Driving the final nails

A jeremiad is a prolonged mournful complaint. The guy who just won't go away is appropriately named Jeremiah Wright. And so it goes.

In the beginning there was just Barack Obama. In spite of his name, Obama looked promising. In the beginning. Yeah, he was a black guy, but not too black, thanks to his biracial heritage. He appealed to a lot of young people, because a lot of them had friends with the same kind of biracial, multicultural backgounds, or were biracial themselves. To the younger generation, the pigmentation issue wasn't an issue.

Yeah, he was a black guy, but not one of the scary kind. He seemed to be cheerful, bright and articulate. Nothing like that last guy who ran, Rev. Al Sharpton. People were voting for Obama in primaries and contributing millions of dollars to his campaign.

None of this was sitting well with the older generation, who were having a hard time picturing Barack in the White House. As Secretary of State maybe, during office hours, but living there ? With that wife and those kids ? Not hardly. The fact that all those crazy young people were enthusiastic about him just made matters even worse. They not only weren't scared of him, they liked him. That's no damned good.

Something had to happen to make him scary, and the first gambit was pretty feeble-- dredging up his middle name, Hussein. Scary enough ? No ? Shit.

Next up was the media controversy over the bitterness remark. That only bothered the old farts who weren't gonna vote for him anyway. It finally started to sink in that Obama wasn't personally scary, and never would be. But maybe he's associated with some scary ones. Enter the infamous Jeremiah of jeremiad fame. Now there's a guy who embodies everything that scares white people.

I don't know what Jeremiah's problem is, and I don't care. If it wasn't him, the conservatives would've found someone else. Here's the thing: now that we've established the argument that the people you associate with can disqualify you in an election, we need to start taking a long look at the people Mrs. Clinton and Top Gun have been hanging around with.