TN mayor blames 'Muslim' Obama for Peanuts Christmas pre-empt

The mayor of Arlington, Tennessee, believes he knows exactly why President Barack Obama chose last Tuesday night to announce his Afghanistan troop surge: It was a nefarious plot by the "Muslim" president to pre-empt that night's broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Russell Wiseman, mayor of Memphis suburb Arlington, suggested in a Facebook posting that Obama wanted to obscure the traditional Christmas TV special's Christian message. And in what the Memphis Commercial Appeal described as "an extensive thread that attacked the president," Wiseman also said that Obama supporters "need to move to a Muslim country ... oh wait, that's America ... pitiful."

This is how the Commercial Appeal transcribed Wiseman's Facebook posting, which is accessible only to the mayor's Facebook friends:

Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch 'The Charlie Brown Christmas Special' and our muslim [sic] president is there, what a load ... try to convince me that wasn't done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation [sic] about it....[w]hen the answer should simply be 'yes'....

And in a statement that will inevitably be interpreted as a declaration of either a class war or a racial war, Wiseman went on to lament the fact that Americans who don't own property are allowed to vote.

"[Y]ou know, our forefathers had it written in the original Constitution that ONLY property owners could vote, if that has stayed in there, things would be different...," Wiseman wrote.

Asked by the Commercial Appeal to comment on his screed, the mayor replied that the newspaper was "making a mountain out of a molehill" over the story.

Read the full story at the Memphis Commercial Appeal here.