This was posted on Facebook by something called “Christians Against Obama’s Reelection”. It is along the lines of what I wrote about here.
While no decentralist is a fan of Mr Obama’s, who has continued the concentration of power in the executive branch that began with Bush and Cheney, if you don’t think there is a pretty big gap between what Obama has wrought and loading people into cattle cars to ship out to the death camps, I’m afraid I don’t know what to say to you.
It is like the political ad I saw in the mail last summer, that talked of Obama’s “reign of terror”; as I said at the time, everyone in my town who was guillotined totally deserved it.
And it is like Jim Quinn, the morning talk show host I have talked about before, who makes Hannity look like an intellectual, and Limbaugh look like a gentleman: this morning he referred to Obama as a “tyrannical dictator”. He then proceeded to rail about how we need the freedom to possess assault rifles to resist such tyranny.
Really, Mr Quinn, while I’m sure Mr Obama is up to no good, if he were the “tyrannical dictator” of your imagination you wouldn’t be spouting your arguably traitorous rhetoric and then going home to your comfortable suburban home. You would be -if you were lucky – languishing in prison. Or standing blindfolded before a firing squad, if not.
Or Allan Keyes, the Al Sharpton of the right, with his flier claiming that Jihad is being waged from the White House.
The tragedy with such alarmist rhetoric is that Mr Obama is, indeed, setting dangerous precedent in expanding presidential power. Not least, look at the position paper released by the administration last week, which justifies the targeting American citizens for assassination via drone attack. No trial. No evidence. Just murder by the State.
This is, in fact, an egregious attack on traditional rights and the notion of justice. That the citizens thus far killed have been unsympathetic in the extreme does not undo the damage.
One can certainly make the case that the groundwork for tyranny has been set. But to argue that it is already operative, and that it is being carried out by a Muslim, or a Marxist, or a foreigner? That just destroys your credibility. In particular it causes folks on the left to tolerate things they never would if carried out by a Republican.
The GOP is famously wringing its hands and wondering what went wrong. It is in the midst of serious soul searching.
But to anyone who looks at what passes for discourse on the right it is not a mystery. There is a consistent alarmist and paranoid tone on the right, and most people are just going to roll their eyes, even if beneath the fearmongering you have a legitimate point.
When you investigate the rumor rather than the person spreading it, you find that all these rumors have a single source- Obama himself, sometimes DECADES before his first election to anything.
Could we actually be looking at a very clever politician using multiple origin myths to disarm political oponents?
Exhibit B: Ted’s comment.
Ted: even if that’s exactly true, it doesn’t mean that the lunatic Right isn’t acting like a bunch of morons. If Obama did set up all these rumors to disarm his political opponents, it’s a strategy that depends entirely on those political opponents buying into the rumors and responding stupidly. Either way, the problem the Right is having right now is the idiocy of those who painted Hitler mustaches on the President and wouldn’t stop ranting nonsense about his birth certificate, drowning out all attempts by the grown-ups to have an adult conversation about government policy and the future of the country.
Oh, I admit that the Birthers, Moslem-haters, and other Right Wing extremists are acting like a bunch of idiots.
And the one sure bet is always on human stupidity, because humans ARE stupid. That’s the reason why a strongly charismatic leader can cause entire populations to act against their own ethics and religion.
I didn’t come back to this conversation until I read the leaked paper- which appears to be from the Bush Administration if I didn’t know it had come from Obama. It actually reassures me that one of the limitations the Obama administration has on the lethal response to American citizens is membership in al-Qai’da (as opposed to say, Operation Rescue).
@Liz – perhaps you could elaborate?
I’m curious about this “Jihad is being waged from the White House” “flier”. I can find no reference to it. Any pointers?
You need to have friends who are seriously into Islamic culture conspiracy theories to have heard it. Google “9-11 Truth”, you’ll find that this was originally about the Bush Administration and the CIA, and has now been transferred to the Obama Administration.
Nothing about a “flier”. Can you link it?
Alan Keyes’ website does not have anything about his mailings. You are just going to have to take the word of this mailman: his mailings, and a lot of right wing mailings, are alarmist and incendiary. One of his flyers talked of an “Islamic Trojan horse” coming from the White House….
“the Right is having right now is the idiocy of those who painted Hitler mustaches” Could you name those people? Other than the sphere of internet dumbasses, I don’t know of any. The example that’s was given for *years* was the one picture that was trotted out at Tea Party rallies. The trotting was done by followers of Lyndon LaRouche, who were demanding “single payer” heathcare; hardly “rightwingers”.
I think we are talking about a matter of degrees, here. Rounding up a neighborhood of Jews, forcing them into imprisonment/work camps and then killing them, is morally equivalent to decimating a group of people with a drone strike, one of whom is an underage American citizen with rights under the Constitution. Our President Has a Kill List. It Includes American Citizens. This is both murderous and tyrannical. I realize we aren’t talking about millions of children, just one at this point, but it would be naive to think this will stop with one American teenager. I think it wise to prepare for the tyranny to bloom, not act like “Well, he’s not HITLER, what’s WRONG with you people?” Americans tend towards hyperbole on these things, because of the foolishness of the left/right paradigm (truly, it’s one super party with two different marketing strategies). Every week when we pray for Peace, every night when we pray “Give unto us Peace in our time, O Lord, for it is Thou, Lord, only, that makest us dwell in safety” we are praying against the State, for it is the instrument of war. The Left AND the Right.
Dan: you should not underestimate the influence of Internet dumbasses; I know several real-life friendships that broke up over “Obama is Hitler” pictures that got posted to Facebook and the like, pushing “moderate liberals” farther into liberalism and “moderate conservatives” into far-rightism. That’s not a far-reaching effect, but it’s a very long-lasting one.
As for the non-Internet dumbasses, several of these photos appear to me to have been taken outside of people waving actual signs: http://www.google.com/search?q=obama+hitler+mustache&hl=en&client=safari&tbo=u&rls=en&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ei=c4YSUZvzH-i30AGc34G4Cw&ved=0CDAQsAQ&biw=1012&bih=664
Of course these people are a tiny minority, but it only takes a tiny and loud minority to drown out a discussion. Especially when one of that tiny loud minority is Rush Limbaugh, whom nobody on the right will dare criticize no matter what comes out of his mouth.
The problem the right is having is that the responsible members of the leadership can’t get the lunatics under control, and the result is the smearing of all conservatives. And the lunatics think this is GOOD. They don’t say “Darn, we lost seats in the Senate,” they say “Great, we got that RINO out of office!” They’d be perfectly happy to have Democratic majorities in both houses and a Democrat in the White House as long as it means every Republican who ever voted for a tax increase is out.
And it is that last I don’t understand. On the left, and the right, real problems are ignored as long as we can discuss how much money we take from whom and how much money we give to whom.
pro-life? That’s just something to be abandoned the minute somebody asks about actually paying women to be mothers.