How far down the barrel are the fundies scraping? Now they're using smears against Obama that have long since been debunked. Case in point--Friday's edition of Sandy Rios in the Morning on American Family Radio. While talking with a caller about whether Islam is the "whore of Babylon," Rios went into an ugly anti-Obama tirade.
Rios declared Obama was not only a "Marxist," but also a Marxist whose "sympathies are most definitely with Islam." The evidence? According to Rios, Obama said himself that "whenever there is a dispute about where I’m going to come down, I’m always going to come down on the side of Islam." She was referring to a quote supposedly in "Dreams From My Father" in which Obama supposedly said, "I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction." People for the American Way got a clip.
There's one problem--the quote isn't there. Here's what Obama really said:
Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.
Rios was reading off a quote that was in a chain email that circulated around wingnut-land in 2008. Politifact rated it as
"False," though by all rights it should have been "Pants on Fire."
Is this the best these people can do? Well, then again, we're talking about a woman who considers stochastic terrorism to be "words of life."