A Guide to the Sleaziest (and Most Contradictory) Smears on the Dem Nominee

By Mister Leonard Pierce, AlterNet. Posted August 5, 2008.

Each election cycle, we're exposed to editorial-page tooth-gnashing about the media's relentless focus on political personalities over issues. While everyone is meant to make frowny-faces over this, for the GOP, it's the natural state of affairs. After all, its positions on the issues aren't going to win any elections: Help the rich get richer, ignore anyone who's hurt by economic downturns, deny people medical care, promote cultural division, and keep supporting a highly unpopular war. That's a whole lot of hard sells, right there; why go to the public with that when you can just accuse your opponent of being the Antichrist?

Such has been the approach of the GOP for the last 25 years or so, and it worked so well with Bill Clinton (well, except for the little detail of him winning two elections), Republicans see no reason to change the script for Barack Obama. Through their reliable toadies of the Internet, the local GOP apparatchiks, and the wingnut-welfare media, they're pulling out all the stops to make sure everyone in America knows that the Democratic candidate for president is located on a moral compass somewhere northwest of Adolf Hitler and southeast of Osama bin Laden.

Unfortunately, many undecided voters are perplexed. They detect a certain inconsistency to the Right's attacks on "B. Hussein Obama," and they aren't quite sure what they're meant to hate him for. Is he a radical Islamist terrorist, or a reverse-racist Christian fanatic? Is he a fist-bumping ghetto gangsta, or an arugula-munching metrosexual elitist? Is he too black, or not black enough? In this guide to the perplexed, we'll help our right-wing brethren get their stories straight by laying out the case (however bogus) against Obama, noting its flaws and strengths, and giving friendly, well-meaning advice about where they should go from here.

*****

The Charge: Barack Obama is black.

The Specifics: Blacks, as every Michael Savage fan knows, are violent, irresponsible maniacs who commit crimes, take drugs and listen to violent rap music. Left to their own devices, they will say ungrateful things about white people.

The Evidence: The American Conservative makes the case with the sort of genteel care that we've come to not expect from some quarters of the blogosphere: Calling him an updated version of the "tragic mulatto" and lamenting how he fell under the spell of "leftist black nationalist preacher" Jeremiah Wright, it claims that even his Christian faith is "an affirmation of African-American emotional separatism" and calls him a "disturbing test of the best-case scenario" of post-racist America, seething with "a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity." Author Steve Sailer seems baffled that this uppity fellow has made no moves to "forgive whites and ask forgiveness for his own racial antagonism as he accepts Jesus."

The Problem: Some people haven't gotten the message. Everyone from David Horowitz's Front Page magazine to bearded gadfly Warner Todd Huston (who claims that Barry "eschews the thug, rapper lifestyle") claims that rather than being too black, Obama is not black enough, and even Bill O'Reilly, a keen observer of African-American culture, says he doesn't "want to go on a lynching party" against Michelle Obama unless more evidence arises that she's actually black. Come on, Bill! At the height of her husband's senate campaign, she made a tape where she ranted against Whitey, maybe! What more "proof" do you need?

The Solution: Hammer the scary-Negro angle for all it's worth. There's still plenty of N.W.A. videos and Willie Horton footage around just waiting to be used. Most of all, don't forget to follow the lead of humorless culture vulture Brent Bozell, who demands that Obama denounce all rappers. America hates rap, and the more you complain about it, the more with-it you will appear! Warning: As terrible as it is to contemplate, this may actually require you to listen to rap music, lest, like Human Events' Evan Gahr, you accidentally claim as misogynist a Jay-Z lyric that is in fact about men.

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Mister Leonard Pierce is a freelance writer currently living in San Antonio, Texas. He enjoys metal, gangsta rap, crime fiction and democratic socialism, all of which he attempts to keep hidden from his neighbors.

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