How exactly is Barack Obama a Marxist and when on earth did Democrats in the US suddenly turn socialist?

[justgoodfolk]

Not at all.
To the American right anyone who's not in favor of social darwinism, the law of the jungle, is a socialist. That's the truth behind their lies and the attempt to demonize every social program or less than free market fundamentalism as socialist or socialism.

Social Darwinism, term coined in the late 19th century to describe the idea that humans, like animals and plants, compete in a struggle for existence in which natural selection results in “survival of the fittest.” Social Darwinists base their beliefs on theories of evolution developed by British naturalist Charles Darwin. Some social Darwinists argue that governments should not interfere with human competition by attempting to regulate the economy or cure social ills such as poverty. Instead, they advocate a laissez-faire political and economic system that favors competition and self-interest in social and business affairs. Social Darwinists typically deny that they advocate a “law of the jungle.” But most propose arguments that justify imbalances of power between individuals, races, and nations because they consider some people more fit to survive than others.
Social Darwinism's philosophical problems are rather daunting, and fatal to it as a basic theory (though some have applied similar ideas). First, it makes the faulty assumption that what is natural is equivalent to what is morally correct. In other words, it falls prey to the belief that just because something takes place in nature, it must be a moral paradigm for humans to follow.
This problem in Social Darwinist thinking stems from the fact that the theory falls into the "naturalistic fallacy", which consists of trying to derive an ought statement from an is statement. For example, the fact that you stubbed your toe this morning does not logically imply that you ought to have stubbed your toe! The same argument applies to the Social Darwinists' attempt to extend natural processes into human social structures. This is a common problem in philosophy, and it is commonly stated that it is absolutely impossible to derive ought from is (though this is still sometimes disputed); at the very least, it is impossible to do it so simply and directly as the Social Darwinists did.

Socialism means the reorganization of economic life under the democratic control of the actual producers, the working people whose labor creates all wealth. It can come about only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, led by a revolutionary party, which establishes a new and far more democratic form of state, a workers' state, which exercises ownership and control over the means of production. Socialism cannot be engineered through backroom deals between Wall Street bankers and Washington politicians, or through the policies of any Democratic or Republican politician.
Some 160 years ago, Karl Marx wrote, "A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism." He was describing the mood of fear and trepidation in the European ruling classes on the eve of the great revolutionary wave of 1848, even though the number of conscious revolutionary socialists was still a relative handful. If the specter of socialism today haunts the American ruling class, despite decades in which socialism has been subjected to an unrelenting campaign of slander and vilification, it is likewise because the profit system faces a new period of revolutionary upheaval.