The Missile Defense Agency released a new logo yesterday. I was contemplating some witty commentary regarding alternate logos, maybe two streaks of light just seeming to miss one another, or maybe just moaning that it would be best if they gave the dough to Raytheon for the SM-3 instead of some design firm.
I was even planning on tracking down that Bloom Country strip in which the Defense Department sends Opus $900 million, mistaking him for “Mr. Spock, chief science officer for ‘Star Trek’ defense research.” Opus designs “Net Wars”, a strategic defense concept in which the earth is covered with a “space net” comprising $500 billion in small bills, and testifies before Congress.
(The strip helped Berke Breathed win the Pulitzer Prize. If someone could scan the strips from Billy and the Boingers Bootleg, I’d love a copy.)
But no commentary on the new MDA logo could best this little wonder from Frank Gaffney (with help from another nut-job), who has taken the whole “Obama as secret Muslim” thing where no wing-nut has gone before:
Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives … seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.
What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo (above). As Christopher Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo.
[snip]
Even as the administration has lately made a show of rushing less capable sea- and land-based short-range (theater) missile defenses into the Persian Gulf in the face of rising panic there about Iran’s actual/incipient ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities, Team Obama is behaving in a way that — as the new MDA logo suggests — is all about accommodating that “Islamic Republic” and its ever-more aggressive stance.
Watch this space as we identify and consider various, ominous and far more clear-cut acts of submission to Shariah by President Obama and his team.
Seriously, Frank Gaffney believes that Barack Obama has a secret plan to subject the United States to Shariah, which he has decoded based on the logo for the Missile Defense Agency.
This is not, as far as I can tell, Juvenalian satire. Indeed, an aspiring satirist could hardly go as far as Gaffney without inviting the criticism that his caricature was too crude.
Wow.
Update | 12:54 I just noticed that Media Matters, Al Kamen in his In the Loop column in the Post and Max Bergmann at Think Progress all beat me to it.