In the annals of douchebaggery, it's sometimes hard to choose a king, but former tennis player turned rightwing lunatic, Selwyn Duke, certainly made a play for the crown this morning. There has been no end of scared right-wingers willing to impugn Obama by oh-so-slyly asserting that he is a Muslim or, like Franklin Graham this last week, that he was somehow born a Muslim. But Duke, writing for the ironically named American Thinker blog (no I won't link to that drivel) makes Franklin Graham look like a paragon of tolerance.
You see, Mr. Duke thinks calling Obama a Muslim is too good for him.
In reality, calling Obama a "Muslim" gives him too much credit. As G.K. Chesterton once said, "We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end." The truth, however, is that few people have thought thoroughly and to a definite end. And Obama is no exception. He hasn't even thought matters through enough to understand the folly of statism. Even more to the point, he is a moral relativist, a position the antithesis of any absolutist faith. Inherent in Islam is that belief that Allah, not man, has authored right and wrong and that, consequently, it isn't a matter of opinion. Thus, Obama cannot truly believe in Islam -- or in Christianity or Judaism, for that matter.
So, according to this thinker, Obama can't have any religious faith whatsoever. But that's okay because what the POTUS most reminds Mr. Duke of is Hitler. And pagans. He knows this because Obama has feigned his Christian faith because... Well, apparently because Hitler feigned a belief in Christianity. He then assures us that he's not really comparing Obama to Hitler and Himmler, after all.
(If some are upset at a comparison between Hitler and Obama, know that I'd never call the president a National Socialist. He's an international socialist. Also, Hitler was patriotic.)
I'm so relieved to know that, as an American, Mr. Duke would prefer Hitler--a mass- murdering sociopath, authoritarian nut job and ruiner of the Charlie Chaplin mustache--to a democratically elected, compassionate and intellectually engaged, but unfortunately brown, president. Also, Musselini, Tojo and Franco were patriotic. And Hussein. Oh, and Bush. For some reason, dictators and would-be despots seem to think it helps.
So he's not a religious Muslim. But a cultural one? Why it must be because Obama had the audacity of attending a school in Indonesia.
And are Obama's passions surprising? He spent some of his formative years in the world's most populous Muslim country, Indonesia, where he was registered as a Muslim in both schools he attended and sometimes prayed on Fridays in a mosque. Moreover, there is another factor, one most people don't consider.
I went to Jamaica once and ate jerked chicken and raw sugar cane and slept under a mosquito net. I visited a plantation house, and a bunch of other places while I was there. It's funny, I never realized that I've been a Rastafarian ever since. Fifteen years and you'd think I would have figured it out, but I guess it does explain the dreadlocks and the burnt sage.
But what's this about another factor? Oh, right. Obama is a black man and black men like Muhammad Ali convert to Islam because Christianity is the white man's faith and they embrace Islam as a way of slighting whitey. But see, Obama is even more interested in slighting whitey than even his fellow dark people.
I sense that Obama is a certain kind of person, one much like Hitler -- who wanted to create a new German pagan religion with himself at its center -- in a particular sense. This type of person essentially says the following to God: "The universe just isn't big enough for the two of us." And his little world certainly isn't, filled to all corners as it is with his bloated, power-hungry ego.
Two things you've got to remember. One: he isn't comparing Obama to Hitler, since that would be unfair. To Hitler. Two: there's not room for both pointless pablum and actual thought since Mr. Duke's mind is filled to all corners with his bloated, power-hungry ego. Also, Mr. Duke is clearly psychic since he knows intimately what everyone says to God.
But I'm psychic too.
I sense that Selwyn Duke is a certain kind of person, one much like Joseph Goebbels -- who knew that the value of really good propaganda didn't lie in it's truthfulness but it's effectiveness. See? Psychic. (Oh by the way I'm not comparing Duke to a Nazi. Goebbels was purposefully vindictive, racist, xenophobic and classist. Selwyn Duke is just a tool. Also, Goebbels had talent.)
The Goebbels wannabe then uses his vast psychic experience to determine that Obama is not a man of faith, at all, and is also opposed to all that is good in the world.
It is, again, unwise to give Obama too much credit. Good faith is defined as "an act of the will informed by the intellect," and any kind of faith requires submission to something higher than yourself. Obama is neither that intellectual nor that humble. But all humans have passions, and his aren't hard to discern. He is anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Christian (the traditional variety), anti-white, and anti-life. He is more comfortable dining with Bill Ayers than with the Queen of England, more internationalist than nationalist, and perhaps more at home in Dar al-Islam than Dar al-Harb.
Well, his definition of faith at least explains what those Republicans were doing in that bondage-themed lesbian strip club; they were just being religious. That aside, if he was anti-white, why Biden? If anti-life, why have kids? Anti-American? Anti-Western? So he's in favor of east coast Canadians then. Never knew. But something else confuses me; if he was more internationalist than nationalist, wouldn't he be a lot happier having lunch with any European than with Bill Ayers? If he was so as anti-American as all of that, wouldn't he not only enjoy lunch with the Queen, but want her to be back in charge of her colonies?
But what gets me the most is use of Cicero.
He is a cultural traitor, and as Cicero said two thousand years ago, "A murderer is less to be feared."
Really, Cicero? The words of a philosopher from two millennia ago, justifying how our president is worse than a murderer? And here I was fairly certain that Cicero wasn't referring to Obama, but who can you trust? Accepted, verifiable history? Or an asshat? Clearly, Mr. Duke's psychic gland was acting up again, to be able to insert a thought into Cicero's brain and then use it to reinforce his own argument two thousand years later? Wow. I stand in awe of that level of douchebaggery. Long live the king.
SERIOUS ASIDE:
The idea that someone could be born a Muslim, simply because his father was Muslim, is patently absurd. My father is Wiccan and my mother is Baptist, yet I am neither. If the right-wingers are serious about this, though, they need only look to the Quran. According to the Prophet, all children are born into Islam and without sin of any kind but are led astray by their parents. Adam, Moses, Noah and Jesus are all Muslims, precisely because they were such good followers of God. That means that, yes, our president was born a Muslim, along with the other six billion plus inhabitants of Earth. Either that, or such a claim is nothing more or less than the same sort of claim that we are all of us God's children, that Vishnu is the creator of everything, or that Joan of Arc can be baptized as a Mormon long after her death.