How can you guys be so unhappy with Obama when I’m so unhappy with Obama? You think you got coal in your stocking? I wanted single-payer health care, a carbon emissions bill, gun control, and legalized pot. If you get to carry around all this outrage over me getting that shit, shouldn’t I have gotten it?…. [Obama] could not be less threatening if he was walking home with iced tea and Skittles.
I never cease to be astonished at the calumny and abject, irrational hatred directed at Barack Obama by the Rabid Right. Depending on who you’re listening to, he’s a Kenyan-born Muslim, a terrorist sympathizer, a closeted homosexual, a Socialist, and/or a harbinger of all that’s evil and anti-American. One would almost think that the President’s just a few steps removed from raping our women and children, then tossing their limp bodies into the street after drinking their blood. Evidently, when it comes to Barack Obama no epithet is too hateful and no invented unsubstantiated accusation is too far beyond the pale. How else could one explain the raftload of plainly made up and thoroughly offensive crimes against America the Far Right regularly accuses the President of?
There’s no logical or reasonable explanation for the Rabid Right’s foaming-at-the-mouth hatred of the President. Most of what he’s accused of is plainly absurd, and on some level those making the charges probably know it. This is the way the game is played today; a Democrat in the White House means having a free pass to use any and all ammunition, regardless of veracity or reasonableness, in order to undermine his legitimacy. The fact that so many on the Rabid Right simply can’t stomach the idea of a Black man in the White House also helps to fuel the rage directed at him.
Passing it off as mere racism-fueled ranting would be to sell the haters short. There’s a segment of the Rabid Right that views the 2012 election cycle in apocalyptic terms. There are others who view Barack Obama as the Anti-Christ. Still others refuses to even believe that he’s an American, a Christian, heterosexual, and/or a legitimate President. (Cue the Newt Gingrich: Barack Obama “isn’t a real President”…though was passes for “real” probably contains at least a dollop of “not White.”)
“He really is like the substitute referees in the sense that he’s not a real president. He doesn’t do anything that presidents do, he doesn’t worry about any of the things the presidents do,” Gingrich said on Fox News’s “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.” “But he has the White House. He has enormous power. And he’ll go down in history as the president, and I suspect that he’s pretty contemptuous of the rest of us.”
There seems to be no depth the Rabid Right will not descend to, no personal insult they won’t engage in, and no amount of over the top, overheated hyperbole they won’t employ in order to smear, delegitimize, and ultimately defeat the President. They’d rather see America burn than to acquiesce to any program, idea, or policy initiative that, if successful, would reflect positively on the President.
What I find so interesting is that so many on the Far Right remained silent while George W. Bush lied his way into an illegal and immoral war in Iraq and cratered the economy…the very things they now hypocritically blame Barack Obama for. NOW the economy is a problem, and since he hasn’t made everything all better, ergo he’s solely responsible for the mess we’re in.
I used to think that Americans could engage in a reasoned and measured debate on the issues facing America. We might disagree, but we could at least debate honestly. The Rabid Right has made that an impossibility, to the detriment of all of us. We might not feel the difference today, or tomorrow, but the degradation of American democracy will come back to haunt us as time goes by.
Can you imagine what would happen if a Black female (and a Democrat) was running for President?
Welcome to our new idiocracy….
