The Devil is in the Details: MSM Misses McCain's Pandering to Paranoid Christians with Tall Tales of Obama as Antichrist
08/11/2008 - 2:00pm
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White
The collective eye-roll over Sen. John McCain's religious campaign ad attacking Obama's supposedly grand ego truly misses the point. While many are able to find a laugh in the idea that Obama was sent to the Earth by the devil, there are frightening numbers of people who may be buying into the idea.
McCain's seemingly innocuous ad called "The One" received a fair amount of media coverage. ABC News, The New York Times, and others derided the ad for "mocking" Obama as "Messianic." A McCain spokesperson picked up on this, passing off the ad as a kind of TGIF moment:
"Our intention to use a little bit of humor. I think campaigns can be mind-numbingly boring and brutal without a little bit of humor, so we're proud to use a little bit of humor at the end of the week, especially on a Friday."
Bruce Wilson, co-founder of TalkToAction.org, a Web site dedicated to "analyzing and discussing" the religious right, was not amused.
"I don't think it bodes well," Wilson said of the political implications of McCain's new ad. "It means a specific form of Christianity is becoming the idiom of politics."
While the media dutifully pointed out that the quotes from Obama used in the McCain campaign ad were actually jokes taken out of context, they failed to acknowledge the religious subgroup for which the ad was created.
In an analysis of the ad, Time Magazine got a little closer to the mark, pointing out the religious imagery with some degree of alarm. The article draws parallels between the ad and an underground Internet campaign to portray Obama as the Antichrist. The article also highlights language used in the ad similar to that of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins in the Left Behind book series, written about a modern time manifestation of the Book of Revelations. In the wildly popular series, the Antichrist comes in the form of Nicolae Carpathia, a worldly junior Senator who enjoys widespread popularity and preaches an ethos of peace and world unity.
(Continued here.)
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White
The collective eye-roll over Sen. John McCain's religious campaign ad attacking Obama's supposedly grand ego truly misses the point. While many are able to find a laugh in the idea that Obama was sent to the Earth by the devil, there are frightening numbers of people who may be buying into the idea.
McCain's seemingly innocuous ad called "The One" received a fair amount of media coverage. ABC News, The New York Times, and others derided the ad for "mocking" Obama as "Messianic." A McCain spokesperson picked up on this, passing off the ad as a kind of TGIF moment:
"Our intention to use a little bit of humor. I think campaigns can be mind-numbingly boring and brutal without a little bit of humor, so we're proud to use a little bit of humor at the end of the week, especially on a Friday."
Bruce Wilson, co-founder of TalkToAction.org, a Web site dedicated to "analyzing and discussing" the religious right, was not amused.
"I don't think it bodes well," Wilson said of the political implications of McCain's new ad. "It means a specific form of Christianity is becoming the idiom of politics."
While the media dutifully pointed out that the quotes from Obama used in the McCain campaign ad were actually jokes taken out of context, they failed to acknowledge the religious subgroup for which the ad was created.
In an analysis of the ad, Time Magazine got a little closer to the mark, pointing out the religious imagery with some degree of alarm. The article draws parallels between the ad and an underground Internet campaign to portray Obama as the Antichrist. The article also highlights language used in the ad similar to that of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins in the Left Behind book series, written about a modern time manifestation of the Book of Revelations. In the wildly popular series, the Antichrist comes in the form of Nicolae Carpathia, a worldly junior Senator who enjoys widespread popularity and preaches an ethos of peace and world unity.
(Continued here.)
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