Despite President Barack Obama's weakened political position, as epitomized by the drubbing Democrats took in the mid-term elections, when many of his Democratic Party colleagues avoided him like, well . . . the plague, do not expect conservatives to ease up on the attacks. Swift boating Obama, one of the longest-lasting conservative smear campaigns in history, will continue unabated as Republicans gear up to lead Congress and set the stage for the 2016 presidential election.
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Swift Boat Veterans for Truth get, and deserve, a lot of credit for helping sink Senator John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. Television ads and a bestselling book titled Unfit for Command, "circulated innuendoes, dubious claims and falsehoods about ... Kerry's patriotism and whether he deserved three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star for service in the US Navy during the Vietnam War," The Jerusalem post has reported. After the Kerry debacle, swift boating became part of the political vernacular, coming to mean a campaign of dishonest, unfair, and unreasonable attacks on a political candidate.
From the time Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic Party primaries, and began his journey to the White House, an assortment of conservative activists, Christian Right groups, Republican Party regulars, right wing think tanks, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and numerous right wing pundits and radio talk-show hosts, launched what is now one of the longest-running smear campaigns in history; think of it as comparable the Broadway run of Cats.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, a political action committee, with ties to the Republican Party, tried to re-employ the swift boating strategy against Obama. Similar to four years earlier, the campaign was highlighted by the publication of a bestselling book called The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, which aimed to brand Obama as having a "messiah" complex, along with "extensive connections with Islam."
Early attacks branded Obama as a Muslim who was born in Kenya; therefore he wasn't an American citizen and was constitutionally unqualified for the presidency. Birther fantasies, advanced by Donald Trump and others, became a Tea Party mantra, inflaming certain parts of the American electorate and eventually forced Obama show his Hawaiian birth certificate.
There was Obama the Socialist, Obama the Emperor, and certain elements of the Religious Right labeled Obama as the Anti-Christ.
Team Obama fought back, the public didn't buy the swift boating, and right-wing funders, 501 (c)(4) organizations, 527s, and political action committees, failed to get traction, as Obama easily beat Senator John McCain.
By the 2012 presidential race, swift boating, once the tactic of a juggernaut of media-savvy veterans, public relations firms and advertising agencies, multi-millionaires, radio talk show hosts and conservative pundits galore, ultimately devolved into a bunch of row-boaters desperately paddling against the tide.
However, that didn't stop Obama-phobes from savaging the president.
The Atlantic reported that "Veterans for a Strong America, a political action group led by Joel Arends, a lawyer and veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, released an ad attacking Obama for exploiting the killing of Osama bin Laden."
Judson Phillips, president of the for-profit Tea Party Nation, sent e-mail to his supporters, demanding Obama "release [his] medical records to prove he's not a drug addict who smoked crack and had gay sex with a lifelong con-man."
Conservative propagandist Dinesh D'Souza, produced 2016: Obama's America, a movie that savaged Obama on a number of fronts, was roundly panned by most critics, yet drew conservative audiences and became the second largest grossing political documentary of all time.
During an interview with Focus on the Family's citizenlink.com promoting , D'Souza said: "Obama is kind of a mysterious figure - and I'm not just referring to his personal mysteries. There are a lot of personal mysteries, such as what was his SAT score for getting into college? Unknown. What were his grades at Columbia University? Unknown. Who were his friends at Columbia? Unknown. What was his GPA? Unknown. What was his LSAT score to get into law school? Unknown. Who were his girlfriends that he dated? Unknown, except for one."
That was then; this is then, too
These days, the plagues of conservative misinformation and disinformation campaigns continue. And, there continues to be lots to shout about.
In a recent press release titled "From America's Pastors to President Obama and Congressional Leaders: Defend America not Islam," the American Pastors Network (APN), which describes itself as "a national network that provides Bible-based and constitutionally consistent analysis and recommendations on matters of public policy," claimed that the "Obama Administration['s] stand against ISIS and other terrorist groups is neither serious nor compelling."
APN declared that "the Obama Administration must quit coddling the advance of Islam and get serious in defending of Christians and Jews against persecution and using all necessary force to end the increasing acts of terrorism."
With the emergence of Ebola in West Africa, mega-church Pastor John Hagee recently accused the president of bringing Ebola to our shores: "Our president is dead set on dividing Jerusalem. God is watching, and He will bring America into judgment," Hagee said on a recent broadcast of Hagee Hotline. "There are grounds to say judgment has already begun because he, the president, has been fighting to divide Jerusalem for years now. We are now experiencing the crisis of Ebola.
"We have a crisis in our economy," Hagee went on. "We are worried on every hand that we are going to be attacked by radical Islam, and there are some very rational voices saying we are their next target. We are a nation that has a crisis of leadership. We are in chaos, in crisis. Anarchy is running our nation in Ferguson, Missouri." For more from Hagee, see: Ridiculous Pastor John Hagee: Ebola is God’s Judgment on America for Trying to ‘Divide Jerusalem’ @ http://www.truth-out.org/...
In a new book titled Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth, longtime conservative popular radio talk show host Michael Savage maintains that Obama is aiming to foment a civil war.
As David Neiwert pointed out in a column at Crooks And Liars, "In recent months, though, Savage has been ratcheting up attacks to extraordinary levels, claiming that President Obama is trying to wipe out Americans by allowing migrant children to bring disease and culture across the border; that he is trying to bring an Ebola epidemic to the United States; and that soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder—who he called 'a bunch of losers'—are weaklings symptomatic of the forces he believes are destroying the country."