Pull together a low-light year for Michael Savage and even those who already dislike the No. 8 radio talk-show host in the nation might be surprised at his eagerness to take the ugly low blow in an attempt to drum up ratings. “Obama is raping America. Obama is raping our values. Obama is raping our democracy.” Not enough? How about predicting a race war, fueled by resentment? “We’re gonna have a revolution in this country if this keeps up… the rage has reached a boil. If they keep pushing us around and if we keep having these schmucks running for office catering to the multicultural people who are destroying the culture of this country, the white male—the one without connections, the one without money—has nothing to lose…. He is still the majority, no one speaks for him, everyone craps on him, people use him for cannon fodder, and he has no voice whatsoever. You’re gonna find out that if you keep pushing this country around [that] there is an ugly side to the white male that has been suppressed for probably 30 years right now but it really has never gone away.”
John Storey / AP Photo
It turns out that “palling around with terrorists” was just preamble. It’s not just what Sarah Palin says but the position from which she speaks—the former vice-presidential nominee of the GOP earned Politifact’s inaugural “Lie of the Year”
award for her “death panels” Facebook post:
“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”
It was ugly and unhinged but undoubtedly effective. With one post, Sarah Palin derailed and deranged an entire summer’s debate over health-care reform.
“I hate Barack Obama. You say, well, you just mean you don’t like what he stands for. No, I hate the person. Oh, you mean you just don’t like his policies. No, I hate him… I am not going to pray for his good. I am going to pray that he dies and goes to hell.”
Here endeth the lesson at the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. That’s where Pastor Steven L. Anderson fired off a straight to the point sermon on Sunday, August 16, titled “Why I Hate Barack Obama.” He even offered parishioners a view into his own private Obama prayer: “Break his teeth, oh God, in his mouth, as a snail which melteth, let him pass away, like an untimely birth of a woman—that he thinks—he calls it a woman's right to choose, you know, he thinks it's so wonderful, he ought to be aborted. It ought to be, 'Abort Obama,' that ought to be the motto."
Anderson is obscure and deservedly so, but his outbursts capture the ugly tone of incitement. (One of his parishioners brought an AR-15 rifle to a protest outside an Obama rally in Arizona after hearing Anderson’s sermon.) And when Anderson yells that “Obama is overturning the U.S. Constitution… He is the revolutionary and it’s a socialist/communist revolution. We are the counter-revolutionaries saying no, we don’t want a change.” He is echoing the cries of talk-show hosts and Tea Party protesters in the Year of the Wingnut. It’s a sobering reminder that if a lunatic is shouting from the same hymnal in your amen corner, maybe it’s time to question the company you keep.
