Smearing two birds with one lie…

A couple days ago, a commenter brought to my attention this ridiculous rumor of Barack Obama being a closet Muslim. What the commenter had cut and pasted (I don’t know what the source was, doesn’t matter) smacked of rightwing lies, fear, and racism. And let’s face it; if it’s lies, fear, and racism, it must be Republican.

I won’t bother to comment on the rumor, it was as transparent as it was untruthful. But leave it to the wingnuts to make a bad situation worse.

Apparently the original source of the “story” was a Republican rag called Insight Magazine. Insight Magazine is now claiming that they received the information that Obama is a Muslim from an “unnamed source” in Hillary Clinton’s camp. While I am not a great fan of Hillary, I have never thought she was a stupid woman, nor one given to much fear. This is simply not her style.

Naturally, the lie surrounding Obama’s heritage was repeated over and over on Fox News. Only Fox didn’t stop there. They’ve also been “reporting” that the information came from Clinton’s camp.

Now, we all know that rabid Republicans and Fox News wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and gave them a blowjob, but this is bordering on the insane. Not to mention that it’s WAY too early for Fox to be pulling out the swift boats. This story is so transparent that I could tell who was behind it from a simple comment left by a reader. I didn’t even have to read the story.

Hillary Clinton may be a lot of things, but she’s not a Republican, and this has Republican written all over it. First and foremost, Democrats are not the ones who immediately jump to “terrorist” every time someone says “Muslim”. Republicans are. Republicans are the ones who fear all things Muslim and who try to instill that fear in anyone who will listen. Rational, reasonable people know that, while all the evildoers are Muslim, not all Muslims are evildoers. This is where they show what racist hacks they really are. The only reason Fox newscasters don’t wear pointy white hoods to do the news is because they can’t read the teleprompters through the eyeholes.

Last time I checked, Hillary was the frontrunner, she just threw her hat into the ring, and the election is two years away. There would be no reason for her to “leak” this rumor, especially at this stage of the game. This was the act of a desperate party. And Hillary is anything but desperate.

But the Republicans are. Can you smell the desperation? I told you when Obama announced his candidacy that he was the Reps. worst nightmare, a Democratic black man in the White House. But that’s nothing compared to the apoplexy the Reps. are having over this: the prospect that Bill Clinton could be back in the White House. And while the Republican Party is well known for being full of racists and sexists, they are, above all things, Bill Clinton haters.

Hang on, folks, it’s going to be a mean season. Luckily, after two terms of George Bush, the American people recognize the Republican's handiwork when they smell it.

Bottom line is, Insight Magazine, along with the Washington Times newspaper, are owned by none other than the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Yes, that Rev. Moon. The crazy, wackadoo cult leader. It is a well-known fact that the Rev. Moon is a huge contributor to the Republican Party.

Since serving his tax-evasion sentence in the early 1980s, however, Moon appears to have bought himself protection by spreading hundreds of millions of dollars around conservative causes and through generous speaking fee payments to Republican leaders, including former President George H.W. Bush.

Moon himself has boasted that he spent $1 billion on the right-wing Washington Times in its first decade alone. The newspaper, which started in 1982, continues to lose Moon an estimated $50 million a year but remains a valuable propaganda organ for the Republican Party.

How Moon has managed to cover the vast losses of his media empire and pay for lavish conservative conferences has been one of the most enduring mysteries of Washington, but curiously one of the least investigated, at least since the Reagan-Bush era.

Any questions?