On Hating America

I think what most astonishes me about the over-heated rhetoric employed against Obama, of late, is the extent to which it ignores the masses of people who support him.

By any objective standard, one must acknowledge, Obama is ahead in the race for the presidency, at the moment. All the national tracking polls have him comfortably ahead, and the various, electoral projections have him either exceedingly close to or past the magic number of electoral votes, while Senator McCain languishes behind. Now, unless one assumes that all of these polls, which, in a broad sense, agree with one another, are all wrong, the obvious conclusion is that more people presently support Senator Obama than support Senator McCain.

Now, from the right, we're hearing a lot of talk about Obama's supposedly radical connections. We hear that he's super-liberal, that he's a Muslim, that he's a socialist, etc. Most vocally, though, we've heard the claim that Senator Obama is a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer or a friend to terrorists. Moreover, the assertion from the right is that these claims are obviously true. No one is saying that if we dug in deep into Obama's past that we might find out that he has terrorist ties - they're saying that we already know for a fact that he does.

No one seems willing to carry these assertions to their logical conclusion, however, even though that conclusion, if true, would be quite shocking and serious. If you believe that it is public knowledge that Obama is a friend to terrorists and you acknowledge that the polls show he is widely ahead in the race, you must believe that all of his supporters either are also friends of terrorists or do not care if the person they vote for is a friend of terrorists. There are no other options. If we Obama supporters could easily learn what the extreme McCain supporters supposedly know, we would have to be either violently anti-American or completely disconnected not to do so and then promptly turn against him.

Why does no one say this explicitly, on the right? Well, because it's obviously untrue. It's absurd to imagine that the majority of people plugged into the American presidential race hate America and support terrorism or just don't care. There is no rational underpinning for such a belief, and it would be laughed out of the halls of public discourse if it ever grew brave enough to give voice to itself. After all, this argument essentially amounts to accusing the majority of likely, American voters of hating America.

There is, of course, one alternative path these extreme McCain-types can take. They can claim that the information about Obama's terrorist sympathies have been hidden and distorted by the media. Under that claim, we honestly don't know whether or not Obama <3's terrorists, because the facts have been kept away from us. The logical problem here is even more obvious - if we don't know the facts, it's impossible to conclude that Obama is a terrorist sympathizer, just as it is impossible to conclude that he is not one. (The complete lack of evidence of any such cover-up is another problem, but I'm really only aiming to point out the internal flaws in these arguments.)

In short, those extreme conservatives accusing Senator Obama of being anti-American are not only being intellectually dishonest, but they are also expressing either an incredibly deep cynicism or (more likely, I think) complete contempt for their fellow citizens.