The election is only two weeks away, so it is time to reveal that Barack Obama is a flag-burning America hater.
I have gotten e-mails for weeks telling me so, and those e-mails include links to the Internet, so they must be true, because the Internet is the only place you can find the straight poop that the mainstream media won't dare to tell you!
Joe the Plumber says so.
Here's the shocking story, written by a reporter named Lindsborg in the Washington Post about what Obama said on "Meet the Press" last month. You don't remember it, but that's only because the media protects flag burners!
"My wife disrespects the Flag for many personal reasons," the e-mail says Lindsborg wrote in the Post (are you following this?). "She and I have attended several flag burning ceremonies."
See?
This is just like the stuff about John Kerry I didn't know in 2004 until I stopped at a bar in Anoka and found the guys passing around an e-mail that said "BEWARE OF MRS. JOHN KERRY," and said that Kerry's rich, foreign-born wife supported terrorism.
Now, this fall, Mrs. Kerry and Mrs. Obama have been seen in public together. What more do we need to know that Obama is up to his eyeballs in the Hate America thing!
Oops. Wait a sec. Oh-oh.
This just in: No one named Lindsborg works at the Washington Post, Barack Obama hasn't been on "Meet the Press" since July, and Joe the Plumber is a tax cheat who doesn't have a plumbing license. Great. What's next?
They're gonna tell me there is no Tooth Fairy?
Man, it is hard to know what to believe anymore. If you can't believe that the Democratic candidate for president burns flags, I don't know what to hold onto.
But I know this: Successful politicians wave the flag.
Former Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer wore so many items decorated with Old Glory that I called her Our Living Flag. Only once did I see her without any flag get-up. I was so astounded I wanted to ask, "Hey, Kiffmeyer, why do you hate our freedom?"
So it has been hard on some voters that John McCain, the Republican candidate for president, did not wear flag pins during the presidential debates. Of course, McCain, with his years of military service and record of heroism, doesn't need a flag on his lapel. But Obama wore the flag at every debate, confounding critics who have accused him of hating America since last year when he was filmed during the national anthem in Iowa without his hand over his heart.
I have seen the video, and when you hear the long, drawn-out and excruciatingly painful rendition of the anthem, as butchered by some Corn Belle, the only surprise is that Obama wasn't holding his hands over his ears.
Still, Obama needed to spruce up his flag act, especially after he gave a dreadful answer when he was asked, also in Iowa, why he didn't wear a flag pin.
Acting like a Harvard Law grad, he said flag pins were "a substitute" for true patriotism, so he had decided not to wear one. "Instead," he said, "I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism."
Clarence Thomas revisited
Klunk. That did not go over well, and the right-wing mob started a high-tech lynching (to borrow Clarence Thomas' phrase) of the man who was being called by his middle name all the time: Hussein.
McCain's middle name, by the way, is Sidney. If you ask me, it's a wash.
Still under fire, Obama said, "I'm less concerned with what you're wearing on your lapel than what's in your heart."
A philosopher, a poet or a priest could say that. But not a politician, especially one accused at every turn of being a secret terrorist and closet Muslim. It's hard for voters to see "what's in your heart," which is why a $3.95 flag pin is a bargain: It makes overly intellectual explanations unnecessary.
Obama started wearing a flag pin again.
But many people who don't see anything wrong with using the flag as a weapon kept up the attack: Just last Thursday, former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum told Fox News that Obama won't wear a flag pin because he is "not in concert" with American values.
Santorum wasn't wearing a pin that day. Obama was.
But Barack Obama could ride a white horse in an Uncle Sam suit and carry six flags in his teeth and it wouldn't be enough. The Internet is still burning up with the phony story that if he had his way, Obama would replace "The Star-Spangled Banner" with "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)" the old syrupy Coca-Cola anthem.
IQ is diving like the Dow.
My friends, Obama is not an Arab, and the whole flag fraud began as a stab at humor by a conservative blogger named John Semmens after the flap over the lapel pin. Humor is dangerous, especially political humor. Semmens' joke was taken as an authentic outrage by many people who already knew from the Internet that Obama has cloven feet and tiny horns on his head.
I have repeatedly received angry e-mails asking why the newspaper won't tell us about Obama's flag-burning ways.
Answer: Because it's a dirty lie.
But it won't go away, and now, as Election Day approaches, the lie has been embellished with the fake Washington Post attribution and fabricated quotes about how Obama wants to disarm America and has been burning flags with his wife.
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public," H.L. Mencken once said.
And to think: Mencken never even saw the Internet.
Sixteen more days to go.
God bless America.
ncoleman@startribune.com • 612-673-4400
