Fun with Obama iconography:

Based on their latest cover, here’s a short list of who Rolling Stone thinks Barack Obama is:

–The totally awesome, glowing, superhero/savior spawn of Jesus and Superman

–A dewy Venus, majestically stepping forth from a serene ocean mist, but, like also a guy who’s running for president.

–Not just the president of the ShinySuit 3000 Club For Men, but also a client.

(via the BlogFather, Glenn Reynolds)

p.s. I haven’t check out Tim Noah’s place to see if he’s added it to his Obama Messiah Watch series.

Those of you who are interested in going deep in the weeds of Obama Messiah iconography should visit this blog.

This searching around with a microscope to examine the hidden meanings and nefarious intentions of the folks on your own side certainly can’t be what Barack Obama was hoping to do with his candidacy.

But now that it’s upon him, he sure seems to enjoy stirring the pot:

Obama, while renouncing what he called “the politics of the past,” shot back Wednesday that it was nonsense to think it could be a boon to a presidential candidate to “be an African-American named Barack Obama.”

“If somebody in my campaign suggested that Senator Clinton was only where she was because she was a woman, I think people would take great offense, and rightly so, because she’s a very accomplished person,” he said. Ferraro, he told NBC, seemed to be participating “in the kind of slice-and-dice politics that’s about race and about gender and about this and that.”

Barack dear, you’re the one who took offense at Ferraro’s remark, and you’re the one engaging in the same old same old politics.

For someone who claims to be an agent of change, you sure do have a hard time setting a good example. How about rising above and not taking the bait?

You are not giving a very good impression to people wondering what an Obama presidency would look like. From where I sit, it looks like it might just be one long intimidation campaign against anyone—Democrat or Republican—who dares to “offend” anyone else.

No thanks, buster.

Among the freedoms our Constitution guarantees is the right to think—and even to promote—poisonous ideas about America and about history.

The novelist Nicholson Baker takes his freedom seriously, as Adam Kirsh, writing in the New York Sun, notes:

Mr. Baker’s book is designed to convince the reader that America should not have fought Germany or Japan; that Franklin Roosevelt connived to get us into the war at the behest of the arms manufacturers, and probably knew about the bombing of Pearl Harbor in advance; that Winston Churchill was a bloodthirsty buffoon and a protofascist; that in Japan’s invasion of China, China was the aggressor; that after the fall of France, Churchill was culpable in vowing to fight on, and not acceding to Hitler’s “peace” terms; that the Holocaust was, at least in part, Hitler’s response to British aggression, and that the only people who demonstrated true wisdom in the run-up to the war were American and British pacifists, who refused to take up arms no matter how pressing the need.

“Was the war necessary?” Mr. Baker asks in his author’s note. “Was it a ‘good war’? Did waging it help anyone who needed help? These were the basic questions that I hoped to answer when I began writing.”

Baker’s previous book contemplated whether or not it was morally acceptable to assassinate George W. Bush. No word on whether he’s got a contract for a new book.

Here’s the one I want:

If you’re planning a suicide-bombing mission, however, this one might appeal to you:

You can see the entire spring/summer/fall/winter line here.