I’m going to have to agree with Huckabee for once, when he said:

What I am saying is that we need to challenge Obama on the basis that his ideas are the wrong ones—not attacking him personally. If people spend their time repeating a bunch of internet driven drivel about his middle name (he didn’t choose his anymore than I chose mine), or his race (I do sincerely celebrate that our country has moved to a place where a person’s race doesn’t limit him from aspiring to the highest office in our land, but I just believe that due to his proposals and lack of substantive experience, he’s gone far enough—not because of his race, but because of his sincere, but misguided proposals), or his church (there are far more important reasons for us to elect Senator McCain than where Obama went to church).

Politics ought to be VERTICAL and Obama’s ideas will not take this country UP, but DOWN. I think he is a sincere and obviously a very intelligent and charismatic person. For us to deny that is foolish. Our focus should be to logically and systematically explain why ideas really do matter and why some are bad for those struggling as it is to pay the rent.

Elections ought to be about elevating the best ideas and exposing the worst ones—not engaging in character assassination with half truths, innuendoes, and disputable “internet facts.”

New Yorker Obama Cover Art

Indeed, the ideas that Obama is presenting to America should be attacked, because therein lies the real problem with his politics.  There’s nothing wrong with drawing lines between his advisors and what they’ve said regarding Israel, and to draw up conclusions about Obama’s support for Israel.  This is conjecture–and it’s easy to say that if Obama’s idiot advisers have said they don’t support Israel, or that the Jewish lobby is too powerful in America, or anything along those lines, well than you can bet they’re the ones whispering the same drivel in Obama’s ear.

But to question Obama’s sincerity or his devotion to America is absurd.  It honestly, to the moderate majority, simply makes the attacker look bad.  It’s ad hominem extraordinaire.  Far better to lay waste to his desire for a supreme Nanny State; far better to show how he’s naive in terms of foreign policy; far better to focus on the flaws of his approach than to focus on the flaws he can’t change–such as middle name, or that he has Muslim relatives.  We can’t change those things.

So the new New Yorker cover that’s all abuzz everywhere is revealing in that it really is satirical of the virulent attacks on Obama.  Yet, the one group that should be most impressed by this satire and yet is denouncing it left and right is, ironically, Senator Obama and his entourage!

“The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in the statement.

McCain’s campaign also issued a statement saying the cartoon is “tasteless and offensive.”

Once again, a complete and utter mistake by Obama.  He has just allowed the cartoon to be used against him, instead of using it as a weapon of his own.  It’s really pretty unbelievably foolish.  Obama, you really do need some new advisers!

Ian Kristofer is a writer and commentator who considers himself to be a left-of-center neo-progressive hawk. He writes at NeoConstant and at his blog LeftHawk.