Perry's Pre-Presidental Prayer Rally

Picture from NPR

Texas Governor Rick Perry's decision to attend "The Response," a prayer rally held yesterday at Reliant Stadium in Houston, has provoked another round of debate over the role of Christian evangelicals in politics. Perry and rally organizers maintain the event's "entirely religious."

I know there are people, critics, that say this is just some political event," Perry said. "Well it's not that. This event is not about supporting some organization...It's going to be very simple...It's just a time to call out to [God] and that's it and lift Jesus’ name up on high."

Event organizers on the call stressed that the event is designed to be entirely religious. They said attendees will be encouraged not to wear political shirts or bring political signs to the event.

"This is not an issue of who's going to be our president...It absolutely has nothing to do with that at all. it's about making Jesus king...," said Jim Garlow, a California Pastor.

But the absence of campaign material or speech hardly renders the rally apolitical. Governor Perry is using his political position and stature to encourage attendance to a large public event, in the context of his possible run for the GOP presidential nomination. Also, the full title of the rally has obvious if vague political ramifications--"A call to prayer for a nation in crisis--as does Perry's video invitation to attend the rally:

. . .As an elected leader, I'm all too aware of government's limitations when it comes to fixin' things that are spiritual in nature. That's where prayer comes in, and we need it more than ever. With the economy in trouble, communities in crisis, people adrift in a sea of moral relativism, we need God's help. . .

To assert that government cannot do anything about certain economic, social, and moral problems is a political claim, as is the diagnosis of those problems--that their source is spiritual. Moreover, as NPR reports, the homophobic American Family Association (AFA) is paying for the event, and is bringing in some evangelical heavyweights with big political chops--James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family), Richard Land (principal lobbyist for the Southern Baptist Convention), and Tony Perkins (president of the Family Research Council). The AFA has also invited a small cast of luminaries of the fringe Christian right:

--John Hagee, a San Antonio evangelist whose endorsement was rejected by John McCain in 2008 because of Hagee's anti-Catholic statements.

--Mike Bickle, a founder of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Mo., who has called Oprah Winfrey a "pastor of the harlot of Babylon.

--Alice Patterson, founder of Justice at the Gate, in San Antonio, who has written that there is a "demonic structure behind the Democratic Party."

--And then there's John Benefiel, head of the Oklahoma-based Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network, who once said this about the Statue of Liberty: "You know where we got it from? French Freemasons. Listen, folks, that is an idol, a demonic idol right there in the middle of New York Harbor.

So arguing that the event is all religion and zero politics is, at best, disingenuous, and predictably, critics of the religious right are all over this--the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AUSCS), Right Wing Watch, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among others, or watch Stephen Colbert's send-up here.

Colbert wryly notes that the prayer rally "doesn't cross the line between church and state; it erases it," echoing the ACLU's worry that taxpayer money might be contributing to the event and, or the AUSCS's argument that Governor Perry is using his office to promote a particular religion. Really, though, the criticism is about the policies and people Perry associates with by sponsoring the rally, such as the Right Wing Watch's reference to prayer rally speakers as Perry's "extremist allies. . .who are dedicated to bringing far-right religious views, including degrading views of gays and lesbians and non-Christians, into American politics."

Is this prayer rally really a big deal? I doubt the ACLU's Freedom of Information request for rally records will reveal use of taxpayer funds, and it really amounts to a kind of nuisance suit. Whether Perry is throwing his governorship behind a particular religion is a stronger point. He did make his invitation as "an elected leader," and did invite all other 49 state governors. And if you check out what The Response states as its core beliefs, this event promotes a standard orthodox evangelical Christian position. That is, it's sectarian.

But does Perry's sponsorship of and participation in the prayer rally mean that he put the weight of the government of Texas behind a particular religion? Did he violate the Establishment clause of the First Amendment, or the "Freedom of Worship" section of the Texas Bill of Rights?

Supreme Court "incorporation" decisions since the 1947 Emerson v Board of Education case have made state and local governments subject to First Amendment religion clauses, though disagreement remains over whether the Establishment clause means no government involvement with religion (an ironclad wall between church and state), or whether it means government can be involved in some way as long as it does not promote a particular religion (a porous wall). In practice, clearly the latter interpretation has held sway, with government activities beginning with prayers and monies going to Congressional and military chaplains. Perry didn't do all that much different than from our presidents have done since Eisenhower--preside over an annual prayer breakfast, except, granted, The Response was hardly ecumenical in comparison.

Texas language is a little more explicit:

No human authority ought, in an case whatever, to control or interfere with the rights of conscience in matters of religion, and no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious society or mode of worship.

So the question goes back to whether Perry's action constituted a Texas government preference for a particular "religious society or mode of worship." I'm no constitutional expert, and am even less familiar with Texas constitutional issues, but it seems to me that Perry violated the spirit of law, but not the letter. He sponsored and participated in The Response as an individual, not as the state of Texas. Still, he didn't seem to make an effort to make it clear he was going as an individual, and not as a governor with presidential ambitions. And inviting all other governors to attend a public event associated with religious leaders that have an obvious political agenda makes his "what's-the-big-deal" position rather dubious. Perry's either obtuse, or just simply dishonest (thank goodness obtuseness and dishonesty aren't unconstitutional, or a lot of us would be in trouble).

Still, I think the critics were too strident. They only strengthen the seeming new norm of vindictive politics--we win the argument by either shouting louder, or telling opponents to shut up, that they do not get to assemble, speak, or practice their religion if it contradicts our policy positions. The critics also confirm what some Christian fundamentalists have complained about--that they are victims of marginalization.

So, critics should have simply reported on Perry's pre-presidenital-bid prayer gig, and not said 'you can't do that.' The reporting's enough. He has clearly shown his cards: he's siding with the militantly anti-gay crowd; he doesn't get the pluralism of the US religious landscape, evidently thinking our crisis is the result of not enough Americans sharing his particular fundamentalist faith; and he apparently thinks public piety will make up for economic and social policies that have left so many lives in disarray.

Shamelessly paraphrasing Proverbs 29: 18, his campaign will perish not for a lack of a vision, but because of it.

A Paranoid Style in American Politics for the Millennial Era

The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" for Harper's back in 1964. In this now well-known piece he compared 19th century conspiracy theories with those of the "radical right" of his day, the John Birch Society and others whose political rhetoric featured "heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy."

He thought the comparison was a stretch--that the paranoid of his day were markedly different from the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings and other 19th century wingnuts:

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country–that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Has anything changed in the last fifty years? Do we not hear in the anti-Obama/liberal/progressive tirades a lament for the disappearance of a "real America" and calls to take it back? Don't we hear wild accusations of socialism, communism, and treason? Consider other Hofstadter characterizations:

. . .The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms–he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. . .

. . .A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. . .

. . .One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. . .

The current hysteria over Muslims gives us all these facets of paranoia. You'll run smack into the apocalyptic gloom at websites like Jihad Watch or in books like "Stealth Jihad." And think of those ex-Muslims "telling all" about the evils of their former faith. Or watch one of Glenn Beck's overwrought chalkboard exercises.

I'm thinking the only difference between Hofstadter's day and ours is the name of the threat.

Letter to Senator Jim DeMint

I write in opposition to your legislative proposal to cut all federal funding to NPR--an effort to punish that media outlet for firing Juan Williams. NPR is one of the few media sources that does not spout bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric, and to end federal support for NPR is not a blow for "free speech," but rather an effort to silence a news source that does not permit slurs in the public square. You are, in effect, celebrating the right of commentators to blather inane statements that incite an unjustified fear of a category of people based on the actions of the few, conceivably a version of someone shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. In effect, you are contributing to a growing and increasingly ugly domestic crusade against Islam.

I am not one of your constituents, but your proposed legislation directly affects me and millions of fellow Americans. I deeply regret your contribution to a US image abroad that we are hypocrites, preaching liberty abroad while trumpeting religious intolerance at home. And I strongly resent your attempt to hamper our ability to find news and political commentary that does not contribute to the anti-Muslim hysteria.

Viral Ignorance

A recent Pew Survey produced some pretty remarkable findings. Evidently, the number of people who believe that President Obama is a Muslim, or not a Christian, has been growing over the past few years. As well, and less surprising, those who buy the falsehood already have a poor opinion of the president.

What explains what must be willful ignorance, the insistence on believing the innuendo and misinformation? Given the correlation between people's opinion of President Obama and their belief regarding his religion, it must be that people feel the need dress up their dislike of him and his policies with spurious attributes. It's not enough to disagree, they must demonize. It's an embarrassing aspect of our political culture--that people would dress up a political leader they oppose in the robes of a Muslim or non-Christian because that somehow confirms his supposed vileness.

I can understand why people might oppose President Obama. It's depressing how some of them are framing that opposition in bigoted terms.

How-To Guide to TV Punditry

On “Tax Day,” April 15^th, a federal judge declared

that the US law authorizing a National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. US District Judge Barbara Crabb said the federal statute violates the First Amendment’s prohibition on government endorsement of religion. She issued a 66-page decision and enjoined President Obama from issuing an executive order calling for the celebration of a National Day of Prayer. The National Day of Prayer was first authorized by Congress in 1952. Since 1988, the date has been set as the first Thursday in May. The judge stayed her own injunction pending the resolution of any appeals.

“I understand that many may disagree with [my] conclusion and some may even view it as critical of prayer or those who pray. That is unfortunate,” Judge Crabb wrote. “A determination that the government may not endorse a religious message is not a determination that the message itself is harmful, unimportant, or undeserving of dissemination,” she said. “Rather it is part of the effort to carry out the Founders’ plan of preserving religious liberty to the fullest extent possible in a pluralistic society.”

On May 6, National Prayer Day, Bill O’Reilly weighed in on the matter, and it’s an exemplary model of how to turn a policy disagreement into a threat to the American way of life.

First, remember that your show is not about making a reasoned argument based on logic and evidence. It’s theater. It’s a show, so start with a simple, straightforward assertion, and add a dose of hyperbole:

O'REILLY FACTOR: In the "Personal Story" segment tonight, today is a National Day of Prayer. It has been endorsed by President Obama. But there are legal challenges all over the place. And that of course, is dumb. The Constitution clearly states the government cannot impose religion on citizens. But setting aside a day to encourage expression of voluntary spirituality is in no way an imposition.

Simple, right? The judicial ruling is “dumb.” ‘Nuff said.

And nevermind that there aren’t “legal challenges all over the place." One group, in one venue, the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin, filed a lawsuit asserting that the federal government’s Day of Prayer violates the First Amendment’s proscription on government establishment of religion. But facts need not trouble us here.

Second, bring someone on the show who shares your view, someone who also enjoys authoritative weight among your viewers. Invite someone equally capable of oversimplifying a complex issue, and someone who won’t make you look stupid. Someone, say, who couldn’t even handle the marshmallow grilling she got at the hands of Katie Couric.

Now, a few weeks ago Sarah Palin said this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska,: For any leader declare that America isn't a Christian nation and poking an ally like Israel in the eye, it's mind-boggling for--to see some of our nation's actions recently.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'REILLY: All right. The governor joins us now. So why do you think America is a Christian nation?

PALIN: I have said all along that America is based on Judeo-Christian beliefs and, you know, nobody has to believe me, though. You can just go to our Founding Fathers' early documents and see how they crafted a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution that allows that Judeo- Christian belief to be the foundation of our lives.

And our Constitution, of course, essentially acknowledging that our unalienable rights don't come from man. They come from God. So this document is set up to protect us from a government that would ever infringe upon our rights to have freedom of religion and to be able to express our faith freely.

O'REILLY: OK.

Third, don’t worry about coherence. Palin’s answer to O’Reilly’s question—is the US a Christian nation—is evidently yes, but she confuses “Christian nation” with “Judeo-Christian beliefs,” two distinct concepts. That’s okay because we want to stay unclear while sounding so assertively clear. After all, saying “America is based on Judeo-Christian beliefs” is about as informative as saying the US’s roots lie in the Renaissance revival of ancient Greek and Roman thought, or Enlightenment principles. Sure, the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible are a part of the canon of US political culture—but that Bible is not the only text in that canon. Nor is there some sort of single, pristine Judeo-Christian belief system that traveled through time from the early Roman Christians to the doorsteps of the US Founding Fathers. But only dumb eggheads worry about such historical distinctions.

Follow the vague incoherence with some obfustication. Yes, the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution permit the “Judeo-Christian belief to be the foundation” for those who choose it, or were simply born with it, but they do not mandate it. But make it sound as if they do codify the Judeo-Christian tradition. And then stretch the meaning of the texts. The Declaration makes vague theistic references with the words “God,” “Creator,” and “Divine Providence,” but for our purposes here, that’s good enough to say we’re a Christian nation. Unfortunately, the US Constitution—the text with the force of law—does not make any reference to a divine entity, except for the standard practice of saying “Year of Our Lord” after the date. And it’s the Declaration that says “inalienable,” not the Constitution. This gives us the fifth point--don’t let facts get in the way of making your point.

PALIN: So it's ironic that here, on the National Day of Prayer, you know, there's so much controversy about whether or not we're a nation that's build on Judeo-Christian beliefs and whether or not we can even talk about God in the public square is absolutely nonsense what we are hearing.

This is good. O’Reilly’s smart programming—addressing the topic of Christian nation on the National Day of Prayer, gives Palin the opening to turn a policy difference over the role of religion in government activities into irony, though it’s not really “ironic.” Irony would be something like an Alabama judge insisting, in the name of religious liberty, that everyone must respect his particular religious beliefs and allow him to plant a huge 10 Commandments monument on government grounds. Well, maybe that’s not irony. It’s just hypocrisy. Again, only smartypants worry about careful use of language.

O'REILLY: All I have to do is walk into the Supreme Court chamber, and you'll see the 10 Commandments. And so we know that you're absolutely correct. The Founding Fathers did base not only the Declaration of Independence but the constitutional protections on what they thought was right and wrong. And what they thought was right and wrong came from the 10 Commandments, which is Judeo-Christian philosophy. That is beyond a reasonable doubt.

Sixth, be very selective with your evidence—what those social(ist) scientists call ‘massaging the data.’ And use that evidence to set up the simple equation. 10 Commandments in Supreme Court Chamber equals Christian nation. Easy. Don’t complicate matters by noting the others figures featured on the Supreme Court external friezes such as Menes, Hammurabi, Confucius, and Augustus, or Mohammed, Grotius, and Napoleon—or those pagan Three Fates near the main entrance.

O’REILLY: But here is what's happened. America has, as they say in California, evolved. And now we're a much more secular nation than we were back in 1776. So the opponents of spirituality in the public marketplace say, "Hey, this is a violation. We can't be pushing any kind of spirituality." And you answer?

PALIN: Well, that new kind of world view that I think is kind of a step towards a fundamental transformation of America that some want to see today, I think, again, that it is an attempt to revisit and rewrite history.

I think we should kind of keep this clean, keep it simple, go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant. They're quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 Commandments. It's pretty simple. I think what's missing in...

Seventh—accuse those whom you oppose of doing what you’re doing (what psychologists call “projection”). O’Reilly trots out a quick version of the modernization = secularization thesis that no one really buys anymore. Palin then knocks down this straw man by labeling it revisionism, even though she’s revising US history to fit her argument. Whatever the case, times have indeed changed, perhaps more rapidly in recent decades. According to one survey study, the percentage of US Americans identifying as Christians has declined from 86% in 1990 to 76% in 2008 (Another survey by Pew reports 78%). And a large proportion of those not identifying as Christians have not joined any other religious affiliation. Maybe O’Reilly and Palin are unaware of these data, but if they were aware, they were right not to mention them. You don’t name the secret fear—the growing pluralism of US society. And did you notice O’Reilly’s sly move? Opponents of federal government sponsorship of religious rituals really oppose spirituality in general. That suggests an eighth point. Never miss an opportunity to misrepresent those with whom you disagree.

O'REILLY: What do you say, though -- what do you say to the people in Chinatown and San Francisco and here in New York and other big cities, the Asian-Americans who come from a different religious culture? Do they not participate in the Judeo-Christian tradition? I mean, they don't believe it. They believe in something else.

PALIN: We get to say to them, "Yay, welcome to America, where we are tolerant and you have a freedom to express whatever faith. You can participate peacefully in whatever religion that you choose. That's what America is all about."

And we would ask, though, that there be respect by our courts. Look at Judge Crabb and this ridiculous ruling or her opinion that's come down that says the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. We would ask that there would be respect for what the Judeo-Christian beliefs are, too. It's mutual tolerance.

Here we see a nice repetition of the seventh and eighth points. Judge Crabb (perfect name!) and the courts are not keeping the state out of promotion of a theistic practice, they are discriminating against all those who share Judeo-Christian beliefs. And this suggests a ninth tactic—act as if you speak for all right-minded people. Your beliefs are common sense; those of your opponents are nonsensical, and this is so obvious that you don’t need to spell out why.

O'REILLY: What do you think drives -- what do you think drives Judge Crabb, who I agree with you is desperately wrong? Again, there is no imposition of religion on a voluntary National Day of Prayer. It's just encouraging people to be spiritual. You can pray to a tree. You can be a Deist. I mean, you know, Founding Fathers, some of them were.

PALIN: Yes.

O'REILLY: So there's no imposition. So what drives a Judge Crabb to say, "Hey, this should be illegal"? What do you think drives that?

PALIN: You know, you wonder what in hell scares people about talking about America's foundation of faith, and you wonder why in the world would she rule as she's ruled? And I guess she'll further explain herself.

But every state Constitution acknowledges God, because every state Constitution, which backs up our U.S. Constitution, can acknowledge that our unalienable [sic] rights came from God not from man.

O'REILLY: Why would Crabb do that? You must have thought about it. Why would Crabb do it? What does she want to accomplish by this?

PALIN: It is that world view that, I think, involves some -- some people being afraid of being able to discuss our foundation, being able to discuss God in the public square. That's the only thing I can attribute it to, is some fear of some people.

But look at our national motto, "In God We Trust." How inconsistent, then, to be told that we, on a National Day of Prayer, which, as you point out, isn't any kind of mandate or any kind of force for anybody to believe any certain thing, but how inconsistent to say that, though, in the public square we cannot talk about or talk to that God that is in our national motto.

O'REILLY: Yes, we can only trust in the God inside our own homes, but once we get out, we can't trust him.

A version of the ninth point. O’Reilly is figuratively shaking his head at the idiocy of people like Judge Crabb. Just a crazy world. Then a flourish of misrepresentation, incoherence and non-facts by Palin. Opponents of the National Day of Prayer have dubious motives (they fear believers), and the federal practice of a theistic ritual is not sanctioning a particular religion, but is a natural response to the roots of our country (also a nice confusion of a government-sponsored ritual and the entire public square). Nevermind that the National Motto was an early Cold War creation (1955), not a primordial creed of the nation. But again, don’t worry about historical accuracy. Palin could have passed off other Cold War religious innovations as existing since the founding: along with the National Day of Prayer (1952), there was adding “under God” to the Pledge (1954), and the National Prayer Breakfast every February (1954). The federal government even granted Billy Graham permission to hold an evangelical revival on federal grounds (1952). Man, those were the days.

All right, Governor, always good to see you.

PALIN: Bill -- Bill, OK, hey, we also need to remember, though, Margaret Thatcher and other foreign leaders and foreign observers thinking America is such a great and exceptional nation, because we do base our lives, our values on the God of the Bible, the Old and the New Testament.

O'REILLY: All right.

PALIN: If they can observe it, we should.

O'REILLY: We appreciate you coming on. . .

Yes—always good to end with some chest-thumping patriotism. In short—oversimplify the issue, misrepresent your opposition, don’t worry about accuracy, logical consistency, or historical complexity, and deliver it all with the upmost confidence in your righteousness, and the certainty of wrongdoing in others.

Hysteria becoming the norm?

The Harris Poll came out with a survey revealing the hysteria bubbling out there among the masses, an hysteria no doubt resulting from a combination of an economic crisis, seemingly unending war, and the presence of a black man in the White House. The results are rather stunning. 4 of 10 Americans think President Obama's a socialist? Nearly a third still think he's a Muslim? Between 1 and 2 of every ten Americans think he's the Anti-Christ? It's not surprising that the lower one's education, the more likely one is to agree with these statements, but the data also show that ideology and party identification matter much more than level of education for most of the statements. Fear-driven belief can trump any amount of education.

Question	Total	High School or less	Conser-vatives	Repub-licans
He is a socialist	40	45	67	67
He wants to take away  Americans' right to own guns	38	45	63	61
He is a Muslim	32	43	51	57
He wants to turn over the  sovereignty of the United States  to a one world government	29	37	52	51
He has done many things that  are unconstitutional	29	35	53	55
He resents America's heritage	27	31	49	47
He does what Wall Street and  the bankers tell him to do	27	35	38	40
He was not born in the United  States and so is not eligible to  be president	25	32	41	45
He is a domestic enemy that the  U.S. Constitutions speaks of	25	32	45	45
He is a racist	23	28	42	42
He is anti-American	23	27	43	41
He wants to use an economic  collapse or terrorist attack as an  excuse to take dictatorial  powers	23	28	40	41
He is doing many of the things  that Hitler did	20	24	36	38
He may be the Anti-Christ	14	18	24	24
He wants the terrorists to win	13	16	23	22

Here's my two cents on each of the statements--

He is a socialist: Socialism is a political-economic system in which the state owns the means of production. We're nowhere close to that, but the US, like all countries, does have a government that intervenes in numerous areas of the economy. If President Obama is a socialist, then so is any homeowner writing off mortgage interest when they do their taxes, any college student getting Pell Grants or federally subsidized loans, any veteran getting GI benefits, any driver racing along an interstate highway, any one using a public library or school, and so on, and so on. If Obama is a socialist, we're all socialists.

He wants to take away Americans' right to own guns: Yes, he's okay with government restricting the use of handguns. Fine with me. But voiding the entire right? Give me a break.

He is a Muslim: For those who don't want to use the N word, you just call him this.

He wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a one world government: Conspiracy theorists have been dreaming up some variation of this since anti-Catholics worried that all those Irish immigrants in the 1840s-50s meant an impending Vatican takeover of the US. We see this fear of losing sovereignty in Cold War sci-fi film (The Blob, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and TV (the Borg in Star Trek). It's our individualism writ large, and run amok.

He has done many things that are unconstitutional: In his continuation of certain Bush-Cheney era War on Terror measures, I'd have to agree.

He resents America's heritage: He may very well resent particular aspects of that heritage, like slavery, Jim Crow, nativist bigotry, etc. Understandable.

He does what Wall Street and the bankers tell him to do: Like Bush, Sr. during the Savings and Loan bailout--the Bush and then the Obama administration worried more about socializing the liability banks amassed then rescuing individuals who lost their pensions or their homes. This is just a fact of political life: the financial class has a great deal of power to shape banking and monetary policies.

He was not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president: Again, this is just another way not to use the N word.

He is a domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitutions speaks of: Ditto.

He is a racist: A favorite rhetorical ploy of a socially privileged group losing the entitlements it unconsciously enjoyed due to its race, sex, sexual preference, religion, etc. So threatened whites accuse blacks of racism, men declare feminists are engaged in a 'war on boys,' straight people argue that equal rights for gays are special or extra rights, Christians complain about not being able to dominate the public square

He is anti-American: this presumes some widely agreed upon definition of American, and it's typically the accusation of those who can't bear to live in a pluralist world.

He wants to use an economic collapse or terrorist attack as an excuse to take dictatorial powers: more conspiracy theory claptrap

He is doing many of the things that Hitler did: the lazy labeling tactic too many of us resort to dismiss an argument, but an effective tactic because way too many don't trouble themselves to read history.

He may be the Anti-Christ: Oh, the power of myth. An Anglo-Irish minister, John Nelson Darby, invents this eschatological framework, including the notion of rapture, in the 1830s, spreads it in the US, and it takes hold of the American imagination. We're all so desperate for meaning and direction, and Darby's fanciful revision of the Bible gave so many just that. And still does. To our detriment.

He wants the terrorists to win: this is just a variation of conspiracy theory, one encouraged by Cheney and his crowd who argue in effect that we need to transform our government into a non-democratic garrison state in order to win this so-called war on terror. And if you disagree with them, you must be on side of the enemy. A variation of the intolerant 'love it or leave it' argument.