Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Frank Gaffney wrote an absolutely insane post at the Big Government site last week accusing the Obama administration of changing the logo for the DOD's Missile Defense Agency to look like an Islamic star and crescent. Here's that "new" logo:
Based on that, and without doing any research whatsoever, Gaffney implied -- but only implied, because he knew he had nothing else -- that this shows that Obama is all part of some Muslim plot against the country:
The Obama administration's determined effort to reduce America's missile defense capabilities initially seemed to be just standard Leftist fare -- of a piece with the Democratic base's visceral hostility to the idea of protecting us against ballistic missile threats. A just-unveiled symbolic action suggests, however, that something even more nefarious is afoot...Team Obama's anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They 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 Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo...
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.
Then he had to eat a huge dish of crow when it turned out that, had he done about 5 minutes of research, he would have known that this new logo was actually ordered by the Bush administration. And you really have to read his lame attempt at retraction:
We have since learned that the logo has been used at the MDA website since at least October 2009. Matters are made more confusing by the fact that the agency continues to use its older shield-like logo for online and other purposes. The contract for a complete rebranding for MDA was let in 2007, during the Bush administration, although much of the work appears to have been done in 2008 in follow-on contracts during the presidential campaign in which the Obama logo was much in evidence.It has also been observed that - rather than embracing the symbolic crescent and star, they could be interpreted as the targets of the intercepting swoosh in the MDA's latest logo. If so, the 2009 design would presumably be offensive to Islamists, rather than evidence of submission to them.
For these reasons, I am content to have the question posed in the last post be answered in the negative, and I regret any confusion caused by my suggesting otherwise.
Ah, the old "Hey, i was just asking a question, I didn't make any positive claims" pose. Glenn Beck must have taught him that one. Because in no way did he actually use that vague bit of symbolic analysis to support the monumentally moronic claim that Obama was officially making the United States submit to Islam. So hey, he's now content and it's all over with, right?
Wrong. An honest apology here would go along the lines of, "I'm sorry, it appears that I went fucking insane the other day and said something that was so mind numbingly idiotic that in a sane society it would mean that everywhere I went from that point on, people would point and laugh at me. And I'm now going to commit ritual disembowlment to spare my family the shame of me saying something equally stupid tomorrow."
And now the punchline, from the original article:
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.
Wow, Uncle Frank! Even more ominous and clear cut than that? I'm breathless with anticipation.
And by the way, will it shock you to know that Fox News immediately jumped on this as an actual story?
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Comments
He is even more of an idiot if he is surprised that a government initiated project is late and results not applied consistently when it was completed.
Posted by: yoshi | March 3, 2010 9:36 AM
Right. Because when you're engaging in a secret conspiracy to help foreigners take over your country, the first step is ALWAYS to put up a new logo to announce the secret conspiracy to the public.
Oh, and if this asshat did ANY research, he'd know that GREEN is the preferred color of Islam. It ain't "Islamic" if it ain't got any green in it. This logo is no more "Islamic" than anything else that has a crescent-moon-ish shape in it.
Team Obama's anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament...
Um...since when was admitting a weapon's nonexistence "unilateral disarmament?" Maybe Obama should have pressured...whoever...to admit the nonexistence of some weapon of theirs in return. I mean, we can't give up our delusion if our enemies won't give up theirs, can we? That'd just be wrong.
Come to think of it, this new logo has the shape of those ridiculous huge belt-buckles they give pro-wrestlers when they "win" a "big" "match." So maybe that's a hint about the reality of our missile-defense program.
Posted by: Rqaging Bee | March 3, 2010 9:39 AM
I see Bee got to this first, but I'm going to comment anyway because this attitude pisses me off so much.
Real life bad guys are not Batman villains. They don't feel the need to provide us with clues to their schemes.
Posted by: Captain Mike | March 3, 2010 9:47 AM
Not true Captain Mike. We "know" what will happen, in 2012, on election day, the evil atheist Mullah Obama will have all True Americans™ in the FEMA camps and he will tell them all his plans. But True Americans™ "know" that the day will be saved at the last possible moment and Sister Sarah will be annoin... errr elected President by a last second landslide stopping the Islamic Communist Fascist Atheist horde from taking over True America™.
Any odds that Zucker will produce a movie like this over the next two years?
Posted by: dogmeatib | March 3, 2010 10:08 AM
Great galloping Melancholy Elephants; could it instead be that there are just so many ways to arrange simple shapes?
Posted by: abb3w | March 3, 2010 10:09 AM
That retraction is completely bogus. Even if the logo review was ordered by Obama it would have been a completely loony conspiracy theory. I'm surprised he didn't just conclude that it now proves that ACORN planted terrorist sympathizers into positions of power within the Bush administration.
Posted by: penn | March 3, 2010 10:26 AM
Secret Muslims? No, no, this is a sign that Obama is quite a different sort of illegal alien.
Posted by: Morgan | March 3, 2010 10:33 AM
Alternatively, and here's a crazy idea, it could have nothing at all to do with Islamists and everything to do with blowing up missiles!
Posted by: Ginger Yellow | March 3, 2010 10:51 AM
The obvious question a reputable media outlet would investigate if they were to report on this is whether these logos are coming out of the same advertising agency or who is the artist everyone is mimicing.
As a businessman who sucks regarding the artistic aspect of marketing (I actually hire a person to choose who develops my materials and they approve of those materials as well), I'm always interested in learning more on how themes become prevalent memes. This artwork is obviously part of a trend where the Obama campaign picked up on it prior to its exploding or perhaps significantly contributing to its explosion on the branding scene. That should not come as a surprise given that the Obama campaign is correctly viewed as successful marketers of 'brand Obama'.
Posted by: Michael Heath | March 3, 2010 11:10 AM
When I saw it, I thought Gaffney was going to claim Obama warped it to look like his campaign logo.
#2 Public declaration of a conspiracy through cryptic symbols which only those in the know and the conspiracy theorist can understand are common. Just check out the History Channel whenever it lapses into one of its conspiracy/ Armageddon weeks.
Posted by: History Punk | March 3, 2010 11:17 AM
Holy Total Information Awareness, Batman!
Posted by: Chiroptera | March 3, 2010 11:20 AM
Its not even the new logo for MDA, its only the new logo for the public website.
Posted by: bobh | March 3, 2010 11:36 AM
Raging Bee said:
I think that is pretty standard fair with conspiracy theories.
Posted by: Jeremy Shaffer | March 3, 2010 12:07 PM
Why on earth does the Defense Department need a logo, new or old? And I wonder how many 10's of thousands of taxpayer dollars they spent on having it designed. This is government waste at it's most egregious.
Posted by: Ann Klein | March 3, 2010 1:45 PM
Hardly. This is peanuts. The cost overruns on a single weapons system shows how minuscule this is. (And it probably gave some graphics artist a decent job for a few months.)
Posted by: Zeno | March 3, 2010 2:04 PM
Having been involved on a DOD program when it was re-branded, it is quite an understatement to reduce the effort to a single graphic artist for a few months. Those changes will have to flow down through all presentations, documents, websites, etc... It can take significant effort on many people's part to achieve that. If they change the program name, the effort is even more significant.
That said, it's still peanuts compared to the typical overruns on a weapon system program.
Posted by: Jojo | March 3, 2010 2:54 PM
Shouldn't the logo for the Missile Defense Agency be people poring money in to a hole? I mean, if someone came to you asking for money to fund a project that's "like a bullet shooting a bullet"...
Posted by: Modusoperandi | March 3, 2010 2:59 PM
Modusoperandi:
I suppose you could look for Vash The Stampede. Cost ya $$60,000,000 though. Which is still probably less than they've wasted on the current non-working versoin.
Posted by: phantomreader42 | March 3, 2010 5:27 PM
Even a "working version" would still be a non-working version. Fooling something that requires essentially pinpoint accuracy to work is easy. Think of missiles vs jets w/countermeasures (chaff, flare) where the jets and the countermeasures are moving vaguely towards the missile while moving faster than it.
As a counter to the Soviets, it barely made sense ("Mostly Mutually Assured Destruction"). As a counter to Iran and North Korea, it's madness.
In part, the USA spent the USSR into the irrelevance. Post-wall, the USA decided to do the same thing to itself.
Posted by: Modusoperandi | March 3, 2010 5:43 PM
That would be a fantastic Myth Busters episode.
Posted by: Owen | March 3, 2010 5:50 PM
That was a Mythbusters episode. Two pistols facing each other, if memory serves. The Mythbusters couldn't get the timing down (even triggered in milliseconds, the difference between shooting a bullet in to a bullet and just shooting the other gun is virtually nil, if separated by six feet). They had to rig it, by putting one bullet in a vice thingy, then shooting it.
Missile defense has issues bigger than that, on a much, much larger scale, where timing isn't so much of an issue, but accuracy is.
Posted by: Modusoperandi | March 3, 2010 7:58 PM
"a spokesman... dismisses the comparison as 'ridiculous'..." I would have loved to have listened in on that phone call.
Idiots.
Posted by: n | March 3, 2010 9:00 PM
Hmmm. It's componsed of, like red stripes on a white background and a blue area with a white star on it.
Vaguely rings a bell somewhere, but I can't put my finger on what that might be a reference to...
Posted by: Brain Hertz | March 4, 2010 12:21 AM