Right wing craziness growing

Since President Obama first won, well before he was even sworn into office, hate and racism have reared their ugly heads against him.

The far right-wing has done everything they can think of to discredit Obama's win.

First, there were the "birthers". Back in March, Ben Smith writing for Politico outlined this movement.

Out of the gaze of the mainstream and even the conservative media is a flourishing culture of advocates, theorists and lawyers, all devoted to proving that Barack Obama isn't eligible to be president of the United States. Viewed as irrelevant by the White House, and as embarrassing by much of the Republican Party, the subculture still thrives from the conservative website WorldNetDaily, which claims that some 300,000 people have signed a petition demanding more information on Obama's birth, to Cullman, Alabama, where Sen. Richard Shelby took a question on the subject at a town hall meeting last week.

These "birthers" have even flooded courts with various frivolous lawsuits attempting to prove that Obama can't possibly be a valid President. Recently, a state appeals court of Indiana ruled against one birther group.

In the Indiana case, Ankeny v. Governor of Indiana, the birthers argued a different thing: that a "natural-born citizen" could not have a foreign parent. And in 1961, Obama's father, a Kenyan, was a subject of the British Empire.

The Constitution doesn't say what a natural-born citizen is. The Indiana court dug into the history of U.S. and English common law, and produced the following distinction. There are two kinds of citizens: naturalized, who become citizens after they are born; and natural-born, who are citizens at birth.

All citizens at birth are natural-born. That is the rule used by the Indiana court. By U.S. law, you can be born in Uzbekistan and if you have one American parent who had been American and lived in the United States for a minimum period of time before you were born, you are American.

The Indiana ruling had a footnote. Obama is not the first U.S. president who had a noncitizen parent. "Chester A. Arthur, the twenty-first U.S. President, was born of a mother who was a United States citizen and a father who was an Irish citizen."

A car dealership in Wheat Ridge, Colorado (Wolf Automotive) recently erected a billboard which asks "President or Jihad?" and demands to see a birth certificate. It further reminds citizens to "Remember Ft. Hood" as if President Obama had anything at all to do with that tragedy.

With the birther fury still wild but gaining little to no traction, they have recently shifted to claiming that Obama didn't win the election...he stole it.

The new national poll from Public Policy Polling (D) has an astonishing number about paranoia among the GOP base: Republicans do not think President Obama actually won the 2008 election -- instead, ACORN stole it.

This number goes a long way towards explaining the anger of the Tea Party crowd. They not only think Obama's agenda is against America, but they don't think he was actually the choice of the American people at all!

Claiming that he wasn't a natural citizen didn't fly...so they are now claiming that the notorious ACORN stole it on his behalf. Of course, there is absolutely no evidence that ACORN is some superpowerful shadowy organization that has the ability to swing elections for the Democratic party. And if they could and did...please explain why Democrats didn't carry every election in this last election cycle.

There is no evidence of voter fraud from ACORN. True, some employees of ACORN inflated their registration numbers but that has nothing at all to do with the actual election.

Elections have been tampered with, however...just not by ACORN. Back in 2004, there were numerous instances of disenfranchised voters and outright illegal activity.

...A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations...

...The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.

Of course, you don't hear a peep from teabaggers about 2004. Nor will you hear them bemoaning the theft of the Presidency in 2000 when Bush carried Florida with a little help from his friends in that state.

Xavier Suarez, ousted as Miami Mayor in 1998 in a notorious case of absentee ballot fraud: 1) was elected to the Executive Committee of the Miami-Dade GOP party last September; and 2) admitted that he "helped fill out absentee ballot forms" for this past November 7 election

Disproportionately effected in the recount shenanigans were black voters, 90% of whom voted for Al Gore.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights approved a report Friday that suggests blacks disproportionately had their ballots discounted in Florida's elections, leading to widespread violations of the Voting Rights Act.

The panel accepted investigators' findings by a 6-2 vote, with both members appointed by Republicans voting no.

But these patriots who want what is right for American don't seem to care about vote irregularities when a Republican wins. Only when it is Barack Obama.

With the crazy anti-Obama conspiracy theories comes the violent rhetoric that often fires up from the extreme right wing.

In Missouri, the Lafayette County Republicans are celebrating a new billboard:





Yes. It literally instructs citizens to "Prepare for War" should they fail to "Vote out incumbents".

This should be no surprise, though. I have previously written of right-wing calls for treasonous actions against the President.

In an even more stomach churning action, right wing activists are using the Bible to attempt to spread their hate: Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8.

That prayer is nothing benign. It is a call to invoke God's wrath upon your enemies.

Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labor.
Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children.
Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the LORD; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.
Let them be before the LORD continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.

Recall that Pat Robertson has stated of Islam:

...not a religion, it's a political system, a violent political system bent on the overthrow of the governments of the world

And yet these people who rail against Islam are advocating the same things they accuse Muslims of doing...overthrowing a government they disagree with.

Like Pat Robertson, Frank Schaeffer was raised a Conservative Evangelical Christian. Schaeffer's father, Francis Schaeffer, was credited with inspiring the flowering of a Conservative Christian political movement in the 1970s and 80's. Frank, however, eventually turned his back on this movement stating:

In the mid 1980s I left the Religious Right, after I realized just how very anti-American they are, (the theme I explore in my book Crazy For God). They wanted America to fail in order to prove they were right about America's "moral decline."

Recently, on The Rachel Maddow Show Frank Schaeffer discussed how these far right-wing groups are coalescing into a phalanx of hate.

...I think that the situation that I find genuinely frightening right now is that you have a ramping up of biblical language, language from the anti-abortion movement, for instance, death panels, and this sort of thing, and what it's coalescing into is branding Obama as Hitler, as they have already called him, as something foreign to our shores -we're reminded of that, he was 'born in Kenya' - as Brown, as Black, above all, as not us. He is Sarah Palin's 'not a real American.'...

...Really, this is trawling for assassins. And this is serious business. It's un-American, it's unpatriotic, and it goes to show that the religious right, the Republican far-right, have coalesced into a group that truly wants American revolution, and if it turns out to be blood in the streets and death, so be it. This is not funny stuff any more. They cannot be dismissed as just crazies on the fringe. It only takes one....

...This is the American version of the Taliban. The Taliban quotes the Qu'ran, and al Qaeda quotes certain verses in the Qu'ran, in or out of context, calling for jihad, and bloody war, and the curse of Allah on infidels. This is the Old Testament, Biblical equivalent of calling for holy war. Now, most Americans'll just see the bumper sticker and smile and think that it's facetious. Unfortunately, there are 22 million Americans or so who call themselves super-conservative evangelicals. Of this, a small minority might be violent. But, the general atmosphere here is really getting heated....

The way these people are behaving...that isn't patriotic. That isn't what America is supposed to be about. We can't sit idly by and assume that because they are acting loony that they will not have any impact on the political dialogue. That clearly isn't true.

We initially took a hiatus with this blog because the hate rhetoric had gotten so fierce that it was disgusting and sad to read and write about politics. But then came the realization that if sane people do nothing, then the crazies win.

Recall the quote oft-attributed to Edmund Burke:

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Ignoring them or belittling them will not make them go away. Neither should one fight violence with violence. Don't allow the crazies to set the ground rules. These people are a threat because they truly want to bring the whole system down and rebuild it in their own image. That is not what America is supposed to be. And they don't care. They want to rebuild their own Conservative Christian America. Immigrants, ethnic minorities, and gays need not apply. As Americans, we cannot allow that to happen.

Be active. Work towards achieving the country that American should be. Freedom and equality for all.

'Cause this right-wing crazy shit needs to stop.