Interesting Quote for the Day...

While reading Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things, I came across this quote from The Satanism Scare by James Richardson, Joel Best, and David Bromley about the witchcraft/devil worshipping scares of the fifteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries, and I immediately thought about the recent "Obama is a socialist" craze that's been filtering through the media here lately. (I even saw a bumper sticker at Wal-Mart yesterday that featured the Obama trademarked sunrise with the statement underneath: "Socialism. Poverty Trickling Up")

So, Richardson, Best, and Bromley describe a moral panic as "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evlauted or resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates.' Such events are used as weapons 'for various political groups in their campaigns' when someone stands to gain and someone stands to lose by the focus on such events and their outcome" (qtd in Shermer 106).

Therefore, question: Who needs the moral panic that Obama is a socialist?!? Answer: FoxNews. "Talk-show hosts, book publishers, anti-cult groups, fundamentalists, and certain religious groups" all thrive on such claims (Shermer 107).

One has to wonder whether the exec's at FoxNews didn't high five each other the night Obama was elected. I mean, would 4 years of a McCain love-in really help their ratings? The whole Obama is a socialist ploy is the gift that keeps on giving FoxNews.