Barack to Reality

Obama's victory didn't magically eliminate America's problems and enemies.

by Christopher Hitchens - November 10th, 2008 - Slate

On election night, I spent a little time on British and then on Australian television. For expressing a few mild doubts about the new president-elect, I was forcibly reminded in one case that the first 14 (I think it was) presidents of the United States could have owned Barack Obama, and was informed in the second case that just 40 years ago, he would not have been allowed to vote in the election, let alone win it.

Well, as it happens, our new president has no slave ancestry, and neither branch of his parentage could have been owned by anybody, or at least not by anybody American. (Muslim-run slavery, though, is an old story in Africa as well as a horribly contemporary one.) And there were not a few elected black American representatives 40 years ago, even if mainly in Northern states. The objection I make is therefore twofold. First, the election of Obama is the effect not the cause of the changes. (One of my questioners appeared to think that our president-elect had been responsible for the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.) Second, a Republican victory would have had absolutely no effect on the legal or political standing of black Americans, which is a matter of our law and our Constitution and cannot be undone by any ephemeral vote or plebiscite.

This is irony ... or something very much like it. Christoper Hitchens backed Barak Obama in this election. He is nevertheless being castigated by the worldwide liberal press because he is not totally mesmerized by Obama. The press cannot accept that backing Obama does not mean absolute adulation. If you do not back him with total conviction, you are not a member of the club. Hitchens is a LIBERAL. In fact Hitchens is a Marxist and proud of it. Yet he is still being castigated for his concerns about how much Obama understands the war he finds himself in and the economic reality of the current global situation.

We are in crazy times when Obama liberals savage a traditional liberal like Hitchens.