Rod makes what is apparently a necessary clarification these days:

And Revelation says absolutely nothing about the Antichrist being a Muslim. Nothing.

I could say that these sorts of chain e-mails and the frequency with which they are passed on and believed demonstrate that mass democracy is a profoundly flawed and foolish system, but that would be a bit too easy.  This chain e-mail also drives home how culturally and historically illiterate many Americans would have to be to not already know that the Apocalypse of St. John never mentions Muslims because it was composed over five centuries before Muhammad.  Of course, that would assume that these people have read the Apocalypse in the first place.  What is perhaps more troubling is that those who would be most inclined to take seriously prophecies taken from the Apocalypse presumably consider themselves very serious Bible-believing Christians, and yet giving credence to the nonsense being peddled about Obama would seem to show that they do not know their own Scriptures terribly well.  If many Americans are poorly educated in their own history and culture such that they are susceptible to this kind of rubbish, this is hardly their fault alone, but I think I draw a different lesson from the popularity of these absurd e-mails than most. 

The kind of worshipful, servile adulation heaped on Obama by the media, giving rise to such things as the “Obama Messiah Watch” and not entirely ironic references to him as some kind of saviour figure, has generated a popular backlash that takes the glowing coverage, the swooning throngs of supporters and references to the “cult” phenomenon among his enthusiasts and reinterprets them in the worst possible way.  The action-reaction dimension of this is obvious: journalists propose, basically as a joke for their own amusement, the idea of the Obamessiah, and gradually this moves out into the broader public and the reaction against this is to take the joke all together too seriously and argue that he must actually be anti-Christ.  Journalists, pundits and bloggers who have enjoyed the inside jokes about treating Obama as something close to the Second Coming have, in addition to their frivolous trafficking in what tens of millions of Americans would regard as blasphemy, probably failed to consider that this would boomerang and come back to hurt the candidate whom they have promoted so adoringly.  This is yet another example of how the excessive boosting of Obama in the most politically dangerous ways is coming back to haunt him.  In this case, it is happening in the form of these under-the-radar communications that are taking the elite and official praise of Obama and turning it into powerful and apparently somewhat popular invective against him.