Doing the Right Wing Limbo – How Low Can They Go?
About a week ago, Mitt Romney accused Barack Obama of being a “disgrace,” an “angry and desperate president” running a campaign of division and anger and hate, adding “the president's campaign is taking American politics to new lows, we're going to do something very differently.”
Well, golly, that would be a nice change. Because the bloodlust Republican Party and the rightwing in general has shown over the last few months running up to this election – so fixated has the right become on defeating Barack Obama at any price – that any personal integrity, any sense of decency, morality, even common sense, has eroded at an exponential rate.
It’s one thing to criticize a candidate on his policies, his voting history, his statements and even his personal life if that personal life could have an effect on his political life. It’s even legitimate to criticize members of his family, if they are involved in the political process; Ann Romney surely deserves a reality check after her toffee-nosed “you people” remark. But the recent attack on Obama’s family has been nothing short of outrageous. If the rightwing can’t get to the President himself, they’ll stoop to anything. Anything.
I’d thought the recent smear campaign fabricated against the other Ann, Ann Dunham, had to scrape the bottom of the barrel when it came to maliciousness and spite. It would seem highly improbable to anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together that a woman with bachelors degree in mathematics and a masters and PhD in anthropology, whose research focused on the work of women in third world countries, who created microcredit programs to fight poverty in rural villages, who worked for the United States Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation in Jakarta and the Bank Rakyat in Indonesia where she applied her research to developing the largest microfinance program in the world... was secretly a nude model for naughty photographs? Seriously? On what planet? Only the most credulous of Fox-fed morons would believe such an idiotic theory. Unfortunately, it seems like there’s a lot of them willing to swallow this bilgewater. But unlike Ann Romney, Ann Dunham isn’t alive to defend her reputation, nevermind her son’s.
Fortunately, George Obama is. Dinesh D’Souza, a naturalized American citizen born in Mumbai, India, conservative political commentator and Evangelical Christian apologist, former policy analyst in the Reagan administration, who has accused “the cultural left in this country [of being] responsible for causing 9/11”, tracked down and interviewed Barack’s half-brother, who lives in Nairobi, Kenya, in what a US news report described as a shack “like something out of Slumdog Millionaire” for his film, 2016: Obama’s America, based on his 2010 book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage, which D’Souza purportedly claims to be an examination of the President’s intellectual influences. He even credits Michael Moore as an inspiration, a rather back-handed sort of compliment, as D’Souza’s film is about as fact-packed as a hot air balloon leaking noxious gas. Even more amazing, his entire approach backfires when D’Souza tries his hardest to pin George Obama down, asking painfully obvious leading questions, such as why the half-brother of the most powerful man on the planet lives in poverty.
