From the First Gospel of Obama (NYT revised translation)

The One actually was engaged in an evangelical crusade to convert the San Franciscans to the glories of guns and religion. That's why he tried to persuade the NYT's Matt Bai, who reprints a couple of long and incomprehensible paragraphs along those lines which inspired my latest whimsical guest-post at HughHewitt.com.

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[Copied here for archival purposes on November 5, 2008, from the post linked above at HughHewitt.com.]

(Guest Post by Bill Dyer a/k/a Beldar).

And so it came to pass, in the tenth month of the eighth year of the third millennium, and nigh upon the time of the next Great Census, that The One remained most grievously afflicted by the wound that He had caused Himself many weeks earlier in the City of the Golden Gated Bridge when, with His own quicksilvered tongue, He had verily shot Himself in the foot.

For the wound would not heal, and the disbelievers and nonbelievers alike continued to smell its fester while clinging bitterly to their guns and religion.

And to His aid then, aboard His great flying bird above the rainbows, swiftly came the emissary of the Grey Lady of the East from the bluest of the Blue States, Matthew of the Clan of Bai on the Isle of Manhattan in the Kingdom of York the Newer. To Matthew, The One did spew new words aplenty, the very first of which Matthew dutifully caught and sought to weave into a mighty bandage.

And The One — whilst clothed in a stiff smooth shirt of virgin white and a scarf of robin-egg blue which Matthew much envied — did bless the bandage with more sweet words and blessings of hopey-changitude, invoking with His words and His countenance such miracles as would change poop into honey, pus into butter, disdain into adoration, and night into day. Wrote Matthew, of the Words of The One:

[T]he moment Obama would most like to take back now, if he could, was the one last April when, speaking to a small gathering of Bay Area contributors, he said that small-town voters in Pennsylvania and other states had grown “bitter” over lost jobs, which caused them to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” ...

“That was my biggest boneheaded move,” Obama told me recently. We were sitting across from each other on his plane, the one with the big red, white and blue “O” on the tail, flying some 35,000 feet above Nebraska. “How it was interpreted in the press was Obama talking to a bunch of wine-sipping San Francisco liberals with an anthropological view toward white working-class voters. And I was actually making the reverse point, clumsily, which is that these voters have a right to be frustrated because they’ve been ignored. And because Democrats haven’t met them halfway on cultural issues, we’ve not been able to communicate to them effectively an economic agenda that would help broaden our coalition.” ...

“I mean, part of what I was trying to say to that group in San Francisco was, ‘You guys need to stop thinking that issues like religion or guns are somehow wrong,’ ” he continued. “Because, in fact, if you’ve grown up and your dad went out and took you hunting, and that is part of your self-identity and provides you a sense of continuity and stability that is unavailable in your economic life, then that’s going to be pretty important, and rightfully so. And if you’re watching your community lose population and collapse but your church is still strong and the life of the community is centered around that, well then, you know, we’d better be paying attention to that.”

Thus by the magic and grace of The One would the bitter be transmuted to the sweet, and the clinging of the unwashed masses into the joyous light embrace of the enlightened. And Matthew of the Clan of Bai pressed the bandage upon The One's wounded foot, and cast the Words of The One out upon the wave of the InterWebs and into the swollen streams of the Ancient Media.

But the disbelievers were still not deceived, and even the nonbelievers still wrinkled their noses at the "honey" from The One, which they were asked to consume whilst handing to The One their purses for redistribution.

"Bah," quoth Beldar the Heretic, "It doth still reek of poop to me. Fetch me Joe the Plumber."

— Beldar