So the question isn’t whether Obama will be relentlessly pelted by the sprawling appendages of the Right-wing edifice and its media allies with the most grotesque, bottom-feeding, substance-free, personality-based attacks. Of course he will be — ones as ugly as, if not uglier than, anything we’ve seen yet.
Up until now, Obama has received relatively sympathetic treatment from the two-headed right-wing/media monster because he’s been the anti-Hillary, and hatred for her resulted in affection (or at least restraint) towards him. Once he’s no longer the anti-Hillary, but instead becomes the only thing standing between John McCain/GOP power and the White House, he’s going to be the target of all of that bile and much, much more. As the Right begins to believe that he very well might be the enemy this Fall, and they thus pressure the media to begin its attacks, this week one got a small glimpse — a tiny fraction — of what is to come.
And, as Greenwald reminds us:
What our political establishment relies on more than anything else is keeping Americans distracted away from what they are really doing and focused instead on how Mike Dukakis looks in a helmet and whether he’d want to murder his wife’s rapist; on blue dresses and penile spots; on the inspiration for Love Story and who invented the Internet; on how John Kerry looks in windsurfing tights, on how manly George Bush’s brush-clearing is, and whether Nancy Pelosi’s scarf-wearing means she loves the Terrorists. That’s how our Beltway culture remains indescribably broken and corrupt without much protest or backlash.
Later thought: I am amazed that so many political observers assume the strum and drang of politics will amazingly disappear once the Clintons are out of the picture.
Do they really think the Clintons are the problem?
Do they really think Obama won’t be blasted in ways we can’t even anticipate? Bill O’Reilly has already used the word “lynching” in talking about Michelle Obama. Could there be a more racist term?
Or this: “But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics.”
So, by default then, Obama’s parents were Communists.