Barack Obama doppelganger plays Satan in “Bible” miniseries: Conservatives react

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 15:58:00 +0000

The History Channel has had a smash hit with "The Bible," a miniseries dramatizing the Good Book -- the premiere episode garnered 13.10 million viewers. That audience, last night, got their first peek at the Devil -- played by Mohamen Mehdi Ouazanni, an actor with a strong resemblance to President Barack Obama.

Glenn Beck was among the first to pick up the resemblance:

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The hashtag #ObamaSatan has taken off among conservative Twitter users:

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The idea of the president -- any president -- being a biblical force for evil is not a new one: WorldNetDaily called Bill Clinton "the Antichrist" in 2001, urging readers: "Reject him. Reject the mark of the beast." It's part and parcel of the swirling conspiracy theories that surround anyone in a position of power.

Is “The Bible” comfort TV?

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:50:00 +0000

The first part of the History Channel’s miniseries “The Bible” was watched by 13.1 million people on Sunday night. This is a huge number, another shiv in the guts of network television. As the New York Times noted, it is double the number of viewers who watched anything on NBC last month, and even more people than watch “The Walking Dead,” another cable show that makes network TV executives drool.

The success of “The Bible” is and is not surprising. That’s a huge audience, and a huge audience for a bad series — plodding, stiff, dull, God-is-a-white-guy-with-sandy-blond-hair kind of bad. But it has been demonstrated before that there is a huge market for religious-based, evangelical-leaning entertainments, of which “The Bible” is clearly one. (Mark Burnett, the producer of “Survivor” and a very canny finder of eyeballs, is one of the series’ producers.) Part of the reason the series is so middling is that it is explicitly constructed not to offend this demographic: It isn’t even serious about all of the crises of faith chronicled in the actual Bible, because that would require elucidating ... crises of faith.

Salon.com > mark burnett

Barack Obama doppelganger plays Satan in “Bible” miniseries: Conservatives react

Is “The Bible” comfort TV?