The Muscovite Candidate

If Obama is a Muslim, is Trump a Russian spy? is one the cleverer ways that I've seen to point out one of the differences between Right and Left in the United States: that while both sides may dislike the other's candidate, the Left is less interested in attacking a Right candidate's "American-ness" than the Right tends to be. Of course, the fact that President Obama's father was not born in the United States, combined with the idea that "father knows best" makes it easier to envision President Obama as a foreign-born Moslem than Donald Trump's family history lends itself to the fact that he might be a Russian agent, but one can imagine that the more conspiratorially-minded of the American Right would be quick to see a Democrat who behaved in the way that Donald Trump has as wanna-be Soviet, to say the least.

To be sure, like most items of this sort, it indulges in calling out Institutional Hypocrisy. It doesn't take any prominent members of the Birther community and tell us what they've said about President-elect Trump. After all, maybe there IS a section of the conspiracy constituency that believes that there's something fishy about Donald Trump. They're just not marching around with signs proclaiming their theory yet. But even so, one can create a stereotype of the Right and the Left when it comes to how they oppose candidates.