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WILLIAM HARWOOD

Soon after his inauguration, Barack Obama had the approval of 83 percent of the American voters. That figure has been diminishing, and disparate polls put his approval rating after 100 days at an average of 65 percent (ABC 69%; FOX 61 %).

A new president’s popularity is bound to decrease as the voters who thought they were electing a miracle worker come to terms with the reality that no president can solve the nation’s problems by waving a magic wand. The same decrease occurred with John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. And the widespread recognition that Obama is not responsible for economic and foreign-policy disasters that pre-dated his election have minimized the effect of the current reality on his approval rating. But part of the drop can also be attributed to the disillusionment of voters who expected his promised “change we can believe in” to include bringing the perpetrators of the Bush administration’s crimes against the Constitution and the Geneva Convention to justice.

Obama’s virtual pardon—by vetoing prosecution—of the Bush Gestapo is bound to cost him a lot of votes in 2012. Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon is widely believed to have made Jimmy Carter President. Obama is probably right in assuming that the number of Democrats who want to see Dick Cheney strapped to a gurney with a needle in his arm is no more than a few hundred thousand. But the number who want to see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rove incarcerated for the term of their natural lives is in the millions. That may not be enough to unseat a sitting president. But added to other factors, it could nonetheless prove decisive.

Obama’s treatment of most minorities is generally seen as even-handed. If America’s 87 percent of non-Blacks had feared that he would try to turn America into a reverse image of South Africa under apartheid, they would not have elected him the first time. And he has shown no evidence that their judgment was wrong. His treatment of the nation’s 20 million Jews and 7 million Muslims has been non-discriminatory, and neither group is likely to prefer a Republican in the foreseeable future. He has avoided alienating America’s largest minorities, women and Hispanics. His first appointment to the Supreme Court was a Hispanic woman, and he has made clear that, while he has a religion-based personal opposition to abortion, he sees a woman’s right to choose as none of the State’s business.

Obama is on the side of the majority of Americans who reject the Neanderthal Rednecks Association’s insane interpretation of the Second Amendment as giving criminals the right to own guns, rather than establishing an armed militia at a time when America had neither a standing army nor adequate law enforcement agencies. If he has ever voiced an opinion on whether Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses should have the right to kill their children by denying them lifesaving medical procedures, most voters neither know nor care.

Similarly, whether Obama recognizes Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard as lying humbugs motivated by lust for power and profit is a nonissue for the average voter. And while he accepts the religious dogma that the victimless behavior of the 30 million Americans who are gay is “sinful,” just as Jews believe that eating a cheeseburger is sinful and Muslims believe that drinking Manischewitz wine is sinful, he has made clear that he sees gays as having the same right to equal treatment under the law as any other minority.

Nonetheless, Obama is a very Machiavellian politician. While paying lip service to gay rights, he has permitted his Justice Department to file a brief with the Supreme Court endorsing the legitimacy of the viciously homophobic Defense of Marriage Act. He is gambling that such a move could win him support from the Christian Taliban, with little risk that America’s 15 million voting-age gays will switch their allegiance to the homophobic theofascist the Republican Party is bound to nominate. In the event that the Republican nominee is a supporter of equal rights, Obama can modify his position at that time so that he remains the lesser evil.

As for Obama’s kowtowing to the organized crime syndicate known as the Roman Catholic Church, it does not come close to the treasonous implementation of the laws of a foreign state enforced by King George ll.

It is Obama’s continuation of his predecessor’s dismantling of the wall of separation between Church and State that has the potential to prove his undoing. “Faith based initiatives” are an unmitigated violation of the First Amendment’s prophibition of any “law respecting an establishment of religion.” Far from abolishing such legalization of theocracy, as the nontheists who voted for him expected, Obama has extended them, and is showing signs of using more tax money to propagandize for the god delusion than Bush Senior or Junior ever did.

King George l is on record as declaring that America’s 100 million nontheists are neither citizens nor patriots, and George ll officially reduced them to second-class citizens with his declaration that he saw himself as the divinely appointed enforcer of his imaginary Sky Führer’s overlordship, even lying to Congress in order to start a war that he seriously believed his god had ordered (over the intercom in Dick Cheney’s voice?).

Barack Obama will be his Party’s candidate for President in 2012. The Democratic Party does nor dump a sitting president running for reelection, even when polls suggest that he cannot win. In 1980, when it was evident that only Ted Kennedy could defeat Ronald Reagan, the Party clung to Jimmy Carter. And in 2012, even if polls suggest that Hillary Clinton could win if Obama stepped aside, she will recognize that becoming a candidate against Obama would not only split the Party and thereby guarantee a Republican victory. It would also permanently end her political career.

Nontheists are fully aware that Barack Obama is as godphuqt as either Bush in terms of his personal beliefs. But they are also aware that any Republican nominee in 2012 will be similarly ignorant, superstitious, and brainwashed. In the event that the Republican Party is manipulated by the mad-dog faction of Rush Limbaugh, Dimbo Palin, and FOX News into nominating a theofascist such as Mitt Romney or a Repuublicanazi such as Newt Gingrich, the election will be a formality and Obama’s coronation guaranteed. But if the Republicans shake off the stranglehold of the Christian Taliban, and nominate an upholder of Church-State separation and women’s sovereignty over their own bodies, a large percentage of nontheists might see Obama’s misuse of taxpayers’ money to discriminate against them as a deciding factor.

President Obama can afford to lose the support of smaller minorities. He cannot lose the support of 50 million voting-age nontheists and still win.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 11:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.