Obama vs. Tea Parties: Uvidenhed er styrke

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It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.

Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies. […]

So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:

“Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday — not that we’ve seen any proof of that,” he said on Aug. 3. “They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that.”

Of course, there is proof as clear as that baseball box score. Look here, www.factcheck.org, for starters, one of many places posting Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate.

On the Muslim deception, Limbaugh has sprinkled lie dust all over the place. “Obama says he’s a Christian, but where’s the evidence?” he said on Aug. 19. He has repeatedly called the president “imam Obama,” and said, “I’m just throwing things out there, folks, because people are questioning his Christianity.”

You see how he works. He drops in suggestions, hints, notes that “people are questioning” things. The design is to make Obama un-American. Then he says it’s a tweak, a provocation. He says this as a preemptive way to keep the press from calling him out. And it works; long profiles of Limbaugh have largely gone easy on him. […]

“I am a devout Christian,” Obama told Christianity Today in 2008. “I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” That’s not enough, apparently, for Rev. Franklin Graham, the partisan son of the great evangelical leader, who said last week that Obama was “born a Muslim because of the religious seed passed on from his father.”

Actually, he was born from two non-practicing parents, and his Kenyan father was absent for all of his upbringing. Obama came to his Christianity like millions of people, through searching and questioning.

Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily. The founder of Politifact, another nonpartisan referee to the daily rumble, said two of the site’s five most popular items on its Truth-o-meter are corrections of Glenn Beck.

Beck tosses off enough half-truths in a month to keep Politifact working overtime. Of late, he has gone after Michelle Obama, whose vacation in Spain was “just for her and approximately 40 of her friends.” Limbaugh had a similar line, saying the First Lady “is taking 40 of her best friends and leasing 60 rooms at a five-star hotel — paid for by you.”

The White House said Michelle Obama and her daughter Sasha were accompanied by just a few friends — and they paid their own costs. But, wink, wink, the damage is done. He’s Muslim and foreign. She’s living the luxe life on your dime. They don’t even have to mention race. The code words do it for them.

Det lader til at være højrefløjens version af de tåbelige 9/11-konspirationsteorier, bortset fra, at disse propagandisters racistiske og intolerante karakter og Limbaughs og Fox News’ magtfulde position gør Tea Party-løgnene langt farligere. Hvor Limbaugh sår, høster ekstremisterne – senest ved det morderiske overfald på en muslimsk taxi-chauffør i New York.

I Danmark ville Dansk Folkeparti gøre det samme, hvis de havde kanalerne til det. Vi ser det allerede på Jyllands-Postens blogsektion, hvor den danske højrefløjs svar på Gøg og Gokke, de notoriske løgnere og islamomaner Kasper Støvring og Morten Uhrskov, der under stor applaus og mange skældsord  fra de kommentatorer, der virkelig tror på, at Danmark er blevet overtaget af islam og følgelig gerne så alle muslimer eskorteret til grænsen, erklærer deres støtte til voldsfikserede amerikanske politikere og udspreder miskrediterede løgne om mosker på Ground Zero, og hvad ved jeg. Forskellen er endnu, at den slags endnu ikke har nogen platform i Danmark, hvorfor der ikke er nogen tænkende mennesker, der tager dem alvorligt.

Men dagen kunne komme. Hvis Pia Kjærsgaard havde et Fox News, ville hun bruge det, og det er en skræmmende tanke. Lad os håbe, at eventuelle forsøg i den retning vil blive afvist af en enig nation af know-somethings, som de komiske Alier Uhrskov&Støvrings løgne allerede bliver det af de mere tænksomme af Jyllands-Postens debattører.

Link: Building a Nation of Know-Nothings