BARACK OBAMA IS A MUSLIM!

No, he isn't. But more than a few people - primarily of the sort who feel that affiliation with a specific religion is a prerequisite for the Presidency - think he is. And quite a few people on Team McCain want you to believe that.

Just like they want you to believe that BARACK OBAMA IS THE ANTICHRIST! Or at least Nicolae Carpathia, the AntiChrist figure from the fundamentalist fiction Left Behind books. But somebody as good and honest and honorable as John McCain wouldn't actually try to tell you that, would he?



Yes. Yes he would.*

So far, all of McCain's attack ads seem to be aimed at a soft-headed demographic. Does he really think he'll find enough people stupid enough to believe him?

Yet even a third cousin of mine in the mountains of North Carolina, an independent-minded Democrat who voted for Gore in 2000 and Bush in 2004, said he can't bring himself to vote for Obama, either. Why? "Because I believe he is a Muslim," said my cousin. Not so, I said. He was raised a Christian and is a practicing Christian. My cousin shook his head. "I just don't believe him," he said.

- Christopher Dickey,"Southern Discomfort", Newsweek, August 11, 2008, page 25**

The people who are trying to replace the remainder of the Supreme Court with their activist judges - and this is the real prize that the NeoCon / TheoCon / Conservative / Republican party has its eyes on, as they've admitted during brief moments of honesty - the Karl Rove-schooled master manipulators, know that there are plenty of soft-headed people out there. After all, despite all the cheating and vote fraud in the last two elections, a lot of people actually legitimately voted for George W. Bush - some of them twice. So, yeah, the answer is yes.

Barack Obama is not a Muslim. Barack Obama is not the Anti-Christ.

No matter what you may have heard.


*Hmmm...even though this is "Paid for by John McCain 2008" and comes from his official site, there's no "I'm John McCain and I approve this message" at the end. Isn't official candidate approval a requirement these days? Is the campaign setting him up for plausible deniability? Or is this just a way to get an ad out there and pull it on a technicality once the heat is on and it becomes a news story?

...or is this really just a way of tricking people like me into posting yet another McCain ad? (My third one so far...)

**Note: The paragraph in the article preceding this one offers a theory as to why the "Barack Obama is a Muslim" meme resonates so strongly in certain quarters:

Dent argues that when Southerners criticize Obama, "They say, 'He's a Muslim, he's a mulatto Muslim, or quadroon Muslim … [only because] they don't want to use the old N word."