I'm working on the Outpost calendar and listening to Bill Cunningham on talk radio. Every time he refers to Barack Obama, he refers to him as "Barack Hussein Obama." I see that Rush Limbaugh is doing the same thing. And now What's Right in Montana is picking it up.
It's similar to, although worse than, Republicans' habit of referring to their opposition as the "Democrat Party" rather than by its actual name, which is the Democratic Party (nobody ever refers to the Republic Party).
Hussein is part of Obama's actual name, of course, but it isn't the name he uses. In fact, none of the candidates in the presidential primaries goes by first and middle name, and Obama is the only one referred to that way.
By the age of 5 or 6, most Americans learn to refer to people by the names they use to refer to themselves. Some Americans never grow up.
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Maybe we should use the full names of all the candidates – wonder what they are? And that first alarmist email about Obama's afrocentric church, mentioned in Klausfiles on Slate this morning, dropped into my inbox last week. The mud oozes.
It's bad enough when they use Obama's middle name. The insufferable thing is that they still think it's clever.
The Republicans are so completely bereft that the only recourse they have is to play the fear card-- "Ooh, the colored one has an ethnic name! Beware!"
It worked for the Republicans in
'04-- remember the anti-Kerry "wolf" commercial-- but no way will it work this time.
It's not as if the Republicans can run on, say, Bush's record, or their own in congress.
I suppose I am the suspicious type--but I have noticed recently that Bush is hyping the idea that Iran is the biggest supporter of terrorism, etc, etc. The idea being to stir up fear of terrorism. Then combine that with a concerted effort to refer to Obama as "Hussein" you move people to the right (which to me is the liberal side of the equation).
If you repeat a lie often enough, some people will believe it's the truth. A recent article in the Atlantic notes that in a survey of registered Republicans, 30 percent believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and another 30 percent think there were such weapons, we've just not found them yet. So, 60 percent of the GOP believes in fairy tales -- but then that same majority probably also thinks the planet is only 6,000 year old. They don't even believe in coal.
A lot of people are calling him "Osama."
Admit it. You have a serious marketing problem.
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