare and smug, factless diatribe.
