Slime Season is here, all festive with mildew and rot and weevils.
After four years of invective, four years during which the right has called President Obama a traitor, a communist, a fraud, an affirmative-action case, a terrorist-sympathizer and a tyrant, its shrillest voices have been reduced to the most primal insult of all. They are calling Obama’s mother a whore.
There’s this pseudo-documentary, Michelle Goldberg explains, that’s being mailed to voters.
The movie claims that Obama’s actual father was the poet and left-wing activist Frank Marshall Davis, who Dunham met through her father, who was a CIA agent merely posing as a furniture salesman. “My election was not a sudden political phenomenon,” says the narrator, speaking as if he were Obama reading his autobiography. “It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that my real father, Frank Marshall Davis, nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the U.S. economy, universities, and media for decades.”
Davis enjoyed taking nude photos of women, and the images said to be of Dunham, to which the director pays lascivious attention, are presented as evidence of their intimate relationship. “These photos were taken a few weeks before 1960, when mom was about five weeks pregnant with me,” the narrator says. “Frank then sold the photos to men’s mail-order catalogues.”
Slut! Slutslutslutwhore.
Gilbert claims that more than a million copies of Dreams From My Real Father have been mailed to voters in Ohio, as well between 80,000 and 100,000 to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire. “We’re putting plans in place, as of next week, to send out another two or three million, just state by state,” he told me.
…Tea Party groups and conservative churches are screening it. It was shown at a right-wing film festival in Tampa during the Republican National Convention, and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council in Missouri. Alabama GOP Chairman Bill Armistead recently recommended it during a speech, saying, “I’ve seen it. I verified that it is factual, all of it. People can determine.”
One wonders what Bill Armistead thinks “verified” means.
And then there’s Dinesh Souza’s book, Obama’s America.
D’Souza argues that part of the reason Ann Dunham sent Obama to live with her parents in Hawaii was so she could pursue affairs with Indonesian men. “Ann’s sexual adventuring may seem a little surprising in view of the fact that she was a large woman who kept getting larger,” he writes. On the next page, he continues, “Learning about Ann’s sexual adventures in Indonesia, I realized how wrong I had been to consider Barack Obama Sr. the playboy … Ann … was the real playgirl, and despite all her reservations about power, she was using her American background and economic and social power to purchase the romantic attention of third-world men.”
There is no evidence for any of this—D’Souza mentions the name of exactly one man who Dunham had a relationship with after her divorce. Even if it was true, however, it’s hard to see how it’s relevant to Obama’s supposed taste for subversion, since as D’Souza himself points out, Obama wasn’t living in Indonesia at the time. The chapter is simply an expression of glandular-level contempt.
Slut! Slutslutslutwhore.
More than 1 million copies? That’s a lot of money.
Money is no problem! Citizens United, remember? Money is speech, speech must be free, bribery has a charter.
I shudder to think what lies in the future for this country. Those racist, misogynist morons that put out this vile bilge are still going to be around post-November, spreading their filth with impunity. What bums me out is the fact that there are, and will be, still takers for such rottenness.
I know Violence Is Not the Answer, but a childish part of me wants to see Obama ask D’Souza to step outside, to address the issue of D’Souza’s slurs against Obama’s mother and Obama himself via fisticuffs.
Shouldn’t this sort of thing be covered by libel laws? I mean free speech is one thing but intentionally spreading lies about a candidate in an effort to sabotage their campaign?
It is always Slime Season for the Republicans. They abandoned truth around 20 years ago.
Isn’t this kind of like being both a Communist and a Nazi?
For one thing, it would guarantee that the President is Not a Kenyan.
I vaguely recall a commandment against lying in The Holy Book.
Heh, not just a sluttyslutslut but a FAT whore. Because it had to be a complete YoMamma joke, right?
Even if public figures weren’t pretty much fair game under U.S. defamation law, Obama would be wildly unwise to use such laws, or indeed to mention or address these idiots in any way, or risk a massive Streisand effect — which would play right into the hands of the loathsome asshats spreading these sexist, race-baiting lies.
The level of ugliness American rightwingers will descend to is astonishing – I absolutely loathe encountering these loudmouth know-nothing bastards online. Unfortunately they appear to be everywhere. The Republican party will either destroy America or destroy itself if it continues as it is. I hope for the latter outcome.
It is, at it’s core, the very same mentality I’ve run across when debating with some believers. They eventually get frustrated, and you can see it coming. When you’ve countered every lame talking point they have, they lose it. What follows is generally some very creative vulgarity, and disturbingly detailed death threats.
The fact that they are able to come up with these images so quickly, to me, means that they’ve probably thought of such things before. That’s the part that creeps me out the most.
That’s why I rarely engage in debate with the religious. What little morbid curiosity I had about them, and what drives them, was satisfied long ago.
Obama looks more like his mother than his father.
Ann Dunahm’s support for a systeme of micro-loans to Third World women back in the 60s and 70s was truly progressive for its day. Those loans allowed a large number of gals to gain a semblance of independance from rigid patriarchal oppression. It’s a very innovative approach to take to female emancipation, and one which has been quite effective.
However, Obama’s courting of the Arab world, his support for mid-east gov’ts sympathetic to the uber misogynistic MB and his obsequious behavior towards Saudi Arabia, a country that classes women as “minors”, kinda flies in the face of much of what his mother was attempting to achieve.
Neither Obama nor Romney are friends to atheists or women.