I was unaware that serious people could evaluate and decide to back Obama and that it should be left to pre-pubescent girls who have a crush. I guess the rest of us are just silly and should obviously support McCain

No, not at all. I'm just arguing that Obama's status as a pop culture sensation doesn't mean that the public has decided that he'd make a good president.

Even if the election is decidedly mostly on McCain's terms, I think he's the underdog (thus "a puncher's chance"). But he's dead meat if it's simply decided on buzz.

From Hoyt's piece:

Luttwak made several sweeping statements that the scholars I interviewed said were incorrect or highly debatable, including assertions that in Islam a father’s religion always determines a child’s, regardless of the facts of his upbringing; that Obama’s “conversion” to Christianity was apostasy; that apostasy is, with few exceptions, a capital crime; and that a Muslim could not be punished for killing an apostate.

Obama was born in Hawaii to a mother from Kansas with Christian roots and a Kenyan father whose own father had converted to Islam. When Obama was a toddler, his father left the family. His mother later married an Indonesian Muslim, and Obama spent five years in Jakarta, where he attended Catholic and Muslim schools and, according to The Los Angeles Times, was enrolled in the third and fourth grades as a Muslim.

Luttwak wrote that given those facts, Obama was a Muslim and his mother’s Christian background was irrelevant. But Sherman A. Jackson, a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Michigan, cited an ancient Islamic jurist, Ibn al-Qasim, who said, “If you divorce a Christian woman and ignore your child from her to the point that the child grows up to be a Christian, the child is to be left,” meaning left to make his own choice. Jackson said that there was not total agreement among Islamic jurists on the point, but Luttwak’s assertion to the contrary was wrong.

Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, said the majority opinion among Islamic jurists is that the law of apostasy can apply only to individuals who knowingly decide to be Muslims and later renege. One school of thought, he said, is that an individual must be at least a teenager to make the choice. Obama’s campaign told The Los Angeles Times last year that he “has never been a practicing Muslim.” As a young adult, he chose to be baptized as a Christian.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, a professor of law at Emory University, said that Sharia, or Islamic law, including the law of apostasy, does not apply to an American or anyone outside the Muslim world. Of the more than 40 countries where Muslims are the majority, he said, Sharia is the official legal system only in Saudi Arabia and Iran, and even there apostasy is unevenly prosecuted, and apostates often wind up in prison, not executed.

And James...nice close up there about Obama. I was unaware that serious people could evaluate and decide to back Obama and that it should be left to pre-pubescent girls who have a crush. I guess the rest of us are just silly and should obviously support McCain (even when he is talking nonsense on the economy, contradicting himself on Iraq, etc). But remember...he's experienced!

The triumph of style over substance is almost complete.

Under Muslim law that makes him a muslim.

Not precisely. If he had been born in a Muslim country, you'd be right but he wasn't and, according to the beliefs of most Muslims there's no assumption that he's a Muslim regardless of who his father was if he's born in a non-Muslim country.

You might want to check out Ali Eteraz's post on this subject. He's pretty well-informed.

Furthermore, we don't elect a "commander-in-chief" we elect a president, who happens to command the military. Traditionally we elect strong domestic leaders with enough sense to delegate military matters to military men. Even if you were to accept the idea that commander-in-chief is the principle role of the presidency, for the sake of joining the argument, would you really then choose mr. last-in-his-class for the job? Obama may not have tried his hand at a military career, but at least he did not try and fail.