cue the right wing smear machine
by Tom Carey
Published: March 7, 2008
If you’ve been paying attention at all this week, I’m sure you’ve noticed a familiar theme that has been evolving recently with regard to Barack Obama and the Republican assault against him. Radio talk show host Willie Cunningham, while opening a campaign event for John McCain in Ohio, referred to the senator from Illinois as “Barack Hussein Obama” at least three times and went on to call him a “hack” politician from Chicago. Cunningham continued to demonstrate his idiocy when he stated with about as much eloquence as the current president, “At some point in the near future the media, the stooges from the New York Times, CBS (The Clinton Broadcasting System), NBC (The Nobody But Clinton Network), The All Bill Clinton Channel (ABC), and the Clinton News Network at some point is going to peel the bark off Barack Hussein Obama.”
Wow. That’s pretty ridiculous, but there’s plenty of insanity to go around that the right has been salivating over the past week. Several Republicans have criticized Senator Obama for not wearing a flag lapel pin and have suggested that this represents the senator’s lack of patriotism. Republicans who tear down a Democrat on the charge that he isn’t patriotic enough? How shocking… well not really. Jack Kingston, the always clear-headed congressman from Georgia, has been one of the leading proponents of this line of attack. Citing that Obama does not wear a flag lapel pin and that he has not led the pledge of allegiance often enough in the Senate, Kingston asked “Where do they stand on America?” Despite the fact that Kingston, as he criticized Obama for not wearing such a pin, was not wearing one himself, the congressman continued to attack Obama and called his conduct “curious.”
These two incidents over the last two weeks are surely enough to convince most readers that the right wing has officially begun its attack campaign on Obama as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. It’s clear that the right wing of the GOP now seeks to place doubts in the minds of people looking to vote for Obama on the grounds that he lacks patriotism. Cunningham and Kingston (a distinct lack of brainpower between them), both now looking like complete partisans willing to swift-boat another Democrat, are telegraphing what the broader debate about Obama will be in the general election. Is Barack Obama really an American? Might he be a Muslim, as is suggested when some fanatics on the right repeatedly cite his middle name Hussein. Is he proud enough of his country, or maybe he’s just like John Kerry, a man who was wounded in combat but is really too soft. Here’s a blast from the past: maybe Obama is worse than former Georgia Senator Max Cleland, a Vietnam vet and triple amputee who also was accused of being too soft. These examples of previous swift-boating by the right wing are obviously the foundation for what they hope to do to Obama in the general election.
The appalling and truly mind-numbing aspects of these tactics of questioning one’s patriotism have become the touchstones of an electoral strategy that the right has become quite adept at in the last few elections. The right’s calculus seems to go something like this:
Well, we really don’t have a good argument against this guy. So we’ll go with his lack of flag on lapels and the idea that he’s a Muslim (and imply that he’s a terrorist).
How pathetic. These tactics are absolutely abhorrent and deliberately manufacture concerns of character that are blatantly false. When will the GOP wake up and realize that a strategy like this is doomed to fail and only further alienates the American people? I like to think that there are enough sane Republicans left who realize this, but with the smear machine out in full force already against Obama, it makes me wonder if the entire Republican Party has lost its mind after the last seven years.
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