Recently, columnist Ellis Cose wrote an article asking the question: Does it matter if Obama is a muslim? My essential answer is: of course not. But I would add that it raises other questions.

And, as others have suggested, there is more than one kind of muslim.  There is the kind who may be your doctor.  There is the kind who you sit near at lunch who looks perhaps to be from Egypt, Iran, India, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia or the Southern Philippines. He may have an accent or dark skin or a knitted skullcap. He may laugh when you smack a recalcitrant ice machine and may say, “The rod tames every man!”  There are happy, respectful, tolerant muslims.

If Barak Obama is a muslim, or has ever been a muslim, by muslim standards, that is, born to a muslim father and raised from birth as a muslim, this is nothing prohibitive, and is even a plus. It shows a certain breadth of experience and appreciation, especially when the US is faced with muslim, extremist adversaries.

If he once was a muslim and converted Christianity for any reason, including that it was politically expedient, that is okay, too. If he really thinks that the 5 pm call to worship is still the most beautiful sound in the world, more power to him.

The problem is that there clearly is another commonly perceived and frequently reported kind of muslim: the kind that deep down in his heart considers non-muslims to be dogs, monkeys and pigs. There are muslims who respect you as a fellow human being, as there are those who fundamentally don’t.

And now that we may finally say that Barak Obama is articulate, bright and clean, we may also consider that Barak Obama seems to go out of his way to prove that he, too, doesn’t fundamentally respect his fellow man. He befriends an unrepentant Pentagon bomber, who founded a group called the Weather Underground among whose members are people who have killed cops and whose only regret is that he did not do worse. And Obama calls this man mainstream.  Obama’s Presidential campaign was actually launched from this man’s home. Further, his mentor and pastor for twenty years is an angry, race-baiting peddler of lies and dissention who would rather invoke God to damn America.  And Obama's wife has said in two separate speeches that she has never been proud of America.

Obama even campaigned for President of the United States by going to Germany and gaving a speech in front of a hundred-year-old monument, cherished by Adolf Hitler, built as a tribute to Germany’s victory over the Belgians and French in the Franco-Prussian war. The German magazine Der Spiegel wrote of his speech that in was clear to Germans that Obama was running for President of the World (and they approved).  In the process he snubbed wounded American soldiers recuperating in hospital in Germany because he couldn’t bring his campaign cameras in to film the visit.  And to top it off, Obama denigrates Christians as motivated by bitterness.

No. Obama is not happy, respectful and tolerant.   And if voters fear his being a muslim, they have good reason. But it’s the least of their problems with the man.

It’s not Stockholm syndrome. It’s not fear of success. It’s not early dementia. But I feel more comfortable now that Russia has invaded Georgia.  I feel safer. I am the product of the cold war, James Bond and Viet Nam.  Godless communists are easily understood by me. Hollywood liberals are not.  Why would anyone deliberately tie the hands of those officers tasked with fighting terrorist aggression?  Why would every single complaint about an imperfect world with imperfect leaders and hypnotizable citizenry be laid at the feet of Bush 43, Chaney and Halliburton.  Hatred for Bush is now an indefinable, unspeakable miasma of malignant cluelessness. Reason has been rejected in favor of poetic imagery: Lied, Died, Fried – chicken that is: obesity, trans-fats.  The United States have gone from protecting that world from Communism to turning on itself like a mad reptile, to hungry to stop gnashing its teeth even after it realizes that it is biting it’s own tail.

The boundlessly energetic American people now have no enemy; so they root through their closets to find a mite to neurotically rail against: trans-fat, homophobia, teenage chastity, home schooling, germy handshakes, red meat, bicycle babies without full body armor, tornados and hurricanes malignantly turned toward American population centers by big, bad American corporations.

Never mind lead paint and melamine imported from China and fed to our children and our pets. Never mind incarcerating pedophiles. Never mind the threats of both drug-driven Mexican Insurgency and nuclear- armed Mohammedan Insurgency across unprotected borders. Never mind treating immigrants who sneak into this country illegally and live on welfare, Medicaid, food stamps and subsidized housing while their children join gangs and murder, rape and sell drugs. 

Never mind that we the US have oil to pump but instead we rely on foreign, terrorist-funding, oil. Never mind that the world is starving as we turn corn into oil.  Never mind the religious genocide in Somalia and the suicidal crash-and-burn of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Never mind selling out the US to serve a larger, dimmer, more decadent regime, whether it is the UN, the EU or the North American Union.

But at least now I can recognize the world again.  And I can sleep better knowing that the world is what I thought it was.  And the world can see it for what it is: a dangerous place; a place where vigilance is required and where leaders and citizens of the free world alike must stand to defend truth, justice and… yes, the American Way.

For example, we all know that guns kill people, but how many stories were presented in my home town paper or on the big three channels about men and women saving their own lives and the lives of their families by having a gun at hand? Only with the internet do I get the other side of the story, the story that I had known for decades was out there but had never heard from the prevailing media. Only now that I live on Guam and read the PDN (occasionally) do I see a paper which actually reports facts. And I'm rather proud of the PDN even if it’s commentary leans more to the left than my tastes would call for.

At the risk of appearing hopelessly Neanderthal, let me remark on my Doctors' Office Test for News Content: My observation is that the quality of newspapers and magazines is inversely proportional to the uselessness of the paper when picked up six months later in a lobby or waiting room. By this standard the two most useless publications are Newsweek and Time magazines. When out of date they are more pointless than even People and the Nat'l Enquirer. At least these last two do not make any representations that they are intended for anything other than 'for entertainment purposes only' whereas Time and Newsweek pretend to be thoughtful, unbiased reporters of the news.

In fact, most of what appears in these high-quality news magazines is not news at all but prognosticative speculation. And while these speculations seem pertinent at the time due to their breathless reportage, the range of possibilities they produce are so out of the realm of what is probable that when one picks up a copy months later, one is left saying, ‘Well none of that ever happened, now did it? I wonder what Brad Pitt was doing six months ago.’ There is not a fact about suspected Iraqi or Russian aircraft, naval, tank and missile deployments that is not accompanied by even more gasping questions about how this will affect events in the next few weeks or months. The same goes for page after page of reportage about everything from DHEA and HGH to the housing bubble.  But does one ever really learn anything from all the words printed in these two weekly publications? Honestly, I find no content in them which justifies cutting down all those trees. (And I am generally in favor of cutting down trees if there's a reason.)

No, being as conservative (in the non-political sense) as I am, I will mourn the loss of the printed page and the provocative locally owned and run newspaper. But I will not mourn what we have been increasingly expected to purchase: white-washed, lopsided, dumbed-down propaganda masquerading as news presented as the ethical, unbiased, objective and honest reporting that we all need and should be getting.

If you, Mrs. Saunders, lose your job because your effete newspaper (See? I didn’t say dinosaur.) withers an dies, why don’t you start your own small, hometown paper. I would like to see these proliferate. And if enough small papers required unbiased news services, I am confident that such would spring up to satisfy the demand. And a proliferation of local papers would provide a variety of competing viewpoints which is the essence of the assurances of the first amendment for the public square. This is, after all, all that the internet provides. For better or worse, they are answering the call for something better than the stock, rubber-cast reporting of the previous media.