Who likes Obama, and why?

Also at Hot Air: prominent on the wall of the newly opened Obama office in Houston is a Cuban flag, decorated or defaced with the iconic high-contrast Che-in-a-beret image. The Hillary! ad below is pathetic and sadly funny; the Obama decor, sinister, and worrisome in a more serious way. It is indicative of the emptiness of the Obama campaign that any rebel with or without a cause feels attracted to it. "We want the world, and we want it NOW!" Everything for everybody, except of course the people we're taking that stuff from, for the greater good; or we're gonna hold our breath, or raise a lot of taxes, or something. (Aside: It is universally agreed that the way to stimulate the economy is to loosen credit, or as with the current bill, just hand out cash. Why do Democrats and Socialists and such think that doing the reverse, i.e. raising taxes, making it harder to do business, will not slow down the economy? To campaign on "the economy is bad, so we must raise taxes" just makes no sense. And see No Recession by Larry Kudlow.)

Update: Make that two of those Che-in-a-beret Cuban flags and a "peace sign" flag. Why would the office of a US Democratic Party candidate have Cuban Communist Party symbols as decor? It is a puzzlement. I wonder if any readers remember that the peace sign stands, not for peace, but specifically for nuclear disarmament, and is still claimed as their logo by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. (Who also oppose nuclear power; which means they must support coal-burning, right? But I'm sure they are opposed to global warming.) History of the symbol.

Charles has a follow-up to a tendentious response by James Joyner: Outside the Beltway and Off the Rails. You wouldn't fly a hammer-and-sickle, it would be a historical curiosity. Likewise the noise some are making about Confederate flags here and there: the Confederacy has been out of business for going on a hundred and fifty years. Cuba is still currently Communist. And another followup: We Got Mail! In which letter-writers reveal that, as I suspected, there are those about who have no clue about the historical Che Guevara, but have faith in the mythical one.

Another update: Ace of Spades adds a comment. And still more on this at Lone Star Times (one, two, three, four posts so far.) Maybe it's just one flag, relocated between TV shoots.

Fausta has a (Che-flag-free) Obama roundup: Foreign millions for Obama.

And another update: Daniel Henninger in the WSJ, by way of Glenn Reynolds:

Listen closely to that Tuesday night Wisconsin speech. Unhinge yourself from the mesmerizing voice. What one hears is a message that is largely negative, illustrated with anecdotes of unremitting bleakness. Heavy with class warfare, it is a speech that could have been delivered by a Democrat in 1968, or even 1928.

Here is the edited version, stripped of the flying surfboard:

"Our road will not be easy . . . the cynics. . . where lobbyists write check after check and Exxon turns record profits . . . That's what happens when lobbyists set the agenda. . . It's a game where trade deals like Nafta ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart . . . It's a game . . . CEO bonuses . . . while another mother goes without health care for her sick child . . . We can't keep driving a wider and wider gap between the few who are rich and the rest who struggle to keep pace . . . even if they're not rich . . ."

Here's his America: "lies awake at night wondering how he's going to pay the bills . . . she works the night shift after a full day of college and still can't afford health care for a sister who's ill . . . the senior I met who lost his pension when the company he gave his life to went bankrupt . . . the teacher who works at Dunkin' Donuts after school just to make ends meet . . . I was not born into money or status . . . I've fought to bring jobs to the jobless in the shadow of a shuttered steel plant . . . to make sure people weren't denied their rights because of what they looked like or where they came from . . . Now we carry our message to farms and factories."

[sarcasm] What an awful country we live in. Let's just tear the whole thing down and start over. Change! This "freedom" business really is not working. Let's try something else. Like taking billions away from the people of this country to give to the governments of other countries, as specified in Obama's pet legislation, the Global Poverty Bill. [/sarcasm off]

Ann Althouse posts on the Henninger article: Obama's message is just too depressing. She quotes parts of the article that I omitted, and omits the parts that I quoted.

And an important post from Neo-neocon, about hope and false hope: Obama: too young at heart.

Yes, there is such a thing as false hope, and it can be as dangerous as a cancer patient’s refusal to undergo a difficult chemotherapy that offers decent odds of survival in favor of a course of laetrile that offers nothing but empty promises. And yet, hope springs eternal—false and otherwise.

My goodness, this post is going on much too long. But one more update, a sidenote on Che Guevara: It seems he was a Galway man! Or a grandson of Galway, at any rate. (Via a commenter at The Jawa Report.)

Oh, what the heck, one more: In Focus: The Sickly Deification of Obama.