The Obama Haters: Behind the Right-Wing Campaign of Lies, Innuendo & Racism

8 Profiles in Cowardice: A Rancid Collection of Fruits, Nuts, and Psychos

99 Profiles in Cowardice: a Rancid Collection of fruits, nuts, and Psychos 8 Liars are the cause of all the sins and crimes. —Epictetus although the disgraceful bigmouths on Fox News (see chapter 9) get the most attention for their tirades against Obama, they rarely perform original spadework. Instead of using their journalistic platform and huge staff to perform true investigations or uncover the lies behind nasty smears, they choose instead to multiply and exaggerate the endless parade of falsehoods from every kook on the lunatic fringe. The denizens who populate this chapter often act as if they are auditioning for a role in the Jim Carrey movie Dumb and Dumber. Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage circulate loathsome chatter to their radio audiences. Savage once said that assassination of President Clinton would have been patriotic. These nitwits might even be comical if they did not cause so much damage by convincing millions of people with outrageous lies. Limbaugh’s most famous remark was, “I hope he fails,” uttered January 16, 2009, shortly before the inauguration. Limbaugh said five days later on Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News, “We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward , backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.” Is that Limbaugh’s position when he reaches into the sewer for his material? 100 — — — — — — tHe oBama HateRs Despite crushing unemployment and American soldiers dying overseas, does draft dodger Limbaugh really hope the new president would fail to end two wars and put Americans back to work? Republican political leadership consistently and shamefully groveled to him instead of condemning his lies. Lee atWateR The Obama haters trace their lineage back to Lee Atwater, their inspiration and mentor, the Grand Old Man of the Grand Old Party’s modern smear campaign. The political strategist, who died in 1991, masterminded the Agent Orange strategy that guided right-wing campaigns since 1988, when he destroyed the reputation of Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for president, to benefit Vice President George H.W. Bush. This laid the groundwork for master practitioners such as Karl Rove, the chief architect of George W. Bush’s campaigns, who was fired by Bush’s father for dirty tricks. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff,” Atwater told Alexander Lamis, a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University, as recounted in his book Southern Politics in the 1990s.1 “I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other,” Atwater told Lamis. “You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’” Atwater remained faithful to his sordid mission by finding original ways to fan racial fears. Due largely to Atwater’s well-conceived slurs, we never had a President Dukakis. Atwater later recognized the Pandora’s box his crowbar had pried opened. He wrote in Life magazine shortly before his death, “I used to say that the President might be kinder and gentler, but I wasn’t going to be. How wrong I was. There is nothing more important in life than human beings.”2 Legend has it that he apologized to Dukakis, but it never happened, at least not directly. “If he did [apologize], I don’t know what he did and how he did it, I think he deserves a certain amount of credit for that. But in the meantime, unfor- PrOFiles in cOWardice — — — — — — 101 tunately, he kind of set the standard for these kinds of campaigns,” Dukakis told me. mICHeLe BaCHmann This Far Right publicity monger, a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota , is the Energizer Bunny of right-wing drivel. If a confederacy of dunces were ever formed, she would unanimously be elected its queen bee. She was reelected even after accusing Obama of holding anti-American views. Rambling incoherently in an interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, she launched into a McCarthy-like diatribe that news organizations should investigate Congress to “find out if they are pro-America...