Posts on Barack Obama

Days after President-elect Barack Obama’s rousing defeat over Sen. John McCain, American Values president and long-time McCain supporter Gary Bauer declared an end to racial tension in America.

Barack Obama’s election should also signal something to all those who have made race baiting their raison de ‘etre: dust off your résumés -- it’s time to find new work.

 

That includes Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, whose race baiting has done a disservice to the black community by turning every grievance into yet more evidence of America’s endemic racism.

In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s historic election, the McCain campaign and RNC led a coordinated campaign to cast the integrity of the vote into doubt. They claimed ACORN was engaging in massive voter fraud. They claimed that Obama was receiving illegal foreign contributions. They claimed that the “liberal media” was skewing the polls in favor of Democrats.

In other words, they were writing themselves an insurance policy in the event of a contested election or narrow loss. But it wasn’t even close.

As a result, the anticipated barrage of conspiracy theories and false charges never materialized. Yet not everyone could just let it go.

Here’s the current poll on Hannity.com:

(h/t: Bob Geiger)

It’s bad enough that the employees of ACORN have had to endure days of baseless and outlandish attacks by John McCain and the RNC. But after McCain outrageously claimed before a national audience on Wednesday night that ACORN was “maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy,” the group came under attack, literally. In the following days, ACORN’s Boston and Seattle offices were vandalized and at least one employee received a death threat.

And for nearly two weeks, ACORN offices across the nation have been subjected to an onslaught of racist and threatening voicemails and emails. We have secured copies of some of the most disturbing and offensive messages and have reproduced them below in order to show the very real consequences of the Right Wing’s overheated and misplaced “voter fraud” rhetoric.

Warning: the emails and voicemails below are highly explicit and have only been edited to remove personally identifying information. Please also note that, where relevant, the proper authorities have been notified.

Voicemail #1:  

“Hi, I was just calling to let you all know that Barack Obama needs to get hung. He's a fucking nigger, and he's a piece of shit. You guys are fraudulent, and you need to go to hell. All the niggers on oak trees. They're gonna get all hung honeys, they're gonna get assassinated, they're gonna get killed.”

Email #1: This email was received by the Cleveland office. The subject line was the name of a senior staffer who had recently appeared on TV to defend the group.

According to McClatchy, the email was traced back to a Facebook account featuring a McCain-Palin sign.

Email #2:

Voicemail #2:

"You liberal idiots. Dumb shits. Welfare bums. You guys just fucking come to our country, consume every natural resource there is, and make a lot of babies. That's all you guys do. And then suck up the welfare and expect everyone else to pay for your hospital bills for your kids. I just say let your kids die. That's the best move. Just let your children die. Forget about paying for hospital bills for them. I'm not gonna do it. You guys are lowlifes. And I hope you all die."

It seems that while I’ve been busy not paying attention to the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, they’ve released parts 2 and 3 of their “Why Obama Is Not A Christian” video series. I was inclined to ignore these new videos until I saw that the CADC was relying on us to help them get the word out:

The controversy continues to swirl around our campaign. RightWingWatch.com, a radical liberal organization, has taken note of CADC and our campaign. They have even posted our video on their site. Many of their supporters have weighed in with a barrage of heated e-mails. We are rejoicing that so many unbelievers are watching the videos. Pray that the life changing truth of Christ's gospel will touch their hearts.

Unfortunately for them, angry emails generally don’t contain donations, which they obviously need:

In order to keep Barack Obama from defaming and redefining the Christian faith we need to raise $10,000.00 this week. Help us keep this vital campaign alive so that millions of Christians will not be deceived by Obama's phony claim that he is a "devout Christian." Your gift will make it possible to get us these videos out!

I sure hope that they raise the money they need because, if they go out of business, I’ll have one less D-list fringe group to mock.

We have written several times already about the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission and their incessant attacks on Barack Obama's Christian faith, so this new 7-part series entitled "Why Obama Is Not A Christian"doesn't come as much of a surprise. 

In the first entry, the Rev. Donald Hamer explains why Obama is "not a Christian by any Biblical or historic measure" and declares that his statements of faith are stunning examples of "subtle, diabolical deceit" before concluding with a simple question: "Who are you going to believe? Jesus Christ or Barack Obama?"

We look forward to the Religious Right decrying this attack on Obama's "deeply held beliefs."

Boxes of Obama Waffles were available for sale at $10 each at the Values Voter Summit until Saturday afternoon when conference organizers shut down the booth.

Advertising at the Obama Waffles booth

Another advertising panel at the Obama Waffles booth

 The Obama Waffles booth around noon on Saturday

photo: cberlet/publiceye.org

Former secretary of Education William “Bill” Bennett said that Barack Obama had too many criticisms of the United States, and noted that after the September 11 attacks, Barack Obama had written in a local newspaper in Chicago that as a country we needed to begin raising the hopes…of embittered children across the world and within our own shores.

Yesterday, I wrote about Barack Obama’s supposed slip of the tongue when he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that John McCain has not personally been involved in spreading the smear about that Obama is secretly a Muslim.  In the context of the discussion, Stephanopoulos was asking Obama about his accusations that Republicans have been suggesting that he has “Muslim connections” and seeking his response to the McCain campaign’s insistent that they have never done so.  

In the course of the discussion, Obama admitted that Stephanopoulos was “absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith”  but went on to say that there clearly were deliberate efforts on the part of Republican activists to spread that idea that Obama was not a Christian.  

And now, in an a move that surprises absolutely nobody, Republicans and right-wing activists are using this very exchange to further spread the idea that Obama is really a Muslim by taking his use of the phrase “my Muslim faith” absurdly out of context and citing it as proof. 

Because they are apparently too dense to understand this on their own, let’s take a walk through the relevant portion of the transcript:  

OBAMA: Let's not play games. What I was suggesting -- you're absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith. And you're absolutely right that that has not come–

STEPHANOPOULOS: Christian faith.

OBAMA: -- my Christian faith. Well, what I'm saying is that he hasn't suggested–

STEPHANOPOULOS: Has connections, right.

OBAMA: -- that I'm a Muslim.

It was Stephanopoulos who misunderstood Obama’s point and erroneously tried to correct him, at which point Obama explained that what he was “saying is that [McCain] hasn't suggested that I'm a Muslim.”  Perhaps he should have said “my supposed Muslim faith,” since that is what he obviously meant, but his use of the phrase “my Muslim faith” was perfectly clear in context .  For some reason, the Rights seems to think that Obama really meant to say “John McCain has not talked about my Christian faith,” but within the context of the discussion that was taking place, that would have been a complete non sequitur and wouldn’t have made any sense.  

For anyone with an IQ above 9, the point that Obama was making is perfectly clear, but that isn’t stopping people like Janet Folger from seizing on this exchange and using it to further spread the very smear that Obama was decrying:  

I've misspoken before. I've misspoken before on national television. I've mixed up words, reversed orders, but I have never once misspoken concerning my faith and the God in whom I trust. Even in the most heated debate on Islam, never did I ever utter the words "my Muslim faith." Nor, even when talking about Buddhism, have I ever slipped up and referred to "my Buddhist faith." Ever. Why? Because my Christianity is so ingrained in me, so a part of who I am, that the thought of adhering to a false religion is so foreign, so blasphemous, that the words would never cross my lips.

Not the case for Mr. Obama. On ABC's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, Obama said:

"Let's not play games, what I was suggesting – you're absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith. And you're absolutely right that that has not come."

Matthew 12:34 says: "For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks."

Notice that Obama didn't correct himself. He was "corrected" by George Stephanopoulos who interrupted Obama, with the words: "Christian faith."

Let's just say he misspoke. Did Obama misspeak when he told the New York Times that blasphemy was one of the "prettiest sounds on earth at sunset"?

That's right. In a Feb. 27, 2007, interview with the New York Times' Nicholos Kristof, that's how Obama described the Muslim call to prayer. That prayer, which Obama recited with a "first-class [Arabic] accent," begins with this:

Allah is supreme!

Allah is supreme!

Allah is supreme! Allah is supreme!

I witness that there is no god but Allah

I witness that there is no god but Allah

I witness that Muhammad is his prophet ...

Really? No god but the false god Allah is the prettiest sound on earth? Really.

Speaking of slip-ups, here's the clip of Obama saying he's visited 57 states. He's such a "global citizen," perhaps the 57 member states of the "Organization of the Islamic Conference" was more second nature to him than our own 50 U.S. states.

While Obama's campaign site declares: "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim" and "was not raised as a Muslim," the records say differently.

Barack Obama was on ABC’s “This Week” yesterday and, during the course of the interview, the issue came up regarding the incessant rumors that Obama is really some sort of secret Muslim.  The issue at hand was whether or not the McCain campaign had ever directly suggested that Obama was a Muslim or questioned his Christian faith, to which Obama replied that they had not, but that there clearly was a concerted effort on the part of conservative commentators and activists to confuse the American public about the issue.  During the course of the discussion, Obama made this point: 

OBAMA: Let's not play games. What I was suggesting -- you're absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith. And you're absolutely right that that has not come–

STEPHANOPOULOS: Christian faith.

OBAMA: -- my Christian faith. Well, what I'm saying is that he hasn't suggested–

STEPHANOPOULOS: Has connections, right.

OBAMA: -- that I'm a Muslim. And I think that his campaign's upper echelons have not, either. What I think is fair to say is that, coming out of the Republican camp, there have been efforts to suggest that perhaps I'm not who I say I am when it comes to my faith -- something which I find deeply offensive, and that has been going on for a pretty long time.

Obviously, the point Obama was making was that McCain has not personally spread the smear about “my Muslim faith.”  Seems pretty straight forward, right?

Wrong:

Sen. Barack Obama's foes seized Sunday upon a brief slip of the tongue, when the Democratic presidential nominee was outlining his Christianity but accidentally said, "my Muslim faith."

The three words -- immediately corrected -- were during an exchange with ABC's George Stephanopoulos on "This Week," when he was trying to criticize the quiet smear campaign suggesting he is a Muslim.

But illustrating the difficulty of preventing false rumors about his faith from spreading, anti-Obama groups within one hour of the interview had sliced it out of context and were sending it around via email. They also were blogging about it.

It was not a “slip of the tongue,” it was a straight-forward and self-explanatory statement that the Right Wing is taking entirely out of context and that right-wing media outlets like the Washington Times are reporting as genuine news.

The AP's Nedra Pickler caught the right-wing website WorldNetDaily in particularly fine form yesterday while researching a story about Jerome Corsi, a serial liar and 9/11 conspiracy theorist who writes for the site:

"Corsi writes for World Net Daily, a conservative Web site whose lead headline Thursday was "Astonishing photo claims: Dead Bigfoot stored on ice."

[Right Wing Watch was first to report the Corsi/Bigfoot nexus yesterday]

Pickler also quoted an Obama spokesman, whose review of Corsi’s new book – if it even counts as a book – was less than positive:

"Jerome Corsi is a discredited liar who is peddling another piece of garbage to continue the Bush-Cheney politics he helped perpetuate four years ago," said Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor. "His is just one of what will likely be many more lie-filled books rushed to print this election cycle, which are cobbled together from debunked Internet sources to make money and advance a partisan agenda. We will respond to these smears forcefully with all means at our disposal."

If WorldNetDaily is any indication, there is apparently money to be made in running a debunked Internet source, especially when you run fabulous ads like these:

On July 31, Focus on the Family’ posted a video featuring Stuart Shepard asking supporters to beseech God with prayers so that Barack Obama’s Democratic Convention speech at Mile High Stadium in Denver would be washed out with “rains of biblical proportion.”  But don’t bother clicking the link to watch the video, because Focus has now removed it, as the Colorado Springs Gazette reports:

Focus on the Family Action pulled a video from its Web site today that asked people to pray for "rain of biblical proportions" during Barack Obama's Aug. 28 appearance at Invesco Field in Denver to accept the Democratic nomination for president.

Stuart Shepard, director of digital media at Focus Action, the political arm of Focus on the Family, said the video he wrote and starred in was meant to be "mildly humorous."

But complaints from about a dozen Focus members convinced the organization to pull the video, said Tom Minnery, Focus Action vice president of public policy.

"If people took it seriously, we regret it," Minnery said Monday.

"Pray for Rain" was posted July 30 and blazed its way through the Internet, scoring 20,000 page views, Shepard said.

It was one of Shepard's weekly video commentaries that appear on www.citizenlink.org, Focus Action's Web site. The general timbre of Shepard's videos is tongue-in-cheek as he examines political issues from the conservative Christian viewpoint of Focus Action.

Most of "Pray for Rain," which lasted less than three minutes, showed a lighthearted Shepard at Invesco Field asking viewers to pray for "torrential" rain during Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention.

"I'm talking ‘umbrella-ain't-going-to-help-you rain,'" he said on the video.

The video's point, Shepard said, is that in his view Obama has not clearly stated his stances on abortion and gay marriage, important themes within the Christian right.

"I'm still pro life, and I'm still in favor of marriage as being between one man and one woman," Shepard said in the video. "And I would like the next president who will select justices for the next Supreme Court to agree."

As for his praying for a deluge: "It's called hyperbole," Shepard said Monday. "It is meant to be humorous."

Minnery said the video was taken down because several Focus members complained that prayer shouldn't be used to bring harm on someone else.

"We are not about confusing people about prayer," Minnery said.

Focus has gone all out; disabling the video and removing it from their archives, as well as from their GodTube and YouTube pages but, unfortunately for them, that hasn’t prevented others from capturing the video and posting it themselves [Good As You has the video as well]:

Despite Focus’s best efforts to remove their video and pretend they were only kidding, it wasn’t enough to keep Shepard from earning himself the top spot on yesterday’s Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World”

Last week, when we wrote about the apparent uptick in right-wing suggestions that Barack Obama might actually be the harbinger of the Antichrist, we juxtaposed the comments of Hal Lindsey and the American Family Association against John McCain’s “The One” ad which seemed to be sarcastically suggesting, counter to the emerging right-wing narrative, that Obama was some sort of Messiah.  

As it turns out, Amy Sullivan writes in Time that the McCain campaign might have been subtly trying to make the point that Obama is, in fact, the Antichrist:  

The ad was the creation of Fred Davis, one of McCain's top media gurus as well as a close friend of former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed and the nephew of conservative Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. It first caught the attention of Democrats familiar with the Left Behind series, a fictionalized account of the end-time that debuted in the 1990s and has sold nearly 70 million books worldwide. "The language in there is so similar to the language in the Left Behind books," says Tony Campolo, a leading progressive Evangelical speaker and author.

As the ad begins, the words "It should be known that in 2008 the world shall be blessed. They will call him The One" flash across the screen. The Antichrist of the Left Behind books is a charismatic young political leader named Nicolae Carpathia who founds the One World religion (slogan: "We Are God") and promises to heal the world after a time of deep division. One of several Obama clips in the ad features the Senator saying, "A nation healed, a world repaired. We are the ones that we've been waiting for."

The visual images in the ad, which Davis says has been viewed even more than McCain's "Celeb" ad linking Obama to the likes of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, also seem to evoke the cover art of several Left Behind books. But they're not the cartoonish images of clouds parting and shining light upon Obama that might be expected in an ad spoofing him as a messiah. Instead, the screen displays a sinister orange light surrounded by darkness and later the faint image of a staircase leading up to heaven.

Perhaps the most puzzling scene in the ad is an altered segment from The 10 Commandments that appears near the end. A Moses-playing Charlton Heston parts the animated waters of the Red Sea, out of which rises the quasi-presidential seal the Obama campaign used for a brief time earlier this summer before being mocked into retiring it. The seal, which features an eagle with wings spread, is not recognizable like the campaign's red-white-and-blue "O" logo. That confused Democratic consultant Eric Sapp until he went to his Bible and remembered that in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, the Antichrist is described as rising from the sea as a creature with wings like an eagle.

Now, the authors of the Left Behind books, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, have felt compelled to weigh in, saying that they don’t think that Obama is the Antichrist … even though they apparently think it is understandable why people might think that he is:

LaHaye and Jenkins take a literal interpretation of prophecies found in the Book of Revelation. They believe the antichrist will surface on the world stage at some point, but neither see Obama in that role. "I've gotten a lot of questions the last few weeks asking if Obama is the antichrist," says novelist Jenkins. "I tell everyone that I don't think the antichrist will come out of politics, especially American politics."

"I can see by the language he uses why people think he could be the antichrist," adds LaHaye, "but from my reading of scripture, he doesn't meet the criteria. There is no indication in the Bible that the antichrist will be an American."

It looks like former Senator Rick Santorum is adding his voice to the right-wing chorus that has been loudly proclaiming that Barack Obama is not a “true Christian,” that his proclamations of Christian faith are ““deceitful” and that is understanding of the faith is “woefully deficient” and borderline sacrilegious.  Steve Waldman at BeliefNet reports on a recent speech that Santorum gave to the Oxford Center for Religion and Public Life in which he asserted that Obama’s talk of the importance of his faith is “absolutely disingenuous” and “phony” and that Obama has “abandoned Christendom” and thus has no “right to claim it”:

Santorum, known for overtly connecting his faith to his politics, said the Democrats' current efforts to be more faith-friendly are "a charade... I don’t think it's sincere at all." Obama's efforts to talk about the importance of faith in his life is "phony--absolutely disingenuous. I think he's a complete phony."

Obama, Santorum argued, chose Trinity Church in Chicago because it was politically advantageous -- "faith was an avenue for power."

(At the end of the attack, he added that of course it would be inappropriate for him to judge the authenticity of Obama's faith, as only God could do that.)

…

However, he questioned whether liberal Christianity was really, well, Christian. "You're a liberal something, but you're not a Christian." He continued, "When you take a salvation story and turn it into a liberation story you've abandoned Christendom and I don't think you have a right to claim it."

Hal Lindsey, best known as the author of "Late Great Planet Earth” once speculated that “the decade of the 1980's could very well be the last decade of history as we know it.”  Yet here we are, twenty years later so it’s not as if Lindsey has a particularly good record on making predictions.  Yet that isn’t stopping him from warning that with Barack Obama running for president and generating excitement in places like Berlin, Germany, it can only mean one thing: the Anti-Christ is coming

America has never faced so many different crises at the same time in living memory. The war with al-Qaida and Islamic terror, the Iran crisis, Afghanistan, nuclear proliferation, the rising price of oil, the falling dollar, enemy acronyms like OPEC, NAM, OIC, U.N. ... Obama is correct in saying that the world is ready for someone like him – a messiah-like figure, charismatic and glib and seemingly holding all the answers to all the world's questions.

And the Bible says that such a leader will soon make his appearance on the scene. It won't be Barack Obama, but Obama's world tour provided a foretaste of the reception he can expect to receive.

He will probably also stand in some European capital, addressing the people of the world and telling them that he is the one that they have been waiting for. And he can expect as wildly enthusiastic a greeting as Obama got in Berlin.

The Bible calls that leader the Antichrist. And it seems apparent that the world is now ready to make his acquaintance.

The idea that Obama may not be the actual Anti-Christ but sure has a lot in common with him seems to be spreading among right-wing activists, as Sarah Poser recently reported:

On Friday, the day after Obama's Berlin speech, the AFA Report's host, Fred Jackson, made note of the "messianic tone" of the speech, then quickly denied that he believes Obama is messianic. Ed Vitagliano, one of the program's roundtable guests, chimed in, "I don't think he's the Antichrist, but there is a spirit of Antichrist at work in the West in a very strong and open way that is leading people to want to solve their problems and have a desire to have their lives improved without Christ. That's what the spirit of Antichrist does, it denies Christ." In other words, Obama's not the Antichrist. He's just like the Antichrist.

But apparently John McCain’s campaign hasn’t yet gotten on board with the messaging, since they just released their latest typically informative, fact-based, and classy ad suggesting instead that Obama sees himself as the Messiah:

Mike Huckabee regularly writes blog posts on his Huck PAC website, but that apparently doesn’t mean that he knows much about how the internet works.  For instance, here’s his latest post:

Someone asked me recently to describe Barack Obama's Agenda. The question caught me off guard, because if you think about it, he's been running as the "change candidate" and yet no one I know understands what change he is aiming for. His Agenda remains shrouded in mystery. For instance, gasoline prices are at historic highs and yet he hasn't articulated a plan of action to help American families.

Really?  It took me all of five seconds to find a pretty detailed plan of action on Obama’s website that included these provisions designed to help American families:   

Reduce the Burden of Rising Gas Prices on Working Families

Provide a Tax Cut for Working Families: Barack Obama has called on the President to enact a second round of economic stimulus to immediately put tax rebates in the pockets of American families to pay for rising energy prices. As president, Obama will enact a tax fairness agenda that provides 150 million workers a “Making Work Pay” tax credit of $500 per person or $1,000 per working family.

…

Enact a Windfall Profits Tax on the Top Grossing Oil Companies and Ease the Burden on American Families: The oil industry has profited greatly—over $150 billion in 2007—due to global instability fueled by conflict in Iraq, failing domestic fiscal policies that have weakened the U.S. dollar and skyrocketing global demand resulting from a lack of investment in alternatives. Barack Obama supports imposing a windfall profits penalty on oil selling at or over $80 per barrel. Revenue from the proposal will be invested in a number of measures to reduce the burden of rising prices on families.

So Obama’s plan may be “shrouded in mystery,” but only for who would rather try to score bogus partisan points than spend a few seconds doing some basic research.