The Republican Right Wing is beginning to look pretty damn scared of Barack Obama. Hillary they think they can handle; they hate her with a passion, and they believe that they could have a field day blackening her name and making her into the Second Coming of either Lucifer or John Kerry. Edwards they feels they have already beaten, and they can use his association with Kerry to club him over the head. Both have legislative or other histories that could be leveraged against them, or other ways to ridicule or belittle them, always a favorite with the wingnuts.

But Barack Obama scares the living crap out of them. The reasons are simple: he has no sordid, scandalous past. He has no long track record they can hang him with. But most importantly, he is a liberal who does not come across as a liberal. He comes across as centrist, reasonable, and personable as hell. His books are well-written, intelligent, and thoughtful, but can’t be pigeonholed as liberal-elite. Even more, he can see both sides of an issue; where Bush claimed to be a uniter-not-a-divider but in action was anything but, Obama does not ostentatiously claim this, but he does display it. He does not give the easy answers to people, he doesn’t tell them exactly what they want him to say–but they leave feeling that they’ve been dealt with straight. And as far as straight-talking is concerned, he makes Bush look plastic and cheap by comparison.

In short, Obama is about as liberal as you can get while having the charisma that could appeal across centrists and even fairly deep into conservative territory. There is a couple I know who are very, very conservative; they hate Clinton and love Bush, and tend to be right-wing mostly across the line. And they like Obama.

This is what brings terror into conservative pundits and political players. If Obama can dodge Hillary and stride out in front without getting too sullied in the primary process, then he stands to be a major threat to John McCain or Rudy Giuliani. Early polls show him doing not much better than Hillary against them, but then again, Hillary has huge name recognition and Obama still has relatively little. Give him a national stage and time, and he’ll start steamrolling.

So what are the wingnuts doing? Well, they’re attacking him on the only point that their slimy hands can seem to get a grip on: his name. That’s right, they’re down to making a deal out of his name, and then trying to build on that. It began a few weeks ago, when GOP strategist Ed Rogers started using Obama’s middle name, Hussein, when talking about him. And when a person doesn’t use their middle name normally and you start strutting it out, it is done specifically to make a point. Imagine if people started calling “Dubya” “George Walker Bush.” Immediately you would wonder why. And with Barack Hussein Obama, the subliminal point is clear: think Obama, think Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Then it escalated: Jeff Greenfield not only mirrored the use of his middle name, but also compared his no-tie casual look to that of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There’s no coincidence that the pundit chose the Iranian president, a threatening Islamic figure.

Now the gloves are off. Apparently confident that they can parlay the man’s name into a conviction that he’s an Islamic terrorist, another right-wingnut is now intimates that Obama, a member of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, is actually a Muslim and insinuates that he is the enemy, or at least on the side of the enemy (as loosely defined by the wingnuts as anyone who is Muslim):

So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on Oprah); is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?

So in their newfound panic, we are beginning to see signs of how dreadfully scummy these people are going to get over the next few years.