Somewhere in the recent past (say, about the time “Dreams From My Father” was published), liberals decided reality wasn’t really their thing. It was too dull. It didn’t give closure. Sometimes the endings weren’t right. So it turns out that Obama’s main squeeze in his young days was a “composite,” digitally enhanced for your reading experience.
Then, it turned out that even the blond, blue-eyed, whey-faced Elizabeth Warren, running against Scott Brown in Massachusetts for his seat in the Senate, was hired by Harvard as an American Indian, though the proportion of Cherokee in her bloodline was just 1 in 32 parts. Just how pale-faced is Warren? A lot more than George Zimmerman, the brown-skinned son of a Peruvian mother who is accused of murdering Trayvon Martin. He was described by the New York Times as a “white Hispanic,” because if you’re going to characterize a death as a lynching, the one who commits it had better be white.
In similar news, three broadcast employees have already been fired for “editing” a call made by the same Zimmerman so that it appeared he found Martin suspicious and pursued him because Martin was black. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit linked headshots of Warren and Zimmerman, with Zimmerman labeled a “cracker,” and Warren described as a racial “minority.” Nothing is more important than race, and race is defined the way the Left wants it.
What could be less real than that? Well, there is one thing — conjecture about what would have been in an alternative universe, in which much is asserted and nothing proved. These have become mainstays for President Obama, whose case for re-election is based not on what has happened, but what could, would or might have occurred under different conditions, which he is allowed to make up. One is his belief that his stimulus averted a second Depression. A second is to charge that a President Romney would not have made the call to take out Osama bin Laden and then to attack Romney for a “decision” he never had the opportunity to make. The supposed evidence for this claim came from a wide-ranging interview on general strategy that Romney had given five years earlier.
But the ultimate blend of the counterfactual and the composite is surely “Julia,” star of a Web presentation by the Obama campaign that traces a fictional woman’s life from ages 3 to 67 as she, led every step by a government program, enrolls in Head Start, goes to college, and bears a son, Zachary (fathered perhaps by the federal government, as there is no sign of a father, much less of a husband).
But counterfactuals can be used many ways, and critics came up with alternative versions: Julia is aborted, and never does anything; loses her job to a stagnant economy; has to moonlight in bars and dies because she can’t buy a gun to defend herself; and is denied care in old age by a government rationing panel, as being too old and too unproductive to merit the expense of treatment. Readers chimed in with their own contributions: “Zachary ends up unemployed and living in her basement,” and “How about a ‘life of Julia’ panel where she becomes a Republican candidate, and Obama’s allies call her filthy names on the air?”
Missing from the authorized version of “Julia” are the scenes where she has a composite affair with a younger Obama, and later finds out she’s also an Indian. But these can be added on later. When nothing is real, anything can happen.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
