“Perhaps the most puzzling scene in the ad is an altered segment from The 10 Commandments that appears near the end. A Moses-playing Charlton Heston parts the animated waters of the Red Sea, out of which rises the quasi-presidential seal the Obama campaign used for a brief time earlier this summer before being mocked into retiring it. The seal, which features an eagle with wings spread, is not recognizable like the campaign’s red-white-and-blue ‘O; logo. That confused Democratic consultant Eric Sapp until he went to his Bible and remembered that in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, the Antichrist is described as rising from the sea as a creature with wings like an eagle.“
You’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan? In TIME, Amy Sullivan parses McCain’s recent “The One” ad to discover that it’s basically a dog whistle for Left Behind evangelicals, declaring Obama is the Antichrist. “A new TIME poll finds that the most conservative evangelicals are the least enthusiastic about McCain’s candidacy. Convincing them that Obama does have two horns and a tail might be the best way of getting them to vote.“
Obama is the Antichrist? Has it really come to this? I know the GOP are feeling on the verge of “Left Behind” this November, but that’s gotta be just about rock-bottom. It’s hard to even imagine an anti-McCain ad that would stoop that low (well, other than that it would probably have to involve the Queen of Diamonds.) And, what with the crazies already percolating, feeding this type of chum to the confused anti-Greg Stillson types out there borders on the criminal.
Come November, these GOP asshats had better lose, and lose big.
Oh, it came to that a while back:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/antichrist.asp
Yeah, I knew this sort of madness was out there, and that the GOP smear machine has been chugging along. But it’s another thing entirely to have it come down officially from the McCain campaign. That’s beyond the pale.
He’s a ghost he’s a god he’s a man he’s a guru.
I’ve noticed that the top priority of the republican talking points is to always refer to Obama as “the one”, “the celebrity”, or “the savior” in a mocking tone. They are attempting to do to Obama what they did to Kerry, which is to trivialize and mock his strengths as opposed to going after his weaknesses. I don’t think it’s working quite as well.
This one is just cryptic, though, and poorly executed. Somehow the McCain camp are trying to tap into that evangelical blood, but this is going about it all wrong. The few souls that would actually parse this as mirroring the left behind books are the same Christian Zionists that are continually trying to get every Jew back to Israel to fulfill an end times prophecy. If they truly believe Obama is the Antichrist, they would actually, probably, feel obligated to bring him to power.
They are always looking for some way to help facilitate prophecy. To speed up the rapture so that they can gloat over all of those left behind.
I wouldn’t put anything past that particular political machine, but in this case I think we might be reading more into it than is really there. My take on that ad is that Moses=Barack, since right before that image he’s speechifying about how the oceans will cease to rise, etc.
The “rising from the sea as a creature with wings like an eagle” connection seems like a stretch, and if it is an attempt at a covert signal to evangelicals, I’m not sure it would be an effective one. The beasts in Daniel 7 are clearly meant to be four kingdoms of the earth (Daniel himself says so), not individual people. There is an anti-Christ figure in that chapter of Daniel, but he’s represented as a horn on the head of a different beast. The connection is so weak as to be nonexistent.
(Of course, I would guess there are plenty of people who’ve read the Left Behind books who’ve never read Daniel, and those people might be more susceptible to the Obama=Anti-Christ message.)
But the OVERT message of the ad — that Obama sets himself up as a savior figure — probably is effective, and plays into the perception that he’s elitist and arrogant. That’s probably more damaging in the long run.
Didn’t Hagee say that the Antichrist would be a gay Jew?
Actually, Frederick II in the 13th century was accused by the pope of being the Antichrist using very much the same language.
McCain ain’t saying nothing new… he’s just seizing on a very powerful current in public opinion. When I visited South Carolina in February, I was dragged into an unpleasant debate with my grandparents’ pastor about the election, and he and his other pastor buddy were dead certain that Obama was the Antichrist, or at least signaled the coming of the Apocalypse.
Of course, an evangelical kid at UNCC once told me that I reminded him of Nicolae Carpathia, so it’s safe to say that the pump has really been primed for this paranoiac, millennial anticipation for quite some time. They’ve been waiting so long to be Left Behind… it’s actually just amazing in itself how perfectly the rise of Barack Hussein Obama fulfills their fervid wishes for a charismatic, cosmopolitan, internationalist leader to emerge.
The Lord works in mysterious ways, doesn’t he?