Recently, as though reason had entirely escaped our society as a whole, the general response to the accusations that presidential nominee Barack Obama was indeed a Muslim was that, no, he was in fact Christian and always had been. Of course, that has always been a readily available tidbit of data, but it took until just last week for prominent Republican Colin Powell to come out on Meet the Press and finally say something sensible that ostensibly should have been the original response to such an accusation:

“And so what if he was Muslim?”

Ah, yes, reason, we can has some. Now, with this subject mostly quelled in the mainstream media due to Powell’s strong reasoning skills in this situation, all is well.

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Oh, if only that were true. Not only has Obama been attacked as though his faith is in question, he has also been attacked as though his politics are in question.

Yes, the conservatives of this country have been bandying about that awful word of hatred. They’re calling Obama a S…
S…..

No, not Satanist, although, I hear Fox News thought McCain could have won the election if he had used that one. (Not to say he won’t win, it’s been a long time since America has had a legitimate election.)

Socialist.

Barack Obama is a socialist and he will bring those pinko commie freaks into the White House!

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Now, let me take a step back a moment. I’d like to share a film with you. It’s an Encyclopedia Britannica filmstrip from 1946. It’s about a nations path to Despotism. It is positively Foucaultian in nature, and is distressing to watch and realize the people of 1946 in this country were obviously more well informed than our current population. Despotism, of course, being any government where all power is consolidated either in one person or an extremely small group of people. Now, here is said film:

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Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I’d like to talk about the Respect Scale, which just so happens to be the first social scale discussed in this short film.

First of all, notice how respect (or the lack thereof) applies not only to race and religion, but also to political party. Strange, how it took until last week for one American to stand up for the Muslim religion, and yet, we have no one defending a certain specific political party from attack in this situation.

While Joe Biden defended comments recently from anchor Barbara West about whether Obama was indeed a Socialist, his best line of defense was a single line: “Is this a joke?”

Honestly, his answer was a good one, because it is utterly a joke to consider someone as centrist (in comparison to liberal socialists in other countries) as Obama to be a socialist. If Obama is the “bright center of the universe” then socialism is Tatooine, to make an un-needed Star Wars reference, but only such an astronomical distance can define such disparity in political ideologies.

However, no one has yet stood up to the country and said: “So what if he is socialist?” Has the Red Scare of the 1950’s returned? Or did it ever really leave?

We “fought communism and won,” or at least that’s how our educators like to frame the collapse of the Soviet Union, even though it truly slowly deflated like a flan in a cupboard, without need for external influence from the United States.

The Red Scare was the patently most absurd political theatre America has been put through (well, up until The War Against Terrorism [TWAT for short]), convincing Americans that socialism was not only anti-religion (which it is not, despite some communist regimes giving religion what-for.), but that the whole political and economic system was entirely dedicated to destroying America and its values. (Sounds familiar doesn’t it? No wonder, considering Donald Rumsfeld was involved in both the communist scare and the war against terrorism.)

The first was easier to instill in the population, pushing through quick legislation to add “In God We Trust” to our currency, to remind our citizens this is a Christian nation (not a Godless Atheist nation, nor apparently a Muslim nation.).

The second was more difficult and positively far more absurd because anyone with an ounce of sense realizes that nations are built from individuals, not from some hive-mind where every citizen of the nation knows that they have a distinct and specific purpose to which they all working toward. America would have had its citizens believe this, that you cannot trust anyone from a Communist nation, and anyone who is willing to consider themselves a socialist is not only a godless heathen but desperately wants to destroy your way of life.

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What is truly disgusting about all this, to me, as a bastard atheist, is that while we defend a religion that in many nations advocates the death penalty for non-Muslims and will stone to death women who are raped, we are unwilling to defend an economic and political agenda that simply says “Hey maybe since we’re all on this shitty rock spinning through space together we should stop acting like fucking animals and share instead of hoard.”

So, Colin Powell, do me one better, give socialists some respect. Don’t give us more reason to believe we’re one pussy-hair’s width away from falling into full-on Despotism, instead, say what no one else has had the balls to say:

“So what if he is Socialist?”