Firebags and afros: the *genius* plan to primary Barack Obama

It’s not news that there are people on the “progressive” side who cannot stand Barack Obama. Well now, the angries have got themselves a plan, and maybe even a poster child. But do they have a candidate?

In recent weeks, the increasing vitriol between progressive/liberal/libertarian opponents, and supporters of President Barack Obama have been lighting up the Twittersphere.

There’s the growing rift over racial insensitivity in some of the anti-Obama critique – centering on who is Obama’s “base” - which has pitted black and white Twitterzens led by Balloon Juice blogger AngryBlackLady and her supporters against Salon editor Joan Walsh and her supporters, including most recently, a ThinkProgress blogger named Zaid Jilani.

There’s Glenn Greenwald’s rather Nixonian enemies list, which he says consists of 30 Twitterzens who spend all their time attacking him (for spending so much of his time attacking the president while sliming anyone who doesn’t attack the president as mindless Obama cultists…) though he refuses to name names.

And there’s the ongoing Obama-slam by big-time Tweeters like filmmaker Michael Moore (@MMflint) and liberal radio talk host David Sirota (@davidsirota), with Moore even launching his own conspiracy theory that the Pakistanis gave the U.S. Osama bin Laden to be “executed”, because he had outlived his usefulness to the “war on terror.”

The most aggressive anti-Obama action is to be found in three places: among an group of highly influential blogs connected to Jane Hamsher’s Firedoglake and its associated FDL Action PAC and knit together via Hamsher’s advertising network; from Greenwald, Moore and other libertarian-leaning activists who oppose Obama’s war and national security policies (which they say are too close to George W. Bush’s); and from Adam Green’s Progressive Campaign Change Committee PAC, which has spent as much time attacking the president as it has advertising against Republicans.

To pro-Obama liberals, these are the “firebaggers” — as vehemently and reflexively anti-Obama as any tea partyer, and when confronted, often just as nasty. It’s thought that some of them, like Hamsher, are into Obama-bashing for the link bait and the cash, while others appear to be true believers in the third party cause, including Greenwald and former Ralph Nader supporters like Moore.

Up to now, one of the things the anti-Obama progressive movement has lacked is diversity, giving them the appearance of an all-white jihad against the first black president. (Hamsher’s history, punctuated by her now infamous “blackface” post attacking Joe Lieberman, doesn’t help.).......

http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/05/firebaggers-genius-plan-to-primary-obama/#mor...

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