For those on the Left who have no problem with our president’s past own personal affiliations with the likes of Wm. Ayres, Jeremiah Wright, and Saul Alinsky who are constantly haranguing anybody to the right of Charles Schumer who doesn’t repudiate their own made-up contrivances of what the Tea Party movement is, comes a thoughtful objection from conservative John Podhoretz to David Goldman’s castigation of Obama.

Podhoretz takes issue with this conclusion to Goldman’s scathing piece (which, BTW, was about Obama’s destruction of our special relationship with Israel…a topic for another day):

Obama is the loyal son of a left-wing anthropologist mother who sought to expiate her white guilt by going to bed with Muslim Third World men. He is a Third World anthropologist studying us, learning our culture and our customs the better to neutralize what he considers to be a malignant American influence in world affairs.

In fairness, Podhoretz rightly excoriates Goldman for his attack on the president’s mother, and even makes this poignant observation:

Spewing repellent nonsense about Obama’s mother and spinning bizarre notions about his innate foreignness — when he is in fact the possessor of one of the great and enduring American stories, and is in his own person a demonstration of precisely the kind of American exceptionalism that Obama so pointedly pooh-poohs — can be used to discredit his opposition.

My slight quibble with John’s objection is simply that, while I agree with him that Ms. Dunham’s predelictions or other vices are a non-sequitur and frankly unbecoming and inappropriate, one can take Goldman’s characterization of Obama being “a Third World anthropologist studying us, learning our culture and our customs the better to neutralize what he considers to be a malignant American influence in world affairs” can be taken metaphorically. I’d definitely see it that way. That description, I think, fits to a T Obama’s view of America (and espeicially Her exceptionalism), which can be seen as such, even for those among us who aren’t birthers.

Punch-line to this is, to the trolls who haunt our comments section, we are having the discussion about those among us who use false accusations and inflammatory rhetoric that cloud our shared disdain for the current president’s socialist proclivities. But perhaps it’s simply happening above the plane of imagined “N-word” accusations and spitting incidents, so they’re not noticing it.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)