Moving on with the mystery of why some Republicans erroneously continue to believe Obama is a Muslim, today we have the Washington Times' Jeffrey Kuhner arguing that the president is a "cultural Muslim." The piece comes complete with an illustration of the president with a crescent logo on his cheek.
President Obama has revealed his true nature. After 20 months in the Oval Office, he still remained a largely unknown figure. A picture is coming into focus now, and it should trouble all Americans. It is widely known that Mr. Obama is a post-national progressive. Yet he is also a cultural Muslim who is promoting an anti-American, pro-Islamic agenda. This is the real meaning of his warm -- and completely needless -- embrace of the Ground Zero Mosque.
What is a "cultural Muslim?" The term is meaningless; it's just a rhetorical device for identifying Obama with an unpopular religious group in the hopes that doing so will make him equally unpopular, without technically contradicting Obama self-identifying as Christian. It doesn't actually matter what faith Obama belongs to, because his "culture" is inescapable. And for Kuhner, just like many others on the right, one cannot be Muslim and American at the same time, which is why treating Muslims differently from other religious groups is justified, because constitutional freedoms only apply to "real Americans."
The right doesn't identify Obama as "Muslim" because he is a Muslim but because "Muslim" on the right has become a generic epithet meaning "dangerous, subversive outsider with some connection to Islam, no matter how tenuous."
The Washington Times has been trafficking in the Obama conspiracy theories since prior to the 2008 election, but even if they're fooling some of their audience, they're not fooling the Internet. Here's a screenshot from Kuhner's Wikipedia entry:
Nothing like getting pwned by your own Wikipedia profile. If only cable news could be as clear.
