I am becoming more and more alarmed by the tone of this election campaign. As McCain gets more desperate and as the time becomes shorter until the election, we are finding more lies spread about Obama. For example, I read this article in The Nation this morning. This only a part of the article.
"I don't normally listen to Sean Hannity, nor did I watch his Fox News special on Sunday, "Obama and Friends: The History of Radicalism." But I did read the transcript. To make their case against Obama, conservatives like Hannity are relying on a highly discredited cast of characters.
Take the example of Andy Martin, the "author and journalist" Hannity quotes extensively in his segment. "I think a community organizer in Barack Obama's case was somebody that was in training for a radical overthrow of the government," Martin tells Hannity. In Martin's view, Obama is just a puppet of radicals like Bill Ayers and Louis Farrakhan. "If you love the Cuban revolution and Castro and if you love what's happening in Venezuela with Hugo Chavez, you'll love Barry Obama--Barack Obama, as he calls himself--in the White House," Martin says.
So just who is Andy Martin? Well, for starters, he's the originator of the "Obama is a Muslim" lie circulating around the Internet, as my colleague Chris Hayes first reported last year.
"In his past, Martin also has expressed anti-Semitic views," the Chicago Tribune wrote in 2006. "When he ran for Congress in Connecticut in 1986, the name of his congressional campaign committee included the phrase 'to exterminate Jew power in America,' Federal Election Commission records show."
Martin wrote in a personal bankruptcy case in 1983, "I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did, when Jew survivors are operating as a wolf pack to steal my property."
Martin's had numerous run-ins with the law, in Connecticut, Florida, Illinois and elsewhere.You can see how the ignorant voter might listen to something said on the Hannity show and take it as gospel even though it is being spread by a hate monger. Too many people do not do any research themselves. They just believe anything said over the airwaves must be true. This is just so scary. I understand they doubled the security on the Obama family this fall.
7 comments:
The interesting thing to me is how a partial truth can be made into gospel truth with the turn of a phrase or a total omission of context. And we wonder so few really able people don't choose to go into public service!
It is so unbelievably scary, I'm almost too scared to read the headlines anymore, afraid of what I'll see -- I do, but I'm still scared. What on earth is happening to this country?
What is happening to this country is it is falling apart. Between racial tensions, political lies, corporate lies, and corporate mismanagement, greed and violence, the world we knew in the 50's is long gone...never to return.
I am concerned that we will go the way of the Soviet Union, imploding over a war as well.
I started watching that show and turned it off. I could not stand to see anymore of it but like you said there are so many people out there that believed every word that was said on that show.
Disgusting, isn't it? Those conservative talk show hosts will say anything and much of it isn't even true.
What surprises me is when you receive a hateful email about Barack Obama and go on to prove it wrong....the person won't even read the truth. They are so hateful that they are blind to the truth.
That's right! Ideology is everything..regardless of the truth.
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