by Teh Nutroots | Right. I wasn't going to touch this. But the Far Right's Finest weren't going to let it go. I realise that most of them are stressed out from being betrayed by reality. They've lost their bearings in the face of the coming realignment. They're clinging to their guns and the Rovian Republican Jesus. They're bitter and shit-scared anticipating the final ass-kicking humiliation that's to come when all they stand for is kicked to the curb by the economic meltdown and the next election. And after that, the slide into irrelevance.
It's kinder just to pretend not to notice.
But there are some lines nobody ought to cross.
It started with an article in The National Enquirer. I won't quote from it---read it yourself if you want more---but it's easy to summarise.
Shorter National Enquirer (via Memeorandum);
So it seems that Obama's childhood friend and "mentor"---introduced to Barack when Barack was 10, or two years older than when Ayers was doing his terrorism thing--- is an admitted sexual deviant who molested children and practiced bondage.
Draw your own conclusions.
The Right's Finest rushed right in. Want to know what they had to say?
Red State's Erickson, nobly refusing to spread rumors:
The National Enquirer now suggests Barack Obama had an underage, gay affair with a pedophile. Yup. That Frank Marshall Davis guy Barry says was his good friend? Turns out he was a perv of the first order and liked young boys. This post is not intended to spread that rumor.
Of course, the story didn't say or even suggest "[u]nderage, gay affair with a pedophile." And let us pause for a moment to consider that phrase and think about all it implies.
Think about how---in any case in which it might apply---it reframes a child's personal tragedy and a betrayal of trust that ought to make an adult's blood run cold.
Okay, to summarize - from the time he was a child until he was a young man, I guess, Barack Obama drank whiskey, wrote dirty limericks, read poetry and, um, was counseled by a sexual deviant, child molester, rapist of children? That about cover it? And in his book he said it had a lasting effect on him? Damn. That could actually be very sad.
That may be worse than his having been counseled by Jeremiah Wright.
No wonder he says "Pakit-stan" in that funny way of his! heh!
Because you know what makes right wingers who read Riehl World View laugh out loud? Even though it "could actually be very sad" if the victim wasn't a political "enemy" they wanted to tear down?
Does anyone believe for one second that if John McCain or Sarah Palin were mentored by an self-admitted child rapist and general pervert that it wouldn't be the singular focus of multiple news cycles, questioning how such a relationship was damage their delicate and emerging psychologies, rendering them too unreliable for the Presidency, or perhaps darkly suggesting that the candidate might have been abused by such a mentor themselves?....
So is CF is determined to do what he darkly suggests would be morally reprehensible in the media if it were aimed at his own team? See for yourself!
His piece concludes:
Barack Obama's list of known mentors now includes child rapists ("Uncle Frank" Marshall), racists (Rev. Jeremiah Wright) and terrorists (Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn).
Crittenden is klassy by comparison, mainly because his comment is so difficult to parse that it is well-nigh inscrutable. Everything's relative. I've read it three times and I'm still not sure what he is implying, but at least he requests that his readers not engage in "fantasy" in the comments.
You don't often get to see members of the right expose the inner truth of their outer bloviating or show themselves up as hypocrites as well as opportunists.
I will just say this: you've got to be a very special sort of political commentator to achieve any---much less all---of the following in a single post about an IMAGINED EVENT:
- Frame an imagined offense against a minor as a consensual gay affair.
- Mock the imagined victim.
- Reframe the imagined event as a political smear, based on the argument that a human being is permanently tainted by association with a wrongdoer, even if the said human being is unaware of it.
I'm not even going to mention the rank effing stupidity of believing in the first place that there is any adult human on the planet who hasn't---whether knowingly or unknowingly---at some point or other associated with one or more persons of bad or criminal character. On Planet Wingnut, imaginary evildoers MUST BE SHUNNED in order to prevent the taint from rubbing off.
I won't get into the staggering hypocrisy of it either. Enough of my ranting. Others have said it better.
At Whiskey Fire, Thers wrote:
Let us be clear.
The last National Inquirer incursion into presidential politics was not the Edwards thing, but this. Headline:
PALIN FAMILY SHOCKERS: WHAT SARAH'S REALLY HIDING!
As I noted at the time, no left blogger of any stature linked to this.
And now?...
The Right Blogosphere is always more morally disgusting than you thought. Always.
Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings explains what common decency would require of anyone who drew the completely unstated and unfounded conclusion that some of the above bloggers evidently drew.
When people discuss (possible) sexual contact between ten-year-old boys who are not their political enemies and grown men, they usually refer to the "underage gay affairs" as sexual abuse. They also recognize that adults who have been abused may or may not wish to tell the whole world the details, and they respect it. Admittedly, most people are not members of the NAMBLA wing of the Republican Party, or, failing that, curdled into pure meanness. Maybe Erickson just holds with the more sweeping theories about the cultural construction of the age of consent. Whatever the reason, he’s sure that that little vixen, ten-year-old Barry Obama, was asking for it man.
This was all known in August, after a widely-blogged report in Britain's Telegraph, but the National Enquirer is now reporting it as an "Exclusive OBAMA SEX PERV SCANDAL," because Obama should be ashamed of almost being molested, or something... [C]hild Obama should have known this would happen, using the same clairvoyant powers that would have allowed him to know Davis was a perv years before anyone else knew he was a perv. For shame!
And see John Cole's post here.
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