BREAKING: Delawareliberal verifies that Obama "clinging to guns or religion" comment was NOT taken out of context

You'll recall that back during primary season, Senator Barack Obama got a nasty surprise when audio from a closed fund-raiser surfaced, with his voice explaining the attitudes of small town Ameircans in these words:

They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

As the UK's Guardian noted,

Obama initially reacted to the resultant media firestorm over the weekend by trying to stand by his comments. But he later apologised, saying: "If I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that."

Now, in a stunning piece of investigative journalism and editorial analysis, Jason Scott of Delawareliberal explains that Senator Obama meant exactly what he said, and that it is the opinion of many liberal Democrat columnists and bloggers that many (if not most) non-liberal middle-class American citizens are feared to be homicidal gun-toting maniacs.

Scott quotes extensively from an article by David Neiwert in 2005 that argues:

I’ve been talking for some time about the course that eliminationist rhetoric on the right would eventually take by the force of its own nature: pretty soon we’d go from talking about liberals as traitors to overtly wishing for violence to be visited upon them and discussing locking them up, followed in due course by such violence and incarceration becoming a reality....

Now, you won’t hear this talk on the upper levels of the conservative movement....

You hear it when conservatives — especially those red-state cultural conservatives from the working class who are most likely to vote against their own self-interest, and then blame liberals for how lousy their lives are — get together among themselves for their communal liberal-bashing hatefests. They’ll say it when they think no one else is listening. You can hear it from “fringe” radio figures like Michael Savage. Or you can read it in the unpublished letters to the editor that most publications choose not to run....

My very clear impression of the rank-and-file American right is that many if not most of them, at the behest of their leaders, now believe that opposing George W. Bush and the Iraq War, as well as his handling of the War on Terror, is an act of genuine treason worthy of the ultimate social condemnation, including incarceration and execution. They feel not only vindicated but profoundly empowered by the election result, empowered to silence their opposition, by force if need be.

Niewart's Eliminationist Rhetoric Theory has, since 2005, become a staple piece of George Lakoff-style issue reframing for liberal/progressive thinkers. [I won't do the thousands of links; just Google Niewart and eliminationist if you want to find them.]

In fact, on the blogs attached to Senator Barack Obama's official election website you can find discussions of Niewart's work, and examples provided that validate the seriousness with which many of the Senator's supporters connect this rhetoric to small-minded Americans out there clinging to their guns in order to create a society that tyrannizes liberals:

There is one conservative spokesperson who's led the rhetorical race to the bottom -- and one specific long-term conservative political agenda item that got served as a result. In his [Niewart's] first example, the NRA's Wayne LaPierre sells a "vision of the world where violent assaults on individuals are inevitable, all laws and institutions are powerless to stop them, and the only guarantee for survival is for citizens to be prepared to fire a gun at the oncoming danger." This worldview can only be adopted at the cost of our own democratic ideals, by fostering a "command-obedience" relationship between the governors and the governed—one that places the use of force outside the rule of law and beyond the control of the people's government. In the presence of arms, people are silenced, and the creative give-and-take required for good problem-solving suffers. Those who hold the guns prevail. This leads to tyranny.

Jason has carefully and perceptively summed up this liberal world-view in the concluding sentences of his post Killing Democrats & Other “traitors”:

It will probably get worse at Obama continues to lead in the polls, and “cultural conservatives” feel more an more helpless and at odds with the mainstream of American thought. As Neiwert points out, violence is the natural result of the kind of rhetoric we’ve gotten from the national conservative punditry. Simmering with rage and comforted by their guns, the Republican underclass is inarticulate but increasingly willing to act out the violent fantasies that Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter have been pimping for the past ten years.

Let's compare those two critical sentences again.

First, the one Senator Obama sort of disowned ["If I worded things in a way that made people offended"]:

They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

And then Jason's concluding sentence:

Simmering with rage and comforted by their guns, the Republican underclass is inarticulate but increasingly willing to act out the violent fantasies that Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter have been pimping for the past ten years.

The only real difference between Senator Obama and Blogger/investigative journalist Jason Scott is that since Jason is not actually running for office he is free to verify what the Senator had to back away from for reasons of getting elected:

Many liberal politicians and bloggers [including at least one running for President] really do believe that any middle-class Americans who are not liberals are in fact potential homicidal maniacs waiting to gun down innocent Democrats.

Thanks, Jason, for clarifying everything on Senator Obama's behalf.