January 8, 2014--Lynching

Circulating virally right now among progressives is a blog posting by Frank Schaeffer, a former member of the Religious Right, in which he comes to the defense of Barack Obama, claiming, with considerable truth, that much of the disproportionate and even savage criticism of Obama is because of racism.

Schaeffer emerged from his Evangelical life a number of years ago and has been telling his story in a three-volume memoir called by some the God Trilogy. In the first of the three, Crazy for God, he reveals that he left his Fundamentalist coreligionists when he "realized just how anti-American they are."

In the blog, "GOP Driven Crazy by Hatred for Obama," which is being widely circulated by some liberal friends of mine, Schaeffer reveals that--

[He] 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? [Emphasis added.]

Shaeffer is the new darling of many progressives because it is so rare for someone, anyone to switch ideologies from right to left. Pretty much all political conversions are in the other direction, from liberal to conservative. It is much more common to find Dick Morrises who begin life as fervent supporters of Democrats and then, for various reasons, become disillusioned with liberal orthodoxy and migrate to the other side of the political spectrum. In cases such as Dick Morris' they become ultra-conservative, believing in paranoid conspiracies or come to realize there's more of a quick-buck available on the extreme right than left.

But the criticism and attacks Obama is experiencing is not a lynching.

A lynching is a lynching as the Holocaust is the Holocaust.

If liberals who pride themselves on knowing their history engage in this kind of hyper-inflated rhetoric how can one criticize right-wing conservatives when they call Obama an Islamic socialist or communist?