Wow! A Manchurian Candidate for Our Times!

With the Cold War dead and gone, the Right Wing needs new enemies. Thankfully, we've got the Muslims. That's right, now having any sort of Muslim background or even sounding like you have a Muslim background is enough to make anyone ask, "Are you now, or have you ever been, a Muslim?" But really, we need a whole mythology to build around this new threat, in the same way that we built all sorts of story-telling devices around the Cold War. Insight Magazine, a right-wing racist magazine connected to the right-wing racist Washington Times (you'll have to look them up, because I won't hyperlink to fascist publications), has revived that oldie-but-goodie, The Manchurian Candidate, in regards to Barack Obama (omigod! it sounds like "osama"!). It's a great plot device (the Kevin Costner thriller No Way Out used it as a subplot), but it had showed its age after the fall of the Soviet Union (although Bush got some legs out of it when he deployed it against former Vietnam War POW John McCain back in 2000).

Today, though, we can revive it in service of the "Global War on Terror" (TM) that's little more than an excuse to spend loads and loads of money on welfare for the military industrial complex and quasi-fascist friends who back in the 1980's ran "Survivalist Camps" but now run "Security Firms." So Insight Magazine reported that Senator Barack Obama attended a radical Islamic school in Indonesia as a child, making him the posterboy for the New World Order's Manchurian Candidate. CNN, however, claims to have debunked this story:

But reporting by CNN in Jakarta, Indonesia and Washington, D.C., shows the allegations that Obama attended a madrassa to be false. CNN dispatched Senior International Correspondent John Vause to Jakarta to investigate.
He visited the Basuki school, which Obama attended from 1969 to 1971. "This is a public school. We don't focus on religion," Hardi Priyono, deputy headmaster of the
Basuki school, told Vause. "In our daily lives, we try to respect religion, but we don't give preferential treatment."
Vause reported he saw boys and girls dressed in neat school uniforms playing outside the school, while teachers were dressed in Western-style clothes.

Thanks for clearing that up, but in the meantime the right-wing blather machine, including that of the sad second banana Glenn Beck on CNN, was in full-swing, with Fox News repeating the allegations as often as they could without sounding too elated not to have to be covering the indictment of yet another highly placed Republican operative.

Interestingly enough, Insight Magazine attributes their story to some unnamed (what a surprise) source in the Hillary Clinton campaign. Of course, the right wing also attributed Vincent Foster's suicide (which they usually put in scare quotes: "suicide") to Hillary Clinton, too.

I'm willing to bet this story will not go away during either the primary or the general elections.