The American left claims to hate how Ann Coulter makes a fortune with calculated outrageousness. What will they say about Mark Morford? This San Francisco Chronicle columnist has been skewered by MRC's Culture and Media Institute for mourning how America may be taken over by a new generation of “easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings.” He described critics of the atheist movie The Golden Compass as “the creepy clowns in organized religion’s gloomy circus, all scrunched brows and gnarled hands and so much repressed sexuality it would make a porn star wince.”
Of course, he is a Barack Obama fan. Who in the San Francisco elite isn’t?
Predictably, he is outraged that conservatives would play around with the name Barack Hussein Obama, pronouncing it “over and over again on Fox News and at McCain rallies and across Wal-Mart's loudspeakers so trailer park denizens across Bush's 'Merka will get even more confused and panicky and start loading up the bunker with Ding-Dongs and Coors just in case the Muslim radicals take over.”
(At this point he links to what appears to be a "news" article in the Chronicle by staff writer Joe Garofoli describing how Cincinnati radio host Bill Cunningham pronouncing Obama’s middle name "highlighted a probable attack strategy, should Obama get the Democratic nomination: American xenophobia." Garofoli incorrectly claimed Rush Limbaugh regularly recites Obama’s full name, and worried that these tactics will test how Americans fear foreigners in a post-Sept. 11 world. He insisted "Obama is a Christian who never worshiped at a mosque and was raised in a secular household. He attends the United Church of Christ.")
To Morford, conservatives are troglodytes who are so intellectually impaired that they believe that Obama will lead to (a) rampant lesbianism and (b) an Islamic theocracy. How does that mesh, precisely?
No, the problem for GOP strategists is not how to inflame the troglodytic, Limbaugh/Coulter-grade sects of the party who, assuming Obama goes the distance, are already hugely terrified of the notion of a black liberal president, given how he'll surely be a slippery slope straight to gay marriage and rampant lesbianism in schools and hourly shriekings to Allah as everyone's forced to give up their guns and drive a hybrid moped to the tofu store.
Morford expects an unbelievable flood of mud from the right wing, playing off America's deep-set racism:
Which leaves us with the one true hot button, the ugly issue everyone expects: race. This is the card the right will have to play very, very carefully, as the slightest slip-up in demonizing Obama's skin color and playing to America's nastiest, deep-set racist tendencies will offend millions and only make Republicans look like the party of old, white, sexist, racist, classist warmongering men they very much are.
But rest assured, if the past eight years are any indication, play it they will. For one thing, the GOP is now counting on the cultural discord that's been simmering for years between the Latino and African American communities. While it's hard to imagine Latinos flocking to the Republicans, given the party's hateful, isolationist immigration agenda, McCain is immigration-friendly, and Obama is, well, black. Will it be enough to sway millions of Latinos McCain's way? Does the right even have the power structure in place to try?
Because here's the thing: When they stole two elections for Bush, the brutal, homophobic conservative machine was tightly organized, had focus, mountains of cash, Karl Rove, the backing of a very nefarious, deeply inbred team of ultra-wealthy war hawks hell-bent on taking over the nation and ruling with a flaccid peni- ... er, iron fist.
(Hat tip: Motherbelt)
