The Right Wing's new Swift Boat Walks on Water.. huh?

[RainDog]

The blog satirist Jon Swift takes his/her name from Jonathan Swift, political pundit via his work Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, and the man considered the foremost satirist of the English language. Blogger Swift wrote about the media fetishization of Obama of Nazareth on Feb. 13th:

http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/02/barack-obamas-achilles-heel.html

Privately, many Obama advisors are also worried about a voter backlash if Obama does not manage to walk on water or raise Ronald Reagan from the dead before they go to the polls in November…

“Swift” also quotes Tim Noah, via Slate, who has lampooned the pundit class for their biased and, ultimately, undermining attempts to make enthusiasm at a democratic candidate’s rally equal to that last Jim Jones revival… oops, maybe a bad choice of words…

Ten days later (Feb. 23rd) The World Net Daily had an article titled “Is Obama the Messiah: Websites Capture Wave of Transcendent Fervor.”

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=57090

The “article” is by Jerome R. Corsi, who wrote a book (The Late Great USA) and who co-authored Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. with John O’Neill. Corsi is a staff writer for the WND and received a PhD from Harvard, so his bio says.

So how, I wonder, can a person who received a PhD in political science from Harvard not know who Jonathan Swift was – friend of Alexander Pope, Whig and then Tory - and thus not get the satirical reference and tone in Swift’s article and in the entire award-winning HUMOR blog? Perhaps because Corsi is, PhD or not, an idiot. Or maybe he’s just a propagandist who knows his readers’ fears.

Corsi cites the following blog as a “reliable” source of info:

http://obamamessiah.blogspot.com/

The “Is Obama the Messiah” blog doesn’t provide a blogger profile. In comments, someone calling himself “Christopher” replied to a question about the removal of comments from the blog. (The answer was… to see the blog in its entirety… ) The blogger links to Obama/Messiah articles from mainstream and conservatives pundits such as Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks, as well as Red State dot com and American Thinker. None of whom, of course, have any reason to try to undermine the Obama campaign.

Corsi also misleads when referring to an earlier article by Bruce Walker in his own web mag that stated: Democratic Sen. Barack Obama eschews the savior language used to describe his campaign for the White House, but it seemed rather natural when he interrupted 50 minutes of occasional soaring rhetoric to toss a bottle of water to a fainting woman in the throng below, then calmly gave out orders to ensure she was well.

The “eschews” part is left out of Corsi’s quotation. What’s so messianic about giving someone a bottle of water? According to Corsi, such moments have… some questioning whether the campaign is employing shills or whether the phenomenon is evidence of fanaticism and cause for concern. Corsi also wanted to use a picture from the other article that looks like an ACLU/Gap version of Jesus Camp. All around journalistic integrity.

From Swift:

In a piece called "The Liberal Messiah" in the American Thinker, J.R. Dunn says that the cult of personality surrounding Obama is symptomatic of how liberals see their leaders." A leader is a transcendent being, someone more than human, someone with a touch of the divine," writes Dunn. "Leaders don't handle tasks, they lead movements, they embody the spirit of the age. They transform. Leaders, to put it simply, are führers. This explains why liberals are so attracted to tyrants on the international scene." Unlike objects of devotion of these liberal fascists -- people like Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Stalin -- Ronald Reagan, he says, "didn't come across as anything preternatural."

From Corsi:

Writing in the American Thinker, consulting editor J.R. Dunn noted the tendency liberals have to see their leaders as transcendent beings, "someone more than human, someone with a touch of the divine."

Examining how liberals tend to put Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy on a God-like pedestal, Dunn commented that for the American left, "Leaders don't handle tasks, they lead movements, they embody the spirit of the age. They transform. Leaders, to put it simply, are fuehrers."

It is so comforting



to know the religious right



would never try to conflate a Republican with the messiah.



So, who and what is “The American Thinker” mag?

In its “about” section, the American Thinker states: “The right to exist and the survival of the State of Israel are of great importance to us.” –this is a clue that these folks are most likely fundamentalists. They seem to care more about a warlike Israel with hostile relations than all but the most hawkish Israelis. They use this quote to introduce another story about “the messianic fever” of the Obama campaign-

"Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic." Pope Benedict XVI

So, Reagan’s morning in America or Bush’s speeches peppered with fundie speak, such as the song “power, power, wonder working power” (in the blood of the lamb – i.e. animal/human sacrifice. whew, thank god Christianity is more advanced than those human sacrificing Mayans!) are not demonic in their attempt to associate republicans with god?

In the Feb. 29th article in the WND by Bruce Walker on Wm. Buckley and Ronald Reagan, Walker notes: These two men were more than conservative icons, they were American icons.

No Leftist will ever be as loved by Americans as that "Arch-Conservative" Reagan and no Leftist will ever be as respected and admired as William F. Buckley, Jr. (so, does that mean no liberal will ever reach the level of fuehrer worship?)

…The first common characteristic is that both men were devoutly religious -- it is impossible to think of either man without soon noting the importance of God in the biography….The attempt to expunge God from politics, therefore, was the first step toward totalitarianism and the sort moldy social jelly that it Europe today.

fyi- this is a Scalia meme- “post-Christian Europe” as a demonstration of an ungodly LIBERAL society. (and the writer’s claim that Reagan revered marriage and family seems to make Reagan’s divorce seem to disappear? –as well as his estrangement from his children while he was in office.)

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/02/buckley_and_reagan_the_qualiti.html

I’m sort of confused here. It’s okay to have icons who should be revered by all conservatives because of their devotion to god, but if a democrat speaks with a preacher’s cadence (a tradition within the African-American social justice movement) or speaks of god and then gets an enthusiastic response from an audience… that person is trying to create a messianic cult? (again, stick with me on this stuff, it’s important for the way in which conservatives will label Obama in “whispering campaigns.” )

Knowledge of Rovian ratfucking leads me to ask why has Jonah Goldberg, son of McGovern campaign mole Lucianne, written a stupid and misleading (because he lies about history, among other things) book called “Liberal Fascists?” - which was published at the start of the campaign season, btw. Why this new label?

Why are they trying to muddy the waters of political thought by upending the definition of fascist, a label that so many have used (many for the first time in U.S. politics) to describe the proto-fascist Bush administration (including conservative insiders such as Paul Craig Roberts and John Dean.) Again, Goldberg and Corsi, et al are playing to their voters’ fears.

The fears are not simply about liberal attraction to “feuhrers.” The fears originate in the “limbic level” of doctrinaire fundies because these memes conflate Nazi Jewish-haters, Israeli fundies, their distorted “muslim” heritage (and thus automatic Jewish hater) background for Obama, and, most importantly for fundies, the issue of The Anti-Christ.

So, if you wanna know where all this b.s. is leading, read up on Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (note Corsi is riding that bestselling hate fest with the title of his book) and the ways in which fundies think they will recognize the antichrist, because I’d be willing to bet my reconstituted virginity that this will be part of a smear campaign. It already is since liberals are already associated with evil in too many of their minds.

As the Swift blogger noted:

Some conservatives...do not dismiss the idea of the messiah running for President out of hand, but they point out that He certainly wouldn't be running as a Democrat.

[RainDog]

1. anyone else noticed this circle jerk?

I would imagine there will be more and more of it.

[RainDog]

2. echoechowcho chamberchamberchamber