Over the years Arthur Silber has been one of the most insightful writers on the blogosphere. Thus I was surprised and sorrowed to see him fall into the “Obamabot” meme.

Based on anecdotal evidence from some clearly fanatical Obama supporters, Silber implies that Obama himself is a cult leader and (based on the title, “It’s the 1930s, and You Are There”) dangerous. Silber doesn’t use the word “fascist,” but it hangs over the post like a bad smell.

Yes, there are fanatical Obama supporters who have attached to Obama as the Savior. But if you have any understanding of fanaticism, you would appreciate that fanaticism is self-created, and the object of a person’s fanaticism can be entirely innocent of causing whatever emotional pathologies are fixated on it.

For this reason, I find Silber’s conclusions astonishing:

Depending on how this campaign develops, and depending on how Obama conducts himself and — very significantly to me — how Obama’s most devoted supporters act, I may conclude that, if you vote, you should vote for John McCain. Unbelievable, I realize, but I may have no choice but to think that the alternative is far too dangerous to countenance.

What alternative? Does he think Obama intends to turn America into a Jonestown cult and hand out Kool-Aid?

My primary reason for supporting Obama is that his considerable organizational skills and his resonance with younger voters could bring about a political realignment and a shift in political culture that progressivism can build on in the years to come. I keep saying I don’t think he’s liberal Jesus and that I expect him to make mistakes and take wrong turns. I am less interested in what I think he will do than in what I think he might help to enable, which is an America in which progressive ideas at least can get a fair hearing.

Some of his recent turns are disappointing, particularly his stand on the FISA bill. I’m not making excuses for that. I realize he’s probably doing it for political expediency to help him win the election in November, but I still don’t like it.

But does that make McCain the better alternative? Hardly.

One of the frustrations I had during the Endless Primary was that so many Clinton supporters clearly were operating on some level of fanaticism even as they screamed about Obamabots. You couldn’t talk to them. They’d literally get wild-eyed and dredge up dark suspicions about Obama’s motivations and possible ties to right-wing extremism, suspicions based on nothing but their own overheated imaginations. And I do think the Clinton campaign cultivated this fanaticism to some extent, particularly as time went on and it was about the only thing the campaign had going for it.

But, ultimately, fanaticism is about projecting. Fanatical Clinton supporters were not fixated on the real Senator Clinton, but on a Hillary Clinton who lived only in their own heads. This is part of the nature of fanaticism.

Awhile back I wrote quite a bit about fanaticism and religion. Religion is a force that does attract fanaticism, no question. Many religions encourage absolutist thinking, and many of them are pinned on some sort of messianic concept of Salvation coming to us from Above. But not all religious people are fanatics, and not all religions are dangerous cults.

Further, a fanatic can be fanatical about nearly anything. And often the cause of the fanaticism, the root of it, has little to do with the object of fanaticism.

Let’s revisit Eric Hoffer in The True Believer.

Only the individual who has come to terms with his self can have a dispassionate attitude toward the world. Once the harmony with the self is upset, he turns into a highly reactive entity. Like an unstable chemical radical he hungers to combine with whatever comes within his reach. He cannot stand apart, whole or self-sufficient, but has to attach himself whole-heartedly to one side or the other. …

… The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources — out of his rejected self — but finds it only in clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace. This passionate attachment is the essence of his blind devotion and religiosity, and he sees in it the source of all virtue and strength. Though his single-minded dedication is a holding on for dear life, he easily sees himself as the supporter and defender of the holy cause to which he clings. … The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justice and holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold on to. …

… The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause. But he finds no difficulty in swinging from one holy cause to another. He cannot be convinced but only converted. His passionate attachment is more vital than the quality of the cause to which he is attached. [Hoffer, The True Believer, HarperPerennial edition, pp. 84-86]

In other words, usually people become fanatics because of their own emotional neediness, not because the object of their fanaticism, whatever it is, seduced them into it.

We are living in way too interesting times, darkened with paranoia and suspicion. Too many of us have lost the ability to stand back and analyze politics (and ourselves) with anything resembling objective detachment. So most of us are projecting frantically and perceive national figures as archetypes of good or evil instead of as the flawed, frightened, imperfect human beings they actually are.

But let us understand why this is happening. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

I realize Obama doesn’t have a big track record, but he does have a track record, in the Illinois Senate as well as the U.S. Senate. And his record is pretty solidly progressive. So I have a hard time understanding what dark, horrible thing Silber thinks Obama is going to do.

Everybody: Get a grip.

The wingnuts are screaming because of something Gen. Wesley Clark said:

The dust-up began with Clark’s appearance Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” where moderator Bob Schieffer asked him about his interview with the Huffington Post earlier this month.

In the interview, Clark said McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, was “untested and untried.”

When Schieffer asked to explain the comment, Clark said he was referring to McCain’s experience, or lack thereof, in setting national security policies and understanding the risk involved in such matters.

“I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces, as a prisoner of war. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility,” said Clark, a former NATO commander who campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.

“He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not,” Clark said.

Schieffer noted that Obama did not have any of those experiences, nor had he “ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down.”

“Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” Clark said.

So a televised wingnut hollered that McCain was being swift-boated by Gen. Clark. Hello? Clark didn’t make unsupportable claims that McCain is lying about his war record or that he had behaved dishonorably in the service, as the swifties did to Kerry. He’s saying that being a fighter pilot and then a POW doesn’t qualify someone to be President.

Dear wingnuts: This is a simple statement of fact.

All manner of people have been POWs who would not have been good presidents. I sometimes write about my uncle, a POW in Japan during World War II, who was a great guy with many admirable qualities. But he would not have been a good president, either.

Look, wingnuts, if your atrophied brains have any firing neurons left, think about what skills a POW needs to survive. Then think about what skills a President needs to carry out the duties of office. I’m not talking about character here; I’m talking about professional skills. What does he know how to do?

I’m not saying that a former POW would necessarily be a bad president. I’m just saying the POW experience is irrelevant. John Kennedy’s PT 109 experience was irrelevant, also. That doesn’t mean he was a bad president. I’m just saying that bravery in war and being an effective POTUS are two unrelated things. I believe that’s what Gen. Clark was saying.

BTW, here’s a lovely bit of projection from a rightie blogger:

The “Ugly Liberal” is coming out in the Democrat Party. A close cousin to the Ugly American – who would go to Europe and other places and display such arrogance and snobbery that it gave all America a bad reputation – this is the election for the Ugly Liberal. It is their hate of Americans, conservatives, life, etc that drives them. They are a constant insult machine, tearing down others to prop up their insecurity. They run their little fantasies about how only they can save humanity from itself.

Cross out “liberal” and write in “wingnut,” and it would be more than accurate until the last sentence. Righties don’t fantasize about saving humanity from itself. They don’t give a bleep about humanity.

Update: Real Swift boaters don’t Swift boat.

Update: See also Josh Marshall:

It’s not surprising. But it is an example of the fatuous McCain worship that is the bread and butter of the Washington press corps that Wes Clark’s comments this weekend on Face the Nation are being called ‘swift-boating’. It’s almost comical, but not much less than Bob Schieffer’s incredulous responses to the fact that Clark had the temerity to argue that McCain’s experience as a Navy pilot and a POW don’t necessarily mean he’d be a good president. …

… The McCain campaign is now launching an attack with its ‘truth squad’ about the Clark ‘controversy’ and pushing Obama to “denounce” Clark, etc. It’ll be interesting to watch what happens here. The McCain campaign’s angle here is to not to prevent attacks on the integrity of McCain’s war record (which Clark explicitly did not do) but to make it off limits for anyone to question that his war-time experience means he has the temperament and experience which make him the better qualified candidate to be president.

We’ve been watching this happen for years now: Some juicy bit of disinformation appears on a far-right blog or forum, and within hours it goes up the rightie media infrastructure food chain — to NewsMax to Drudge to Limbaugh to the Washington Times to Bill O’Reilly — and then corporate media reports that “a story is circulating about. …”

And, IMO, many of these juicy bits are planted originally by highly placed political operatives who also make sure the other links in the chain are tipped off.

Dave Johnson provides a current example (emphasis added):

“Someone” posted an anti-semitic comment at the Obama blog. (See if you can guess who posted a comment that a right-wing blog knew about a few minutes later.) A few minutes later the hate site Little Green Footballs wrote a post saying that the Obama blog says so-and-so. (If you don’t know about this site, spend a few minutes there and you’ll get the picture. No, it is not a parody of right-wing nuttiness.) Then dozens of far-right-wing sites quickly echoed the “story.” It rapidly turns into a great big right-wing hissy fit.

Soon the right’s Politico has picked it up. (Which shows they’re spending time reading hate sites.) And then Rush Limbaugh talked about it on his show.

You see, someone (guess who) leaving a comment at the Obama site proves that Obama is anti-semitic. You’ll be hearing about it from every direction very soon.

Obviously, it’s enormously unlikely LGF would have known about and blogged about the anti-semitic post “a few minutes later” unless someone involved in the origination of the post tipped them off.

The Right did a hell of a job with this during the 2004 “swift boating” of John Kerry. It’s the easiest thing in the world to pull a crazy allegation out of thin air and then float it around as if it were legitimate inquiry. You’ll remember this classic confrontation between Chris Matthews and Michelle Malkin:

Ah, I never get tired of that. Anyway — Questions are being asked whether John Kerry shot himself to get a purple heart. We don’t need evidence or anything approaching a factual basis for those questions. Somebody makes up some questions, and away we go. Questions are being asked whether Michelle Malkin worships the Devil. Questions are being asked if Michelle Malkin tortures puppies. Hey, I’d like to know.

Now Michelle Malkin is asking questions about Barack Obama.

Jim Geraghty takes a look at longstanding blog buzz over Barack Obama’s birth certificate, which the campaign refused to release to the St. Petersburg Times in April:

We tried to obtain a copy of Obama’s birth certificate, but his campaign would not release it and the state of Hawaii does not make such records public.

Has anyone seen it? Why shouldn’t the record be in the public domain for presidential candidates?

Geraghty walks through various rumors now circulating in the wake of the Obama campaign’s birth certificate blackout, including this one:

Rumor Three: His mother did not want to name him after his father, and his birth certificate says “Barry.” Perhaps the most plausible of the rumors, as Obama was known by that name through much of his childhood and young adulthood. If true, this would spur a new round of “When Barry Became Barack” stories – a minor headache for the campaign, but hardly a major scandal.

Other rumors are that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii; his middle name is really “Muhammad,” not “Hussein”; his parents weren’t really married.

One might argue the Obama campaign ought to just release the mystery birth certificate to put the rumors to rest. But you know that would just set off a new round of rumors. Some rightie blogger would question the authenticity of the birth certificate, and that very evening Sean Hannity would look into a Faux Nooz camera and intone, why did Barack Obama release a forged birth certificate? Questions are being asked, after all.

The hunger of the right-wing rumor beast can never be satisfied. However, I do strongly suggest the Obama campaign hire some hall monitors for their campaign web sites — no more unfiltered public comments allowed. Obama supporters will understand.

Regarding the Barry/Barack question, you might ask why that’s a question. I don’t know, but then — I’m not insane. Apparently Obama’s given name is Barack, and as a child people called him “Barry,” but as he approached adulthood he decided he’d rather be called “Barack.” No rational person could read anything sinister in that. Little Jimmies and Bobbies do have a way of becoming Jims and Bobs when they grow up, and Jameses and Robertses if they become important.

But we’re talking about wingnuts, so … never mind. Questions are being asked about why Obama changed his name. There must be some double super secret darkest Africa gang-related terrorist fist-jab reason.

Update: BTW, I won’t be letting the wingnuts hijack the site today. If you are a right-wing troll, don’t hold your breath waiting for your comment to be posted. No, wait … do hold your breath. Please.

How are we in Liberal Land reacting to Scott McClellan? I wrote in a comment this morning that I thought we lefties would mostly be forgiving. “I think we appreciate that he’s going through a process of waking up to reality. As long as we see him struggling to be honest, I think most of us will wish him well,” I said.

Maybe I spoke too soon. I see that Buzzflash is calling Scotty the “hypocrite of the week.”

This probably is the Buddhist in me talking, but we all stumble through life in a fog of self-delusion. Some of us are foggier than others, of course. My impression is that Scotty allowed himself to be a useful tool of the Bush Administration because he honestly believed the Bushies were the good guys. It wasn’t until he was shoved out of the White House bubble that some of the fog began to clear and he saw what had happened in a different light.

So, my feelings are those of a missionary toward a sinner who wants to come to Jesus, and I’m ready to forgive his sins. But that’s me.

Here’s a true clip & save: McClatchy Newspaper — “Memo to Scott McClellan: Here’s what happened.”