Busy

You can always count on AOL-Huffington's Fashion Magazine. When its publishers and editors aren't doing public relations work for Christina Hendricks's dress maker, or running anti-Iranian propaganda written up directly by the State Department's Undersecretary for Lazy Lies, you can count on them for a strained, melodramatic indignation at the slightest hint of unsanitary political language:

"As we learn about the man who shot bullets into the living quarters of the White House, an unnerving fact has emerged: The shooter believed that he was on a personal mission from God and that President Obama is the anti-Christ."

I don't know if there's a god or not. You don't know. Huffington's writer doesn't know. And the millions and millions of people who rifle up in the name of Jesus, Vishnu, Allah or the Nichiren mantra don't have a fucking clue either. But, it's not like it's all that surprising that people believe that the divine fucks around in human affairs and gets a stiffy at the prospect of dead infidels. This is kind of what religion is about. And I don't mean the dreamy, perfect religion of endless love what belongs to every true Scotsman who ever got it in his head to insist that the maker of the universe has a crush on him. I mean the historical religions of the world. Death dealing, fulminating, damning, castrating, witch burning, finger cracking, slave trafficking and raping is what religions have accomplished, and what apologists for faith have justified, since the first wet slab of clay had the first symbol for a bull god incised into its surface.

It's hardly "unnerving" that another god-sot with access to a murder tool put one and one together and gave credence to the voices in his head.

The attack on the White House and the first family is the result of an almost casual use by President Obama's political enemies of iconic religious imagery.

Sure it is. This guy was out to kill the whole treasured, innocent and unsuspecting "first family" - you know, those firsts among equals - because Obama has political enemies who condemn him with unfavorable religious symbolism. It's not because the whole five thousand year history of recorded religious belief is an unrelenting record of deceit, manipulation, lies, false dichotomies, double binds, hysterical breaks, rape rackets, slavery, child abuse, crusade, jihad, holy war, peonage, degradation and other behaviors which harm and warp their victims for life.

It was "political enemies" who made this man drive up to one of the most heavily guarded imperial residences on the planet and take an utterly quixotic shot at one of its windows.

The shots are a violent echo of the 2008 election when the rumor of Obama being "The One" surfaced through an ad by the McCain campaign. As Mara Vanderslice, then of the Matthew 25 Network, who now works in Obama's Faith Office, wrote:

'At best, this ad implies that those who plan to support Senator Obama are looking for a new savior or a replacement Messiah. But many are reading it even more darkly as an attempt to portray Obama as an anti-Christ figure.'

So, let's see how this works: Candidate Obama, who steeped his campaign rhetoric in the overt symbolism of an aggressive and evangelical Christianity, who called on the same God that allegedly enjoys the ripping open of the wombs of his enemies, and the dashing of children's heads against rocks, the god who sends bears to murder children for the crime of mocking a Biblical inquisitor's balding pate, this candidate was targeted - no less - by the damaging, frightful of words his political opponents, who, in a surprising breach with custom, used similar religious rhetoric to call his character and mission into question? Is that about right?

Yeah, I could see how that would be truly awful. And how, several years later, it would be exactly echoed by a single gunman with the voice of God rattling around in his head and with no apparent plan to elude the authorities. Of course there's a causative relationship. It's not like the President has done anything untoward or reprehensible in the intervening years. It was the rhetoric of his political enemies that done it, obviously.

As the 2012 campaign gears up, we are once again faced with the prospect of sinister religious rhetoric that paints opponents with hyper-charged and potentially lethal brushes. The case of Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez proves that words matter with potentially horrific results.

I shudder at the thought. I suspect you, dear readers, have already reached for your security blankets. Because what's genuinely frightening in this big, bad world of ours is political and religious rhetoric. Words which are so "hyper-charged" that they unleash a storm of lethal brushes.

This case has certainly led to horrific results. I mean, can you imagine what would have happened if he'd broken two windows. Or if the evil thought demons unleashed by Obama's political opponents had resulted in a new and insidious website devoted to discovering signs of Obama's apostasy as revealed in a Jesus faced slice of pizza? And, I'm loathe to even put to words the image of a bullet of sinister rhetoric piercing the shattered heart of a political ally, breaking his will in an act of reprehensible verbal terrorism, and preventing the passage of the only "jobs" bill that can save the planet.

Let me say this as clearly as I can with my head still attached: President Obama is NOT the anti-Christ.

No doubt, he's not. He's too busy for all that. Obama is a man with a lot on his plate. Between handing millions of captive clients to predatory insurance companies, compromising with his alleged "political enemies" to criminalize or price-out abortions for anyone who isn't wealthy or the rapist son of a Senator Whatshisname, orchestrating the overthrow of aging dictators who fail to completely neoliberalize, saber rattling at Iran, providing cover for an Israeli strike on the same, transferring billions to Arab client states who do play ball so that they can crush their restless dissidents, prosecuting the drug war more zealously than his predecessor, doubling down on the incarceration racket, and collaborating with his "political enemies" again, this time to punish the poor and the working classes with higher use taxes and austerity, he's been somewhat pre-occupied with winning the bet he had with Petraeus and Panetta that he could kill more non-combatants with sky death robots in three years than that no-talent scrub, Georgie Boy Bush, could do in over the course of eight.

Of course he's not the anti-Christ. He doesn't have the time for a minor gig like that.