redblueamerica.com

OK, so I'm not thrilled with Michelle Obama's recent pronouncements. Luckily, National Review is around to come up with something sillier.

Barack Obama, you see, might've been a baby Communist. I give you Lisa Schiffren:

And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. ... For a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics.

What? What? But there's more.

It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution.

Perhaps. But it was also an explicit tactic of Dixiecrats and their ilk to paint the entire Civil Rights movement with the broad brush of Soviet-backed communism.

That said, let's consider the possibility that Schiffren's right: Barack Obama's parents met in the service of Global Communism. So what? If there were evidence that Obama himself was once a Soviet agent, or that he was in any way a Communist, that would be fair game for discussion. But to visit the (wholly speculative) sins of the father upon the son isn't just repugnant -- it's un-American.

Luckily, some of Schiffren's colleagues recognize this.