The Right's Five Hilariously Boneheaded Anti-Obama Smears

From birth certificates to Bernie Mac, a look at the goofiest attacks against the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Brad Reed
AlterNet
August 20, 2008

In recent months, right-wing opinion outlets of varying pedigrees have accused Barack Obama of participating in an increasingly preposterous web of dopey conspiracies, including plots to make himself the next Hitler, to forge his birth certificate and, most sinisterly, to make children learn Spanish. And thanks to the wonder of the Internet and right-wing blogs, we can now chronicle how right-wing memes are spawned, from their genesis within the comments section of the Free Republic Web site to their viral spread across the Michelle Malkin blog empire to their final destination in the pages of "respectable" conservative opinion journals such as the Weekly Standard, the National Review and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. In this article, you will learn about the Right's five most unintentionally hilarious not-ready-for-prime-time smears that have been trial-ballooned in various forms during the 2008 presidential campaign. Each conspiracy will be rated on a scale of 1 to 10 wingnuts that will be a reflection of its originality, implausibility and sheer, flat-out insanity.

While I'd like to say that this article will be informative and enlightening, I'm not going to lie to you: Your IQ will plummet by at least 10 points just by reading about the first two smears, and by a whopping 30 points by the time you get to Obama's unseemly affection for fancy vegetables. I recommend listening to a nice collection of Bach cantatas while reading this article, and also having copies of Joyce's Ulysses and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow nearby in case you need to take a break and feel smart again. Now if you're ready, we're going to move on to the first smear, which just happens to be:

SMEAR #1: OBAMA IS A COMMIE NAZI!

Origins: While accusing Democrats of being commies has been a time-honored American tradition dating back the McCarthy era, the Right has breathed ingenious new life into this old standard by tracing Obama's commie origins back to his pre-fetus years. For as the National Review's Lisa Schiffren deftly notes, Obama's father is black and his mother is white. Why is this important, you ask? Because "for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958 ... there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics." Wowsers! So even Obama's very conception was forged out of a mutual hatred for capitalism!

And that's not all: In his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Obama says he developed a close relationship with poet and activist Frank Marshall Davis during his teen years in Hawaii. Davis, of course, just happened to be A COMMIE! While several poets over the years have been known for their controversial political views -- Ezra Pound, for instance, was a notorious fascist -- Obama's mere association with Davis was enough to prompt blogger Bob "ConfederateYankee" Owens to ask the burning question: "Is Barack Obama a Communist?" Owens allows that right now, "We simply do not know where along the radical leftist continuum Barack Obama's thoughts reside," although he feels certain that Obama must be either a Marxist, a "socialist revolutionary with Maoist tendencies" or an out-and-out communist "like his own wife," who insists that "someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so someone else can have more."

The flip side of this vast commie conspiracy, of course, is the idea that Obama is actually simultaneously positioning himself to be the next Adolf Hitler. While it may seem counterintuitive to think of a black guy as the newest incarnation of an ideology that hated black people, consider that Obama gave a speech in Germany and printed campaign fliers that were written ... IN GERMAN!!!! To make matters worse, noted blogger Dr. Melissa Clouthier, Obama and Hitler have used campaign literature that looks sort of similar, if you ignore the fact that it doesn't look anything alike at all.

"When I saw the Obama flier picture, my mind immediately called up this Hitler image and I was struck by how similar they are in feel," she darkly intoned. "This is about artistic tone. The profile view. The serious expression. The shading ... Unnerving really."

Blogger Gene over at the Say Anything Blog has also noticed Obama's fascistic tendencies and thinks that Obama fills a savior void for liberals, who are "mostly godless" people who spend too much time "relying on reason" and who "have empty souls." And because liberals are so soulless and reasonable, they "need a person to invest their faith and trust in. ... In Germany that person was Hitler, today that person is OBAMA."

The notion that Obama is a fascist is not wholly accepted by everyone on the right, however. John Ray of the Stop the ACLU blog, for example, thinks that calling Obama a fascist does fascism a great disservice, since at least "fascists were patriotic and Obama is the sort of America-hater that is now typical of the Left." Well, you can't please everyone, I guess. (more)

© 2008 Independent Media Institute.