Boot some dupa, Barak.
While it is not uncommon for political candidates to stack the house with supporters while barring potential rabble-rousers at high profile photo-op events, I wonder what would have happened at the recent Obama rally at Cobo Arena if my wife's sainted Polish grandmother had shown up wearing her babushka head scarf?
If it had been our long-departed "botch" and not those two Muslim-American women who got the ziggy from Obama's roadies at this week's rally because they were wearing traditional Islamic head scarves, somebody would have ended up with boot prints on their dupas.
And I don't even want to think about the firestorm of criticism that would have surrounded John McCain if his handlers had been that insensitive to Muslim guests.
I suspected early on that Obama's handlers were loading his crowds with acceptable faces when I watched the TV clips of the youthful senator's appearance at the suburban Taylor campus of Wayne County Community College earlier this week. Why Taylor, I wondered? Why not the CC's headquarters campus in downtown Detroit? Or the east side campus on Connor? Isn't that where the hardcore Democrats live?
Then it struck me. The Detroit-based WCCC student body was likely to be "too African American" for a guy who's struggling to convince white America that he's neither a religious terrorist nor a black activist. Heaven knows, Obama has enough of a problem trying to shake the out-of-the-mainstream image created by his Arabic name (he's a Christian, incidentally). The last thing he needs is to leave even the slightest impression that he's catering to blacks to the exclusion of persons of other racial backgrounds.
As for his handlers' intolerant barring of the two scarved women, who were first invited to sit behind Obama (where the TV cameras would see them) during the Cobo speech and then turned aside by his screeners because they didn't pass Obama's uniform muster, the ladies deserved more than a cursory dismissal from some staff roadie and they got it when Sen. Obama did the right thing - after the insult hit the media - and called each personally to backfill his apology.
Obama ought to show them and the nation he's sincere, however, by publicly booting some dupa on those misguided donkies who caused the insult in the first place.
