Psalm 109:8 is just straight up memetastic, appearing on bumper stickers and T-shirts, all of which carry the benign sounding message, "Pray For Obama." But, as Gawker's John Cook points out, this is just one more in a "long line of cheekily coded Obama death threats." The verse in question reads: "May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership." That leads fairly naturally into the Psalm 109:9, "May his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow." You know, in case you miss the point.
Rachel Maddow took up this issue, inviting Patience With God author and Huffington Post blogger Frank Schaeffer to explain whether or not the citation of this Biblical text "means something less threatening to people hearing this in a Biblical context."
SCHAEFFER: No. Actually, it means something more threatening. I think that the situation that I find genuinely frightening right now is that you have a ramping up of Biblical language, language from the anti-abortion movement for instance, death panels and this sort of thing, and what it's coalescing into is branding Obama as Hitler, as they have already called him. And something foreign to our shores, we're reminded of that, he's born in Kenya. As brown, as black, above all, as not us. He is Sarah Palin's "not a real American." But now, it turns out, he joins the ranks of the unjust kings of ancient Israel, unjust rulers to which all these Biblical allusions are directed who should be slaughtered, if not by God, then by just men. So there's a parallel here with Timothy McVeigh's t-shirt on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. He said the tree of liberty had to be watered by the blood of tyrants. That quote, we saw at a meeting where Obama was present carried on a placard by someone with a loaded weapon.
What we're looking at right now is two things going on. We see the evangelical groups I talked about in my new book, Patience With God, enthralled by an apocalyptic vision that I go into in some detail there. They represent the millions of people who have turned the Left Behind series into best sellers. Most of them are not crazy, they're just deluded. But there is a crazy fringe to whom all these little messages that have been pouring out of Fox News, now on a bumper sticker, talking about doing away with Obama, asking God to kill him. Really, this is trolling for assassins. This is serious business.It's un-American. It's unpatriotic. And it goes to show that the religious right, the Republican far right have coalesced into a group who truly want American revolution. If it turns out to be blood in the streets and death, so be it. It's not funny stuff anymore. They cannot be dismissed as just crazies on the fringe. It only takes one. You know, look at the Boston Globe article from a few weeks ago that says the threat level faced by the Secret Service has gone up 400%, higher than any other time in 52 years, for any president, Democrat or Republican. These are no jokes.
Schaeffer added, "Look, this is the American version of the Taliban... this is the Old Testament Biblical equivalent of calling for holy war."
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