Don’t Blame The Rubes

by digby

More calumny:

Among the images that greeted visitors to the John McCain campaign office in Pompano Beach this week was a sign headlined “Barrack Hussein Obama” that compared the Democratic presidential candidate to Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler and Fidel Castro.

Shown a picture of the sign Thursday night, Broward Republican Chairman Chip LaMarca said he was “disgusted” by it and would immediately go to the office and remove it.

“I’m speechless at the ignorance,” LaMarca said. “It’s not something we can condone.

I wonder if they have considered who it is that might be condoning this type of thinking:

Tom Delay is on a book tour…The book, “No Retreat, No Surrender,” has generated a bunch of press, but it’s clear that Jewish Democratic activists haven’t read it. Or else they would have jumped all over this graff…

“I believe it was Adolf Hitler who first acknowledged that the big lie is more effective than the little lie, because the big lie is so audacious, such an astonishing immorality, that people have a hard time believing anyone would say it if it wasn’t true. You know, the big lie — like the Holocaust never happened or dark-skinned people are less intelligent than light-skinned people. Well, by charging this big lie” — that DeLay violated campaign-finance laws in Texas — “liberals have finally joined the ranks of scoundrels like Hitler.”

He’s funny …

Or this, from wingnut welfare queen, Brent Bozell:

Obama’s communist connection adds to mounting public concern about a candidate who has come out of virtually nowhere, with a brief U.S. Senate legislative record, to become the Democratic Party frontrunner for the U.S. presidency. In the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, Obama beats Republican John McCain by almost four percentage points.

AIM recently disclosed that Obama has well-documented socialist connections, which help explain why he sponsored a “Global Poverty Act” designed to send hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. foreign aid to the rest of the world, in order to meet U.N. demands. The bill has passed the House and a Senate committee, and awaits full Senate action.

But the Communist Party connection through Davis is even more ominous. Decades ago, the CPUSA had tens of thousands of members, some of them covert agents who had penetrated the U.S. Government. It received secret subsidies from the old Soviet Union.

This stuff is nothing unusual among the right. All Democrats are considered communists of some sort among these folks. (Bill Clinton traveled to Russia as a college student — OMG!) But there is something deliciously frightening in their minds about a black communist. They may not even know who Paul Robeson was, but they’ve absorbed the message into their tiny lizard brains.

Recall this one recently from National Review’s Lisa Schiffrin (of “W makes me so hot when he wears that tight jumpsuit” fame) who wrote:

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. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)

I don’t know how Barak Obama’s parents met. But the Kincaid article referenced above makes a very convincing case that Obama’s family, later, (mid 1970s) in Hawaii, had close relations with a known black Communist intellectual. And, according to what Obama wrote in his first autobiography, the man in question — Frank Marshall Davis — appears to have been Barack’s own mentor, and even a father figure. Of course, since the Soviet Union itself no longer exists, it’s an open question what it means practically to have been politically mentored by an official Communist. Ideologically, the implications are clearer.

Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama’s mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of racism — let’s recall that the very question of interracial marriage only became a big issue later in the 1960s. The notion of a large group of mixed race Americans became an issue during and after the Vietnam War. Even the civil-rights movement kept this culturally explosive matter at arm’s distance.

It was, of course, an explicit tactic of the Communist party to stir up discontent among American blacks, with an eye toward using them as the leading edge of the revolution. To be sure, there was much to be discontented about, for black Americans, prior to the civil-rights revolution. To their credit, of course, most black Americans didn’t buy the commie line — and showed more faith in the possibilities of democratic change than in radical politics, and the results on display in Moscow.

Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family’s background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much.

(Belle Waring does a masterful deconstruction of this ugly, multi-faceted smear, here.)

Why blame some obscure Republican citizen for putting up a sign comparing Obama with famous communists and Hitler down in Florida? This stuff is coming from well known movement conservatives and featured in their respected publications and websites. Of course people are picking it up around the country. They’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to do.

H/T to BB
.