It doesn’t take much to stir the talk-radio pot. Anything having to do, of course, with President Obama and Islam will do the trick, no matter how unfounded or just plain silly. Today, right talkers and opinionators were concerned with a U.S. Missile Defense Agency logo, which is abstract and blue and red and swervy. Examining it, not only do the talkers see reference to Obama’s 2008 campaign logo; they see references to Islam’s crescent and star. Obama plus Islam equals scary!
Here’s the formula, as presented at Denver KHOW’s Caplis and Silverman conservative talk radio website today:
The Missile Defense logo, the one at the bottom in the photo, was designed by TMP Government, a website management company. TMP manages the Missile Defense Department site. TMP is not strictly a design firm nor is it a political firm. In fact it designed the logo before the 2008 election. Neither the Obama administration nor the Obama campaign had any influence on the design.
Yet at Andrew Breitbart’s right-wing Big Government website, security pundit Frank Gaffney wrote that the logo amounted to a tipped hand that revealed the Obama administration’s soft accommodationist approach to Iran.
A just-unveiled symbolic action suggests, however, that something even more nefarious is afoot… Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah… the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo… Watch this space as we identify and consider various, ominous and far more clear-cut acts of submission to Shariah by President Obama and his team.
The Missile Defense Agency’s Richard Lehner laughed off the logical leap:
“It’s ridiculous. It isn’t a new logo to replace the official logo. It’s a logo developed for recruiting materials and for our public website. Also, it was used prior to the 2008 election and it has no link to any political campaign.”
Think Progress seems even to have been taken aback by the wingnuttery behind this kerfuffle:
Frank Gaffney, a protégé of Richard Perle and an influential figure in right wing national security circles, has firmly entered the world of right wing tin-foil hat paranoia.
Media Matters documents the development of a new right wing conspiracy theory, claiming that the Obama administration manipulated the redesign of the Missile Defense Agency to look like his campaign logo. This theory then evolved to claims that the new logo incorporates the Islamic crescent as well.
This nutty conspiracy theory was escalated by Frank Gaffney, who sees it as explaining Obama’s rationale behind his cuts to missile defense. How so? Well because he is a secret Muslim of course, which since all Muslims are out to destroy America, means Obama is out to do the same.
