MICHELLE OBAMA, PRIVILEGED BLUEBLOOD

When the middle-aged right-wing establishment apparatchik Peggy Noonan and the youngish creator of the inept wingnut comic strip "Day by Day" sing exactly the same tune from the same hymnal on the same day, you start looking around wondering who's picking the hymns for the choir.

Chris Muir's "Day by Day" today (click to enlarge):



Noonan today:

His problem was, is, his wife's words, not his, the speech in which she said that for the first time in her adult life she is proud of her country, because Obama is winning....

Are the Obamas, at bottom, snobs? Do they understand America? Are they of it? Did anyone at their Ivy League universities school them in why one should love America? ...

Have they been, throughout their adulthood, so pampered and praised--so raised in the liberal cocoon--that they are essentially unaware of what and how normal Americans think? And are they, in this, like those cosseted yuppies, the Clintons?

That's right -- Michelle Obama, daughter of a secretary and a city pump operator, is a snooty child of privilege. In fact, being born black at a time when some blacks in this country didn't have the right to vote actually gave her an unfair advantage:

... I have wondered if it is hard for young African-Americans of her generation, having been drilled in America's sad racial history, having been told about it every day of their lives, to fully apprehend the struggles of others. I wonder if she knows that some people look at her and think "Man, she got it all." Intelligent, strong, tall, beautiful, Princeton, Harvard, black at a time when America was trying to make up for its sins and be helpful...

Noonan, of course, supported both Bushes. She wrote the 1988 convention speech in which the elder Bush described his move to Texas as "taking a chance and pushing into unknown territory with kids and a dog and a car." Taking a chance? When has any Bush ever truly had anything at risk?

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For right-wingers and those who take their rhetoric seriously, all this dovetails quite nicely with the other meme that's been spread about the Obamas this week: that they're big commies. And gosh, what a coincidence -- the smears came in a wave all at once this week: the article by Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media that suggests Obama is a commie because a family friend who advised him thirty years ago, before he went to college, was a communist; former Dan Quayle speechwriter Lisa Schiffren's absurd but McCarthyite response to the Kincaid piece, in which she implied that Obama's parents must have been commies because all the interracial couples she knew growing up in Manhattan, several time zones away, were commies; and now the Politico story "Obama Once Visited '60s Radicals" (the radicals in question are people who, for better or worse, had become part of Chicago's political establishment when Obama was trying to make his political way).

Go back to the beginning of the Noonan excerpt above ("His problem was, is, his wife's words, not his, the speech in which she said that for the first time in her adult life she is proud of her country"). Now remember how this right-wing meme goes: commie = dangerous subversive, but commie also = overeducated = elitist = out of touch with Joe Sixpack.

This is how they're going to try to get Obama, from now until the end.

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OOPS. Almost missed "Obama: Is America Ready for This Dangerous Leftwinger?," published today by Rupert Murdoch's Times of London. It begins:

For most ordinary Americans, those not encumbered with an expensive education or infected by prolonged exposure to cosmopolitan heterodoxy, patriotism is a consequence of birth.

And it goes on to say:

There is a caste of left-wing Americans who wish essentially and in all honesty that their country was much more like France. They wish it had much higher levels of taxation and government intervention, that it had much higher levels of welfare, that it did not have such a "militaristic" approach to foreign policy. Above all, that its national goals were dictated, not by the dreadful halfwits who inhabit godforsaken places like Kansas and Mississippi, but by the counsels of the United Nations.

There it is -- everything I talked about above, packed into two paragraphs. Funny how everyone on the right had the same thoughts at the same time.

By the way, don't believe for a minute that Rupe likes Obama just because his New York Post endorsed him -- or at least consider the possibility that the Post endorsed Obama precisely in order to keep Obama off balance and unsure of Murdoch's intentions, a perfect setup for attacks like today's (I'd add that Murdoch seems to have set up Hillary Clinton the same way). From this piece it's clear that Murdoch got the memo and knows precisely how Obama is supposed to be attacked.