Obama akbar!

There is no God but Obama and Mrs. Obama is his prophet!

(AP photo from April 16, 2007, found at Salon.)

From the First Lady aspirant's recent speech at UCLA:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

You have to stay at the seat at the table of democracy with a man like Barack Obama not just on Tuesday but in a year from now, in four years from now, in eight years from now, you will have to be engaged.

Jim Geraghty reacts:

Does anybody on the left side of the aisle find this rhetoric a little creepy? Isn't this describing an authoritarian presidency way beyond anything George W. Bush has done or proposed?

Do the powers of the presidency really encompass everything Michelle says Obama wants and plans to do? Based on this rhetoric, isn't he actually running for messiah?

Here's the non-sailor-blush-inducing part of Ace's reply:

Pardon the overstatement, but this is creepy stuff, suggesting, as it does, that your lives are now required to have meaning and purpose -- and that the government will be providing that meaning and purpose to you.

Via See-Dubya, who says it gets weirder:

But that's not what got some people I know fired up. My dad called me from Oklahoma last night to ask if I'd seen the Obamessiah's victory speech. I hadn't--still haven't--but the laid-back See-Dad was seriously freaked, noting that the rhetoric and atmosphere was "like a Nazi rally", "full-bore socialism", "like Stalin", and the guy kept it up for 45 minutes like Castro. And as soon as it was over a family friend, a cattleman of some means and again, a calm demeanor, had called him to ask "Did you see that?"