The web-site Oh!pinion reports that in Mason City, Iowa, the North Iowa Tea Party has a billboard showing pictures of Hitler and Lenin, and, in between, a picture of President Obama. The title on the billboard seems a classic example of projection: “Radical Leaders Prey On the Fearful and Naive.”
“Projection,” according to Freudian psychology, is “a psychological defense mechanism whereby one ‘projects’ one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings onto someone else.”
Many right wing leaders manipulate the fearful and naive, and the more successful they are in ginning up fear and misinformation, the more money they make and the more political power they gain.
Glen Beck and Sarah Palin are making millions. There is a whole boatload of radical right wingers who seem only interested in their own gain and who have found a way to manipulate the fearful and naive to help their own self promotion. This billboard headline is pretty funny when seen in that light.
The Tea Party, in this ridiculous slam at Obama, projects onto Obama what, in fact, propels and motivates much of the leadership of the right wing and the Tea Party movement, itself. It manages to reveal the truth of what it does so well — “Prey on the fearful and naive.”
Update: According to this source:
“A billboard in Mason City that pictured President Obama flanked by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and communist leader Vladimir Lenin has been papered over this morning.”
I agree, we could easily put Beck or Palin’s pictures up there instead.
Obama is a moderate with special campaign support and connections to Wall Street, who have done comparatively well from his administration. He has not taken significant steps to help unions, working people, the unemployed, people losing their homes, even when more could certainly have been done with the bailouts of the finance industry and GM. Whether you think this is good or bad, the idea that he is a radical socialist marxist, to say nothing of a Nazi, is so absurd it is amazing anyone who wants to be taken seriously gets away with saying it.
Stan, he certainly is an extortionist, as he shook down BP for $20 billion.