MSNBC's occasional Christianity "expert" Frank Schaeffer has come truly unglued with a dreadfully overwrought blog post called “The Slow Motion Lynching of President Barack Obama.” On Twitter he boasted “My blog went global closing in on twenty thousand shares/likes”. There's probably a lot of overlap with the "Bring Back Bashir" crowd. Bashir liked putting on Frank's rants.
Schaeffer insisted he’s a wiser white man now about American racism, that “I’ve changed because if this country will lynch a brilliant, civil, kind, humble, compassionate, moderate, articulate, black intellectual we’re lucky enough to have in the White House, we’ll lynch anyone. What chance does an anonymous black man pulled over in a traffic stop have of fair treatment when the former editor of the Harvard Law Review is being lynched?”
Let's dig into the most passionate (crazy-sounding) section, where he yells at Chris Matthews on the television (beneath the historic picture on the right):
One famous liberal commentator wrote a book on how Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil [sic] could disagree and still be friends. Why, he asked on many a TV show promoting his book, couldn’t President Obama be like that? Because, I yelled at the screen, those two men were white Irish Americans and part of a ruling white oligarchy.
Because, I yelled, you might as well ask why Nelson Mandela didn’t talk his jailers in South Africa into seeing reason.
Because, I yelled, the President is black and anytime he’s reached out he’s pulled back a bloody stump.
Because, I yelled, liberal white commentators have been as bothered by a black man in the White House, who’s smarter than they are as much as right wing bigots have been bothered.
Because, I yelled, President Obama has been lied about, attacked, vilified, and disrespected since Day One.
Because, I yelled, this country may have passed laws so blacks can vote and eat in a white man’s world, but in our hearts are stuck in a place more like 1952 than 2013.
We’ve been watching a slow motion lynching of a moderate brilliant family man, a father, and faithful loving husband. The Republicans in Congress are so dedicated to lynching the President they’ve been willing to shut down our government and risk the future of our economy.
Evangelical “Christians” have been so stuck on putting a rope around this black man’s neck they have denied their faith and been the backbone of the lying Tea Party who spawned the so-called “birthers” and the rest of the white people driving our news cycle.
Roman Catholic bishops have denied their tradition of helping the poor and been so eager to destroy this president they aligned themselves with white Evangelical bigots and tried to stop health care reform, all because the President wants to give women a fair shake. The bishops even called him “anti-religious” because the president wants insurers to pay for contraception.
This is a slow motion lynching of a black man who is so moderate and centrist that he favored Wall Street enough so that the Left is all over his case. He’s so “radical” and “leftist” and “hates America” so much, and “coddles our enemies” so much, that he killed bin Laden and used drones to kill our enemies. He’s such a “socialist” that he presided over the revival of our economy from the worst recession since the Great Depression, and led us to the present day stock market boom. President Obama is such a “Marxist” that he tried to give insurance – not socialized medicine – to all Americans.
President Obama never answered back to the disgusting southern right wing rubes from the former slave states that have tried to belittle, mock and stymie his presidency shouting “You lie” in a million ways, while actually meaning “You lie, nigger!”
Schaeffer really hates America, the country he somehow imagines is still stuck in 1952: "We have a lot to do to heal this country of the damage done by the right wing Obama-haters and the Left wing know-it-all pundits who did not have his back because they don’t have the honesty to admit that we still live in a backward racist swamp of prejudice. Maybe in 50 years our country will be worthy of someone of President Obama’s forbearance again."
This is the kind of article that even Barack Obama would say, "Whoa, fella." Even Keith Olbermann would tell Schaeffer to steady himself.
Schaeffer last appeared on MSNBC on Al Sharpton’s show on November 1 to denounce Ted Cruz’s father Rafael for saying “ObamaCare is going to destroy the elderly by denying care, by even perhaps denying treatment on people that are in catastrophic sicknesses.”
Schaeffer brought out the usual secularist sermon:
You know Rev, we`ve talked about this before. But you`re one of the only in the mainstream media that gets it. The fact is America does not have a right-wing political problem. America has a right-wing religion problem. And when they talk about losing our heritage and all the rest of it, this is a kind of religious delusion that I talk about in my book "And God Said, Billy" which might as well be a biography of the Cruz family.
The fact of the matter is, religious delusion is driving this debate and we`ve got to stop being so polite. You know, we believe in religious freedom and tolerance. And so, we kind of dance around it and we don`t say something very obvious. And that is that the Obama sabotage campaign has been driven by one group and one group only in this country. And that is white predominantly southern evangelicals who have a chip on their shoulder because he`s black, because he`s liberal, because he`s compassionate and humane. He doesn`t go along with their war on the poor, their war on women, their war on gay people. And they have it in for him.
