"Klansmen for Obama"

Well, not quite. But according to The New Republic, white supremacists and neo-Nazis don't seem as perturbed as you might expect by the prospect of an African-American President. Needless to say, they don't like Obama by any means, but they don't appear to think he's any worse than his white opponents. (via Hot Air)

...far from railing at Obama's rise, [David] Duke seems almost nonchalant about it. Self-described white nationalists like himself, he explained cordially, "don't see much difference in Barack Obama than Hillary Clinton--or, for that matter, John McCain." Sure, Duke considers Obama "a racist individual," citing his Afrocentric Chicago church. But soon the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People was critiquing Obama as overhyped and insubstantial in terms you might hear from, say, Clinton strategist Mark Penn. "They say he's for change. What change? He's become almost a cult figure. I don't see any shining light around Obama's head. I don't see any halos," Duke said.

[...]

After Obama won the Iowa caucuses last month, Mark Potok, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, decided to survey the latest writings of the major right-wing hate groups he regularly monitors. How would America's vilest race-mongers respond to a black candidate's victory in a white Midwestern state? Again, the response was counterintuitive. "It was extremely weak," Potok says. "You could find people saying nasty words about Obama, but it wasn't red-hot at all."

That has remained the case even as Obama has become the front-runner. On several websites, forums, and online journals that promote the view of white superiority over blacks--the types of outlets that rejoiced over Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of the Lower Ninth Ward--there is precious little discussion of Obama's campaign. The day after Obama's blowout win in Wisconsin, for instance, the home page of the poisonous Vanguard News Network featured stories on Serbian nationalism, home schooling, Holocaust-denial, and Pat Buchanan--yet nothing about Obama. It turns out that, although the white right certainly has no love for Obama, its hatred of him is muted--and directed less at Obama himself than at other nefarious forces behind him.

These "nefarious forces"? The white liberals presumably pulling Obama's strings, and - you guessed it - the Joooooooooos:

...It turns out that what truly animates the white supremacist contingent these days is not racism but anti-Semitism. The black man is of trifling concern next to the "Zionist Occupation Government," or ZOG, a term that describes puppet regimes of the global Zionist conspiracy. As one commenter on the popular white-power Web forum Stormfront explains it: "The blacks would be a non-factor if it weren't for the ZOG's legislations and skullduggery (civil rights act, hate crime laws, affirmative action, welfare, forced integration, etc etc ...), allied with a compliant media that promotes black worship." Thus, when the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published an anodyne article on Obama's support among American Jews, white-power sites like National Alliance News ("your single source for worldwide pro-White news") quickly pounced. "Barack Obama: The Jewish Connection" came the breathless headline. (Never mind that Obama has had a rockier relationship with the American Jewish community than has Clinton.) "[U]ltimately he's just another Jew puppet," concludes another Stormfront commenter. "I look at his foreign advisers," adds David Duke. "[They're] Israeli supremacists. He's even got Dennis Ross!"

An interesting phenomenon (perhaps better described a non-phenomenon) considering how many so-called "progressives" are convinced the radical right will gun Obama down any minute now.

Or could it be that the Klan is just getting soft?

Damian P.

Posted by damian at February 27, 2008 04:30 PM