The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Freak Show

While reading what I hoped would be an informative article on Sen. Clinton's behind-the-scene worries and calculations, I ran across something troubling. Being relatively new to the vast right-wing conspiracy, I've sometimes worried that my masters/handlers/thinkers would leave me out of the loop. You know...forget to send me the days talking points, fail to tell me which minority group to beat up on this week, etc.

Today it happened. There's been a name change, and apparently I didn't get the memo. It seems that we are no longer the vast right-wing conspiracy:

Both men lost control of their public images to the right-wing freak show — that network of operatives and commentators working mostly outside of the mainstream media — and ultimately lost their elections as many voters came to see them as elitist, out-of-touch, phony, and even unpatriotic.

Obama is a much less familiar figure than Kerry or Gore, with a life story that is far more exotic, who is coming out of a political milieu in Chicago politics that is far more liberal.

The freak show has already signaled its early lines of attack on Obama. Polls show a significant percentage of Americans believe — falsely — that he is a Muslim. Voter interviews reveal widespread unease with minor and seemingly irrelevant questions like why he does not favor American flag pins on his lapel. Nor have we heard the last about Wright and his fulminations.

Here will be the real kitchen sink: every damaging comment or association from Obama’s past, mixed together with innuendo and downright fiction, to portray him as an an exotic character of uncertain values and weak patriotism.

Obama’s advisers say they are not naive about freak show attacks. Their response is that Obama’s appeal to a new brand of politics, and his personal poise and self-confidence, will allow him to transcend attacks and stereotypes in ways that Gore and Kerry could not.

Emphasis mine.

Yes, we are now the right-wing freak show. Concerns about a potential Commander in Chief supporting a Kenyan politician who sought to institute sharia law in Kenya is just a fear-mongering, anti-Muslim attack from the right-wing freak show. Skittishness over the fact that the potential leader of the free world has long-term and close associations with domestic terrorists, people who call Judaism a "gutter religion", and think America invented HIV to kill African-Americans is nothing more than a freak show smear.

Good to know.