Take it easy folks! Why are we going into twitters about someone called Barack Obama? Until recently, outside America, he didn’t exist. And now almost every article, editorial in Pakistan berates Obama, the happy bomber who singled out Musharraf and said if he didn’t fix the Taliban inside Pakistan, Obama would.

You and I should know Barack ain’t succeeding Bush. Americans are not ready, just yet, for a black president in the White House.

If Obama hungers after attention, so does our parliamentary defence secretary Major (retd) Tanveer Hussain. Having jumped ship and joined PML-Q a mere few weeks before the CJ crisis erupted, Tanveer now vents his anger at Musharraf and his policies. “The only way for us to take revenge against the US and India is to recognise the Taliban and launch a jihad … jihad, jihad and jihad.” He well knows he will have no chance at the next general elections with a PML-Q ticket, having lost the lottery ticket he was holding when he became an MNA. The PPP will not have him back or will it?

The US embassy in Islamabad was not amused. What particularly inflamed the embassy was Tanveer’s allegation that the CIA along with RAW and KHAD were behind the killings of Chinese nationals in Pakistan. If this was not enough, the Syed from Lahore then went on to declare that the US and India wanted to control Kashmir to emasculate China. Send jihadis into Kashmir, was his thunderclap.

Surely the major must have gathered his intelligence from some knowledgeable quarter considering that he is second senior-most after the defence minister in the political hierarchy. Was the information classified? If so why then did the parliamentary secretary use the floor of the house to scream blue murder against America? The major must speak up or hold his peace forever. Like so many other parliamentarian outbursts, his rant will be docked as cock and bull unless he gives us proof of his slanderous allegations.

But to be fair to Tanveer’s anti-American crank, if his shout was based on doctored intelligence, then he’s not alone in this game. Look at America. It has cooked up facts on Pakistan. The Washington Post reported the intelligence report called NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) was altered to prove that Islamabad’s deal with the militants had enabled Al Qaeda to establish a ‘safe haven’ in the tribal areas. According to the Post, the deliberate change completely altered the complexion of the intelligence estimate.

Here’s what an angry blogger wrote. ‘Americans are so very under-informed about the war on terror precisely because the Post and others bury the real news by issuing nonsensical articles like this. For years the media pushed the idea that there was no war on terror, that it was some sort of fiction that the Bush administration cooked up. Now an NIE comes out and says the threat is not imaginary, as they had insisted, but real. And they cover it up with this garbage.’

If America and Pakistan are dullards at connecting the dots that their intelligence operatives cull together, Pakistan is a notch higher. It can’t even get the printing of its paper money right. As reported in Dawn, a parliamentary committee has been asked to ‘probe’ why the national flag is shown in red instead of green on a thousand rupee note! It shows the Turkish flag instead of the Pakistan flag on the right hand corner of the note.

How dumb is that?

Intelligence failure aside, in America ethnic diversity is the nation’s second biggest issue after terrorism. Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, spearheaded an influential study interviewing 30,000 Americans across the board -- black, white, Hispanic and Asian. When asked how much they trusted their neighbours with diverse races and what was each community’s level of social and civic engagement, the picture that emerged was a bleak one. It showed, ‘civic desolation, affecting everything from political engagement to the state of social ties.’

In his findings, Putnam wrote that those in more diverse communities tend to ‘distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down' -- that is, to pull in like a turtle.’

What an inconvenient truth!

The fact is that racism is alive and kicking in America. And the most damning statement to quantify the Harvard political scientist’s find came from the Florida lawmaker, arrested in a park, offering $20 to a black for a sex act in the park’s bathroom. State Representative Bob Allen didn’t realise he was soliciting an undercover cop until he got arrested.

“I was so intimidated by this black stocky guy that I would have said anything including offering to pay for sex with a stranger,” was Allen’s tortured logic as he was being hauled up to go to prison.

In the ordinary arc of life where race, sex, terrorism melt down, the unshakeable truth is that Pakistani and American lawmakers are a deliriously detached reality show where much is made of nothing, portraying life as just a bubble.

Let’s hope the bubble blows away soon, but I wouldn’t bet on it.