John Mitten is Stupid

The New York Times covered a Palin rally today in which supporters of John McCain chanted the following phrase:

Vote McCain, not Hussein!

This is a play on the fact that Obama's middle name is Hussein: A fact that many stupid people use to make the assertion that Obama must be a Muslim! This is stupid because these people only apply this "logic" when its convenient for them. If they attempted to apply this rule consistently (that people must be what their name implies about them) then they would have to insist that I'm a drummer because my middle name "Mark" was selected because my Mom, back in the late 60s, liked a group that had a drummer whose name was Mark. Of course, I'm not a drummer, and thus would confound their attempt to use this rule. (In the same way that Obama confounds them, since he isn't a Muslim, but a Christian, indeed has been a Christian for many years. And I'm with Gen. Powell on this one, so what if he WAS a Muslim? Is there a law against being Muslim in this country? Not the last time I checked.)

Indeed, they could then move on to saying, well Ken must be a football player, since the Cincinnati Bengals used to have a quarterback named Ken Anderson. And, once again, I would have to disappoint them: I don't even like football. So, spending just a few seconds thinking about this and demonstrating two quick counterexamples should end this stupid obsession about Obama's middle name, but remember we're talking about stupid people here and stupid people are fairly immune to logic.

But, none of this explains why this post is entitled "John Mitten is Stupid"... John Mitten is stupid because he goes on record in the linked article as saying that he guesses the reason that Barack Obama has the middle name 'Hussein' is because he's named after Saddam Hussein.

No, really, that's what he said. Go click on the link and scroll down to the bottom.

So, score one for Karl Rove and all his disciples... their ability to slime good people and fool stupid people is still unparalleled. Indeed, Karl Rove would probably get a good chuckle out of seeing John's asinine assertion.

First, only Obama's parents know the real reason why they chose the middle name Hussein for their child. I suspect that Obama's middle name is Hussein because it means "good; small handsome one". In that, its similar to my first name, Kenneth, which means "fire born; good-looking". And what parents wouldn't think that their baby boy is both good and handsome?

Second, Barack Obama was born in 1961. So, for John's assertion to have any hope of being true, we would need to ascertain that Saddam Hussein was a household word in the US in 1961. In other words, Saddam Hussein would need to be so well known and respected in, say, 1960 that Barack Obama's parents would have heard of him and liked him enough to decide to name their son after him.

Lets take a quick look at Wikipedia's article on Saddam Hussein. Saddam was born in 1937 and would have been 23 in our target year of 1960. It turns out that one year before, in 1959, he was a member of the Ba'ath party and helped the CIA in a failed attempt to oust then Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qassim. After that assassination attempt failed, Saddam was forced to flee to Egypt where he remained until 1963.

Okay, armed with that information, lets calculate the chance that Obama's parents would have heard of a 22 year old Iraqi Baathist in the employ of the CIA who had to flee to Egypt and lie low for a while... let's see:

0 x 0 x 0 x 0 x 0 = 0

That's right, there exists a zero percent chance that Barack Obama was named after Saddam Hussein, and such a conclusion can be reached by anyone with a brain after thinking about it for no longer than five minutes.

QED