Reductio creep in action: Last week, Barack Obama shrugged off the freak show
debate in Philadelphia with a panache unprecedented in modern electoral history, proving that yes we can elect a president who isn't hopelessly out of touch with contemporary culture. Little did I know, when I wondered how long it would take some half-wit to suggest that Obama's reference to Jay-Z was a gang sign, that a half-wit with a reasonably large platform had already uncovered the disturbing truth about Obama's scandalous connection to the Roc-A-Fella Dynasty.
In a piece aptly entitled "Obama's Other Jeremiah Wrights," Evan Gahr of Human Events rides Paul Revere-like into small town America to warn that Obama's fifth column includes not only Jeremiah Wright, but equally troublingly, Jay-Z, will.i.am, Ludacris, Q-tip, Russell Simmons, Nas, and "9/11 conspiracy theorist" Mos Def. Obama's "complicity with rappers" — another impressively insightful word choice — goes all the way "back to at least 2006." Only egregious liberal media bias can explain why these shocking facts haven't come to light until now. The piece does not report, though doubtless a future installment of Human Events will, about the meetings Obama has held with these "thugs" to discuss their secret plans to seduce your daughter. But Gahr does helpfully put the matter in its appropriate context when he closes with the observation that David Dinkins had the courage to denounce Louis Farrakhan, and Obama should therefore denounce the Farrakhans in his midst as well.
I'd like to quibble with Gahr, but his major point is absolutely right: The questions Mos Def and Nas raise about Obama's character are every bit as significant and informative as the questions Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan raise about his character. And in general, there is something almost admirable about the volume of surplus work the guilt-by-black-association crowd is willing to do composing interminable ponderings about how they were quite ready to vote for a nice, clean, articulate black man until all his scary black friends turned up — thousands upon thousands of words written, and who knows how many man-hours of labor wasted, all to avoid saying, more starkly but also more accurately: "People! Are you crazy? Don't vote for a nigger!"