It's about policy

About one out of three New Jersy "conservatives" seem to think that Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, says TPM. About half of those think he has the number 666 on his scalp. To me, the idea that that many people can assert that the concept itself is rational is shocking enough, but of course, as Michael Steele assures us, it's certainly not a racial thing. That the same third believes he wasn't born in the US couldn't be other than a valid suspicion independent of his complexion either. Oh no, it's not about his color, it's about his policies and one certainly notices a lot of policy discussion amongst the pistol packing, Kalashnikov carrying crowd carrying signs calling for the murder of his children. It was about his policies quite a bit before anyone know what those policies might be.

"I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African American"

said former President Jimmy Carter yesterday. That's a massive understatement in my opinion.

"When a radical fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kinds of things are beyond the bounds,"

Indeed they were out of bounds some time ago and the early defensiveness of his attackers about "the race card" long before accusations of racism began to emerge suggests an awareness. At this point, I don't think any doubt remains as I don't think there has been such an irrational series of accusations and threats of violence since the Salem witch trials. Posters of Obama as an African warlord or as a Nazi in "teaparty" posters reek of racism.

It's inevitable that someone will comment that there are deranged Democrats and racist Democrats and stupid Democrats, fallacious defense though it might be. I'd like to ask just how many people showed up in protest of Bush's illegal actions carrying weapons and carrying signs demanding the death of the president, his wife and "stupid children."