The right’s apoplexy over Obama begins to take shape

December 20, 2006

Last week, we talked about how the right, anxious to smear Barack Obama but unsure how, had come with a variety of uninspiring attacks, including criticizing Obama for having mainstream Democratic beliefs, attending a Christian church that isn’t right-wing enough, and having big ears. They’re hardly the kind of criticisms that will undermine Obama’s popularity.

So, some conservatives have decided to take things up a notch. My friend Michael J.W. Stickings noted, for example, how right-wing blogger Debbie Schlussel chose to go after the Illinois senator.

[W]hile Obama may not identify as a Muslim, that’s not how the Arab and Muslim Streets see it. In Arab culture and under Islamic law, if your father is a Muslim, so are you. And once a Muslim, always a Muslim. You cannot go back. In Islamic eyes, Obama is certainly a Muslim. He may think he’s a Christian, but they do not.

So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on Oprah); is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?

Is that even the man we’d want to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency, if Hillary Clinton offers him the Vice Presidential candidacy on her ticket (which he certainly wouldn’t turn down)?

NO WAY, JOSE . . . Or, is that, HUSSEIN?

It’s tempting to think this is some kind of bizarre joke, made up by a satirist to make conservatives appear foolish, and yet, this is an actual item from a fairly prominent far-right blogger, who wasn’t kidding in the slightest.

As Michael responded:

He may think he’s a Christian? What is that supposed to mean? That, no matter his beliefs, he isn’t a Christian because his father was Muslim? Schlussel isn’t just a bigot, she’s a fu**ing idiot.

Thankfully, there are some sensible voices on the right who have stepped up to denounce this nonsense, including James Joyner.

Barring a David Duke nomination by the GOP, I’m not going to vote for Obama. We have fundamental disagreements on core public policy issues and I don’t believe he has sufficient seasoning to serve as Commander-in-Chief. But I have no reason to doubt his loyalty to the country or his basic decency. If, by some odd sequence of events, he were elected president in 2008, the chances that the country will find itself under Sharia law or in alliance with al Qaeda are exactly the same as if John McCain, Newt Gingrich, or Pat Buchanan were elected: zero.

Juliette Ochieng, who is also conservative, was also disgusted, and wrote a terrific post on the subject.

I’m tired of it all. I’m tired of the insinuations about Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) because his dead father was a Muslim. I’m tired of the insinuations about his middle name — Hussein — and the racist/bigoted insinuations that I’ve seen on the Right that flow from there…. Is that how the Right wants to portray itself?

I can’t help but wonder about a possible backlash. Many Americans are uneasy about the Middle East and Muslims, but there’s a fundamental decency among most people in this country that, I suspect, reject the kind of hate Schlussel is espousing.

Maybe Schlussel and others like her believe they’re doing the GOP a favor by smearing Obama before he even announces his intentions, but I think it’s far more likely that they’re simply embarrassing themselves and creating a degree of sympathy for Obama. The abject stupidity of the right-wing attack machine has its limits.

“The abject stupidity of the right-wing attack machine has its limits” – CB

Not that I’ve ever noticed.

By Schlussel’s logic, George Felix Allen Junior is Jewish because Jews determine ethnicity by maternal descent.

Of course, maybe the fact we just found out about his Jewish heritage is why he lost this time?

  • Appalling. You know what Schlussel’s argument sounds like? One of Colbert’s diatribes. I was almost laughing at her grandiose false logic and psychotic psycho-analysis.

  • What would happen if you had a Jewish mother and a Muslim father? Would the religions have to amalgamate into a super-religion? Jewism?

  • I think she’s doing us all a favor with this kind of insane ranting. It cements the image of the Reich Wing as dangerous extremists in the mind of the electorate and makes the decent majority of the population even more likely to vote for someone far removed from these views.

    Even her own people on the right are jumping down her throat, thankfully, as well they should. It might even prompt some of them to jump the shark and become Independents if not Democrats out of sheer frustration.

    Nice job, Debbie. Keep up the good work.

  • Aside from the flaming ass-hole-inity displayed by this woman, it’s interesting to note that nothing warms a right wing Christian’s heart more than saving souls in the ranks of the infidel and yet this son of a Muslim is somehow not good enough to truly embrace Jesus. Of course, if you go back far enough, none of the people on earth have ancestors who were born Christian.

  • I think you’re right, CB. America does have a really slow moving gyroscope that lefts things when they get too right. Attack radio has to burn out at some time. Maybe it’ll be isolated in Dixie with all the rascist Rebublicans.

    I know we don’t hear much from white Southern progressives, but I know they’re there. The progressive South will rise again (well maybe for the first time).

    I think the Stones called it. Wingnuts are out of time and out of touch and ain’t gonna get no satisfaction. Hey you wingnuts with your pact with the devil, get off my cloud.

  • I’m having difficulty even parsing the sentence “So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on Oprah); is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam?”. Schlussel’s a right-wing blowhard moron (oops, I’m being redundant).

  • There are nuts in this country that will take that stuff seriously and believe Obama is an enemy of the state. I have been reluctant to say anything about the comparisons with JFK and RFK but this does need addressing. The political leadership should recognize the danger and beef up the secret service protection on all presidential candidates.

  • Is that how the Right wants to portray itself?

    No, they want to portray themselves as hateful toward all minorities, not just Muslims.

    Sociopaths have no shame, so Schlussel will only apologize if she thinks she’s about to lose her meal ticket. If neither of those two things happen, we will indeed see how the Right really does accept people that hateful and stupid.

  • From the comments at Juliette Ochieng’s blog: …frankly, it’d be difficult to call the curiosity about a man named “Hussein”‘s personal faith an ‘insinuation’. Nine out of ten in the street would think him a muslim or at least to have come from a muslim background upon hearing his name irregardless [sic] of their own prejudices, biases, or upbringings. No ‘evil’ in that- just reality…

    The knuckle-draggers just don’t get the concept of reality. Their knuckle-dragging friends think a muslim name equals suspect religious faith, so it’s OK to insinuate that Obama is lying about his loyalty to the country he grew up in.

    I sure love to see the right wing eat its own tail. Pass the popcorn.

  • “fairly prominent far-right blogger”

    Fairly prominent? Please don’t give her such status! I can guarentee you 99.5% of this country doesn’t even know this nutbag exists.

  • Has anyone read the comments after that Schussel piece? The comments section over there is crawling with bigoted wackos. It’s very unsettling.

  • Wasn’t JFK’s catholicism an impediment until he publicly announced his allegiance to the Constitution and not to the Vatican? Will the right demand an oath from Obama? Have we come no further in this country in 47 years?

  • All you need to do is replace the words Muslim/Islamic with black and Christian with white, and you’ll see how Schlussel is just preservering the proud conservative tradition of racial bigotry. Jesus, she sound like John C. Calhoun (or Jesse Helms) raving about octoroons or something – and how awful it will be if they’re ever accepted into society.

  • Some of my ancestors were probably frickin’ druids. Does that make me a druid? Guess so. This is just the warmed over “One black ancestor means you are black (and therefore inferior)” argument. Yawn.

    But it is strange that a radical righty seems to say Muslim law supercedes American law. Some one notify the NSA.

  • Dennis Prager, Roy Moore, Virgil Goode, Debbie Schlussel… The anti-Muslim screed is exploding. Pogroms cannot be far behind.

  • ***…we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam?***

    Debbie SludgePot is always good for a laugh or two, isn’t she? If she’s so worried about this “fight for our lives” (fight for your own damned life, SludgePot—mine’s just fine, thank you very much), then maybe she ought to go over to Baghdad—and rant at the troops.

    Preferably from outside the Green Zone perimeter.

    These morons are no better—not even a smidgen better—than that filthy little beast Fred Phelps and his herd of mindless lemmings, ranting and screaming hatreds at a funeral procession. Feed ’em all to the hyenas….

  • The heart of Schlussel’s anti-Obama screed is that there is somehow a religion gene we all possess, and Barack’s religion gene, passed down from his father, is Islam and other Muslims can see that in him (Sort of like how gays find each other through “gaydar,” Mulsims can see one another though their “Islamdar.”)

    And yes, Barack’s middle name is HUSSEIN, as in the late King Hussein of Jordan who was a very gracious friend of the US.

  • I don’t understand religious and ethnic identities. I especially don’t understand how Islam treats things.

    However, I know a bunch of orthodox Jews who say that George Allen is a Jew, period. I remember when various Jews on my block needed me to help them on the Sabbath because they weren’t allowed to do certain things. However, they would never ask my father, who has been a Christian far longer than I have, because my father is Jewish.

    So, maybe some Muslims do think that Obama is a Muslim. Many Jews think George Allen is a Jew.

    I don’t care if you put your hand on the Bible or you put your hand on the Koran or you put your hand on the dictionary. I just want you to uphold the Constitution. I don’t even care about the swearing or the affirming part. I care about the ‘doing’ part.

  • Let’s pretend Muslims actually care about his father. Would that not put him in position of trust that the other candidates would need years to develop in the Muslim world?

    It’s not like guy is going to have in Allah we trust put on currency and make us all face Mecca 3 times a day to pray. Man, these people need to graduate junior high before they start writing blogs of working for major news papers.

  • I suspect she’s just trying to become the next Ann Coulter, TAiO. Sure beats having to work for a living, doesn’t it?

    Especially with her limited mentality and social skills. 😉

  • Some of my ancestors were probably frickin’ druids.
    Comment by The answer is orange

    Yes. Sorry. Tell the trees I said hello.

    I wonder if having an Islamic father makes BAM(tm) subject to fatwas and stuff like Salmon Rushdie was?

  • Well if they go after Obama in their reflexive move to nativist, bigot then hey…. It won’t be pretty, and actually be so ugly and the PR overseas would just be “lovely” – but it would finally put-paid to the GOP efforts to reach out to the non-white community. Their true colors and their white-southern identity would be further exposed.

  • Can we do a fact-check on the claim that, “In Arab culture and under Islamic law, if your father is a Muslim, so are you.” It’s not improbable, but I’m not going to take her word for it.

  • This may sound weird, but if you’re a Howard Stern as am I, you’re all too familiar with Ms. Schlussel. She’s a periodic guest on the show, and as you can imagine they have a lot of fun at her expense (although mostly because of her prudish ways).

    One thing that must be pointed out immediately is that her priorities do not lie with the security of the United States. I’m not saying she doesn’t care, but her interests lie in using American power to advance Israel’s security. Everything she says and writes must be seen through that lens. Every time she utters the word “terrorist”, she’s not just talking about the groups that are a real threat to America; she lumps all of them together as threats to Israel and America.

    This is nothing new. Conservatives used this trick to great effect to get us into Iraq in the first place. Remember Ansar al-Islam, Abu Nidal, and Hussein paying $25,000 rewards to the families of terrorists? Of course they’re all terrorists, but none of them were interested in attacking America.

    Even after the Al-Qaeda-Hussein link was proven to be totally bogus, conservative spinners could go on TV before the war and say, “Saddam supports terrorists”, and never even be questioned about exactly what kind of threat these groups posed to Americans. The answer: none. It was all fudged together.

    Another thing that girds Debbie’s loins is the large Muslin-American population that resides in Michigan. Guess where Debbie’s from? Right. Ever hear of Dearbornistan? That’s her new name for what the rest of us call Dearborn, Michigan.

    Knowing as much as I do about her and her rantings, this column comes as no surprise at all. Next she’ll be fishing for some botched birth certificate where a single-letter smudge proves that Barrack’s real last name is………OSAMA!!!!
    (cue the blood-curdling scream)

  • Ms. Schlussel is an Ann Coulter wannabe who thinks the more outrageous she is the more successful she’ll be. One of Debbie Schlussel’s dubious accomplishments was a column dissing the late Marla Ruzicka as a “traitor” for her efforts to help Iraqi civilians after the Iraq war began in 2003. Obviously Debbie Schlussel has never heard the proverb “de mortuis nil nisi bonum.” Debbie Schlussel is also an attorney licensed to practice in the state of Michigan and belongs to the State Bar of Michigan. As someone who passed Michigan’s bar in 1991, I’m amazed that she did pass given the utter lack of logic in some of her arguments.

  • Good post. You make some great points that most people do not fully understand.

    “Maybe Schlussel and others like her believe they’re doing the GOP a favor by smearing Obama before he even announces his intentions, but I think it’s far more likely that they’re simply embarrassing themselves and creating a degree of sympathy for Obama. The abject stupidity of the right-wing attack machine has its limits.”

    I like how you explained that. Very helpful. Thanks.

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