It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced.             F.A. Hayek, Road to Serfdom, "The End of Truth"

Of course liberals have attacked David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, over his decision to publish illustrator Barry Blitt’s controversial Mr. and Mrs. Obama Go Jihad cover cartoon. Remnick unwittingly violated one of the left’s many unwritten laws: if the rise of today's leftist utopian order is to reach it zenith in November, the infallibility of the movement's god-king Barack Obama must be safeguarded.

We must be allowed only to see images of Obi-Wan Obama that are shrouded in mystery like glowing, numinous holograms. Nothing may be spoken, broadcast or published that pierces Obama's veil of celebrity.

When Tavis Smiley, a popular African-American journalist and radio and television host, publicly criticized Barack Obama for declining an invitation to his State of the Black Union conference, Smiley received so much hate mail and death threats that he quit his radio job on the “Tom Joyner Morning Show”.  According to Joyner,  "He can't take the hate he's taking over this whole Barack Obama thing. People are really upset with him. He's always busting Barack Obama's chops. They call. They e-mail. They joke. They threaten.”

The unconscious projections that Obama stimulates in the mind of followers, through phantasmic homilies about hope and change, are like energy beams that must be continually powered, and protected from even the slightest current fluctuations or interruptions.

As The New Yorker magazine found out, publishing a satirical cartoon of Obama, even in a left-leaning magazine very sympathetic to the Obama candidacy, is just not acceptable. This is not because of the tiny kernels of truth that may exist in the parody, but because of the potential stimulus to thought outside the Obama projection beam.

Apparently, it’s not just crazy right-wing kooks who wonder about an Obama-Muslim connection. In a very interesting July 15, 2008 article (“Belief that Obama is Muslim is Durable, Bipartisan – but Most Likely to Sway Democratic Votes”), Michael Dimock, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, analyzes his organization’s recent study of the perceptions around the rumors.

Dimock highlights one particularly interesting conclusion from the study: “The belief that Obama is Muslim, however, appears to have virtually no effect on Republican voters -- who overwhelmingly support McCain in any case. But Democrats who share the misperception are significantly less likely to support Obama.”

This means that Republicans aren’t making decisions on Obama-Muslim rumors. (Republicans are probably engaged more in a study of ideological differences.) It is Democrats who, in the end, are the great majority deprived of independent thought, which may be swayed by Obama-Muslim rumors and the unintended consequences of the cartoon.

According to the New Yorker (July 13, 2008, New Yorker press release, “How Chicago Shaped Obama”), the cartoon “satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama’s campaign”. And, as the liberal press tells us all the time, it is the “vast rightwing conspiracy” or “those uneducated, Bible-toting redneck conservatives” who are generating the scare tactics and misinformation and trying to derail the Obama campaign.

The Pew report’s unexpected findings seem to fly in the face of liberal assumptions and must be disturbing indeed to Obama’s propaganda machine. There is nothing worse to the left than interference from truth or thinking outside the "Obama Box".

Just because the Barack and Michelle Obama are not gun toting Muslim radicals or even Muslim at all, doesn’t mean they are exempt from whatever attention the left feels is offensive or inappropriate. It is important for voters to have a chance to learn who Barack Obama really is.

Obama is above all a politician who offers a plan that is purposely vague and alluring, that shuns the scrutiny of reason and deprives “the great majority of independent thought”. It is a plan where “public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken public support” (Hayek).

The plan is appealing on its surface, because Obama preys on desire for a quick and easy path to a utopian world of economic freedom. But underneath is an unspoken agenda of unlimited governmental social planning through surrogate experts and pressure groups, who think they know better than we what we want and need.

The Obama plan of today rejects freedom as we know it today, the “wisdom of crowds”, self-determination, organic growth and change, and true diversity in a marketplace of competing ideas. As Hayek warned in the 1940s the left has an insatiable impulse to control every facet of society: “Every activity must derive its justification from a conscious social purpose. There must be no spontaneous, unguided activity, because it might produce results which cannot be foreseen and for which the plan does not provide.”

During the current presidential campaign, we see that delving, questioning, pressuring Obama to be specific about his core political and economic philosophies, and to make his intentions clear, are taboo forms of inquiry. Criticizing, disparaging, attacking Obama's statements, ideas or objectives are punishable by ridicule, marginalization and, if possible, censorship, under arcane laws of political correctness.

It does appear that in the liberal world view, anyone not yet within range of god-king Obama’s influence, whether just curious or with legitimate concerns, and especially those in the thoughtful minority, must be silenced. Could this be the end of truth and the beginning of the con of man?