Tag Archives: Media Malpractice

Barack “Hussein” Obama

Here is an irritating development within journalism, buried within an article detailing yet another stupid Republican exercising his right to terrify voters in our theocracy:

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina Roman Catholic priest has told his parishioners that they should refrain from receiving Holy Communion if they voted for Barack Obama because the Democratic president-elect supports abortion, and supporting him “constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil.”

The Rev. Jay Scott Newman said in a letter distributed Sunday to parishioners at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greenville that they are putting their souls at risk if they take Holy Communion before doing penance for their vote.

“Our nation has chosen for its chief executive the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or to run for president,” Newman wrote, referring to Obama by his full name, including his middle name of Hussein.

“Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exits constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil, and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ’s Church and under the judgment of divine law. Persons in this condition should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation.”

How delightfully coy.  I love that referring to the president-elect by his full name has become journalistic shorthand for “this person’s nuts.”  His name is Hussein.  I understand that referring to BHO that way is designed to rile up your xenophobic parishioners’ hatred of the other and to delegitimize Obama in some way.  But the media is beginning to treat Obama’s middle name like it’s some crazy aunt in the attic that must never be mentioned lest one be grouped in with the psychos.

The phraseology is passive-aggressive and contributes to this emerging taboo.  I’m in no way a fan of catering to the crowd that screams “left-wing bias in the media!” but this is objectively a bad technique.  However, to put this issue in context, Republicans have truly lost it.  Someone needs to remind this priest that the campaign is over.