Osama, Obama, what's the diff?

I couldn't have seen it until I saw it but now here it is. They’re going to try to take down Obama by tarring him as a Muslim. Say it enough and it will stick, especially with a scandal-hungry press ready to report every rumor and lie as a “controversy.” Obama’s only hope of survival is to meet the charges head on, exactly as he would have to if the charges were actually true. He must realize, as Kerry was to dim to understand, that it simply doesn’t matter whether a political attack has any basis in truth. TV creates the reality; the truth is whatever is on TV.

It was reported the other day that Barack means 'Blessed' in Arabic, and that Barack's grandpappy was a hard core Muslim. That means in the minds of most Americans he was hanging out fighting whitey with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's grandpappy. And Barack's middle name is Hussein, and his first name rhymes with Osama, so that’s that. He might as well be wearing a turban and carrying a scimitar.

OK. There's only one way to handle this. Right here, right now, big throwdown. Obama has got to hold a Checkers-style, prime-time 1/2 hour of plain speaking about himself and his God-blessed American-ness. And at the end he's got to cry about how much it hurts him to have anyone cast aspersions about how much he loves this country. He's got to detail everyone in his family's lineage that was Muslim, and tell the heartwarming story of their conversion to God’s real religion, and how converting is part of what a free nation allows its free people to do.

But mainly, he's got to say that we're not in a war against Islam, we're in a struggle for the hearts and minds of a billion Muslims. He's got to say that our leadership, by making this moral struggle a shooting war on terror, has terrorized the Muslim base, which is at it's core actually quite conservative and religious, and apt to be friendly to good American Heartland people. Obama has to compile a list of all the great people who say that we are not at war with Islam and read it to us. He's got to paint a devastating, super-scary and super-detailed picture of what's going to happen if we keep treating this like it is a war--really paint the full-on doomsday scenario. And all the while he does this he must wrap himself in the flag.

He has to explain that we can't militarize our way out of this situation, and that while we will go after specific people who are known to be bad, we have created a global war out of our conflict with a few small and isolated bands of fanatics. It is only a global war because we made it one. And he's got to make it look bad. Really bad.

Then he's got to offer us a way out. Instead, he would say, we will play the long game, using our real strengths: our moral vision, our honesty, our can-do attitude and good old American ingenuity. And we're going to do what half a trillion dollars has been (intrinsically) unable to do: we're going to calm these people down. We're going to get enough of them back on our side that we aren't doomed. How? Well, he'll explain, we're going to try to become as energy independent as is reasonable, we are going to reach out to the international community, we are going to try to work with the world to stabilize this region, we are going to try to figure out what the source of disaffection among the populace at large is such that we can help address their grievances in ways other than having them blow themselves up and us with them. Subtext: I can deal with these people.

So he gives this talk and the whole thing shifts. Imagine the headline: Presidential Candidate Denies US In War on Terror! It would make worldwide news. Can you imagine Obama in the follow up interview: "Look, one crazy guy with a few crazy followers managed to do something very smart and cunning, but the cleverness of the hijackings doesn't prove that entire countries and their populations were behind it. Indeed, prior to the bombings, only 3% of the Muslim populations advocated bombing US soil. Now 56% do! It wasn't the bombing of Americans that made their world hate us. We had their sympathy! It was our idiotic and indiscriminate response. We have to undo some serious damage here, and you are lucky you have me at your disposal to do it."

Then, by not fighting, we win. In summary: if Obama creates a strong enough cognitive dissonance, and makes it utterly clear at the outset that the problem is that we've ignited a world to hate us, and that only a guy with an Islamic inoculation can address the situation, we win. Though not a Muslim, Obama has Muslim antibodies. It's not a liability. He's our secret weapon. If Obama flips his Muslimness thus, in essence saying: “I can get these guys off your back,” then with each subsequent attack he only gains strength.