Remember when AP ran a photo similar to this one featuring Dear Leader George Dubya? Remember how the progblogs (correctly) screamed for weeks about that gross exercise in Messianic imagery?Do you think any progs will complain about this? Naw. It's very, very different, y'see.
7 comments:
"Agnus Dei, Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere Nobis"
As I recall, the next line is "Dona nobis pacem." In other words, let's get the troops home from Iraq AND Afghanistan NOW.
I would have expected this phenomena to have settled down a bit by now. But I guess it's too soon.
See: obamamessiah.blogspot.com for an ongoing documentation of this sort of fandom. It's like the whole Trekkies thing. Kinda cute, kinda silly, and a little bit scary sometimes.
Oh Hell. I see another commemorative plate design here.
As was documented on the above-referenced blog:
"... a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany ... and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama"
- Barack Obama, Lebanon, New Hampshire. January 7, 2008.
It's one thing for someone else to say that about you, but for you to say that about yourself?!?
(And lest anyone think it was just in the heat of the moment, he said the same thing on at least one other occasion I can recall, in North Carolina.)
I asked a Christian relative what she thought of him saying that, and her first reaction was:
"He thinks he's God?"
Now, he may not think that he is God, or that his rhetoric has such power that it inexorably inspires a revelation equal to those of divine origin, or even that his election was divinely ordained, but if he doesn't, then that means he was cynically and calculatedly using the natural human hunger for the spiritual to attain political power, in the worst tradition of tyrants.
Given that choice, for all of sakes, I would rather think that he was merely possessed by delusion and a massive ego.
Sergei Rostov
EricL
As a trekkie I must protest. Even the few of us that forgot this was all fiction, didn't have this worshipful attitude - obsessed as they may have been. Science was always big with trekkies, rather than religion.
OTOH I have seen videos from some Obama rallies. Nothing cute or silly there, just plain scary.
Re what Edge said:
I second that about Trekkies; while I've heard tell that some called him "The Great Bird of the Galaxy" - I never heard this myself, depsite being one my entire life - it was pretty much just admiration for his vision that someday we would make an end to war, prejudice, poverty, hunger greed, and so forth, and that technology would not just be the agent of all these things, but be only used for good.
If you search over on Mydd, you can find a firsthand account of one of those rallies - people chanting, swaying, fainting, and all that - scary. (You also see some of why the fainting occurred: an hour and a half in the cold followed by an hour and a half crammed together in the heat with no water...the latter not really necesaary for security reasons, so it seems the combination was deliberate in order to produce physical and mental/emotional duress (the two components research shows are necessary for successful brainwashing).
In contrast, of all the above, I've only seen swaying at an sf-con, and that was when someone had had too much to drink. :)
Sergei Rostov
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