A Cult, You Say?

by dday

This “Obama is a cult” thing is starting to fly around in the media, and yet things like this go virtually unnoticed:

Few visitors will venture far from the usual sites to see a spectacular exhibit — just a short walk from the Mall — that so very much captures the spirit, the essence, the greatness of this shining city on a hill.

Yes, it’s the beautifully designed photo homage to one of our nation’s leaders, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson. The photo exhibit is boldly and proudly displayed in the lobby of HUD’s headquarters building, itself a dreadful gray relic of Great Society architecture.

Tour groups need not even go through the inviting metal detectors to admire 20 large, color photographs of the secretary, each about 2 feet by 3 feet. No fewer than five of them feature Jackson with President Bush– in the Rose Garden, in the Oval Office, chatting together, coming down the steps at the Capitol.

The photographs cover an entire wall of the lobby as you enter, passing two other photos, the smaller official ones, of Bush and his old buddy from Texas days, side by side to greet you.

I mean, we have a White House Chief of Staff who has a wall collection of pictures of Bush’s HANDS at key moments in his life.

And we’re talking about some OTHER politician leading a cult?

This, of course, is an example of the attacks we’re going to start seeing with regularity if Obama, as presumed, becomes the nominee. We’ll see more baseless insanity masquerading as analysis like this:

Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics.

Shorter National Review writer – I knew someone who knew someone who was part black and part Jewish, therefore Obama is a Communist!!!1! Almost as good as there was a poet from Hawaii named Frank who joined the Communist Party at some point, therefore…

These stories aren’t meant to convince anybody, they serve as a backdrop. It manifests itself when the right finds a bill or some policy paper that they can elevate into a full-fledged hissy fit, as they are now doing in a very off-the-radar-screen kind of way:

It isn’t a high-profile bill, but the Global Poverty Act has lit up the conservative blogosphere, and even Rush Limbaugh has gotten into the act.

Quietly approved by the House of Representatives last fall with bipartisan support, the bill, sponsored by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., would require the president to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to help reduce extreme global poverty.

Conservative critics, including Limbaugh, Tony Perkins — who heads the Family Research Council — and others, claim that the measure would cost U.S. taxpayers $845 billion over the next dozen or so years. They also charge that it would tie the United States to the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which, among others things, calls for banning “small arms and light weapons” and ratifying the Kyoto global-warming treaty, the International Criminal Court Treaty and the Convention on Biological Diversity […]

Smith says there’s no link and points out that there’s no additional spending mandated in his bill.

He said the attacks weren’t aimed at him but at Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, whom he recruited last year to be the bill’s chief Senate sponsor. Smith is the chairman of the Obama campaign in Washington state.

Limbaugh, according to a transcript of his radio show, last week called the bill an effort to “soak U.S. taxpayers again to fund global, liberal feel-good garbage.”

So it’s not enough that (insert liberal here) will steal our hard-earned money and give it to the undeserving poor in this country, it’s now that (insert liberal here) will steal our hard-earned money and give it to the undeserving poor all over the world. And with the background of “Obama is a Communist” from the far right, and probably worse from various email forwards and other sludge, the pieces fit together. Obama wants to realize Che’s vision and install one world government to destroy the American way of life and make us all wear burqas, even the men, while the lucky duckies in Benin live it up with our cash.

(By the way, isn’t Bush spending a week in Africa, the last place where he can show his face, to tout these kind of “handouts” like investment in decent medical care to stop the spread of AIDS and malaria?)

The progenitor of this “Obama is the Communist Robin Hood” attack that ties it up all in a bow is the same guy who’s been pushing many of the far-right attacks on Obama, including the one that he knew some Communist named Frank in Hawaii.

The dustup began last week when Cliff Kincaid, a columnist for Accuracy in Media (www.aim.org), a conservative news-media watchdog organization, dismissed the bill and linked it to an effort by Democrats to burnish Obama’s legislative credentials. His original column was widely distributed on Web sites ranging from www.fishingbuddy.com to www.capitolhillcoffeehouse.com.

On Wednesday, Kincaid ratcheted up his criticism.

“This is how the Washington game of spending more of your money works,” he wrote. “This is a budget buster that siphons your hard-earned tax dollars to the U.N. and the rest of the world.”

This guy is paid, and probably very well, by the wingnut noise machine to put these things out there into the ether and then find something to make the ridiculous sound plausible.

In fact, if there’s any group that characterizes the behavior of a cult – moving in lockstep, making up wild fantasy stories that they will themselves and others into believing, ignoring mountains of evidence to arrive at their conclusions – it’s the wingnut welfare crowd. Of course, that’s the cult of the “I-Know-Where-My-Bread-Is-Buttered.”

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