A guide for Obamaphobes

I have a hunch that most Obamaphobes are not in the habit of hunkering down on Sunday mornings with The New York Times Magazine. Which is probably a good thing – because if the phobers had chanced upon yesterday’s lengthy excerpt of a new book about the president’s mother, their heads would have exploded.Nevertheless, phobers still have ample time to Be Very Afraid, to cherry-pick a line here and a line there, to find fresh grist for their viral emails. But I’ll save them the trouble. Let’s speed this news cycle along. Having already read the article drawn from Janny Scott’s A Single Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, which details the boy’s life in Indonesia between the ages of six and 10, I hereby offer my grist list (story passages in italics) – and the predictable phoberspin:Yet the city had a magi­cal charm. People who were children in Jakarta in that period, including Barack Obama, reminisce about the sound of the Muslim call to prayer in the days before public-address systems, and the signature sounds called out by street vendors wheeling their carts…Obama permanently brainwashed by the siren call of Muslim street prayer!The white woman and her half-African son made quite a pair traveling in Indonesia together. Elizabeth Bryant, an American who lived in the city of Yogyakarta at the time, remembers a lunch held at another expatriate’s house that Ann and Barry attended. Ann arrived in a long skirt made of Indonesian fabric — not, Bryant noticed, a look that other American women in Indonesia seemed to favor.Obamamom’s refusal to travel on American soil! Fashion emergency – Obamamom’s Muslim fabric and her hatred of clothes for American women! Ann also seemed to be teaching Barry respect. He had all the politeness that Indonesian children displayed toward their parents. He seemed to be learning Indonesian ways. “I think this is one reason he’s so halus,” Bryant said of the pres­ident, using the Indonesian adjective that means “polite, refined, or courteous,” referring to qualities some see as distinctively Javanese.Obama’s secret infiltration of America with foreign Javanese values!(Ann’s Indonesian husband, Lolo, frequently hobnobbed with American oil company executives at a private club, and he wanted Ann on his arm.) Ann begged off. “She didn’t understand these folks — the idea of living an expa­triate life that was so completely divorced from the world around you, that involves hiding yourself away in these protective cells of existence,” (friend) Maya said. “That was peculiar to her, and she was bored by it.”  Ann complained to her friend Bill Collier that all those mid­dle-aged white Americans talked about inane things. Lolo, she told Collier, “was becoming more American all the time.”Obama indoctrinated by his self-hating white American mother to hate white Americans!Young Obama and a houseboy named Saman often slept in the same place — sometimes in the bunk bed in Barry’s room, sometimes on the dining-room floor or in the garden. On this occasion, Barry, who was 8 or 9 at the time, asked Saman to turn out the light. When Saman did not do it, he said, Barry hit him in the chest. When he did not react, Barry hit him harder, and Saman struck him back. Barry began to cry loudly…Obama’s Indonesian houseboy and the nights they slept together! The America-hating mother who made her son sleep on the floor where Muslims pray! The escalating nocturnal Indonesian violence that forced Obama to raise the white flag of surrender!“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Lolo asked Barry one evening, according to Saman. “Oh, prime minister,” Barry answered.Obama’s self-confessed hate-America agenda to seize power as the undisputed leader of a large Muslim country that’s located somewhere or other!That’s a sampling, anyway. But the clincher is the photo that ran on the front of the magazine: Ann posing with her young son, who is dressed as a pirate. Study it closely and you will realize that neither of them is wearing an American flag pin. Why not? Did they defiantly toss their pins in the grass? Has anyone closely studied the grass? Is their pose intended to hide a Muslim prayer rug that’s behind them in the grass? Will Donald Trump please solve these mysteries in time for the May NBC ratings sweep?——-Overlapping with the phobers, of course, are the birthers. In my Sunday newspaper column, I crawled deep within the catacombs of the birther mind.