Two anti-Obama shots in the ST’s Insight Section today: the first a syndicated opinion piece from Kathleen Parker deriding the support for Obama as a religious craze:

So what is the source of this infatuation with Mr Obama? How to explain the hysteria? The religious fervor? The devotion? The weeping and fainting and utter euphoria surrounding a candidate who had the audacity to run for leader of the free world on a platform of mere hope?

[…]

To play weatherman for a moment, he is a perfect storm of the culture of narcissism, the cult of celebrity, and a secular society…

[…]

Here’s how a 20-year-old woman in Seattle described that Obama feeling: “When he was talking about hope, it actually almost made me cry. Like it really made sense, like, for the first, like, whoa … ”

This New Age glossolalia may be more sonorous than the guttural emanations from the revival tent, but the emotion is the same. It’s all religion by any other name.

Whatever the Church of Obama promises, we should not mistake this movement for a renaissance of reason. It is more like, well, like whoa.

The second anti-Obama shot is on the next page, nestled in John McBeth’s column deriding the US, headlined the “Land of hype and corny?”. I have no idea why they picked that headline since “Land of Hope and Glory” is a decidedly British song, and the puns they used weren’t so brilliant as to merit using the title of a song so wholly unconnected with America. But to get back on topic, here’s the anti-Obama shot:

We have all been watching the presidential campaign with a certain horrid fascination. While they may be a necessary part of the political theatre, those rallies where the candidate is “just so happy to be back in south Texas” just seem so contrived.

Does anyone actually believe rhetoric so lacking in substance? It is only now that commentators are waking up to the fact that as charismatic as he is, Democrat Barack Obama does little more than mouth generalities and platitudes.

A young voter told CNN recently that Mr Obama “will make us look good in the eyes of the world”. I’m not so sure about that. Isn’t he the same man who said that if the circumstances warranted it, he would order the US military into Pakistan — with or without Islamabad’s permission?

I am not bothering to link to the McBeth piece because I am sick of having to clear all my SPH-related cookies in order to log in to the Straits Times’ website. Awful, awful website.

But back to the anti-Obama sentiments. I say sentiments, because they don’t deserve to be called arguments. Parker assumes, on anecdotal evidence, that Obama is popular solely on the basis of having the ability to incite religious allegiance to him in people. The whole article revolves around baseless accusations that his platform is based on nothing but religious or quasi-religious rhetoric, when anyone who has actually bothered to read more about his proposed policies would easily see that there is a lot more than “nothing” there. Perhaps it is true that the majority of Obama supporters were drawn in by his charisma. But it is certainly not true that he is running on “a platform of mere hope”. Neither is it true that he “does little more than mouth generalities and platitudes”.

McBeth’s second criticism of Obama’s statement that he would order US troops into Pakistan without Islamabad’s permission if the circumstances warranted it is even more ludicrous considering that Obama is the only serious presidential candidate left who consistently opposed the US sending troops into Iraq without Iraqi permission. Both Clinton and McCain have already voted for the Iraq invasion. Obama has not voted for any such stupid war, and he has consistently said that he does not oppose all wars. Only extreme pacifists would say that they would not invade Pakistan under any circumstances — to say that Pakistan should be invaded if the circumstances warranted it is hardly extreme. It is not difficult to think of circumstances (say, severe prior aggression on Pakistan’s part) in which a reasonably strong argument might be made for invasion.

Now that my alleged biases are clear, I will air my suspicion about the occurrence of two anti-Obama shots, on consecutive pages, neither of which constitute substantive criticisms. I have not seen any of the other presidential candidates subject to such prominent, concentrated criticism in the ST. Given what we all know about how the press in Singapore operates, I think it is not unreasonable to suspect that someone Up There does not like Obama.

P. S. This is priceless.

Update:
Just went to read the weekend’s Today, and guess what, another anti-Obama article, in prime location (full 3rd page). This one puts forward radical views, to say the least — claiming that Martin Luther King Jr ‘built nothing and taught us only how to take a beating’, and that the rise of blacks’ median income from 50% of whites’ to 62% of whites’ is an insignificant change. This is too much of a coincidence for there not to have been explicit instructions from above to make a stance on the US elections. After all, there were no other opinion pieces about the US elections in either of the two major English-language newspapers.

From Matthew Parris’ comments on Rowan Williams’ suggestion that Sharia law be allowed in Britain:

The State, not family, faith or community, is the guarantor of personal liberty and intellectual freedom, and it will always be to the State, not the Church, synagogue or mosque, that the oppressed individual needs look.

There is no imminent danger, I don’t think, of Sharia law being allowed in Singapore, but there are similar problems that stem from the State’s lack of protection of liberties and its frequent exhortation that we leave the determination of these to be decided by the ‘moral majority’. But just because it’s a majority doesn’t mean it isn’t tyrannical or unreasonable.

It is, in my opinion, highly underrated how tyrannical cultures and families can be. Here our discourse is shaped by deference to cultures, in the name of harmony. Our cultures condone nothing as bad as suttee, but plenty of lesser evils.