IT WAS JULY 21, 2008 — at the peak of Obama’s race to become the most powerful person in the world. There on the front cover of the New Yorker Magazine was the cartoon image of Barack Obama in Muslim garb fist-bumping with his Afro-coifed and AK-47-toting wife Michelle. Other in-your-face details included a fireplace with a burning American flag and, on the mantel above, a portrait of Osama Bin Laden. Here’s how the editors of the New Yorker explained this bizarre cover: “Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd.”
There’s one big problem with satire, though. It can blow up in the satirist’s face. Consider, for instance, “Gulliver’s Travels.” This four-book masterpiece of 18th-century satire has forever been relegated to the ash-heap of innocuous children’s literature. Why? Because naive readers never got beyond the story of the little people (Lilliputians) in Book One! Also consider what happened in 2006 when the Dutch newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad. Outraged Muslim rioters burned the Danish mission in Damascus and vandalized a Catholic church in Beirut.
The New Yorker’s cartoon cover had little impact on readers back in July 2008, though. By then, most Americans were already head over heels in love with Obama. It was a foregone conclusion that Time would pick Obama as “Man of the Year,” depicting him on its December front cover not with a representational photo but with a red-white-and-black abstraction. It was Time’s way of saying, “This is not just America’s first black president but a superman who will transform America as it has never been before!”
Even when Air Force One, escorted by two F-16s, flew ominously low over the World Trade Center on a Monday morning in April 2009, only a few scaredy cats like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg flinched. Surely no one could think the White House was trying to intimidate the “fat cats” on Wall Street by reminding them of 9/11. It was just a little reminder to America of who’s really in charge.
Fast-forward to May 21, 2012, when American Catholic institutions filed a series of lawsuits to protect their rights under the First Amendment. At issue was the Obamacare regulation forcing all employer-provided insurance policies to provide free birth control, including sterilization procedures and abortifacient drugs. Cardinal Timothy Dolan declared that the president had reneged on his promise to “take the protection of the rights of conscience with the utmost seriousness.” Even the ACLU started making noises about violating the Establishment Clause.
Feeling duty-bound to react to this news, on June 27, 2012, your “humble correspondent” sent a protest letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius. Included were these words from my December 4, 2009 column in The Benicia Herald: “This evening after dark, Kathleen, step outside and look up at the stars in the sky. Ask yourself as you contemplate the vast reaches of the firmament, ‘Am I the most important creature in this universe? Is my body and my power to control it all that matters?’ If the principal guardian of all human health care services in America answers yes, then clearly there really is nothing more dangerous than a man or a woman with only one idea.”
Exactly one month later, I received a stern email from the White House addressing me as “Dear Friend” and informing me that “We will ensure religious liberty remains protected, and that women will receive the critical preventive services guaranteed by the law.” The real message of this anonymous response, however, was contained in an attached JPEG file titled “Photo of the Day.” It showed President Obama seated at his desk in the Oval Office, holding in his right hand a long white fungo bat.
Now, in July 2013, we know the White House is still at war with the Roman Catholic Church and the First Amendment. What scary picture will we be presented with next — a giant image of Barack Obama chiseled in stone on Mount Rushmore? Cartoonist Martin Kozlowski has already provided a sketch of what this might look like in the Wall Street Journal. (See Daniel Henninger’s Feb. 14 column, “The State of Obama.”)
Scary pictures won’t save Obamacare, though. As the so-called Affordable Care Act accelerates to full speed, the cost of fueling this clunker will blow the whole thing up. Remember Obama’s promise that, if you like the doctor you have, you’ll be able to keep him? Well, that won’t happen because, under Obamacare, your doctor won’t be able to afford to keep you! Then there’s Obama’s promise that no one will be denied Obamacare because of a pre-existing condition. The only problem is we now know a diminishing population of healthy young people will have to pay the freight for an exploding population of overweight, chain-smoking geezers.
By the way, here’s the latest breaking news — Obama’s decided to delay enforcing the employer health care mandate that levies a $2,000 fine for every uninsured employee. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell put it, “The White House seems to slowly be admitting what Americans already know.”
Well … some of us Americans anyway.
Bruce Robinson is an author and former Benicia resident.
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It showed President Obama seated at his desk in the Oval Office, holding in his right hand a long white fungo bat.
Bruce, I rarely disagree with you, but I am going to have to speak out on this one. I have seen the picture to which you refer and I do believe it is NOT a Fungo bat. It looks to me more like a regulation Louisville slugger.
😉
Wit is wanting among the wingers.
You’re probably right about the bat, Dennis. I’ve always enjoyed the great American pastime, but I’m definitely not an expert on the details. I doubt anybody in the White House would know the difference either. The point is these people make Al Capone look like Little Orphan Annie. The scariest part is they now control the only weapon that finally put Al behind bars–the IRS. As one pundit recently put it, they also think the Department of Justice really means the “Department of Just Us.”
Bruce, anything worthwhile can be fixed, even if it starts out with some flaws. Obama Care is, and will be, worthwhile. If in fact it is never made to work well, it may prove of service by getting the public fully ready for the Single Payer, universal care system it should have elected in the first place.Yeah, I know — only a socialist would want to undercut and eliminate all those blood-sucking, private companies.
The only thing that will work is the Kaiser Staff model. Nothing else will work unless it is tax, tax and more tax on all tax payers. Now we know that will not happen. Robert check your wallet come 2014/15 it will be very thin and no blood-sucking {your words not mine} private company will be able to help you. Last time I heard Robert those private companies support our country and make the tax payers able to support many liberal blood-sucking programs. Obamnacare is a failure will be a huge drain on our economy untill it is fixed.
Robert,
You seem to have no compunction in supporting legislation that was conceived on false premises, while being rammed through Congress w/o the support of a single member of the opposition as well as now being demonstrated to be far more costly than originally predicted and only being declared “legal” by SCOTUS based one of the most blatant cases of Judicial activism in history.
I know, the ends justify the means; legality, honesty can go to hell, as Obama got his Bill through.
Typical right-wing butthurt. Sit back and relax. Obamacare is the law of the land and all the whining in the world won’t change it. And yes, it was passed legally and upheld constitutionally. Find another topic to misinform people about.
I don’t know who you are and apparently you don’t either. You don’t know anything about the Constitution of the United States either. If you did, you would realize that your own “right” to repeatedly insult and defame your fellow American citizens in a public forum without risk of reprisal and/or incarceration is protected by that document. The Affordable Care Act may now be “the law of the land” but so too, once, was the institution of slavery. In a Republic like ours, laws can and sometimes must be changed. If you don’t like living in a Republic, go live someplace else.
Did you just compare the Affordable Care Act with slavery? Only Hitler would be that stupid.
Excekkent comment DDL.
Another typo, sorry
“In the case of the ’employer mandate,’ even a number of liberals agree that it’s a bad policy. Republicans could probably find support for repealing that provision, if they weren’t hellbent on repealing the whole law.
“But it’s so much more cathartic to call a hearing, assume a posture of umbrage, and use words such as ‘calamity’ and ‘fiscal time bomb,’ and ‘socialism’ and ‘dictatorship.’”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-republicans-obamacare-search-and-destroy-mission/2013/07/10/8e32d920-e9a9-11e2-8f22-de4bd2a2bd39_story.html?hpid=z2
In other words, the right could improve this law, they could even see parts of it repealed, but they are just TOO STUPID to get the job done.
Republicans and the ignoramuses who enable them AREN’T SMART ENOUGH to achieve what they want. We are dealing with total, utter buffoons here. And they are killing the country they profess to love.
The problem is that the employer mandates are a key revenue feature of the legislation. Along with the individual mandates. In the past two weeks we have seen the Administration postpone the employer mandate and loosen tremendously the rules for qualifying for subsidized individual mandates. This completely blows a hole in the funding for entitlement.
Are you the least bit worried about budget deficits and the debt? If so, these developments should be VERY alarming.
Further, the law has already proven to be a cost accelerator … new projections have healthcare costs growing 10 times the rate of inflation.
We should all be concerned.
“blood-sucking, private companies.”
Funny … I was just thinking that it was the blood-sucking government bureaucracies that are messing everything up!
I believe the bat was handed to President Obama by an American baseball player who has batted over three hundred many times. He handed it to the President and said Mr. President you bat over three hundred and I will run the country. Got the picture.