As for Obama being a Muslim, as desperate right wingers are charging...

The Campaign is Entering Silly Season
By Dave Lindorff

I've been getting some emails that refer to Barack Obama as a "Manchurian Candidate," a guy who is somehow hiding a secret radical and/or Muslim jihadist agenda that will burst forth if he's elected president. There is a certain idiot factor at work here, since if Obama were a closet Weatherman, who somehow learned of and adopted that 1960s college dropout organzation's creed at the tender age of 8, it would have clashed badly with any Muslim teaching he might have picked up as a student in an Indonesian public school at the same time (he attended an Indonesian public schoolfrom the age of 6 to 8 before transferring to a Catholic-run institution).

But since some low-wattage and conspiracy-minded people seem ready to believe this kind of stuff, let's consider John McCain's early background, and the possibility of his being a Manchurian Candidate too. Fair's fair, right?

Okay. McCain, it turns out, was actually born outside the US, in the Panama Canal Zone, which in 1936 was territory leased from Panama. His father, a Navy officer, was stationed there with his wife at the time of McCain's birth. Now it's a safe bet that McCain was largely raised--fed, diapered, and spoken to--at that age by a local Panamian woman. That's what, after all, you do when you are an elite officer and the wife of an elite officer in a foreign country where low-wage help is abundant. Who knows what subversive ideologies were poured into the young McCain's tender ears at that vulnerable period of his life by his Panamanian nurse? Maybe that would explain McCain's support for an amnesty program for immigrants from Latin America a few years back. Does he have a secret agenda to throw open the doors of America to Latin American immigrants once in the White House?

And worse yet, maybe his Panamian amah was a Marxist! Lord knows that Central America in the mid-1930s was a hotbed of revolution. The dreaded Augusto Sandino had only just been executed in Nicaragua, just north of the Zone, two years before McCain's birth, following a bloody guerrilla war against US Marines, and the region was full of bitter and vengeful nationalist and Marxist revolutionaries bent on throwing the US out of Latin America. Could his nurse have been one of these people, whispering and implanting the language of liberation into the young boy's still unformed mind, ready to spring to life once he assumed high office in Washington?

Then we turn to McCain's prisoner of war days in the hands of the North Vietnamese. Certainly his mind was weak and vulnerable to control. While many of McCain's fellow POWs endured five, six or more years of torture without cracking, he is said to have begun spilling secrets and agreeing to broadcast anti-American propaganda statements after only four days of torture shortly after his capture. We also know that the Communists had a sophisticated system of mind control developed, which was shared among the Communist nations of the USSR, China, North Korea and North Vietnam. Were these techniques applied to the captive McCain, and did they leave him after five long years of captivity robotically programmed to seek and win the presidency, only then to launch a campaign of sabotage to soften America up for Communist takeover?

This prospect seems much more likely than that some Muslim teacher got to Obama in his grammar school in Indonesia.

Actually, I find the Obama Manchurian Candidate theory much weaker than the McCain Manchurian Candidate theory, just based upon my own experience. I was, after all, put through some serious indoctrination by my own family. My parents sent me to Sunday School at the local Congregational Church, from the age of six to the age of about 11. I can still remember the earnest parent volunteers teaching us all the nonsense about the earth being formed in six days, about Adam and Eve, the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, the Virgin birth (What was a virgin, I wondered? They wouldn't say...), and the crucifixion and resurrection. None of it stuck. The only thing I really learned in Sunday School was how to smoke--something a number of us learned together while skipping class and hiding out in the church attic. Is Christian dogma that much weaker that it can fail to impress a young mind while Muslim dogma can take a firm hold in an even shorter time? What an insult to Christianity!

My daughter too, is testimony to the limits of early childhood propaganda efforts. At the age of 7, we brought her to Shanghai, China, where for a year, she attended first grade in a local Chinese public school. She learned excellent Chinese there, but though there was considerable indoctrination in Maoist theory, with special focus on the life of the young Mao and also of the selfless workers' hero Lei Feng (they actually had one daily class called "Loving the Country class" and most other subjects had a propaganda aspect), and though she also attended a fifth grade Chinese public school when we returned to China a few years later, for a stay in Xi'an, at 24 she is hardly a Commie or a Maoist. I'm sure though, that should she someday decide to run for president, some of the same people who suspect Obama of being a closet Muslim terrorist will say she harbors secret Communist sentiments from her early school years.

Such is the state of some American minds.