B. Hussein Obama

The use of Barack Obama’s middle name should not be an issue for obvious reasons but, incredibly enough, it is. Obama’s middle name is “Hussein” so some fiery conservatives have taken to using the full version of his name to conjure up Saddam and Islam and 9/11. Then an elected official with way too much time on his hands started coming up with bizarre justifications as to while the middle name matters. He even went so far as to explain that everyone was oversensitive and that there was nothing factually incorrect about what he said. More people got involved. Hannity defended King, Colmes objected. (It should be mentioned that Steve King is not very intelligent and, on Bill O’Reilly when put on the spot about the middle name being important, King danced around the issue and refused to give a definite comment. Even O’Reilly, who wanted to give the man the benefit of the doubt in the worst way, seemed a little amused by King’s refusal to back up his original words.)

The people in support of using Obama’s full name are assholes. Yes, that’s his name and yes you can certainly use it… but that doesn’t make you any less of an asshole. It’s like the dude said… And it’s wrong on so many levels. First off, I don’t really see the difference between this and name calling. His name randomly sounds like the name of a recently deposed dictator so yelling it a bunch of times is an insult? Good thing his middle name wasn’t James or else they might tease him about his initials being “B-J”. Or imagine if his name was Obanal (long first “a”)… people would have had a field day with that.

But forget for a second that name calling is ridiculously immature and get to the real issue – stuff like this hurts the Republican Party. It makes the party look like it’s led by petty name callers who are elected by redneck conspiracy theorists who think that Obama’s secretly in league with Osama and the major clue lies in his middle name. It makes moderate-to-left people switch off Fox News and refuse to give McCain a chance. Is it really more important to fire up a couple of your most adamant supporters at the price of potentially alienating swing voters? Not that any of this matters because anyone even remotely affected by Barack’s middle name would not be voting Democrat in the first place.

As an aside, it scares me that a person’s given birth name can matter so much in a political election. I just keep imagining a brilliant and charismatic person named Jesus Hitler Castro destined to lead our great country into a time of prosperity only to have his political career cut short mere seconds after exiting the womb when his mother cursed him with the worst name for politics ever. (Just kidding, his presidential ambitions really died nine months earlier when his parents decided to be Mexican. Wait a minute... was that last line blatantly racist or was it a comment on the mindset of the average American voter...?)