Obama hit piece

Happy birthday to me! Okay, enough celebration.. Who needs to be reminded that every day they are one day closer to their death? :P

So a friend of mine sent me (and a bunch of other people) an email with a link to a video. The video was a straight-up right-wing Obama hit piece, touching on every rumor and innuendo about Obama that has circulated the internet. I'm choosing not to link to it from here because I don't want to give it any more traffic. It's absurd. But I wanted to post my reply to his email, where he asked for comments on what people thought:

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Here's what you need to know about this video. It's right-wing scare propaganda. It's actually perpetuating lies and half-truths about Obama in order to scare people in to not voting for him. Whenever you see a video about Obama that emphasizes his middle name, you know that it's a scare piece. The underlying message is this: Obama is new, he's black, and he has ties to Muslims (through his name, his father, his upbringing in Malaysia), and he is unpatriotic (refusal to wear flag-pin or put his hand over his heart during national anthem), and so we should be scared, during this time of terror, to vote for him.

But the truth of the matter is this: Obama's Muslim father left him and his mother when he was a young kid. The school he attended in Malaysia wasn't a Muslim "Madrassa", it was a regular public school with both Muslim and Christian students. Obama refuses to wear the flag-pin because he says it has been put forth as a replacement for true patriotism, and he would rather show his patriotism for real, rather than just by wearing a pin (and BTW, neither McCain or Clinton wear lapel-pins). As for the national anthem, putting your hand over your heart is something you do during the pledge of allegiance, and is not what you do during the national anthem. That's the part of the story they don't tell you.

The Rev. Wright is crazy! I see how what he says could scare people away. But what we all know is that the black church is very different than the typical white church, or Hispanic churches. But that doesn't mean that they are trying to destroy America. And that doesn't mean that Obama follows blindly what Rev Wright preaches about. Idk if you go to church regularly, but look at people you know who do, and think about whether they blindly follow the teachings of their church pastors and priests. Most people take away what they will, which is the idea that we should aspire to better ourselves and our communities. And if you look at Obama's history, you'll see that that's what he's done his whole public life. And in his statements about the Wright controversy, he states this idea, that he doesn't agree with Wright's view of the US, and what he's always tried to do is help his community.

All of these things are non-issues, which the right-wing conspirators are propagating to scare people away from him. Look, Obama is not a black muslim looking to enslave the white race and convert America in to a Muslim nation run by terrorists. That idea is totally ridiculous, regardless of what the people who made this video think. They even touch on communism and a supposed tie to Che Guevara, (in that case it was a local Obama staffer in Texas who had the flag up, and was asked by the national campaign to take it down, which she did). The communism plot is typical right-wing scare tactic harking back to the red scare with Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 50's. This video will likely work to lock older Republicans in to John McCain, but I have faith most reasonable people will dismiss it for what it is.

The bottom line is this: When you don't care enough to look at what the candidate stands for, and what he or she is trying to do (put forth by their policies), and instead make your judgment based on far-fetched hate conspiracies (like Obama is going to convert us all to Muslims and enslave the white race), you get someone in control like Bush, who doesn't give a rat's ass about the American people, and does whatever he wants to do, which usually benefits the few elite upper 2% of Americans at the cost of the lower and middle class Americans.

If you agree with John McCain's policies and vision for the future, then vote for him. If you agree with Obama's, then vote for him. But don't make a decision based on this crap! :)