Obama’s Polish Joke

Some Polish jokes aren’t funny

By A. Holmes for Western Voices

Not so long ago Polish government officials were accused of making “racist statements” about demagogic US President Barack Obama. News reports said that a joke had been circulated by the Polish Foreign Affairs Minister Radoslaw Sikorski: “Why does Barack Obama have Polish roots? Because his grandfather ate a Polish missionary.”  

Sikorski claimed that he had heard the joke from “someone else” and only repeated it as an example of “racist” sentiments rampant in Europe concerning the election of Barack http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5759 Obama, which he hoped to expose. According to a spokesman, Sikorski “was only giving an example of the unpalatable and racist “jokes” that surround Obama.” Even though an official of the National Security Bureau confirmed that he had heard the joke from Sikorski and was willing to testify in court, Sikorski claimed that his wife, US citizen and neocon author Anne Applebaum, supported Obama, as he did himself. Still, the fact that Sikorski uttered the joke stalled his expected appointment as Secretary General of NATO.

Wojciech Olejniczak, a leader of the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), claimed that Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of rival Law and Justice, told him the same joke. Olejniczak’s SLD, the former ruling http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5427 complimented Obama for being a “handsome and tanned young man,” the humorless politically correct censors went wild, pretending to read “tanned” as some kind of racial slur. News reports have abounded with tales of the extreme idolization Obama supposedly enjoys in Europe, though the numbers undoubtedly partly reflect the fear of many of those polled, in a climate where people are literally jailed for speaking, of being called “racists.” There is also a degree of “Schadenfreude,” the German expression for delight at the misfortune of others. For a lot of Europeans, the spectacle of the United States, which exports its materialist culture and ideas around the world and presumes to order other nations around, being so crippled by its own egalitarian myth that it installed Obama in the Presidency as the ultimate act of affirmative action, is sweet justice served.

Ironically, in Obama’s nation, Polish jokes are still common, and as with “redneck” and Italian jokes, are not subject to anything even approaching the kind of Medieval horror associated with jokes about non-whites. And while in the US people are still formally protected by the First Amendment, people exercising freedom of speech are often at risk of being tagged as “extremists” or even “domestic terrorists” if their words subvert the dominant paradigm. Careers are also often at extreme risk, as seen in recent episodes where people said things that were deemed politically incorrect. Michael Richards, a well known comedian and a former star on the hit series “Seinfeld,” was subjected to a blizzard of “bad publicity” after uttering the dreaded “N word.” The popular Duane “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2244, and was so comprehensively witchhunted that the brawny bounty hunter sobbed that he was willing to commit suicide if that would expiate his speech crime. Dog even offered to personally grovel to race hustler “Reverend” Al Sharpton, but was snubbed; Sharpton was “too busy.”

Yet when the “offender” comes from a protected and/or special http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4217. Jacobson, who is Jewish, spoke at an ESPN event, shrieking “f**k Jesus” at a stunned crowd. Nothing happened, and ESPN laughed the insult off until the Catholic League and a conservative website finally generated attention. In different circumstances Jacobson would have been subjected to relentless attacks and her career would have been ruined. But in these circumstances ESPN reportedly responded, finally, with a laughable “one week suspension.” As Catholic League chief Bill Donohue said, “there is no evidence that ESPN is taking this matter seriously. Are we to believe that her hate speech is of no consequence? It is also important to note that being drunk didn’t help Mel Gibson’s case when he made remarks about Jews.”

Or what about the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5721 verbal assault on Sarah Palin at a Jewish theater in Washington, DC. Berhard, who is Jewish, hysterically castigated Palin’s deep Christian faith as “bullsh!t” and inferior to Bernhard’s religion. Even more darkly, revealing the deep insecurity of the “feminist” left when faced with a successful Christian conservative white woman like Sarah Palin, Bernhard gloated that Palin would be gang raped by black males if Palin dared set foot in Bernhard’s New York neighborhood. Yet what was the response to this degrading, disgusting behavior? Far from reporting Bernhard to the Secret Service, Ari Roth of Theater J, the venue, applauded “Sandra’s blistering indictment” of “White Folk” as “cutting edge.” The theater also bragged that ticket sales soared when the tepid McCain/Palin “campaign” limply complained.

Humor about Obama has led to even more self-censorship than is usual when it comes to race. The title of a Washington Times article said it all: “For political comedians, the joke’s not on Obama.” The May article quoted comedienne Linda Smith. “In New York, nobody wants to hear anything anti-Obama. And even if they do, right-leaning comics must walk through a historical minefield to mock the first black president.” Conservative radio host Glenn Beck said that many comics are “afraid” when it comes to Obama. “We’re now into biased comedy. We can’t even laugh without a political agenda,” he said.  

As with Polish jokes, a racist double standard persists around speech. Non-whites regularly make disparaging and hateful public slurs against “white trash,” “white boys” and the like and repercussions are usually non-existent. When Obama’s own pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was shown engaging in outrageous racist rants against white people he not only refused to apologize, but went on to add even more racial abuse in a defiant series of performances. Had Wright and Obama been white and Wright had made identical statements about non-whites, the fallout would have been incalculable.

When it comes to Obama, political correctness goes into overdrive. The same kind of people who lambasted George W. Bush as a war criminal, traitor and evil incarnate, who threatened to emigrate after Bush’s second electoral win, and who today demand the investigation, prosecution and imprisonment of Bush, Cheney and other partisans of his cabal, now paint gruesome nightmare fantasies about how dangerous anything less than abject praise for Obama is. According to the psychotic conspiracy theories of the Obamaniacs, white “racists” are so unhinged by the sight of a black man in the White House that almost anything could happen. Stoking the paranoia to advance their own agenda are special interest groups, who have a stake in the fear. Their lunatic speculations about white terror plots, separatist soldiers and palefaced would-be assassins humiliated the Obama government when they were added to “assessments” that branded millions of ordinary people as real or potential “domestic terrorists,” from anti-abortion activists and people who think white people have interests in common to those who support the Second Amendment and/or think taxes are too high. The acts of a miniscule handful of mentally ill criminals have been inflated to represent the aspirations of all those who don’t kowtow to the Obama program.

According to their “logic,” every vegetarian is a potential Animal Liberation Front terrorist. It’s a world where Pat http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5958 anti-Semites intent on rolling back Vatican II’s reforms organize compounds disguised as monasteries. Armies of intolerance, haters of diversity, fueled by “hate speech” and internet chat forums.

Dark fantasies, certainly. But for many religious people clear thinking is less important than blind faith. In fact, Artur Gorski’s accurate comment about Obama as a “black messiah of the new left,” the quote that could land Gorski in prison, actually proved to be an understatement; to some of his acolytes, Obama is God. Before the advent of the internet, Newsweek was an influential magazine considered to be a leader of public opinion instead of the voice of marginal cranks that it is. Consider Newsweek editor Evan Thomas and his appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” and you’ll see why the “mainstream media” is lining up for bailouts. It would seem that, for Thomas, the Sermon on the Mount was nothing compared to Barack Obama’s Cairo Speech. “Obama’s standing above the country,” gushed Thomas, “above, above the world, he’s sort of God.” Host Chris Matthews concurred with his fellow acolyte. “I think the President’s speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful…But what I liked about the President’s speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility…The question now is whether the President we elected and spoke for us so grandly yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave us and to the world.” Evan Thomas expanded: “He’s going to bring all different sides together…He doesn’t even use the word terror. He uses extremism. He’s all about let us reason together…He’s the teacher. He is going to say, “now, children, stop fighting and quarreling with each other.” And he has a kind of a moral authority that he, he can, he can do that.”

And that’s a joke that isn’t funny.

2009-07-16