Commenting about Glenn Beck's 2010 attacks on George Soros, Michelle Goldberg wrote:
Anti-Semitism, like all ideologies, tells a story about the world. It’s a story about almost occult Jewish power, about cabals that manipulate world events for their own gain. In classic anti-Semitic narratives, Jews control both the elites and the masses; they’re responsible for the communist revolution and the speculative excesses of capitalism. Their goal is to undermine society so that they can take over. Through the lens of anti-Semitism, social division, runaway inflation, and moral breakdown all make sense because they all have the same cause.
This, of course, is the tactic of the Nazis and most other anti-semitic hate groups and nationalist movements in the last 150 years
Now we see the right constantly shifting its complaints about Obama. On the one hand, he's a "Kenyan Socialist," who wants to redistribute wealth (see Plumber, Joe the); the "food stamp President" who wants to take your taxes and give them to those people; the evil socialist engineer of the "government takeover of health care."
But when the President proposes a pro-corporate or anti-New Deal policy, to the right he has confirmed that he is an elitist, Harvard-type, who wants to crush working Americans in favor of the wealthy.
Steve Benen notes this today in the post Can a President be radical socialist and a Wall Street shill? Republicans have been screaming for years for lower corporate tax rates. But last week, when the President proposed them, they didn't just reject the bargain (stimulus in exchange for the cuts); all of a sudden, they are Gus Hall, Saul Alinsky and Che Guevara. Benen, quoting Dana Milbank, notes, "GOP lawmakers now say they are the ones defending the "little guy" against an Obama administration beholden to corporate interests."
That noted Sans-Culotte, Bolshevik and Chavezista Paul Ryan grabs his megaphone, mounts the Sundial at Columbia 1968-style and declaims:
The president claims his economic agenda is for the middle class. But it's actually for the well-connected.
The President is such a shifty Chicago pol that not only does he wage class warfare.
He wages it from both sides. (See also -- Republicans demand "chained CPI," then call it a "shocking attack on seniors" when Obama says OK.)
As always, when this kind of "both ways" rhetoric surfaces, I'm reminded of the historic anti-semitism Michelle Goldberg described above.
Which of course leads to the conclusion that, contrary to the beliefs of high percentages of Republicans, President Obama is not a Muslim, but actually our first Jewish President.