Ad hominem attacks – which means, roughly, an attack “against the man” – are common in political discourse. The purpose of attacking the character of an opponent is to deflect his argument without responding to it. It’s an effective political tactic because the masses believe that if the messenger is bad, the message doesn’t matter. President Bush was a target in numerous ad hominem relating to his intelligence – often “proved” by his Texas accent and mispronunciation or misusage of words, or his ties to big oil, or simply calling him (and everyone else in his administration) Nazis. President Obama is no different in that regard. Many on the right have thrown ad hominem attacks at him in (generally futile) attempts to derail his credibility. The biggest problem with attacking the character of either of our last two presidents is that there is enough there for opponents to bring them down on policy alone while leaving character out of it. So in this piece I will refute some of the character attacks on Barack Obama so that the five of you who read it can focus on what he is doing rather than who he is, or isn’t.

Barack Obama is not the antichrist. Stripping away the theological discussions about what the antichrist is or isn't, I don’t believe that Barack Obama is the antichrist. He is not the putative embodiment of evil on earth. He is not Satan, Lucifer, the Devil, the Enemy, or whatever you (personally) call the Supreme Ruler of Hell. There are e-mails going around that indicate that the book of Revelation indicates that Obama is the antichrist, but no such passage (or anything describing the antichrist) exists. (And if you think it does, show me the chapter and verses.) He may follow a preacher who preaches a strange theology (“Black Liberation Theology”); he may denigrate true Christian beliefs on abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and the like; he may even be as corrupt as Rod Blagoyevich or Bill Clinton (that last is simply a possibility, not an accusation) but he’s not the antichrist.

Barack Obama is not Adolph Hitler, nor is he a Nazi. Yes, his rise to power is based primarily on his celebrity. Yes, his policies indicate that he favors nationalizing the economy. Yes, some of the statements he has made, the people he has associated with, and the people he has hired – even as President – can lead a reasonable person to believe he harbors some racial animosity. But this does not indicate that he intends to actually carry out the systematic extermination of the white race, nor does it prove that he intends to rule the US as a brutal dictatorship and use its might to spread his evil across the world in a search for lebensraum. He has actually tried not to let his racial animosity be his guiding principle, despite letting it slip from time to time (the Cambridge police acted “stupidly”, for example). Recall that Hitler spent much of his time blaming the Jews for Germany’s problems. He was very public about his anti-Semitism, and fed on the general anti-Semitic feelings within Germany at the time, much as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does today. Barack Obama does not do that himself. Yes, he lets his supporters call his opponents racists for opposing him, but he doesn’t give them credibility by acknowledging them.

Barack Obama is not a radical Muslim. I read the refutation of this one in Snopes, but it primarily dealt with things Obama has said about himself. I rarely let one’s own words prove or deny something about them. If Charles Manson said “I’m not a murderer” would that be enough to cast even the slightest amount of doubt in your mind? Having said that, however, there has been little indication that Barack Obama follows wahhabist Islam, as he has been accused. If favoring the Palestinian Authority over Israel is an indication of radical Islam, then just about every Democrat – even a lot of “Jews” – is actually a radical Muslim. Besides that, a radical Muslim would not spend his Sundays in a United Church of Christ church listening to a radical Black Liberation Theology preacher for 20 years. He may have had some Muslim upbringing. His father – who abandoned him – may have been a Muslim. He may have attended elementary school in Indonesia, a major Muslim country. But that doesn’t equate him to Osama bin Laden any more than it makes me, a Catholic, a member of Sinn Fein.

Barack Obama is not occupying the White House in violation of the Constitution. Sure, his policies may violate both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution’s goal of limited Federal government, but so far as any evidence exists, he, himself, is eligible to be President of the United States. There is independent evidence (in the form of newspapers and the like) that show that Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. was born in Hawai’i. Last I checked, Hawai’i is in the United States. Even in the unlikely, but I suppose not altogether impossible, event that there is some merit to the story, proving it is nigh impossible. Until and unless they start fingerprinting every infant at birth to include with the birth certificate – a process that would only help a situation like this as early as 2044 if they started right now – proving that a copy of a US birth certificate is a fake would be difficult at best. Of all the constitutional problems Barack Obama stands to cause in his administration, whether or not he was born in the US is the least of my worries.

Barack Obama does not think there are 58 states. I’ve never played this one up much because it’s so worthless a criticism. This stems from a comment he made on the campaign trail where he said he had been to at least 57 states at one point during the campaign. Ladies and Gentlemen, it was a joke! Maybe it wasn’t all that funny, but it was a joke! It’s like when you tell your coworkers that you were stuck in traffic for a week (a frequent comment where I live). You weren’t, you know you weren’t, your audience knows you weren’t, people who don’t like you know you don’t think you were. He was simply making a point as to how much traveling he’d done recently. I’d have probably made the same joke in his position because a lot of my humor is based on hyperbole.

These and other attacks against Barack Obama’s character only divert attention from his policies, which should be the point of the argument. He has done enough wrong – stimulus packages, Obamacare, the Henry Gates incident, Sonya Sotomayor, etc. – for conservatives to oppose him on ideological grounds. Ad hominem attacks are a waste of time.