Black, Muslim, Arab, Socialist, Whatever.

The emails going out about Obama have been crafty. The gossip is not that he is black – that’s obvious enough – but that he is dangerous for other reasons. You can’t say a man’s unacceptable because he’s black these days; no one wants to admit to being racist. You have to invent something else.

I have heard several phony reasons. The most widely circulated one is that he is a secret Muslim. Someone called in on a TV program last week who had supposed that Obama openly admitted to being a Muslim: the caller was asking which sect Obama belonged to, Shia or Sunni. Fortunately, the panelist on the program corrected him: Obama is not a Muslim, he is a Christian. A woman in Florida told a television reporter that she could not trust Obama because he would socialize the country [somehow she was missing the government buyout taking place as she spoke; it's now too late for Obama to do it, Bush and company have just done it]. And yesterday a woman in a suburb of Minneapolis told John McCain that she could not trust Obama because he was an “Arab.”

Whatever the reason, we know Obama can’t be trusted, these people are saying. As Sarah Palin keeps putting it, “he’s different from us.” The nuance is clear: Black, Muslim, Arab, socialist: whatever he is, he different. And dangerous.