Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [58]
Limbaugh, bolder than the rest, took the lead by openly taunting the media and daring them to call him a racist. On one show, he discussed a Los Angeles Times opinion piece titled “Obama the ‘Magic Negro.’” Limbaugh then proceeded to repeat the phrase “Barack the Magic Negro” twenty-seven times over the course of the show, eventually singing the words to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and predicted that the media would skewer him.80 He must not have received the reaction that he’d hoped for because he then had a conservative comedian record a full version of the song in the impersonated voice of Al Sharpton, which Limbaugh played repeatedly throughout the campaign.bb81
Ultimately, the right-wing media settled on two persecution politics tactics to challenge Obama’s candidacy. The first was to present Obama as an “affirmative action candidate,” to use Limbaugh’s words.82 Limbaugh found Obama’s candidacy so astounding that he surmised it had been arranged by a Soros-run anti-Clinton conspiracy to front a black candidate:
We know that George Soros is involved with Obama, but there’s somebody that’s putting the words in his mouth . . . There must be real animosity toward the Clintons at high levels of this party. To go with a veritable rookie whose only chance of winning is that he’s black.83
Glenn Beck, who eventually found the courage to express his inner racist, suggested that Hillary Clinton give Obama “an additional 5 percentage points just for the years of oppression.”84 Ann Coulter followed up by suggesting that “B. Hussein Obama’s” first big accomplishment was to be born “half-black.”bc85
Curiously, conservatives like Coulter make a big deal of the fact that Obama’s mother was white, as if to prove that Obama didn’t deserve the affirmative action from which he allegedly benefitted. Limbaugh called Obama a “half-minority” and a “Halfrican-American.”86 (Conservatives must have loved the “Halfrican” knee-slapper because various right-wing talk show hosts used it repeatedly.) Fox’s Monica Crowley even denied Obama his half-blackness. She promoted a fiction that “Barack Obama is not black African, he is Arab African.” (Does Crowley know what Arabs look like?) She continued, “And yet, this guy is campaigning as black and painting anybody who dares to criticize him as a racist. I mean, that is—it is the biggest con I think I’ve ever seen.”87 (Does Crowley know what a con is?)
The second strategy, which soon became the primary one, was to project racial hatred onto Obama by turning him into an “angry black man.” This was a difficult trick to pull off because “angry” is not an adjective that comes to mind when describing Obama. The first attempts relied on guilt-by-association to tie Obama to people who were much more obviously “angry blacks.” Fox News’s Sean Hannity led the charge. First, he invited a guest onto Hannity & Colmes who asserted that Obama’s church was “more like a cult or an Aryan Brethren Church . . . They refer to themselves as an African people, and that somewhat disturbs me from the viewpoint of, well, do they consider themselves Americans? Do they consider themselves Christians? Are they worshipping Christ? Are they worshipping African things black?”bd88 Another guest compared the church to the Ku Klux Klan.89
Next Hannity reported that Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., had praised Louis Farrakhan, the paranoid anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam, which led him to conclude that Obama “associated” with Farrakhan.90 This logic relies on the transitive property of association—if A associates with B, and B associates with C, then A associates with C. If you then apply the associative property of belief—if A associates with B, and B believes X, then A believes X—you’ll see that Obama is in fact the paranoid anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam.
But combining the transitive property of association with the associative