Just how badly does President Obama want the Democrats to lose the 2010 midterm elections? Just how much did first lady Michelle Obama relish her Spanish vacation?
Just how thrilled and grateful were the Gulf State residents to discover that the Obamas were giving them one whole day of their time — between Michelle’s Spanish vacation and the family’s real vacation, up there in Martha’s Vineyard, at a posh estate near their own kind of people — to dip their dainty toes in their oil-soaked waters?
And exactly how thrilled were the Democrats’ candidates, already facing headwinds of epic proportions, to wake up Saturday morning to find out that their president had come out in favor of a Mega Mosque near Ground Zero, opposed by only two-thirds of American people, and added another to the impressive collection of millstones — health care, the stimulus, the economy, Government Motors and a few other triumphs — he had already hung round their necks?
How brilliant are these strategists there at the White House, and how canny at reading the mood of the people? How wise is this strategy of giving them what they don’t want, and then, when they complain about it, telling them to shut up, and keep giving them more?
How clever to tell them Missouri’s vote against the individual mandate meant “nothing,” when it is only the fourth vote against health care — Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts being the others — to be taken in less than a year?
What smarts does it take to take a huge popular mandate, and shred it in no time? How clever of them to hit on coalition destruction as a method of governing! In that White House In The Sky, FDR and Reagan are probably seething with envy. Why didn’t they think of it first?
How brave is Obama, to speak out as he did against the persecution of Muslims that is sweeping the country, and has swept it in fact since Sept. 11, 2001? Who can forget the riots that engulfed the whole country, the cross (and Star of David) burnings outside the mosques and the homes of innocent Muslims, the lynchings and hideous acts of unprovoked violence; the demands of conservatives, Tea Partiers, and Sarah Palin enthusiasts that Muslims and in fact all Arab-Americans, be confined in camps somewhere out in the country — Wasilla, for instance — as Japanese-Americans had been during the Second World War?
How lucky was it that Obama was swept into office just as George W. Bush was about to put this vicious scheme into practice? What would the world then have said about that?
How wise too for Obama to come out for the mosque, enraging survivors of those killed in the terror attacks and swing voters everywhere, and then walk it back somewhat, ticking off the press and the left wing of his party (but we repeat ourselves), who now feels a little betrayed?
It’s not as if Muslim outreach hasn’t paid off already: Iran has dropped its nuclear plans, and adopted a Good Neighbor policy, which would never have happened if Bush were in office. Can we all say a prayer over this?
Can we say a prayer too for President Obama, and all the mosque backers, for being sensitive to the right of the would-be mosque builders to violate the sensitivities of the victims’ survivors, New Yorkers and Americans everywhere? And how lucky are we to have this rare president, brave enough to look at these friends and relations, spouses and children, of people who died on Sept. 11, and call them out for the bigots they are?
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
