As Elitists Go, Barack Obama Is A Terribly Violent Elitist

Who cares about the stupid New Yorker cover? It just makes the silly-sallies at the Obama campaign look like, uh, silly-sallies, and makes the New Yorker look terribly unfunny, which it is, except for that Anthony Lane who is astitch. No, the New Yorker is a not a comedic but a Journalistic magazine -- and it can also help you figure out your summer vacations plans! Since you all have no homes or money, consider spending your "staycation" this way: roll yourself in a barrel down the street to your nearest public library with free Internet access, go to NewYorker.com and spend an ENTIRE WEEK reading Ryan Lizza's 15,000-word -- that's 15 internet pages! -- opus on Barack Obama's Chicago days. What fun! We heard that Barack Obama threatens to kick someone's ass in the piece, and since we are Dumb Americans, we found this juicy bit and read nothing else.

So one time, in 1997, when Barack Obama was a magician's apprentice in the Illinois State Senate, he disagreed with some schmo about a bill and got, as this schmo might imply, "uppity."

Although the exchange was part of a longstanding tradition of hazing new legislators, the tensions between Hendon and Obama were real. On another occasion, Obama voted—a parliamentary error, Obama says—to block funding for a child-welfare facility in Hendon’s district. Hendon rose and criticized Obama for the vote. The two men became embroiled in a yelling match on the Senate floor that looked as if it might become physical; they were separated by Courtney Nottage, then the chief of staff for Emil Jones. Nottage led Obama off the floor to a room that legislators used to make telephone calls. “It looked like two men that were having a serious disagreement and they had walked up to one another really close,” Nottage told me. “I didn’t think anything good could come of that.”

Hendon told me, “He’s the one that got mad, because he said I embarrassed him on the Senate floor. That’s when he came over to my desk.”Before Nottage broke them up, Obama, who had learned to box from his Indonesian stepfather, supposedly told Hendon, “I’m going to kick your ass!” Hendon said, “He said something like that.” He added that more details will appear in a book that he’s written, entitled “Black Enough, White Enough: The Obama Dilemma.”

We have put that last part in bold to emphasize how reliable and unbiased a storyteller this Hendon fellow is.

 Making It [New Yorker]