Christian Right fears of Obama - 2008 looking at 2012

James Dobson's Focus on the Family Action published a gloom-and-doom letter during the election in 2008 about the dreadful future awaiting us if Obama were elected. Here are some quotes from this wingnut classic, here from the World Nut Daily site, entitled "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America". This first one is heartbreaking to read now:

In his first week in office, Obama followed President Clinton’s precedent and fired all 93 U.S. attorneys, replacing them with his own appointments, including the most active members of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). President Obama argued this was not a selective political action like what President Bush had done, because Obama had fired all of them, conservatives and liberals alike.

The Justice Department soon began to file criminal and civil charges against nearly every Bush administration official who had any involvement with the Iraq war.37 During his campaign, Senator Obama said, “What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued.”38 In order to facilitate these proceedings, President Obama rescinded President Bush’s executive order that had prevented presidential papers from being released, and millions of pages of previously secret White House papers were posted on the Internet. ACLU attorneys have spent four years poring over these papers looking for possible violations of law. Dozens of Bush officials, from the Cabinet level on down, are in jail, and most of them are also bankrupt from legal costs.

Let's just say that prediction was spectacularly wrong.

... As Vice President Joe Biden had predicted on Oct. 20, 2008, some hostile foreign countries "tested" President Obama in his first few months in office. The first test came from Russia. In early 2009 they followed the pattern they had begun in Georgia in 2008 and sent troops to occupy and re-take several Eastern European countries, starting with the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. President Obama appealed to the United Nations (UN), taking the same approach as he had in his initial statements when Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008 and he said, "Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint, and to avoid an escalation to full scale war," and "All sides should enter into direct talks on behalf of stability in Georgia, and the United States, the United Nations Security Council, and the international community should fully support a peaceful resolution to this crisis," But Russia sits on the Security Council, and no UN action has yet been taken.

Then in the next three years Russia occupied additional countries that had been previous Soviet satellite nations, including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria, with no military response from the U.S. or the UN. Meetings of NATO heads of state have severely condemned Russia’s actions each time but they could never reach consensus on any military action. Liberal TV commentators in both the US and Europe have uniformly expressed deep regret at the loss of freedom of these countries but have also observed that "the U.S. cannot be the world’s policeman."

Their view of Latin America is comic-book silly:

President Obama has also moved to deepen U.S. ties and U.S. trade with Communist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia, regimes that had long enjoyed the favor of far-left factions in the Democratic Party. Several other Latin American countries now seem ready to succumb to insurgent Communist revolutionary factions funded and armed by millions of petrodollars from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

And if fantasy can be dishonest, this is a good example. Let's just say it's a preposterous scenario:

In mid-2010 Iran launched a nuclear bomb which exploded in the middle of Tel Aviv, destroying much of that city. They then demanded that Israel cede huge amounts of territory to the Palestinians, and after an anguished all-night cabinet
meeting, Israel’s Prime Minister agreed. Israel is now reduced to a much smaller country, hardly able to defend itself, and its future remains uncertain. President Obama said that he abhorred what Iran had done and he hoped that the UN would unanimously condemn this crime against humanity. He also declared that the U.S. would be part of any international peacekeeping force if authorized by the UN, but the Muslim nations in the UN have so far prevented any UN action.

This one is almost funny to read now. Or just sad:

The new Congress under President Obama passed a nationalized "single provider" health care system, in which the U.S. government is now the provider of all health care in the United States, following the pattern of nationalized medicine the United Kingdom and Canada. The great benefit is that medical care is now free for everyone -- if you can get it. Now that health care is free it seems that everybody wants more of it. The waiting list for prostate cancer surgery is 3 years. The waiting list for ovarian cancer is 2 years. Just as the Canadian experience had shown prior to 2008 with its nationalized health care, so now in the US only a small number of MRIs are performed — only 10% of what they were in the U.S. in 2008 – because they are just too expensive, and they turn out to discover more problems that need treatment, so they are almost never authorized.

It's worth noticing that the writer's Christian priority was not to see that people without health insurance get it. Their Christian priority was to oppose any such program and instead to defend the 2008 framework. And oppose a new program with dishonest scare tactics, at that.

Michael Lind's article Is Barack Obama a socialist? Salon 11/01/08 (accessed 10/31/08) provided some useful, quick antidotes in real time to some of the crazier accusations in the "2012" paper.

Tags: christian right, christianism, radical right